Will You Be My Neighbor?
Six years ago, my wife and I moved to Omaha. We were excited for a change in life (new jobs, new start). We decided, as part of our downsizing, we would locate in a newer suburb where young families gravitated, where we’d have opportunity to develop new friendships in a new neighborhood. We eagerly moved into a smaller house that was less than 10 years old in a newer development.
But our hopes for new neighborly friendships were quickly dashed. In six years, we have experienced virtually no interaction with our new neighbors. We’ve made friends with a total of one older person. The house next door has had three owners since we’ve arrived, with the latest being a single woman in the military who won’t even acknowledge our hellos. Our backyard, a favorite hang out in the summer, has a view of about twenty other backyards. Rarely do we see anyone using his or her backyard or lovely decks. We’ve come to learn that most people drive into their attached garages, shut the door and never come out until they drive off to work the next day. Our dream of neighborly involvement has been utterly shattered. But what has created this detached, unfriendly and uninvolved world we live in?
Zygmunt Bauman’s book Collateral Damage provides an explanation for this very common state of our modern communities. Bauman’s rather bleak assessment of our shrinking world (globalization) and expanding technological communication (internet) would suggest that humanity should be drawing closer together, when in fact these very modern movements are actually exacerbating our differences and causing us to be less attached in any real or meaningful way. A major blame for this lack of community rest on the shoulders of government. Bauman suggests that it is the very nature of government to use uneasy and fear as an excuse to swoop in as protector and savior, allowing government more control and greater involvement in our lives. As Bauman states, “Humanities uncertainty and vulnerability are foundations of political power.”[i] The most prevalent source of fear available is free market uncertainty. “The vagaries of the market are sufficient to erode the foundations of existential security and keep the spectre of social degradation, humiliation and exclusion hanging over most of society’s members.”[ii] When this isn’t enough, the government can stir up further insecurity through creating fear for personal safety, “fears of the threats to human bodies, possessions and habitats – whether rising from pandemics and unhealthy diets or lifestyles regimes, or from criminal activities, anti-social conduct by the ‘underclass,’ or most recently global terrorism.”[iii]
This creation of real or imaginary fear and potential insecurity has resulted in nothing less than a general lack of trust and suspicion. “With lack of trust, borderlines are drawn and with suspicion, they are fortified with mutual prejudice and recycled into frontlines.”[iv] This leads further to “wilting of communication; in avoiding communication…the ‘strangeness’ of strangers is bound to deepen and acquire even darker, more sinister tones…”[v] The evidence of this is most clearly found in our modern gated community, which walls out the stranger and announces to all that you are not welcomed. This lack of trust pushes people apart and keeps them indoors.
Added to this fear and suspicion is our newest form of communication–the internet–where we find our modern sense of community even more eroded. Bauman suggests that traditional communities were founded on connectivity, loyalty and commitment over the long haul. The new internet community provides a false sense of community, as it requires no commitments, no loyalty, no discipline and no long-term involvement. What is lacking most in this virtual world is what people need the most: real security. According to Bauman, the combination of fear and insecurity and the turn to virtual community has resulted in a weakening of the “bonds of interhuman solidarity.”[vi]
It is a very sad picture that Bauman paints, and yet the evidence for this is right in my backyard. Why else would people not meet or interact with their neighbors as they did in the old days—or at least acknowledge you with a hello? If not fear, it is must be the painless and commitment-less community that they would rather rush to on-line where nothing is asked and nothing is offered. It is also, in my opinion, the 500 channels of cabal TV that provide more captivating entertainment (hours of Honey Boo Boo and the Bachelor) than one could ever find in watching birds at the bird feeder and rabbits playing in the backyard or the feeling the sun on your face converse with your neighbors on your patio. This same TV provides hours of news stories that only feed into our sense of insecurity and fears, that keep us indoors and safe from the strangers around us. And so, in our unsafe, unconnected, insecure world, how can we ever hope to break down the barriers of distrust and become real neighbors again – to enjoy the interhuman solidarity that we have lost? We have yet to figure out how to connect with our neighbors and truly despair of ever experiencing truly neighborliness ever again. Will it require that we begin by speaking truth to power (Bauman’s source of fear and uncertainty), since there seems little opportunity to speak truth to my next-door neighbor? (She won’t even respond to hello!) But the bigger question I ponder is how can I hope to reach a lost world when I can’t even connect with my own neighbor?
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