Schools of fish and thought on the dying of community
MY neighbour returned from interstate this week and I was at her door in an instant to welcome her home and return her goldfish.
A few months back she was called away to assist an ailing relative, and in her hurried departure had asked me whether I could water her indoor plants and care for her goldfish while away.
I named the fish Huey, Dewey and Louie and transferred them to my house.
On his first morning here, I found Dewey dead.
I was mortified and spent the next few months in a mild state of anxiety because I figured one dead fish was an accident, but two or three would be unforgivable.
Thankfully, Huey and Louie survived and I grew to enjoy their company, as did my son’s budgie, who liked to bathe in their bowl (he’s chirping at his own reflection in the printer next to me as I type), but I was happy to pass the life-or-death responsibility back to my neighbour.
“Thank goodness you’re home,” I said over a cuppa. “It’s been torrid.”
I tell this tale because somewhere in its almost inane homeliness there lies a life-affirming significance, perhaps even a raison d’etre.
Ordinary neighbourly or family stories like this underpin community.
The experiences of sharing a time and space together kindle a sense of belonging — the amiable nod and “g’morning” to those we pass on our daily constitutional, or the chat about the glorious weather of late, or how the wattle is blossoming or that the echidnas are out and about at the moment.
Local footy once brought people together. Clubrooms were a hub for mums and dads, sons and daughters and girlfriends and wives to join players for celebration or commiseration.
But grassroots footy has been replaced by a new model where a local’s only value is as an AFL draftee, and the game is designed as a nursery for the elite. Community, once the bedrock, is not even a consideration.
Community is being trampled by the modern world and the technological revolution.
Increasingly, the internet and social media bridge the spatial divide between people on a global scale. This can be a good thing, but relegates locality to a secondary consideration.
Online connections assume greater importance than the corporeal neighbourhood. Community is dying. In the 1800s, French sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote about anomie, a phenomenon that results from the collapse of social bonds between individuals and community as occurred in the industrial revolution. Durkheim said that when bonds disappeared, social identity and shared values did too.
Karl Marx described something similar with his alienation theory about the isolating and dehumanising effect of capitalism.
While alienation and anomie are different concepts, I think Durkheim and Marx were describing a similar observable social detachment that occurs when revolutionary change up-ends community and belonging, as it did when peasants moved en masse to cities to work during the industrial revolution.
Similarly, Republican senator for Nebraska Ben Sasse writes in his new book
Them: Why We Hate Each
Other and How to Heal that the mayhem consuming the US at the moment is a result of the technological revolution.
The ugly division — epitomised this week by the discovery of pipe bombs in parcels sent to former president Barack Obama, ex-secretary of state Hillary Clinton and retired Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan — is not about politics, but that Americans are lonely and confused.
Sasse says their frustration is being vented as anger.
“Do you have a nuclear family?” he asked on radio recently. “Do you have a few deep friendships? Do you have meaningful callings? Do you have shared work? Do you have shared vocations? Do you have local worshipping communities? All of those things are connected to place, and place is being undermined by the digital revolution right now.”
Sasse says the conflict is fuelled by media fragmentation, partisan news and a void of shared facts.
In times of upheaval I suspect people tend to look at the world optimistically or pessimistically.
Those who see the glass half full believe in the inherent good of their neighbour. They embrace those who suffer, welcome those who are lost, and want to heal the world. They believe in hope, rehabilitation and redemption.
Those who perceive the glass half empty see only bad around them. They arm themselves to the hilt to protect their families, demand crooks are locked away, and cheer the persecution of bad guys. It is hope versus fear. As I linger on those words, there is a knock at my door. It’s my neighbour.
She presents me with a decorative bowl in the shape of a fish ( pictured) as a gift for looking after Huey and Louie.
I miss how the perky little orange chaps stared at me with their shiny eyes and splashed excitedly when I approached with dinner, but I am glad they are no longer my responsibility.
Welcome home neighbour, you’ve missed the start of a sublime Tasmanian spring. The wattlebirds have been riotous.