Real communities - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 24: Participation Society
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Hugh Mackay
WHEN WE FEAR THAT THE SOCIAL FABRIC IS FRAYING, it's tempting to assume the best solution is to impose a kind of regulated morality on society by creating more rules to compensate for the lack of social engagement. Calls for everything from anti-vilification laws to more regulation of corporate boards, tougher sentencing of criminals, tighter censorship of the media, all the way down to dog-walking laws ... these are signs of our vulnerability to the idea that if we can't trust each other to act with restraint, compassion and moral sensitivity, we must legislate to create the kind of society we want.
As a response to social insecurity and anxiety, this is understandable – but unwise. Ever tougher rules and regulations won't make us a fairer, more compassionate society. In fact, it is more likely to do the opposite since excessive regulation tends to stifle, rather than quicken, the conscience. If we continue down the path of increasing regulation, we may well order our society in ways currently thought to be desirable, but at what cost?
The real challenge for anyone interested in rebuilding the sense of community is not to regulate more, nor to preach about ethics in the hope that people will start to act more considerately or compassionately in obedience to some written or unwritten charter of social responsibility. If we believe in the benefits that flow from being part of the life of a functioning community, the challenge is simply to find more ways of bringing people back together again.
For a start, we need to create more urban and suburban spaces conducive to the kind of spontaneous social interaction that facilitates friendly neighbourhoods – places where people can eat together, walk together, sit and talk together, or play together.
We need less emphasis on private space and more on public space, bearing in mind that two-income households have less time to maintain a traditional house and garden. We need to explore the concept of co-housing, where small living units are clustered around communal dining and recreation areas. We need to place more emphasis on shared transport, and less on the isolating cocoon of the private car. A great example is the ‘walking bus' concept for kids, organising them into supervised groups for the walk to school. We need to accelerate the trend towards establishing commercial centres on the perimeters of our large cities, so more of us can work where we live and, in turn, have more time and energy to become engaged with our local communities. We need to encourage greater participation in community activities – everything from clean-up campaigns and bushcare groups to team sports, drama classes and poetry clubs – which reassure people that ‘the village' exists and that they can belong to it.
In fact, the more you look at the ills of contemporary society – alienation, fragmentation, isolation, depression – the more compelling the need for communal participation in the arts seems. Surely, encouraging co-operative, collaborative creativity must be one of the better ways to foster a sense of community, promote mental health and well-being, and reduce the pressures of a competitive, materialistic society. Learning to paint or write (in a class that creates its own sense of belonging), putting on plays and musicals, organising festivals, making movies, taking up photography, puppetry or tapestry, singing in choirs, dancing, playing in bands ... these are all effective pathways to mental health for people whose daily lives are mostly spent in non-creative pursuits.
I recall my own experience of singing in a choir and resisting, every week, the demand to attend rehearsals: ‘I'm too busy for this – I'll have to skip it
this week' ... until the conductor's baton was raised, we began to sing and the therapeutic effects kicked in as reliably as any drug. We talk endlessly about the need for ‘balance', by which we usually mean the balance between work, family and leisure. But there's another quite magical possibility: balancing the stresses, disappointments and tedium of life with the therapeutic release of tension through some form of regular creative outlet that restores your sense of perspective and your sense of worth, while connecting you to others.
Many people recall with intense pleasure their participation in school plays, orchestras, choirs and art classes. It wasn't just the music or the art or the performance: it was often the strong sense of group cohesion – of being a team player – that lingered most vividly in the memory. Sometimes they look back wistfully and wonder where all that pleasure (and all that talent) went. Why did it stop when they left school? And why couldn't it be recaptured?
Perhaps it's time to dust off all those Schools of Arts across the country and put them to the use for which they were originally intended.
MOST OF US FIND THE RICHEST SOURCE OF LIFE'S MEANING in our personal relationships. Being herd animals, we are born to communicate, to join, to gather, to connect and to share. When we deny those natural impulses, we diminish both ourselves and the communities to which we properly belong. The online revolution notwithstanding, I believe the most significant communities – significant, that is, in building a civilised, participative society – are still our local neighbourhoods. Grand visions of society have their place, but it's in the neighbourhood that we join the dots, a fact brought home to us with stark clarity whenever a crisis, like a flood or a bushfire, draws us together.
Getting along with friends and other like-minded people is easy: belonging to school or church communities, or even to gardening clubs or art classes, can be deeply satisfying and should be encouraged. But if we're not careful, such micro-communities can become tribal enclaves that add to the problem of social divisiveness. The real test of the civilising power (indeed, the moral power) of community is how we get along with people we haven't chosen to be with, don't especially like, and who don't necessarily share our interests.
Those unplanned, accidental encounters still happen in streets all over Australia, where people manage to get along with neighbours they never chose to live beside. But the pressures of our society are working against the miracle happening. We are tending to confine our contacts to the tried and trusted, at the cost of connections with our neighbours. That's unhealthy. There's no point in complaining about the loss of a sense of community if you haven't knocked on your neighbour's door and introduced yourself.
If you're serious about wanting to restore the health of your neighbourhood, join a choir or a book club, by all means. But don't forget to invite the neighbours in for a drink, as well. Find a few neighbours prepared to take it in turns to mow the lawn of the elderly person on the corner, or do the shopping for a harassed carer or single mother. Leave the car in the garage and walk around the block occasionally, greeting the people you meet.
That's participation; that's engagement; that's investment. ♦