Our new way of being a community
Date: July 13 2002
By Hugh Mackay
It's hard to escape the feeling that we are on the cusp of another cultural revolution that is going to reshape our society as surely as the gender revolution has done. The signs of it are everywhere, most obviously among the rising generation of young Australians who are showing us what "connection" really means.
Case in point: at an independent secondary school that still gives Saturday detentions to miscreants, a 16-year-old is ordered to perform community service (gardening) for three consecutive Saturdays. On the first appointed day, he turns up with half a dozen of his mates, all ready to join him in performing whatever task he is set.
"You don't have to do this," says the teacher to the others. "He's the only one with the detention."
"That's all right," one of the students replies. "We've got nothing else to do."
The other students are not claiming to have been involved in whatever offence the boy had committed; this isn't a kind of group confession of shared guilt. They are simply asserting their willingness to help with whatever work he is being set. They are his friends, and what else would friends do?
Sure enough, for the following two weeks the same group turned up, still willing to share their friend's detention. The supervising teacher reported that they didn't seem to be trying to reduce his workload; they weren't confining their activity to the assignment he had been given, but were hopping into a series of associated tasks that meant the total amount of work being done was more than the equivalent of one detention's worth.
This was a mini-tribe - a herd, a gang - behaving the way tribes do. Without trying to put it into words, they were saying, in effect, that their identity is a shared identity, rather like the shared identity of primitive tribal people: "I am part of this whole; we are part of each other. I define myself through my connection to these others."
Like tribesmen everywhere, these boys were demonstrating that their emotional security depends on their membership of the group, in precisely the same way as, in a previous era, it might have depended on their membership of an extended family.
Another case, another school: a female teacher, walking down a corridor between periods, comes across two girls locked in a protracted hug. She recognises one of them as a girl who should be in her next class. "Come on," she says, "you'll be late for English."
"We're just saying goodbye," says the student.
"But you'll see each other again in 40 minutes," says the teacher, not yet fully adapted to the ways of a tribal generation.
Yet another case, this time from the world of work: an employment officer makes an appointment for an interview with a teenager applying for his first job. The young man shows up with three friends in tow.
"Are you all applying for the job?"
"No, I'm applying for the job, but some of my mates came with me."
Two generations ago, his parents might have accompanied him to his first job interview, but now it's the representatives of the tribe, not the family, who offer emotional support. (The interviewer felt that if she'd offered them all the one job to share, they would have jumped at the chance.)
This is a new way of being a community. This is a new level of peer group connection. These are the members of a generation who spend all day together at school, then get on the bus to go home and ring each other on the mobile phone, or send a stream of text messages to each other. "Where are you now? Who are you with," they inquire solicitously, while their parents pay the bill for this flow of continuous contact.
Then, when they arrive home, they hop on to the Internet to link up again in a chat room, or via e-mail. While their parents fondly believe they're consulting the library of the University of Minnesota for their homework, they're actually planning the weekend.
"They are the generation that beeps and hums," one of their fathers remarked recently, and so they are. They are the generation who, having grown up in an era of unprecedentedly rapid change, have intuitively understood that they are each other's most precious resource for coping with the inherent uncertainty of life.
Their desire to connect, and to stay connected, will reshape this society. They are the harbingers of a new sense of community, a new tribalism, that will challenge everything from our old-fashioned respect for privacy to the way we conduct our relationships and the way we build our houses.
The era of individualism is not dead yet, but the intimations of its mortality are clear.
Hugh Mackay's fourth novel, Winter Close, has just been published by Hodder.