Welcome to the global suburb - Considering roots and the mobile society

In the 1960s the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase 'Global Village'.

It neatly embodied the growing awareness that talking to friends in Australia was as easy as having a chat over the garden fence. Its sense of intimacy and friendliness recommended it to an optimistic era and it passed quickly into the public's vocabulary.

30 years later, the village metaphor is less convincing. The over-the-garden-fence chat is the stuff of out-dated soap operas. We are reluctant to let children play in the local park, assuming we have one. Our high streets are guarded by CCTV cameras, our new housing developments by gates and security guards, and our homes by security locks and neighbourhood watch schemes. All is not well in the village, it seems.

Few of us know our neighbours really well. For many people an ever-lengthening commuting time has effectively bisected life, severing home and work and ensuring we know work colleagues (who live 30 miles away) better than neighbours (who live 30 yards away).

At the same time, more and more high streets appear to be assembled from identikit packages. Once upon a time (and not so long ago) every town had dozens of small, privately-run, unique shops. Today those high streets which haven't actually decayed are crammed with the same stores selling the same product lines for the same prices. All traces of local distinctiveness are gone. As Tom Wolfe wrote of America in his novel, A Man in Full: 'the only way you could tell you were leaving one community and entering another was when the franchises started repeating and you spotted another 7-Eleven, another Wendy's, another Costco...'.

In reality, few Western villages today are actually village-like. The urban and suburban streets in which most of us live certainly aren't. Communication is vastly quicker and cheaper than when McLuhan coined his aphorism but our lives and environment are much less village-like than he could have imagined. In the 21st century, most of us in the West live in a boundless, featureless 'Global Suburb'.

Love of mobility

A number of social trends have converged to bring us to this point, but by far the most important is our insatiable love of mobility.

Mobility has helped address some of the worst sins of human nature and culture. As TV's anti-hero Alf Garnett showed, a wholly immobile existence can provide a rich breeding ground for narrow-mindedness and prejudice. When that immobility is combined with isolation, the worst kind of cultural myopia and intolerance can result.

Mobility, on the other hand, offers opportunity. It allows children to exceed their parents' role and position in society. It helps individuals develop their skills and fulfil their potential. Above all, it promotes economic growth. The modern Western world is built on mobility.

The problem comes when we idolise mobility and fail to see it enslaving us. It is, after all, possible to have too much of a good thing.

As a nation we travel over three times further today than we did in 1952. We travel further to work, to school, to shop, and to visit friends than ever before. The average person makes over 1,000 journeys per year, totalling nearly 7,000 miles, 2,000 more than in 1975. This is forecast to double again in the next 25 years.

An ever increasing proportion of us work abroad. As a nation we flew 35 times more domestic miles in 1998 than we did in 1952. In 2000, British airports processed twice as many passengers as they did ten years earlier.

We also move house more frequently than we used to, with the equivalent of half the British population moving in the 1990s. By 2001 there were nearly 1.5 million housing transactions per year.

Perpetual motion's results

The impact of this perpetual motion is ultimately highly disagreeable. The fact that we work, shop, learn and play further from home than ever before, means that where we live has less and less to do with where we live our lives. Local interaction time falls and we have less time to build relationships with the people who share our streets.

The result is that not only is our environment more anonymous and less convivial but, more practically, we have no one around us to help out when we need it. It also impacts crime levels as, although mobility has nothing to do with why people commit crimes, it has everything to do with how they commit them. In a world which is largely anonymous, rootless and fluid, it is much easier to commit casual crime such as house burglary or vandalism.

This in itself breeds a siege mentality in which we fortify our lives with locks, gates, CCTV, and guard dogs. Some-what ironically, the most widespread and effective means of protection, the neighbourhood watch scheme, deliberately copies the natural behaviour of pre-mobile communities.

