What Matters Most: How a Smile Builds a Neighbourhood
In his new book 'Australia Reimagined', social researcher Hugh Mackay tells how inclusivity is a key to neighbourhoods
It’s probably fair to say that our moral formation is not complete until we’ve learnt how to get along with people who aren’t our chosen friends, who may be quite unlike us in ethnicity, religion, musical tastes, child-rearing practices or recreational pursuits, but who nevertheless share our locality.
Not everyone sees being a neighbour as involving that kind of social contract. Some people prefer to live as recluses; some will do everything possible to avoid contact – even eye contact – with their neighbours; some totally reject the idea that, by choosing to live in a particular dwelling, they have any moral or social obligations to the other people who live in that street or apartment block or locality. After all, they may say, I didn’t choose to have these people as my neighbours in the way I choose my friends, so why do I owe them anything? My ‘community’ is my work colleagues, or my friendship circle, or the people I play footy with, or my network of school or university friends, or my Rotary or Probus club, or my church, or the local branch of my political party.
Not everyone sees being a neighbour as involving that kind of social contract. Some people prefer to live as recluses; some will do everything possible to avoid contact – even eye contact – with their neighbours; some totally reject the idea that, by choosing to live in a particular dwelling, they have any moral or social obligations to the other people who live in that street or apartment block or locality. After all, they may say, I didn’t choose to have these people as my neighbours in the way I choose my friends, so why do I owe them anything? My ‘community’ is my work colleagues, or my friendship circle, or the people I play footy with, or my network of school or university friends, or my Rotary or Probus club, or my church, or the local branch of my political party.
But what is a neighbour? And why does being a good neighbour make such a critical contribution to the development of social capital?
We all know how to act like neighbours when there’s a crisis: floods, bushfires, storms, or horrific events like the carnage in Melbourne’s Bourke Street Mall in 2017, when a motorist drove into a group of pedestrians, killing six and injuring more than 30 others. Of course bystanders rushed to the aid of the injured and dying. People almost always help those in obvious pain and distress – that’s the kind of species we belong to. So why does it so often take a crisis to remind us of our responsibility to the other members of our community, including the elderly and the isolated, whose need of help – perhaps in the form of nothing more than a bit of conversation – might not be as immediately obvious as an accident victim’s?
We all know how to act like neighbours when there’s a crisis: floods, bushfires, storms, or horrific events like the carnage in Melbourne’s Bourke Street Mall in 2017, when a motorist drove into a group of pedestrians, killing six and injuring more than 30 others. Of course bystanders rushed to the aid of the injured and dying. People almost always help those in obvious pain and distress – that’s the kind of species we belong to. So why does it so often take a crisis to remind us of our responsibility to the other members of our community, including the elderly and the isolated, whose need of help – perhaps in the form of nothing more than a bit of conversation – might not be as immediately obvious as an accident victim’s?
If we’re serious about building social cohesion, we’d do well to attend to comments like this one from a single mother, recently divorced: “As a sole parent, I feel invisible. It’s as if other families don’t think we’re a real family. I’ve found I don’t get invited to anything where husbands are present. Even when I’ve taken the initiative and invited a few couples to dinner, they never reciprocate – except if it’s a women-only occasion.”
Among the elderly, divorce or bereavement can induce a kind of invisibility that leads to social isolation: One example is, “People were really kind after my wife died, but then they sort of dropped me. I’m never included in events with couples. People say, ‘You seem to be getting on well,’ without ever acknowledging the effort, the loneliness and the pain of it.”
In another example, “I was relieved when my husband finally left. He was welcome to the younger model, frankly, and she was welcome to him. But I wasn’t prepared for the change in my social life – I’m often left out. Maybe some of my women friends think I’m after their husbands. As if! Luckily, I have a neighbour nearby who is in the same boat as me.”
In another example, “I was relieved when my husband finally left. He was welcome to the younger model, frankly, and she was welcome to him. But I wasn’t prepared for the change in my social life – I’m often left out. Maybe some of my women friends think I’m after their husbands. As if! Luckily, I have a neighbour nearby who is in the same boat as me.”
Building social capital doesn’t only depend on responding to another person’s cry for help. We build social capital and help to preserve social cohesion whenever we acknowledge another person; whenever we smile at a stranger; whenever we undertake volunteer work in the community; whenever we ask the neighbours in for a drink; whenever we greet people we encounter in the street, in a queue, in a lift, or beside us in a bus or train; whenever we join a local organisation or patronise a local coffee shop, library or post office and engage in some personal interaction with the people we see there. Smile. Say hello. That’s how we help build social capital; that’s how we help build social cohesion.
We have plenty of time to enjoy our solitude and privacy when we’re behind the closed door of our home. Once we step outside, though, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by being the kind of person who encourages, by our own example, the idea that since we’re all in this thing together, we might as well acknowledge each other, at least.
We have plenty of time to enjoy our solitude and privacy when we’re behind the closed door of our home. Once we step outside, though, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by being the kind of person who encourages, by our own example, the idea that since we’re all in this thing together, we might as well acknowledge each other, at least.
This is an extract from Australia Reimagined by Hugh Mackay, published by Pan Macmillan, rrp $32.99, available now.
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What are your thoughts on community ties and social capital? Share them in the Comments below. And if you enjoyed this story, like it, save it, save the photos and join the conversation.
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Read more lifestyle stories on Houzz
In the same way, a society needs to develop social capital to maintain and nurture its institutions and its way of life through the fostering of harmonious social interactions, transparently honest commercial relationships, productive workplaces and cooperative communities – all characterised by mutual support, trust and respect, and a willingness to accept responsibility for the wellbeing of others as well as ourselves.
The health of any society depends on the robustness of its social capital. While it’s true that social capital is developed through any relationship based on mutual respect, the critical ‘nursery’ for the growth and development of social capital is the local neighbourhood. This is where we make our homes, raise our kids and do much of the business of living. It’s also where we share ‘common ground’ like footpaths, roads, parks, shops, libraries, schools, churches. It’s where incidental interactions occur between people who, generally speaking, did not choose to live in close proximity with each other, but who soon realise that a basic level of cooperation, harmony and reciprocity is going to make life more pleasant for all of us. In short, it’s where we learn to become citizens.
The local neighbourhood is a place where neighbours are expected to act like neighbours – not by being each other’s best friends, though that occasionally happens, but by recognising that when you buy or rent a house or apartment you are taking your place as a member of a neighbourhood, and moral and social obligations flow from that.