How much do you trust your neighbours? How about the wider community in which you live? I've come across a few things over the last little while on the decline of social trust and the importance of it, especially when it comes to surviving disasters. This seems to be one of the consequences of our increasingly online world, the loss of the day-today encounters with the people we live closest to. Many of the daily interactions we once had with neighbours and other community members are being replaced with online checkouts, AI support chats, and faceless deliveries.
The thing is, this loss of trust also erodes empathy. Humans are naturally tribal, it's how we've survived. Yet, we've shifted so much of that into online communities with people we don't actually know and do not share geographic proximity with. This leaves us more likely to extend empathy to @username10128 than the family living across the street.
What I want to note here is that as our world continues to move into crisis after crisis we need to reclaim the art of working together for a shared public good. Cooperation might be the most needed skill of the 21st century. And it begins at a neighbourhood level.
As Bill McKiben writes,
"We’ve come through 75 years where having neighbors was essentially optional: if you had a credit card, you could get everything you needed to survive dropped off at your front door. But the next 75 years aren’t going to be like that; we’re going to need to return to the basic human experience of relying on the people around you. We’re going to need to rediscover that we’re a social species, which for [North] Americans will be hard."
There was another really good part in the podcast on alternative modes of travel that I was listening to the other day in which one of the speakers was noting that in many of the more suburban areas in Europe that she had visited, the speed limits were reduced to 30km/hour and high fines were imposed. Kids were then free to play in the streets without fear of cars speeding through them. However, what stood out to me the most was the way she described cars as guests in the streets.
What I have noticed in my day-to-day travels is that most drivers seem to feel a certain entitlement to the streets, as though it is by default their space and everyone else is an inconvenience to their needs. This mindset is ever expanding to the point where it is barely challenged; and, I assume many drivers would scoff at the idea that streets weren't made solely for their vehicles. But, as I have noted before, this is not the way it always was.
The thing I liked about this is that it's a relatively inexpensive infrastructure change to make. Smaller communities could easily make this change. In fact, with proper enforcement, it could be a bit of a money maker for a while as drivers get accustomed to this change. Of course drivers will bristle at this, but tackling car dependency is a major multisolving opportunity for us.
I was listening to a podcast recording of a panel on alternative modes of travel and one of the speakers brought up an interesting point on transit routes. They shared how transit companies have these goals to have transit stops within a certain proximity to a certain number of homes; however, rather than adding more routes they simply expand existing routes to more stops. The result is that bus routes end up being less direct and more time consuming as they wind through neighbourhoods in order to pass by more homes. This, of course, leaves transit feeling like a far less convenient alternative to car travel.
If we ever want to get serious about our car dependency we need to invest in alternatives in a way that makes them more compelling than driving ourselves. Nothing would boost transit more than sitting in traffic and watching busses move along quickly in their own direct and dedicated, congestion free lanes.
Reading an article this morning on the four day work week and how, separate from a worker right's movement, they just become an employment perk. The author, Oshan Jarow, notes,
"The deeper issue is that convincing companies to adopt four-day weeks does little to change the balance of power between workers and employers. Left unchanged, the negotiation over how many hours should constitute “full-time” would continue being held in the boardroom, where workers and their interests are largely without representation, and given today’s hampered labor movement, without much influence. That would significantly reduce the scope of our potential leisure time by leaving employers — rather than workers or an empowered labor movement — in virtually sole control of deciding when economic growth translates to more time off."
The main point behind the article is that we have stopped seeing productivity increases translating into more and better leisure time for workers; instead it has mostly just increased profit for employers. It also highlights the role and value of leisure time in our lives, something that the current capitalist system wants us to ignore. Rather than seeing the richness that leisure time can bring, we are increasingly asked to find value, meaning, and relationships in our work. Hustle culture was the previous incarnation of this. Now its the rise of solopreneurs and a sharper focus on company culture. These aren't bad in and of themselves, but they will never replace the meaning that good and frequent leisure time can provide.
We are in a time when people are increasingly cut off from their neighbours and surrounding communities, mental health crises are compounding, smart phones give us the ability to always be 'on,' and civic engagement is decreasing. Just as public space can be a physical solution to many of our problems, leisure time can a metaphysical one.
Reading a book this morning on Christian history from a global perspective that I picked up a while ago and never got around to reading. The focus of the author is to highlight the role of mission and how the tradition grew and formed in its various contexts; as opposed to the usual Eurocentric view that has tended to dominate Christian history. I'll try to layer in some interesting ideas as they emerge.
The major takeaway up front is to be reminded that there is no single, clear trajectory of the Christian tradition; it is something fluid, constantly evolving and recontextualizing for every new time and place. It emerges from lived experience, responses to challenges and controversies, and interactions with other cultural forces. Contextualizing, more than preserving, is the more accurate understanding of the tradition.
What's more, for the first few centuries at least, belonging to the church (in a universal sense) was about relationship rather than adherence to rules or doctrines. Bishops, were meant to be those who could trace their lineage of appointment back to the apostles; sort of like an apprenticeship model that lent credibility to one's leadership. Cyprian's famous quip, "outside the church there is no salvation," is a response to the question of rebaptism by those who were not baptized by bishops who carried the proper lineage credentials.
I guess what I'm getting at here is that we spend a lot of time arguing about what set of beliefs or practices constitute the right version of Christianity but history is rarely that neat and tidy.