It is children, however, who suffer most in our 'hyper-mobile' culture. Opportunity for independent play is severely curtailed by car-jammed streets. Children can no longer walk to school, because parents are understandably wary of 'stranger danger'. Nor can they walk to the shops, because they have relocated to retail parks on the edge of town. Their friendships and schooling are further disrupted by frequent relocation of parents' jobs. This is hardly the 'sweet wine of youth'.

A biblical response

Any biblical response must start with the understanding that the static, pre-modern, agrarian Israelite society was very different from the hyper-mobile, post-modern, post-industrial British one of the 21st century. As ever, biblical teaching must be handled with considerable care.

It is fair to say, however, that Scripture is preoccupied with the principle of rootedness in the land. In many ways the entire biblical story revolves around a tension between roots and mobility. God's first words to Abraham were for him to 'leave your country, your people and your father's household', and yet settlement in Canaan is central to the history of early Israel. Much later on, Israel's sin leads God to evict her from the land and send her into exile, but while there Jeremiah advises the people to sink roots and also promises their return from captivity.

It is this promise which remains theologically unfulfilled at Jesus's birth. Jesus's ministry is explicitly peripatetic and he expects individuals to be prepared to uproot themselves entirely if called by him. The Old Testament theological understanding of the land has been refocused on Jesus himself.

Yet Jesus's commands to follow him are balanced against those advising people to 'return home and tell how much God has done for you'. The warmth and familiarity with which he was welcomed into the home of Martha and Mary testify to the fact that knowing him did not necessitate dismantling your geographical community. He was, after all, Jesus of Nazareth, even when that counted against him.

Similarly, Paul's letters read like an atlas index of the eastern Mediterranean: Colosse... Ephesus... Philippi... Thessalonica... Corinth... Rome. In each, Paul writes to the communities he has helped plant and water and which are clearly rooted firmly in their locality.

In many ways, the early church was implementing the community commands which Israel was given in the Torah. The idea of being rooted in the land acted as a backbone to Israel's story and yet, as God told them in Leviticus, 'the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants'. In reality, the rooted Israel was required to maintain a mobile mindset, one which was dependant on God, rather than on their own land, power or wealth. The early Christians lived with a similar objective, building locally rooted communities of mutual support and justice, but ones which were also rooted in and strengthened by faith in Jesus Christ.

Being rooted was very important for Israel and the New Testament churches, but was not enough in itself. Rootedness was a means to the ends of establishing a people whose example of godly love, socio-economic justice and right relationships would be a blessing to the rest of the world. For individuals, being rooted was the means by which they would know, support and love their neighbour.

Where to next?

Biblical teaching on rootedness and mobility provides a valuable but challenging resource for Christians today.

The biblical vision of rootedness should not be used simply as a scourge against our hyper-mobile society. The call to sink and maintain roots in an area needs always to bear in mind the potential sins of settlement, many of which are documented in the Old Testament. The biblical goal is not just to create a rooted society but to create one which has roots which foster strong, committed and joyful relationships.

Biblical teaching does counsel against our use of mobility simply to escape commitment, idolise autonomous freedom or foster economic growth. Freedom and wealth may be extremely valuable in themselves but when they are pursued to the ends of eroding family, community and society they need challenging.

This challenging applies to everyone. The biblical vision of effective social capital (the phrase popularly used to denote good local relationships, civic virtue and community networks) demands that each of us examines our attitudes and behaviour with a series of often uncomfortable questions. How close and committed are you to relatives, friends, work, and neighbours? How engaged are you in the life of the local community? What impact do your shopping and leisure habits have on your local community?

Ultimately human beings are relational and relationships are grounded in place. Mobility has liberated Western men and women in many ways but this shouldn't allow us to let it become our master. We need to rediscover the value of roots.

Nick Spencer's booklet, 'Where do we go from here? A biblical perspective on roots and mobility in Britain today', is available free from The Jubilee Centre. For a copy phone 01223 566319 or email jubilee.centre@clara.net