Do I Need My Neighbor?

“I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul” - Invictus 

William Earnest Henley

“We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. 

We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.

G.K. Chesterton

When was the last time you ate with your neighbors? Do we even know our neighbors? In an older time, having a pleasant and practical relationship with your immediate townsfolk could be a life-or-death affair. Take this old farm reimagining of The Golden Rule: “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.” It is indeed a bygone world, that the literal “shit” your neighbor might put in the water would have direct consequences to you and yours. Being neighborly was a Christian virtue as much as a practical necessity. And so this “older world” was a world of mutual dependence. Beyond avoiding self-destruction of each other’s water source, this world required daily sacrifice, dozens of hours a week of literal blood, sweat, and tears, only to provide a lifestyle we would now decry as the poorest poverty. When we talk about “Progress,” we must remember that while we may be progressing beyond material hardships, we are also progressing beyond any loyalty we might owe to each other and the land we once called home. 

While we no longer “depend” on our immediate neighbors, any idea we might have of ourselves as “independent individuals” is only an illusion. What forces keep the US $ as the most powerful currency in the world? What about our food supply; which of you can supply 100% of your calories from your backyard? And what about reading this very article in the comfort of your own home: the data, the electricity, the software of the website? Surely, someone somewhere is responsible for managing all of this. And this is our tragic irony. Dependence is inevitable, but when dependence was once localized we might’ve grown to love those we depended on; in our current state, we can never love those we depend on; their very nature is impersonal. In our age, we do not need our pastor, we do not need our land in any meaningful or practical sense, and we do not need our next-door neighbor. This “successful liberation” is our tragedy; we have achieved what our cultural and technological script writes for us. We move away from home; we have machines that take our fall in “working the field,” and from forming necessary bonds among our neighbors; we do not need the wisdom of our ancestors or our God, and we are exactly what we want: alone.

The easiest way to get a pulse on a culture is to assess its relationship to romance, or at least Erich Fromm thought so. After fleeing Nazi Germany for greener pastures in the US, he spent a lot of time thinking about our nation’s cultural and psychological state. If you want to know a people and what they value, watch how they treat the opposite sex. A culture can go without organized religion, it can survive without nuclear families, and it can even limp along without friends, but it can never survive long without some ideas around romantic love. For Fromm, post-WW2 America was all about buying things. Our neighborly relations are no longer about our usefulness to one another or any long-held generational bonds we might have; our neighbors were only good for exchanging money. So it naturally follows, that we would come to view prospective husbands and wives with the same psychological framework: someone who is “attractive” has a nice package of qualities that are highly sought after on the personality market… what determines the market are none other than the fashions of the time.” Though he would not live to see our age, it would not surprise him that today the mechanisms used to order take-out food could also be initiated to form a romantic “relationship.” It also would not surprise him that one of our primary metaphors justifying promiscuity is relating to the opposite sex as “test-driving” a car. The metaphor fits all too well, as most cars are traded in after 7-8 years, and increasingly so, our marriages.

Let’s think of the implications of viewing a lover as an object or experience to be “Consumed.” Instead of bringing to the table a life-giving, self-sacrificial, productive love, we make demands of our lover; we want them to bring meaning to our life, chaos to our order, etc… For a time, we may have some intense infatuation, and we may even point to those feelings as evidence for the quality of love, but it only proves the severity of our own inner loneliness. We “love” them for applying a temporary salve to the emptiness of our own lives and culture, or as the poet says, 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light

And so it goes, in our friendless, cultureless world, we lack the tools and generational wisdom to build the maturity “TO LOVE” our lover with a quality and maturity that endures until the end. We sell the experience of “falling in love” in many of our movies and songs, but on the subject of developing a permanent state of “being in love,” we have little wisdom to offer. 

There is an ironic wisdom in the first heartbreak between a thirteen-year-old girl and her middle school boyfriend. For her, the world is “over,” and she’ll never recover, and she’ll die alone. Three weeks later, she’s fine, but for a short moment, the world was over. To the credit of the intensity of a middle school heartbreak, our current crisis of family formation is apocalyptic. The youngest generation’s romantic struggle is the canary in the coal mine. In the most obvious way, a culture that cannot marry and raise families is a culture slowly marching (or scrolling) toward its death. But its current crisis reveals a much broader problem in our way of “life.” We are not only seeing increasingly fewer marriages, but friendships, and it’s quite obvious to see the relationship between the two problems. A culture that does not foster friendship and neighborliness among its youth cannot expect its people to magically conjure up that skill the second it comes time to marry and raise children. 

Postscript

We determine what a people value based on what we can observe in their lives and the decisions they make. So, we’ll end this piece with a series of questions. As you read them, think of the direction your parents might have nudged you towards, think of what you see depicted in movies/shows, and think of where your own heart might lead you.  

Is it better to be employable for a specific job or marriageable? 

Is it better to live in a city with better economics or a better community? 

Is it better to have food made with love or food made as quickly as possible? 

How frequently should we / the kids see Grandma? 

Is it better to see my neighbor day-to-day, or to only smile when we awkwardly cross paths?

Is it better to forgive a friend or find a new friend group? 

Is it better to marry “For better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health..” or to marry until I find a character trait I don’t like? 

Is it better to think more of myself or less of myself? 

Think of how you would answer, then think of how you would hope your neighbor would answer. Remember the river? While I’m sure most of you don’t live on a river, I’m sure you get the picture of how your neighbor, your friend, or your spouse’s answer to some of these questions might directly impact your own well-being.