It’s a fool’s game to try and summarise the British crisis vis a vis community life in a few hundred words, but here goes! It is, of course, an immense and hyper-complex subject. But it has not received the care and consideration it urgently needs mainly, no doubt, because of those characteristics. My thought is that that should be done via a Royal Commission.
We live in a society and world of perhaps faster change than ever, impelled by the extraordinary technological revolution in every dimension of life.
__________________________________________________________________________________
RELATED CONTENT
Supporting small community groups is not a ‘luxury’ but an investment
__________________________________________________________________________________
Distance has been all but abolished. But the problem is that we humans have not yet found a technical substitute for face to face, tangible encounter which affords those concerned those dimensions of non-verbal communication denied to even the skype-type exchange. Ambiance, body language etc can be invaluable, sometimes more true, additives to mere words.
Globalisation begets the most extreme contrasts with traditional communitarianism, and is fast becoming the key focus of giant business and indeed politics.
Even in my lifetime communities were overwhelmingly geographical in concept and very local in reality, typically centred on villages and Market towns. Even in London, as Michael Young discovered in his famous book on East End life post 1945, ‘Kinship in the East End’, the richness of the relationships between those living in those poor, terraced streets was life-affirming, and contrasted starkly with that prevailing in the same streets when a follow-up study was done a few years ago.
Today, as a recent national poll revealed, around 85% of those asked did not even know the names of their neighbours. In our vastly more individualised and materialist times we are pulled apart, not often concerned about the common good. Indeed, in today’s mobile, rootless, distracted and loyalty-free country ‘ordinary’ citizens feel nothing in common with the metropolitan money-rich and celebs.
Indeed, the other bonds which held us together so effectively when I grew up are generally enfeebled, though with with many happy exceptions. Take family networks and continuities; the reduction in inter-dependence; the replacement of locally-owned and run shops by faceless superstores; The huge impact of commuting to work; the reduction in workplace loyalties; the inexorable rise in 2nd-home owning; the loss of communal meeting places such as pubs, clubs, halls; above all, the rise in car ownership.
In a community everyone is someone. Today millions feel all but anonymous; outside the tent (look at politics); shorn of vitalising mutualities and commonalities. As Robert Puttnam called his celebrated book on this broad subject, too many of us feel we are ‘Bowling Alone.’
Perhaps the most invaluable aspect of living in community is what you cannot avoid learning, about yourself and others, by rubbing shoulders with them year after year in a myriad of often unchosen circumstances. The experiential revelation which this affords concerning the mysteries of Life is the source of true and profound wisdom.
As far as I can see, the undoubted wonders of the new, technology-led universe do not embrace those virtues which seem to me to inculcate the values and patterns of living indispensable to the good life.
At all events let us try through a Royal Commission to pool our insights and grope for positive outcomes.