Place Matters
The 1990 film Avalon, directed by Barry Levinson, is a touching story of an immigrant Jewish family who makes their way to the city of Baltimore. The picture begins on the Fourth of July of 1914 with the arrival of Sam Krichinsky, one of four brothers who eventually relocate from Russia to America. Avalon is the name of the Baltimore neighborhood where Sam and his brothers first settle. Gradually, the Krichinskys pool their resources together to bring over other family members. Over time, each member arrives in Avalon and joins the ever-expanding network of relationships.
The first half of the film highlights the integration of the extended family. There are scenes of siblings and numerous cousins playing in the streets between the Baltimore row houses. Mothers are talking with each other across front porches. Asking when their neighbor will be walking to the nearby market, and if they might walk together. Children are seen spending time not only with parents, but grandparents and aunts and uncles who either live in the same house or closely nearby. Then there is the weekly family dinner, which becomes so large that several tables have to be put end to end to accommodate everyone for the shared meal.
Avalon is a portrait of a robust, relationally rich extended family. Life is lived with others, both in times of shared joy, along with periods of struggles and hardships. People are connected. Conversations are many. Common meals are the norm. Life is rooted not only in relationships with others but also in relationship to place.
About halfway into the film, however, something begins to change. The vibrant colors used to paint the picture of a relationally connected life begin to darken. The mood of the story changes. Three forces are introduced into the life of post-World War II Avalon that initiates the fragmentation of their relational connectedness. At first hardly anyone notices. The changes that begin to take place in the life of the family seem right – even commendable. But once the family fully embraces this new American way of living, there is no possibility of holding the pieces together.
The three separate, but interconnected themes that are introduced into the life of the Krichinsky family include the creation of the suburbs, the use of the automobile, and the introduction, for the very first time, of television. It is the birth of the suburban middle class. While each of these issues lead to a similar outcome, in regard to the fragmentation of their extended family, they each take a slightly different route towards the transformation.
The creation of the suburbs. The second generation of the Krichinsky family is experiencing the upward mobility of a postwar economic boom, with the accompanying (false) promise of a better life. More conveniences. More leisure. More space. In one poignant scene, Sam’s grandson Michael (played by a young Elijah Wood) learns that his family will be moving away from the rest of the relatives, the relatives, out to this new world called the suburbs. “What’s a suburb?” he asks.
His mother replies, “It’s a nicer place to live.”
“That’s what it means?” he counters. “A nicer place? Everyone is going to live there too, right? In one house?”
In the mind of this young boy, the thought of moving away from a permanent, familiar place full of relationships cultivated over a lifetime simply didn’t make sense.
The rise of the automobile. As automobiles became more affordable and thus more common, fathers were able to relocate their families to the suburbs without giving up their jobs in Avalon. Every day they would drive out of the neighborhood, alone, to work in a place that was no longer home. In some cases, the places they lived were so far away that fathers were late coming home, missing time with their children.
The popularization of television. Just when the family is about to eat dinner together at the dining room table, they realize their favorite television program is about to come on. They all grab their plates and rush into the living room, where they sit silently, staring at the television. Smaller groups eating off TV trays replace the large, loud family meal. Family conversations about the specifics of the day are left behind.
The final sequence in the film is heartbreaking. Sam, now in the final years of life, sits by himself, late at night. Asleep in his recliner. Alone in the living room with little more than his chair and a television. The room is dark, except for the dim light that radiates from the television that has gone off the air. It is a sad precursor to the way in which our modern families, torn loose of their roots, have left the elderly alone and lonely. The story of the film is the story of how proximity and presence of an extended family is replaced over time by alienation and isolation.
When viewing the film for the first time, I recognized the significant similarities the movie had with a book written the same year by sociologist Ray Oldenburg. In The Great Good Place, Oldenburg contends that the vast majority of communities in the United States are void of relational vitality, primarily because of the loss of what he calls informal public places. He understands the absence of this informal public life as being the result of suburban sprawl and the rise of the automobile culture. Both of which fosters geographical and relational separation between home and workplace. Magnifying the problem is the proliferation of home entertainment that often inhibits face-to-face communication. However, this has moved far beyond the simple introduction of television as portrayed in the film. Today there is the addition of smartphones, computers, gaming devices, and limitless television viewing options.
Oldenburg asserts the combination of these factors is pushing individuals towards what he calls “pitiable isolation” that prohibits sufficient opportunities and encouragement for voluntary human interaction. He describes daily life in the typical suburban setting like “a grammar school without its recess periods” or “incurring the aches and pains of a softball game without the fun of getting together for a few beers afterwards.” Both the joys of hanging out with people and the social cohesion that comes from it are disappearing as the settings to make them possible are fading away.
