Think about the things that kill community: someone treats someone else badly; they feel slighted; there is an unwillingness to forgive, a rift, a feud. Or there is insufficient generosity of heart (most of us could admit to this) to give time to someone else’s needs, someone else’s problem. I’m alright, Jack. Or some look down on others, feel themselves to be too superior to mix, whether it be for reasons of race, creed, class or supposed moral worth. Or else, there’s a climate of fear and mistrust, because some locals behave anti-socially, so that there is safety in isolation.
What these all boil down to is a lack of values – a lack of codes of behaviour, taught by word and example, imbibed with one’s mother’s milk and nourished by a culture that encourages the best in us and restrains the worst.
After all, our children grow up speaking English because that is what is spoken all around them. It may be refined by learning grammar and spelling, but the core of it is the result of unthinking imitation. If we had been French, they would have grown up speaking a totally different language, without a second thought. Similarly, they grow up being kind, considerate, polite, honest, humble, forgiving, generous, reliable, tidy, quiet at night, reasonable, charming, nonintrusive, respectful – in so far as they see people around them behaving in those ways and in so far as unthinking imitation is strengthened by a moral teaching that says “don’t boast”, “give it back, it’s his toy”, “now, say sorry to your brother”, “tidy your bedroom”, “finish your food” and a host of other overt forms of teaching. This is the stuff of character formation.
In families, we need values – that much is obvious, or you get fights, abuse and an atmosphere so intolerable that people eventually opt out. In communities, it is a whole lot easier to opt out. In fact, it is so easy that the ‘default position’ increasingly seems to be to allow community to slip away, let it be nothing, because something will always be less trouble than nothing.
What is the answer to this social quandary that seems to affect most advanced societies? We don’t seem to need each other for bread and butter issues, so lets slip imperceptibly into isolation – and, if at all, relate only to those that are like us, agree with us and don’t overly challenge our self-centredness or cause us discomfort. This is the opting out mentality. It is rife in our society. Avoid difficulty. Avoid life.
Community and values belong together in three distinct ways. Firstly, it will be values (rather than self interest) that will propel us to act in a communal way. It will be the sense that we ought to be good neighbours, ought to pay some attention to loneliness and suffering around us, ought to show love and concern, ought to take some responsibility for others – it will this owning of a sense of obligation that will motivate the recovery of community, through street associations or by other means.
Secondly, it will be the challenge of behaving well towards others that, if we rise to it, will make community viable in the long run. It is simply that, if we want community to work, we will have to behave properly towards others – and in many cases re-learn that ‘art’. Being unkind, rude, unreliable, unforgiving and plain selfish will wreck any chances of community forming around us – that much is plain. Hence: “people are more important than things; we should all serve the needs of others; truth is the foundation of trust”; these things are at the very heart of a well-functioning community.
Thirdly, community is a seedbed for values. A virtual world, where real face-to-face contact is reduced to a minimum, creates the conditions in which values can be avoided, because in such a world there is little come-back from my actions. I shaft someone: it is a bit like dropping a bomb from a plane – I don’t get to see the damage. I am rude to someone: well, I wasn’t in relationship with them anyway, so no relationship is thereby broken. I am unreliable: but people are now clever enough not to have relied upon others in the first place.
But in community, you shaft someone and you know it; you are rude to someone and it ricochets around the place; you are unreliable and you see the disappointment, come face to face with the harm. Conversely, you show kindness and your world is enlarged: someone else has come to matter to you.
And so you and I tend to act more morally, with more accountability and more responsibility, more generously and more lovingly, than we would do in an impersonal world of books from Amazon, entertainment from satellite TV, groceries ordered on the internet and neighbours quietly ignored.
If we, as a nation, are to reclaim our values, we need to reclaim community; for community makes us need them and allows us to breed them.
Meanwhile, if as a nation we are to reclaim community, it is what is left of our values that will impel us to do it.