Few things are guaranteed to provoke British wrath more than daring to question our right to travel where we like, when we like and how we like. Mobility is an incontestable right. It is the foundation on which Western wealth has been built. It is the pre-requisite of our much-cherished liberty and individualism. It is no less than an axiom of modern, civilised life.
Evidence of this was seen in some of the early howls of protest over Ken Livingston’s latest attempt to drag drivers out of their cars. “Londoners are not happy about the forthcoming congestion charges,” declares the frankly-named website www.sod-u-ken.co.uk. “Everyone will be affected - Business people, parents, central London residents, cab drivers, emergency services…”
Although in this case the target was the scheme’s supposedly ill-thought-out and inequitable logistics, the underlying issue is more profound. As the poison-chaliced role of Transport Secretary has shown, our mobility, or more accurately, our ‘hypermobility’ has become an almost insoluble problem in Britain today.
Welcome to the Global Suburb
As a nation we travel over three times further today than we did in 1952.[i] We travel further to work, to school, to shop, and to visit friends than ever before.[ii] The average person makes over a thousand journeys per year, totalling nearly 7,000 miles, 2,000 more than in 1975. This is forecast to double again in the next 25 years.[iii]
Nor is it simply our ‘micro’ or day-to-day travelling that has risen. An ever increasing proportion of us work abroad. As a nation we flew 35 times more domestic miles in 1998 than we did in 1952.[iv] In 2000, British airports processed twice as many passengers as they did ten years earlier.[v]
We also move house more frequently than we used to, with nearly half of the British population moving in the 1990s. By 2001 there were nearly 1.5 million housing transactions per year.[vi] We appear to have become a nation always on the move.
This mobility has had numerous positive effects. It has fostered economic growth, broadened horizons, helped address racism, xenophobia and cultural myopia, and enabled countless individuals to fulfil a potential which would have remained dormant in static, pre-modern communities. We tend to disparage the benefits of mobility only after having benefited from them.
The problem, however, comes when we make a social God of a social good. Increased mobility necessarily means shallower roots. As people travel further to shop, school and work, the economic and occupational glue that holds communities together disintegrates. Local businesses find themselves increasingly unable to compete with out of town malls. Town centres are left without amenities or become colonised by indistinguishable chain stores which abolish any trace of local distinctiveness. As Tom Wolfe wrote in his novel, A Man in Full: “the only way you could tell you were leaving one community and entering another was when the franchises started repeating and you spotted another 7-Eleven, another Wendy’s, another Costco…”[vii] We live not so much in a global village as a global suburb.
Who is my neighbour?
And life in the global suburb faces some real problems. The dramatic fall in ‘local interaction time’ – partly because we are travelling more and partly because our travel is predominantly by car rather than by other more sociable means (foot, bicycle, bus or train) – weakens community links and destroys social capital.[viii] We spend far more time among people we don’t know and less time among neighbours whom we know less and less well. Our world becomes more anonymous and less convivial as we find ourselves living in a nation of strangers.
Hypermobility has effects more tangible than simply making our environment less pleasant, however. A culture of necessary job mobility compounded by a time-consuming commute helps reduce ‘family-interaction’ time, just as it affects ‘local-interaction’ time. Moving home and area can disrupt children’s education and an individual’s proximity to and capacity to care for elderly relatives. The more we travel, the more challenging it becomes to sink the roots necessary for healthy family life.
Hypermobility also facilitates crime: while having little to do with why people commit crimes, it has everything to do with how they do. In an anonymous and fluid local environment, car crime and house burglary become far easier. In a world full of strangers, it is easy for criminals to blend in. “People are far more willing to steal from strangers and institutions than from personal acquaintances.”[ix]
All this can provoke fears over the invisible enemy ‘out there’ and, somewhat ironically, lead people to demonise groups in the way in which traditionally static communities are supposed to. Mobility may broaden the mind but hypermobility can close it down again.
Our natural response to crime is self-protection. In modern Britain, this has primarily involved the (somewhat ironic) imitation of pre-mobile communities in the rise of the neighbourhood watch scheme, which recognise that looking out for one another is the most effective and economic means of dealing with crime. Less convivially (and more expensively), it has also given rise to all-pervasive surveillance technology, massive growth in home security and the increase in gated communities and private roads. A suspicious society breeds a siege mentality in which all public space is hostile and potentially dangerous.