The problem of place in America manifests itself in a sorely deficient informal public life. The structure of shared experience beyond that offered by family, job, and passive consumerism is small and dwindling. The essential group experience is being replaced by the exaggerated self-consciousness of individuals. American life-styles, for all the material acquisition and the seeking after comforts and pleasures, are plagued by boredom, loneliness, alienation, and a high price tag. America can point to many areas where she has made progress, but in the area of informal public life she has lost ground and continues to lose it.”
The warning that Oldenburg was sounding more than twenty-five years ago is as pertinent as ever. Today we recognize what the sociologist was proposing then was just the tip of the iceberg. The demise of relational vitality that Oldenburg described is feeble compared to the level of displacement and personal isolation felt by many today. Even though there has been a deliberate upswing in the establishment of public places, that trend continues to fight against new forces of relational isolation.
Look at all the lonely people
God has created us as social, relational beings. We are created to be in a relationship with the creator, but also to be in relationships with other people. We have been formed with an innate need to know and be known. Yet, the current way of life in developed countries is greatly reducing the quantity and quality of our relationships. The majority of people no longer live in extended families or even near each other. Instead, people often live on the other side of the country or even across the world from their relatives. When you add the high degree of mobility, with a strong sense of individualism, and the decreased opportunities for informal public life, isolation and loneliness become increasingly common.
While studies show that we are now actually “connected” to a larger and more diverse circle of people, nearly a quarter of Americans say they have nobody to talk to (in 1985 that figure was 8 percent). (1) And this is not simply a picture of solitary retirees. The middle-aged are the loneliest group of all in the United States. According to one recent study 40 percent of adults between the ages of forty-five and forty-nine said they were lonely, up from 20 percent in the 1980s, (2)
The issue of isolation is compounded by a sense of detachment from place. In a highly mobile society people rarely feel rooted geographically. We live as nomads, both figuratively and literally. In Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement, the author contends;
We in North America live in a culture of displacement. "This world is not my home; I'm just passing through" is no longer the sentiment of a certain kind of dualistic pietism; it is a culture-wide attitude. Whether we are talking about the upwardly mobile who view each place as a rung in the ladder that goes up to who knows where, or the postmodern nomad with no roots in any place or any tradition of place, or the average consumer who doesn't know anything about the place where she lives or the places her food comes from, the reality is the same – we are a culture of displacement…. Wanderer, expatriate, exile, diaspora, stranger, migrancy, displacement – all ways to describe the homelessness of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century.
In his book Incarnate, author Michael Frost uses the term excarnation, meaning “to deflesh,” to describe this idea of displacement. Excarnation is the opposite of the more commonly used term, incarnation, which means, “to take on flesh.” Frost compares the modern western experience of life to that of a tourist, someone who is always moving, yet never belonging. Always interested in collecting experiences but remaining superficial and disconnected from permanency. Further, he argues that when the physical places we inhabit—whether homes, offices, shopping malls, highways, airports, cities—look alike, place seems to matter even less. We end up with “a geography of nowhere” — where every place looks like no place in particular. Frost’s summary is that our culture is rootless and disengaged, both relationally and in regard to corporal place.
The lack of meaningful social interaction and the sense of displacement is not only heartbreaking – because we were created for so much more – but it is astoundingly harmful to our way of life. It is literally killing us. According to the volume of evidence Susan Pinker assembles in her book The Village Effect, persistent loneliness alters the genes in every cell of our bodies. And not in a good way.
She builds a convincing argument presenting data from numerous studies that indicate that the influence of social relationships on the risk of death are comparable with well-established risk factors for mortality such as smoking and alcohol consumption and exceed the influence of other risk factors such as physical inactivity and obesity. The subtitle of Pinker’s book is Why Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter. The point is that if we don’t interact regularly with people face-to-face, the odds are we won’t live as long, remember information as well, or be as happy as we could have been. In one example she shares research that shows that playing cards once a week or meeting friends every Wednesday night at Starbucks adds as many years to our lives as taking beta blockers or quitting a pack-a-day smoking habit.
Word Became Flesh and Blood
What then is the appropriate response to a culture of increasing displacement? Can something really be done to turn the tide of isolation? Are there practical actions that can be taken to help mend the broken pieces? To restore people and places back to a point where they can once again flourish?
The solution is no doubt multi-faceted. It will involve a variety of tactics, including the themes of; the art of neighboring, restoring genuine community, sharing meals with others, welcoming the stranger, and opening our lives to those who are disconnected. But I am convinced that all of the practical actions – “the how” – must be rooted in the “why” of incarnational presence. The journey of restoring the relational fabric of our communities must begin with our tangible presence.
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1.) Susan Pinker. The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter (Random House Publishing Group: 2014-08-26) Kindle location, 212.
2.) “Loneliness Among Older Adults: A National Survey of Adults 45+”. AARP. September, 2010. http://assets.aarp.org/rgcenter/general/loneliness_2010.pdf
