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Steve McAlpine zeroes in on a social value that everyone thinks is doing us good, but in reality, is as toxic as weed killer.
Where are we going as a society? And will you be happy when we get there? Steve McAlpine is here to help you answer those questions.
If a Delorean time machine pulled up in front of your house - Back To The Future style - and someone offered to show you what the future would be like, would you be content with what you found? And if not, what could you do to change it? Thinking this through is what Steve McAlpine calls Delorean Philosophy.
Steve McAlpine is a well-known social commentator, respected theologian and popular author. Each week, he takes a crucial trend or event that's playing out in society now and asks, "Where is this taking us?"
Rather than just pontificating, Steve then provides practical steps listeners can take if they want to change the future. That's Delorean Philosophy.
Recently I sprayed all of our indoor plants with non-selective plant killer. Now we have a lot of indoor plants, sometimes I think too many.
They range from hardy ficus trees, thickened and gnarly after ten years growth, through to delicate necklace trailers that look like they would keel over in a puff of wind. Or a few squirts of weed killer.
You see, here’s the thing. I didn’t mean to do it. It wasn’t some act of vengeance towards my wife or a nihilist act of self-loathing. It was a genuine mistake. It was in fact the opposite of what I was intending to do. I had reached high into the laundry cabinet to grab the brown bottle of liquid feeder.
Which was sitting next to the other brown bottle. Of plant killer.
The first I realised was when I congratulated myself on not getting any of the brown, fishy-smelling organic mix on the white walls behind the plants. And come to think of it, the smell wasn’t too bad this time. I finished the plants, then stepped back and looked at the bottle.
Cue shock. Cue self-loathing. Cue minor panic attack. Jill was sitting ten feet away in her office, working on a report that was due. I screamed silently, looking vainly for some non-toxic soil to throw on my head in penance.
My first thought was to feign surprise in five days time when everything started wilting. My second thought was telling Jill, via phone, after signing up to the witness relocation program. My third thought was to tell Jill.
I told Jill. She cried. She pointed out that the replacement value was somewhere in the vicinity of 2000 dollars.
She went too far though, I have to say it. She anthropomorphised her favourite fiddle leaf tree to the point where I felt she was about to put out a dinner setting for it.
In her eyes I had committed first degree herbicide. I planned to plead guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
Something had to be done. And soon, if we were to save the plants. But more of that later.
The irony though. What I thought was helping the plants flourish was exactly what would make them fade. What I assumed would make them grow, was going to make them wither.
Now, what if we were to make the same mistake with something more important than plants? With us for example. Humans. Our society, especially here in the West.
What if the ideas or values we feed ourselves with, all designed to help us flourish and grow are actually making us fade and wither? What if, in our search to figure out how best to move ourselves forward, we’re taking a huge step backwards?
Can I suggest that’s exactly what we’re doing in our modern commitment to the “you do you” culture that our Western society is marinaded in?
The technical term is expressive individualism – the almost sacred right of every person to find out what aids their flourishing, and to do that, even if it comes at the expense of other people.
It’s a project seemingly full of promise. Full of personal growth. And it’s built on the philosophical assumptions of the past couple of hundred years, in which communities – particularly family and faith communities – are viewed as restrictive and damaging to your flourishing as an individual.
French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously said that man was born free, but everywhere finds himself in chains. In other words, the things that wither us are those things imposed upon us by our society. Throw those chains off and you’ll grow to be the you you were truly destined to be.
Now you may not be able to quote Rousseau, but no doubt you’ve sung along to a Disney number, in which you’re urged to follow your heart. High culture, low culture, pop culture, we’re marinaded in this idea.
We’ve been spraying this product into our social and spiritual ecosystem for some time now.
So much so that to deny it, or insist that we should out of any sense of duty, discipline or nobility, maintain relationships and remain within networks that we struggle with or that bear a high emotional cost, is viewed as less than authentic. And authenticity – the search for personal self-actualisation – is the proof that we actually flourishing in our modern society.
Now a caveat: This is not a restriction on breaking away from a truly toxic situation. But it is to say that you might want to look more closely at the bottle before you spray this social weedkiller too liberally.
Here’s what’s interesting. The evidence over the past forty years is that “project self”, the “you do you” individual program is actually showing signs of withering us more than helping us flourish.
Simply put, there’s something residual about this direction we’re taking culturally, but the evidence is pointing in the other direction.
Loneliness is so endemic that the UK Parliament recently established a government department to deal with it. I’m kinda hoping the office is open floor plan.
Robert Puttnam’s seminal 2000 work, Bowling Alone, was the first real take on what has now spread across the West. Puttnam noticed that men, rather than joining ten pin bowling teams, were increasing, you guessed it, bowling alone. Even bowling became a single-person sport. He asked the question: What’s going on in Western society.
Now the subtitle of Puttnam’s book is instructive: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. The loss of community – whether it’s religious, family, sports, civic, has taken hold of not just America, but the West. I frequently work with churches, and the complaint is that church volunteerism has taken a dive.
I tell churches not to worry – or at least not to worry more than any other organisation out there, because volunteerism is at an all time low across the board.