The Sweet Wine of Youth
Nowhere is this hostility more evident than in the lives of children. At first glance accident statistics suggest that our roads are getting ever safer for children. There are, for example, about a third as many under-16s killed on roads today as there were in 1922 when there was very little traffic and a nationwide 20mph speed limit.
This does not, however, mean that the world is three times safer for children as the real reason for the fall in accidents is that roads have become so dangerous that children are no longer allowed out to play in the same way as they were 80 years ago.[x] Between 1971 and 1990 the proportion of 7-8 year olds who went to school unaccompanied by adults fell from 80 per cent to 9 per cent.[xi]
A combination of lethal roads and omnipresent ‘Stranger Danger’ confines children to the TV or perhaps to the gated (and guarded) school playground, and has been considered to impair social development.[xii] The ultimate hypermobile society is one in which, unless supervised, children cannot play outside (because it is too dangerous), cannot visit the shops (because there aren’t any within walking distance) and cannot go unescorted to schools (because of fear of paedophiles).
A Polarised Society
A more subtle impact of hypermobility it is the way it helps polarise society. The huge increase in the distance that the average person travels masks a big disparity across income. Mobility is strongly correlated to household car ownership and car ownership is strongly correlated to household income. In the top quintile of incomes, half of all households have access to two or more cars; whereas in the bottom quintile 71 per cent of households have no car. Accordingly, the average distance travelled to work by those in the highest quintile of incomes is over eleven miles, compared with than those in the lowest quintile which is under five.[xiii]
Superficially this sounds like a good thing, with the poorest in society not suffering from the anonymity and social dislocation that hypermobility inflicts on others. However, because this group is anomalous it ends up suffering rather than benefiting. With society tailored to mobility generally and to the car specifically, those who are too old, young, poor, or ill to drive become effectively second class citizens, with a restricted choice of jobs, amenities and shops. We recognise the unfairness of hollowing out the local retailers and public services which glue communities together but refuse to recognise that it is our own hypermobility that is at the root of the problem.
A Global Problem
It is also worth considering briefly the broader global picture of mobility polarisation. In the last 50 years the number of car owners in the world has risen from 50 to approximately 500 million. In the same time the number of non-car owners has increased from 2.5 to 5 billion.[xiv]
The issues this raises are clear. The West has lost any moral right it might once have had to tell developing nations not to use their cars in the ways we do. In any case, these nations are hardly likely to allow Westerners to pull the ladder up from under them.
And yet, should the whole world succeed in catching up with the US’s current state of car ownership by 2025 there would be 6.4 billion motor vehicles on earth, enough to form a traffic queue 30 million miles long. The environmental consequences of this would, of course, be catastrophic and the social problems experienced by hypermobile societies would be a truly global phenomenon.[xv]
A Biblical Perspective
Hypermobility is a phenomenon unrecognised in the Bible. The ancient concept of mobility focused on national upheaval and migration on a mass scale, as opposed to our modern idea of daily, small scale, atomised journeys.
Yet, in many ways the entire Biblical story revolves around a tension between roots and mobility. God’s first words to Abraham instruct him to “leave your country, your people and your father’s household”, so that he can be made into a “great nation...[through which] all peoples on earth will be blessed.”[xvi] The means of mobility lead to the ends of rootedness.
From this point on the narrative focus oscillates between mobility and rootedness. Israel is called to sink roots in Canaan but is told in no uncertain terms that “the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants”[xvii] The Israelites are leaseholders and not freeholders, called to rootedness but, crucially, a rootedness which maintains the dependent mindset of mobility. The land is a blessing and gift but one which can be and is revoked if Israel flouts the leasehold agreements.
Can anything good come from Nazareth?
Superficially, the whole picture changes with the coming of Jesus. Nowhere in the New Testament is the physical territory of Jewish Palestine referred to with any theological importance. Instead, Jesus assumes the land’s significance and declares himself, one with “nowhere to lay his head.”[xviii] He explicitly tells the woman at the well in Samaria, “a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on his mountain not in Jerusalem… a time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.”[xix] His parting words at the end of Matthew’s gospel are “go out and make disciples of all nations.”[xx] The sense of place so keen in the Old Testament appears to have been abolished.
