More than you might realise - and than I ever realised....
As we have been delving into the dynamics of honour and shame, one issue that comes up is how the cultural issues of shame and behaviour-constraint play out in the urbanisation of Africa. The old people are constantly complaining that the young people don't understand respect (honour) anymore.
I recently read a blog post over at Ligonier Ministries bringing a correlation between Cities and Mega Churches and living/worshipping 'incognito'. Here are a few quotes from that post:
"Though it may be counterintuitive, it is nevertheless true—we have more privacy in the big city than we do in the country. There is actually a converse ratio between people per square mile and anonymity levels. In the city, even though we are cheek by jowl, we have precious little interaction and what we do have remains strictly surface. In the country, though we may be as far from each other as to very far away things, we notice things, follow events in each others lives, even, truth be told, talk about each other. Many have known to follow the high praise of country living, "Everyone knows your name," with the bitter complaint, "and everyone knows your business."
While I stand opposed to the sin of gossip, I stand to speak in favor of knowing our neighbors. I know, having spent more than half my life in the country, that there is a gracious restraint that comes from having your neighbors know you. I was regularly informed on by neighbors I barely knew, but who knew me, and called my parents from time to time to bring them up to speed. Even more often I was kept from reportable sins precisely because I knew word would get back.
I'm not arguing that we need to all move to the country. I do, however, want to suggest that there is a parallel here with mega-churches. Like mega-cities, monstrous churches not only carry the temptation of invisibility, but such is one of their selling points."
RC Sproul Jr in the post went on to say how difficult it is to truly 'love one another' when we keep our distance from one another as the body is meant to function together as one and is not to think any part has no need for any other part.
Co-incidentally, I had a news email come across my 'desk' a couple of weeks back that included a comment by a prominent adolescent psychologist in Melbourne, Michael Carr-Gregg ""We've had people moving to these artificial villages called cities, primarily to get jobs and in doing so, a lot of the kinship networks have been destroyed"
As I read RC Sproul's and the Psychologist's comments, my mind immediately went to two corners of our 'research data' on honour/shame:
1. As people here move their living/working context from the village to the city, their sphere of accountability changes. Where once a person functioned in the arena of a village that was a 'closed' community where all of life happened among just one group of people in one small geographic location, a person now functions in an 'open' context across many groups of people in various geographic locations.
Where once those I lived with were also those I worked in the fields with, who were the same people I socialised with, who were the same people I went to church with or met at the shop,....now the people those groups may not know each other or even live near each other. The people I see at work I may never ever meet in any other context of my life. Under the context of the 'old days' if I do something shameful and wrong at work (in the field) in the village, not only do those I work with know, but also those I socialise with, live with, go to church with or meet at the shops.
In the city, that is not so. In the village the shame of my wrongdoing in the plowing-field or at home or wherever, is felt everywhere. In the city, I can avoid the intensity of that shame and I have the added benefit of the possibility of changing jobs or church or moving house to find a place where I am not 'known'.
Closely linked to this is the 'gossip' chain of news dissemination in a village that brings a form of 'always being seen'. Its like the village is the 'person' who is always watching and has 'eyes' everywhere. The connections are such that word will always filter back to others who 'should' know.
In the old days, this was a very high motivation to do what was expected - what was accepted by everyone as the 'right thing'. If you didn't you could end up being an 'outcast' in your own village just by people's shunning/shaming of you. The only way to escape it would be to go to another village/tribe where from the outset you would also be in a shamed position of being 'less' than those 'real' members of that village family. The fear of shaming and rejection is a highly effective motivator, even though it mostly functions at the sub-conscious level.
(This scenario is very similar to the concept of the 'Western' country town which resembles more of the 'closed' community, where relationships are tight.)
We see this is one reason that 'bad behaviour' seems to increase in cities and has certainly increased here in Botswana as the country has rapidly urbanised, so much so that it has gone from almost the total population living in a rural village setting to over 80% living in urban centres, in less than 50 years.
....look out for the next blog post with Part 2
Photo from www.publicdomainpictures.net
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