You may have noticed from recent blog posts that I’ve been thinking a lot about independence in Western culture, and the effects of it.
One aspect of independence is the high value based on consumer choice, the mentality that says, “I have the right to choose the best option for me.” Again, the individual is at the centre of this mentality, and the needs of others don’t really enter into it. I know this is a great oversimplification, feel free to argue in the comments.
I think this mentality explains a lot about why the sense of community has decreased rapidly, for example in the UK. In searching for the best option in whatever it is we are looking for, we need to start looking in wider and wider areas. Because of our wealth and technology, we are able to, and happy to, travel a fair distance to find cheaper, better quality, higher quantity of whatever it is we are looking for. That distance might not even be a physical distance any more, as virtually (!) anything is available on the Internet.
I’m not just talking about shopping. All aspects of life have dramatically spread out over the past decades: where we shop, where we work, where we socialise, where we go to church… In all these areas we are willing to go further from home to find what we are looking for. And that means that our home becomes a base from which we travel, rather than an area in which we do life. Streets are no longer communities because the people in the different houses have different interests, and pursue these interests in different locations from each other. Villages and neighbourhoods are no longer communities because there are no real attractions in those areas that draw local people together. And churches are struggling to maintain communities because people are so busy rushing from place to place, and they live so far apart from each other, that it’s almost impossible for them to share any meaningful part of their lives together except Sunday morning and maybe one evening a fortnight.
These are just my observations, I’m not offering any answers. I’m not suggesting that we all should go back to a simpler way of life confined to a smaller geographical area, because that would be denying all the good things that come with opening up of our lives to wider borders. But I do think that we have to seriously consider where we spend our time as well as how we spend it, if we want to be serious about building community
Disclaimer: I’m probably one of the worst at this! My experience of living in Woking and working in Watford is that I didn’t really feel part of a community in either place, because I was never there for long enough. Now that I am living closer to work, I feel like I have more time at/near home, but in this transition period I’m really struggling to build any sense of community there.