Living uprooted as most of us do, spending our lives adrift on a sea of strangers and rarely seeing loved ones, was in most cultures the worst punishment. Ancient Greeks chose death over exile, and the Israelites grieved to be strangers in a strange land. International law today condemns solitary confinement as literal torture, but that is how many of us spend our lives, alone even in a crowd.
While the social network dissolved earlier in my USA
than in Ireland, even here older people can remember a time when it was utterly
normal to know all the neighbours and “borrow a cup of sugar,” as the phrase
goes. There’s a world of meaning in such old phrases; it implied that people
could walk around neighbourhoods unafraid, knew their neighbours well enough to
walk in and ask for something, and could expect to be told yes. It also meant
that most people cooked their own meals, rather than buying them pre-cooked and
frozen from the store, so that people could plausibly need a cup of sugar for
something.
In his excellent book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam used dozens of polls, surveys, diaries and other statistics to back up their depiction of what American life used to be, a culture rich with neighbourhood gatherings, card games, fraternal lodges, dinner parties, bowling leagues, PTA meetings, political caucuses, town ban
Sitting alone in our cars, our cubicles and in front of our screens, it’s almost impossible for us in the modern world to imagine how communal and intimate virtually all human life used to be until historically yesterday. For twenty years I talked to elderly people in rural Ireland – who often grew up in intense poverty, without electricity or cars – and over and over they described how everyone looked out for each other. What they describe is simply how most humans lived – in tribes, villages and neighbourhoods – for thousands of generations until historically yesterday.
Living uprooted as most of us do, spending our lives adrift on a sea of strangers and rarely seeing loved ones, was in most cultures the worst punishment. Ancient Greeks chose death over exile, and the Israelites grieved to be strangers in a strange land. International law today condemns solitary confinement as literal torture, but that is how many of us spend our lives, alone even in a crowd.
While the social network dissolved earlier in my USA than in Ireland, even here older people can remember a time when it was utterly normal to know all the neighbours and “borrow a cup of sugar,” as the phrase goes. There’s a world of meaning in such old phrases; it implied that people could walk around neighbourhoods unafraid, knew their neighbours well enough to walk in and ask for something, and could expect to be told yes. It also meant that most people cooked their own meals, rather than buying them pre-cooked and frozen from the store, so that people could plausibly need a cup of sugar for something.
In his excellent book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam used dozens of polls, surveys, diaries and other statistics to back up their depiction of what American life used to be, a culture rich with neighbourhood gatherings, card games, fraternal lodges, dinner parties, bowling leagues, PTA meetings, political caucuses, town bands, Boy Scouts and many other groups. This, by the way, was true for both genders and all races. He also shows how all these things – in fact, all forms of human interaction – have plummeted in recent decades, as screens and politics have conspired to divide us against each other.
One surprisingly useful resource to see this transformation – in the USA, at least– is through the newspaper “funny pages,” comic strips like Blondie or Family Circus. Many of then have been running for more than a century and have changed little, as they were written by only one creator for decades, and the increasingly elderly readers liked them just fine the way they were. Thus they provide a valuable time capsule of the habits and values of Americans three or four generations ago.
For example, in Family Circus, a running gag shows the mother sending a child out to the neighbours to borrow a cup of sugar and telling him to “come right home.” The rest of the comic is a map of their town, showing the child taking a winding route through the woods, the creek, the playground, his friends’ houses and finally home to an exasperated mother. When the strip was created in 1960 this immediately earned a chuckle, as adults saw children do this every day, and remembered being that child.
Today, the scene looks too incomprehensible to be funny; not only would few people in a village even know their neighbours, much less borrow from them, but few parents would allow their child to wander the neighbourhood unsupervised, or play in the woods, or wander in and out of other houses.
Blondie also has once-common scenes, like the husband sitting at a bench at his favourite diner and chatting to the cook as a neighbour – normal when the strip appeared a century ago, but try doing it in the local kebab shop or fast food joint. Another common joke is that he is always late for his carpool in the morning; he and all his neighbours carpool to work, an act that was taken for granted several decades ago but is rare today.
Also in Blondie, many of the jokes centre around the husband and wife chatting amiably with local children who just wander up to them and talk, or Dennis the Menace – no relation to the UK comic of the same name – pestering his adult neighbours. Today, if a local man were to spend a lot of time with a child, parents would be likely to call the police.
Of course comic strips were works of fiction that exaggerate reality for broad comedy, yet the comedy only worked because everyone who read the strips recognised the situations from real life. Today, they are read mostly by an increasingly elderly audience who remember the lost civilisation they depict, and can appreciate the jokes. For the rest of us, society has changed so much that they are merely bizarre. Their humour now consists of what we might as well call “banana-peel jokes,” something we register as a standard joke material even though no one can remember the reason it was once supposed to be funny.
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