Real communities
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 24: Participation Society
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Hugh Mackay
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The former prime minister once dreamed of Australia as a nation of shareholders, enriched by their participation in the adventure of capitalism. Properly conceived, that is certainly one form of social engagement. If it looks a little less appealing to the punters today than it did back then, that might be because the full value of that kind of participation has not been widely or well enough understood.
Investing in our economic future is a worthwhile thing to do, and is most rewarding in the long term if, like philanthropy, it is undertaken as a form of social engagement. That's how the finest capitalists, from Adam Smith onwards, have approached it. Such investment is a symbol of the investor's faith in the future and in the integrity and potency of the enterprises they choose to support via their shareholding. Committed investment helps build communities and hold them together.
If, by contrast, the stock market is conceived of as a vast casino where buyers and sellers behave as if they are nothing more than gamblers, the system is bound to break down because the motivations are warped. Exploitation, motivated by greed, is a very different thing from investment. It is also a very different thing from social engagement.
Investment is the key to the creation of stronger communities and, ultimately, to a stronger nation.
But this is not only about dollars. We could dream a much larger dream about investment since, one way or another, we all make a social and emotional investment in the kind of society we are becoming. We could, for instance, choose to dream of a society where each of us understands that we are all part of one vast, vibrating web of interconnectedness. We could invest in the idea that all our actions – the way we save and spend our money, the way we occupy our time, the way we respond to the needs of strangers, all the ways we live – have consequences for the health and well-being of the whole. At its utopian best, this would be a dream about a nation – or even a neighbourhood – where our natural individualism is submerged beneath a concern for the common good; where, as a guiding story, competition gives way to a more egalitarian spirit of co-operation; where the shared values of citizens are shaped by a powerful sense of belonging to
each other.
BELONGING? COMMUNITY? SHARED VALUES? These, surely, have become the weasel words of contemporary social analysis. Overblown and overplayed, they have been robbed of much of their meaning. They have come to sound more like mantras than social goals.
Indeed, the word ‘village' is de rigueur if you're writing a real estate advertisement or creating a promotional brochure for a new high-rise development: the vertical village is with us. It's even become fashionable to speak of ‘the Australian community', as if Australians were a close-knit little group, sharing in the life of some village where everyone knows everyone, everyone trusts everyone, and from which we draw a powerful and sustaining sense of identity and emotional security.
Yet we cling hopefully, and sometimes desperately, to words like community and village, precisely because we know, deep in our guts, that any successful, civilized society would aspire to that utopian prospect. Perhaps we also sense that the fondly imagined community is under threat, and we suspect the consequences of that might be serious. In fact, the consequences could hardly be more serious: our moral sense is, after all, a social sense.
It is only by learning how to live in a community that we gradually acquire our sense of right and wrong, as well as more subtle values like tolerance, compassion and respect for others. The fact that we don't even know our neighbours' names may have become a cliché of urban life and a favourite piece of anecdotal evidence for those who worry about the state of modern society. If you're concerned about the stability and cohesiveness of communities, there are more compelling pieces of evidence than that.
Take the upheavals in our patterns of marriage and divorce. A mere thirty years ago, the institution of marriage was still regarded by most Australians as a symbol of our stable society: 90 per cent of Australians were married by the age of thirty, and only about 8 or 9 per cent of marriages ever ended in divorce. Today, fewer than half of us are married by the age of thirty and over a third of contemporary marriages are expected to end in divorce.
While there's a strong argument in favour of easy divorce, and much to be said in praise of higher standards for marriage, a high-divorce society does have to contend with the fact that many friendship circles, neighbourhoods and communities are destabilised by marriage breakdown and family dislocation. Almost a quarter of families with dependent children are one-parent families and many of those solo parents are too busy, too stressed and too tired to participate in the life of any community.
About one million dependant children are currently living with only one of their natural parents, and about half of them regularly migrate from the home of the custodial parent to the home of the other parent for an access visit. This mass migration of children is a challenge to communities: not only is there inevitable disruption on a large scale, but there are additional needs for the care of children – and parents – distressed by all these comings and goings. The new Children's Contact Centres, designed to ease this pain, are a positive sign of our community's capacity to address the changing social order.
In the suburbs of the past, children typically acted as a social lubricant. But in spite of the present, probably temporary, lift in the birthrate, we have reached the point where, relative to total population, we are currently producing the smallest generation of children Australia has ever seen. That social lubricant is in short supply, especially in the middle and upper-middle socio-economic strata.
Not only is their birthrate falling faster than in lower socio-economic strata (where, among other factors, the $5,000 baby bonus is a major incentive), but parents are also becoming more protective of their children, less inclined to allow them to go outside and play and more likely to confine them to private cars on the way to and from school. A sharp decline in the number of stay-at-home mothers has further altered the dynamics of neighbourhood life, producing a generation of over-worked women and converting most of our suburbs into true dormitories with little daytime social interaction.
Increasingly, we need to make an appointment to chat with our neighbours. The mobility of the population also disrupts neighbourhoods: on average, Australians move house once every five or six years. That helps to explain why, according to research published by Edith Cowan University, only a third of us say we trust our neighbours.
Even the burgeoning numbers of wealthy Australians – and the widening gap between them and the rest – erode our sense of ourselves as members of a relatively homogeneous, middle-class society. It is now beginning to look as if our egalitarian dream might be evaporating, as a spirit of entitlement takes root among more affluent Australians.
Information technology plays its part, too, by blurring the traditional distinction between data transfer and communication, by tempting us to spend more time with machines than with each other, and by seducing us with the idea that online connections are just like the other kind. Indeed, for the rising generation of young Australians, words like ‘community', ‘connected' and even ‘identity' have acquired new meanings in cyberspace.
Older people might think the idea of the global village was a hoax perpetrated by vested interests, but the young know better. If you doubt it, take a look at MySpace or Facebook, or any of the online networks and mobile phone links that facilitate constant contact between the members of the new cyber-tribes. They don't just feel as if these are real communities; they also have a range of online identities to go with them. The Symantec Identity Survey, conducted by Woolcott Research in 2007, found that heavy users of the internet typically had more than ten ‘virtual identities' and that well over a third of users of internet social networks, virtual worlds or gaming sites believe their online identities are closer to their ‘true self' than their physical or ‘real-world' identities.
Back in that real world, our shrinking households are an intriguing sign of how radically and rapidly Australian communities are changing in ways that threaten social inclusion. (The fact that we are building ever larger houses to accommodate ever smaller households is also intriguing, but that's another story.) More than a quarter of Australian households now contain just one person and the ABS estimates that proportion will have risen to over one-third by the year 2026. One-person and two-person households already account for more than half of all households.
This is a complex picture, of course: we shouldn't automatically assume that aloneness equals loneliness. Many people cheerfully choose to live alone – often for brief episodes – but, at least in the short term, it looks as if the shrinking household heightens the risk of social exclusion and disengagement.
Longer term, I'm inclined to regard the shrinking household as an encouraging signpost to a more connected and more engaged community. We are, after all, herd animals and when the domestic herd shrinks below the normal herd size of seven or eight, we need to look elsewhere for herds to connect with. We may begin by grazing with the herd (it's no accident that the café revolution has coincided precisely with the upheaval in household composition), and then move on to a book club, a choir, a clean-up roster.