And the pandemic didn’t help. If you weren’t part of what I call “a thick, rich community” going into it, then you won’t have been able to draw from the bank what you hadn’t put in.
During long lockdowns we had to lean on those things already established. And if they weren’t established, then we found to our cost that the chains we most found ourselves in were the isolating and atomising chains of what Rousseau claimed to be freedom.
I belong to a running club. Running can be a lonely sport – and indeed that’s one of the reasons I like it. I can get up at 5am and run with the sound of my thoughts, my footsteps and my breathing. But Saturday runs are long runs, and they’re slower and with other people.
On one of those Saturday runs, one of my friends remarked just after yet another lockdown had ended, that she and her husband had struggled with loneliness and isolation, and being 10 thousand miles from her family did not help.
And then she said something interesting, interesting at least for an Irish lapsed Catholic: “I kinda envy you people in church, because you’ve got people around you who will care for you in times like this.”
And it made me realise I took that church community for granted a little bit. I just assumed everyone had communities like that: communities that helped feed you, or move your house, or visit you when you were sick.
I’ll never forget the day my dad died, because it was the day we had to move from our house of nearly twenty years. A dozen men from church turned up that hot, tearful summer morning, cars and trailers in tow, and did everything for us that one day that is indelibly etched on my mind. I cried tears of grief and thankfulness all at the same time.
And they did it all for the price of, well the price of nothing. They did it because that’s what communities do for each other. Communities that are built on something more than the ‘me-project” in which my flourishing is the primary goal, and in which the means to achieve that is to be singularly self-focussed.
Turns out we’re not just bowling alone. We’re living alone, travelling alone, having sex alone, grieving alone, and dying alone. I’ll never forget the dementia-ridden men and women in my dad’s care facility who never saw a visitor in the five years my father was in there. None of that looked like flourishing to me.
The online world is promising a new type of community – virtual ones. Immersive experiences that make you feel like you are right there. When in actual fact you’re sitting in your bedroom - alone. Mooted as a form of connectivity, we’re finding that such technologies cannot rise above our commitment to radical individualism. Digital technology is to blame for the loneliness epidemic, it’s simply shown it up on a high-speed connection and fast-tracking the problem.
VR promises us a world - or worlds - in which we can be anything we wish to be. And we end up being ourselves, as a banana, or a Viking. And the biggest dangers in these promising new worlds? Sexual harassment, bullying and trolling. If all we’re getting is everyone being who the unfettered expression of who they want to be – to the detriment of others- no wonder people want to be alone.
Robert Puttnam does offer something more though, doesn’t he? The subtitle of his book is about community revival too.
There’s hope there for true flourishing – if we do some systemic root and branch work, and admit we might have grabbed the wrong bottle.
Perhaps the first green shoots will be bowling teams again. Or perhaps it will be community groups looking at new ways to do group housing at a time when individual dwellings are out of the reach of many young families. Communal gardens are springing up, while digital technologies can be used to build up relationships not tear them down.
And what we call mediating institutions: those mini forms of self-government that sit between the individual and our actual governments. Attending to things like community groups, healthy and broad family networks, volunteer organisations, these are the flora and fauna that spring from the soil of a healthy ecosystem.
So back to my plants. What did I do? And how – if at all – are they going? I raced off to the local Bunnings Garden Centre and bought ten large bags of potting mix. Then one by one, I stripped all the soil from every plant, washed them down carefully, and re-potted every last one of them.
And then waited. And waited. And so far, that systemic change seems to have worked. The shock of the new was almost as much of a shock as the poison, but radical root and branch reform seems to have done the trick. In fact, it was such a radical intervention, even the fiddle leaf tree looks a deeper green than ever. No withering so far. Flourishing looks odds on.
And maybe that’s the solution to our social withering as well, some radical scrubbing, starting at a grassroots level. Minor acts of community kindness and involvement, building into something that grows healthy over time.
And perhaps not opting out at the first sign of hardship, or the first time you run across someone and don’t agree with them. The tricky thing about community is that it can’t just be built upon a common goal, it must be built upon a common foundation: a conviction that being together is good and in and of itself.
Goals spring from community life, they don’t merely drive it, because when we’re doing things together, goals form that we would never have envisaged by ourselves. And for sure, it’s a risk, but the risks – and the actual outcomes of radical individualism – are not leading to the flourishing we’ve been promised, but are actually withering us.
From my own experience, being part of a church community based around the person of Jesus – who was the most authentic person ever to live – is critical.
Just the fact that Jesus said it was better – more self-profitable actually – to give rather than to receive, plus his observation that self-denial is the key to life, - self-denial in the service of others –, should give us pause for thought.
A community of other-person servers sounds like it offers the kind of social safety net many people in our isolated and isolating societies are craving. And it’s got to come with dollops of forgiveness and patience.
Whatever it is, it’s probably time to check the label before you start spraying the plants. If we project out this “you do you” strategy, we’re going to see a further withering of our social capital in the coming decades. It might be time to do some radical repair work, and do our part to ensure we’re part of what we hope will be a flourishing community.