Elizabeth Braund, who for many years has run Shallowford Farm to help inner London city children, shares her experience.
The riots in a number of cities last summer shocked us all. There were banner headlines about the ‘end of an era’, a constant barrage of grim forebodings from the media, endless political argument and social confrontation. But all this has left us not so much keyed-up to new resolve, as indifferent and only wanting to be left alone to get on with our own lives.
Can we do just that — any of us? We have heard about how we must or must not shape our future society. We have heard a good deal less about how our society has been shaping us. Perhaps if leading politicians had understood this a little better, they would not over recent months have assumed that the people they were addressing are just the same in attitudes as those of even a decade ago. They are not. Attitudes have changed rapidly and radically; and we need urgently to look now at some of the pressures that have thrust in upon us.
Slum clearance
I know this personally. I worked and lived in the midst of the social revolution of a working-class slum clearance area being transformed into high-rise concrete tower blocks in a major inner city development project which took place in the 1960s. This set in motion social pressures out of which a new kind of society emerged.
When the bulldozers moved in they did more than tear down streets and reduce whole neighbourhoods to mud and rubble; they also swept away a way of life. The unhealthy living conditions were no more, and the modern 18-storey blocks were equipped with all mod cons. That was the plus side, but what of the minuses? The big picture windows were lovely — but when you looked out of them you could only see people as ants far below. Front doors opened on to bare corridors. When the kids played out, you did not know where they got to. The old sheds and gardens had gone.
Now in these places, if you are old and living alone, no one knows what is happening to you. You may not even know who your next door neighbour is. Housing estates contain a hotchpotch of strangers from different backgrounds and different races. There is little sense of community life. Everyone is a stranger — united only in the problems they face.
Materialism and meaning
The first obvious pressures today are materialism and a materialistic outlook, pre-eminent in our national and social life? What we have got, what others have got, what we can get, how we can get it and at the least cost! You judge and are judged solely by what you have got, not how you got it.
But there is a debit side to it. There is, for instance, the loss of meaningfulness in life, so characteristic of our new society, and responsible for many of its social problems. For the old meanings — traditions, standards and values as well as belief in the ultimate authority of God and his laws — have been swept away and in the name of permissiveness we are left with meaninglessness. For when you take away an ultimate standard and authority, what ultimate meaning is left in anything?
We see the miserable effects of this malaise working out among our inner cities. Some young couples have luxury homes, but there is boredom, loneliness and a sense of futility. There are queues of women in the doctors’ surgeries waiting for anti-depressants. Playgroups for children have to put up with mothers too, because they cannot bear the tedium of being on their own. Social services multiply their workers but the problems arising from meaninglessness continue to multiply among all age groups. The old, sitting alone watching the world go by on their TVs, feel their lives hold no meaning for anyone any more — not even for themselves. All the values they were brought up with and based their lives upon are now being rejected.
Growing into lethargy
And the kids, growing up in this climate of meaninglessness, understandably grow into lethargy. Nothing seems worth making an effort to attain — except money, and even that can be got easily if you know how. Why go to school? Truancy is a major problem in the cities. Why work hard or aim high? Why bother being honest or telling the truth? Why not smash and vandalise? At least it alleviates the boredom of living.
Inevitably tied up with this is the loss of identity in our society. Who are you anymore? You travel more, see and hear more, but many no longer have the sense of belonging in a community or to families as they did. Older folk are put in homes. Fathers or mothers go off with new partners, leaving the rest of the family, or introducing new ‘mums’ or ‘dads’ to confused children. Many, indeed, do not know who of the various adults in a household they belong to. Homelessness among youth is in fact causing grave concern at the present time. And add to all this the numbers of children in care because their parents cannot or will not assume responsibility for them. Is there any wonder that insecurity abounds among the youth of our society, or that they tend to gang together for protection in an alien world?
Loss of responsibility
There is another loss, very characteristic of this emergent society. It is a loss of responsibility. It is quite possible to allow the state to take over responsibility for keeping you, rather than working for a living, and other members of the family, and even neighbours. Instead of going in to see if your elderly neighbour is all right, you leave it to the welfare. And it is surely a symptom of the times that little consideration is given to people as having feelings and minds and wills of their own. You simply use them to gratify yourself in some way or regard them as a number or a mere statistic.
Lastly, there is the loss of integrity. In a society that lacks meaning, there is no encouragement to be consistent and reliable in what you do or say. You may let yourself and others down as much as you like. For what you do is all according to how you feel. There is no need to stand firm, for there is nothing firm in life to stand on — everything is a sliding scale. In fact, having first thrown out an ultimate meaning in life, our new society is fast causing us to lose purposeful meaning in our own personal lives. And that is surely just another way of saying that the pressures of our new society are dehumanising and deadly to true human development.
Nothing new
These deadly pressures — loss of meaningfulness and identity, responsibility and integrity — are not suddenly a new phenomenon in our society. They have long been at work. What is new is the extent to which old standards and values have not just been set aside, but have been totally denied as existing at all, and so our new society is left with no other basis than a great void of ultimate nothingness. This is indeed a tragic dimension, and from it the most urgent of our problems stem. We see the process with terrible clarity in those areas where people are most cut off from the old undergirding standards, but the sombre truth is that these hungry people are in every social grouping.
But we thank God that Jesus said, ‘Come unto me all you that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest’ (Matthew 11.28) and ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’ (John 14.6). It is him that our society needs.
