I want to repeat this until you are sick of hearing it: Networks do great harm by appearing enough like real communities to create expectations that they can manage human social and psychological needs. The reality is they cannot.
John Taylor Gatto
Recently as I was driving to work, battling the brutal traffic of Ntinda and Bukoto – two suburbs of Kampala with notorious traffic, my car stereo was tuned to a contemporary FM radio station. Between the frustration of snail-crawling traffic and rowdy boda boda cyclists (motor cycle taxis) who have found a way of trying to make me lose my mind, morning radio is usually the only solace I have to stay sane.
It doesn’t help that I drive a stick shift. Clutch burn out is the story of life.
Anyway, let me not digress. The show hosts normally banter and discuss about the most important topics of the week – mostly relationship issues, wannabe celebrities trying to be relevant and politicians swindling everything from mabaati (iron sheets) to funds meant for the wanainchi (citizenry).
The topic on radio that morning was somewhat different. As I shifted the gears, I was listening intently.
One of the loud ladies was talking about classism in a leading primary school where the kids have the latest iPhones and are dropped in top of the range luxury cars by their stay-home mothers who double as pseudo business women. In the evenings, the kids are swamped with a ton of homework. Over the weekend, if they aren’t glued to Disney Channel, they have life-skills activities: swimming, piano, soccer, etc. Mothers compete amongst themselves to make sure none of them is seen to be poor.
“In the end, the mums are burnt out and stressed. The kids are also exhausted,” commented the male co-host who is usually level headed.
“When I was growing up, we had time to go out and play. Our mums never got burnt out because they had help from the village. First of all, they knew all the neighbors where we might be playing,” he added. “Even if lunch time found us there, mum didn’t have to worry because she knew we would be taken care of.”
“Where did the sense of community go these days?” Even the loud lady in studio was silent for a moment.
I could relate with Mr. level-headed man’s sentiments. We live life on the fast lane nowadays, so much that we are losing our sense of community.
When I was growing up, I knew all the kids in the neighborhood. I had so much fun being outdoors and really enjoyed my childhood. I forged some life-long friendships.
Today, there are walls everywhere. Everyone who builds has a 20-foot brick wall around their house – complete with an electric ring and CCTV cameras.
Those didn’t exist when I was growing up (save for embassies and diplomatic missions).
John Taylor Gatto in his book Dumbing Us Down published in 1992 had a lot to say about the quality of schooling in today’s contemporary education system, and how it is affecting the quality of life for both learners and parents.
On how modern schooling is setting us up to live in networks instead of communities:
“It is a fact generally ignored when considering the communal nature of institutional families like schools, large corporations, colleges, armies, hospitals and government agencies that they are not real communities at all, but networks. Unlike communities, networks—as I reminded you—have a very narrow way of allowing people to associate, and that way is always across a short spectrum of one, or at most a few, specific uniformities. It is a puzzling development, as yet poorly understood, that the “caring” in networks is in some important way feigned. Not maliciously, but in spite of any genuine emotional attractions that might be there, human behavior in network situations seems to become a dramatic act—matching a script produced to meet the demands of a story. And as such, the intimate moments in networks lack the sustaining value of their counterparts in community. Those of you who remember the wonderful closeness possible in army camp life or sports teams, and who have now forgotten those you were once close with, will understand what I mean. Have you ever forgotten an uncle or an aunt?
I belong to some networks myself, of course, but the only ones I consider completely safe are the ones that reject their communitarian facade, acknowledge their limits, and concentrate solely on helping me do a specific and necessary task. But a vampire network like a school, which tears off huge chunks of time and energy needed for building community and family—and always asks for more—needs to have a stake driven through its heart and be nailed into its coffin. The feeding frenzy of formal schooling has already wounded us seriously in our ability to form families and communities by bleeding away time we need with our children and our children need with us. That’s why I say we need less school, not more.
Networks divide people, first from themselves and then from each other, on the grounds that this is the efficient way to perform a task. It may well be, but it is a lousy way to feel good about being alive. Networks make people lonely. They have no way to correct their inhuman functioning and still succeed as networks. Behind the anomaly that networks look like communities but are not lurks the grotesque secret of mass-schooling and the reason why enlarging the school domain will only aggravate dangerous conditions of social disintegration it is intended to correct.
I want to repeat this until you are sick of hearing it: Networks do great harm by appearing enough like real communities to create expectations that they can manage human social and psychological needs. The reality is they cannot. Even associations as inherently harmless as bridge clubs, chess clubs, amateur acting groups or groups of social activists will, if they maintain a pretense of whole friendship, ultimately produce that odd sensation familiar to all city dwellers of being lonely in the middle of a crowd. Who has not felt this sensation who frequently networks? Belonging to many networks does not add up to having a community, no matter how many you have or how often your telephone rings.
With a network, what you get at the beginning is all you ever get. Networks don’t get better or worse, their limited purpose keeps them pretty much the same all the time, there just isn’t much development possible. The pathological state which eventually develops out of these constant repetitions of thin human contact is a feeling that your “friends” and “colleagues” don’t really care about you beyond what you can do for them, that they have no curiosity about the way you manage your life, no curiosity about your hopes, fears, victories, defeats. The real truth is that the “friends” falsely mourned for their indifference were never friends, only fellow networkers, from whom in fairness little should be expected beyond attention to the common interest.“
Nowadays we live in social networks – echo chambers which make us less open to differing views and easily triggered by anything that is incongruent to what the algorithms are constantly feeding us.
We are losing our sense of community – of Ubuntu. We have traded it for jobs that keep us away from the people we love and us love us, for technology and social clubs where we try to impress people who really don’t care about us. It’s all a charade.
I think we can partly blame it on contemporary education. What is the alternative? How do we fix this? Maybe I should share my thoughts on this another time.
Nonetheless we need to be intentional about the fact that family and community are some of the most important things – if not – the most important things in life; the things we have to nurture and hold dearest if we are going to thrive in this world. We cannot do life alone. Life is indeed better together.
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