And yet this shift in focus from the land to the messiah can lead us to overlook the continued importance of rootedness. Whilst a willingness to be uprooted was central Jesus’ message, that did not necessarily equate to uprooting people. His commands to leave all and follow him should be balanced against those advising people to “return home and tell how much God has done for you.”[xxi] The warmth and familiarity with which he is welcomed into the home of Martha and Mary testify to that fact that knowing Jesus did not necessitate dismantling your geographical community. Jesus remained Jesus “of Nazareth” even when the epithet cost him credibility.[xxii]
This importance of roots is supported and built on in the life and letters of Paul. Paul’s unenviable task was to turn the ‘mobile’ idea of being “in Christ” wherever one was, into the reality of building genuine, tangible fellowship, in a manner not dissimilar to the task of Israel after the Exodus. For the young churches fellowship was not some watery idea of ‘getting along together’ but rather a concrete, socio-economic living out of the fundamental idea of being in Christ. It involved financial and material generosity, hospitality, morality, and a concern for the needy. It meant living out their theology where they were, whilst being prepared to follow Christ if he called them elsewhere.
Where do we go from here?
Questioning the modern god of mobility is liable to get you pilloried for heresy. Doing so armed with 2,000 year old scriptures will merely intensify the condemnation. And yet, as is almost invariably the case, when our tools become our goals we find ourselves in deep trouble. The social and environmental costs of our hypermobility are, slowly, being recognised. Constructing a feasible solution will not be easy, particularly given the strength of vested interests and human selfishness ranged against it.
More pointedly and less comfortably, any solution must begin with us. We cannot fall into the trap of believing that government re-appropriation of the railways or mayoral road taxes will solve the problem. The problem lies with how, where and when we choose to travel. In short, we are the problem.
Biblical teaching can offer some overarching guidelines concerning how we relate to place and mobility. Place is important: without it there is no community and only weak relationships. Place is dangerous: the transition from appreciating location to aggressive nationalism is easily made; people can allow a land to be the master of their minds rather than their servant of their lives. Mobility has nothing intrinsically wrong with it: maintaining a ‘mobility mindset’ is key to the Torah, and Christ’s peripatetic lifestyle exemplifies how a semi-nomadic existence can be right for the right people in the right circumstances. Both mobility and rootedness should be focused on the key question: what kind of relationships should we be sustaining?: neither mobility not rootedness is the final goal in itself but both can be used by God to guide, reward, warn, and discipline his people.
Having recognised this, we are faced with a number of questions ourselves. What is our reason for moving to/ living in a certain place? How long do we intend to remain there? How close are we to relatives and friends? How well do we know our neighbours? Are we sufficiently rooted to fulfil our obligations to wider family, church and community?
The questions extend beyond the individual to employers, policy makers and churches. Is there a tacit expectation that your employees should be prepared to relocate/ travel long distances/ spend days away from home in order to discharge their duties? What is the level of your corporate social responsibility? Does the company have any commitment to its local community? How far does the physical, social, retail, and transport infrastructure of a locality facilitate strong relationships and a healthy community? What role in the community does the church play? Is the congregation stable enough to minister effectively? Does it have any affiliation with local charities, amenities, schools, hospitals or other organisations?
None of these questions is particularly easy to answer and many of them reveal a profound hypocrisy in our lives (at least they did with this author). Nevertheless, as our voracious love affair with mobility proceeds to destroy family, community and environment, we need to think carefully – and quickly – how we currently contribute to the problem and how we might, as Christians, address it and live as a body through which God may bless all peoples on earth.
Nick Spencer's booklet 'Where do we go from here? A Biblical Perspective on Roots and Mobility in Britain today' is available free from The Jubilee Centre. To request a copy please e-mail jubilee.centre@clara.net or phone 01223 566319.
This article first appeared in Third Way.
[i] 720 billion passenger kilometres per year in 1999 vs. 218 in 1952. Table 1.1, Transport Trends 2001, Office for National Statistics (The Stationery Office, 2001)
[ii] ibid., Tables 1.8 and 1.10
[iii] ibid., Table 1.5; cf. John Adams, The Social Implications of Hypermobility, (www.oecd.org/env/docs/epocppct993.pdf), page 99
[iv] 7 billion domestic miles in 1998 compared to 200,000 in 1952. ibid., Table 1.
[v] 142 million passengers in 2000, ibid., Table 7.7
[vi] In 2001 there were 1.45 million housing transactions compared to 903,000 in 1961.Office for National Statistics, Statbase (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/tsdataset.asp?vlnk=704&B4.x=61&B4.y=15). See also DETR, http://www.housing.dtlr.gov.uk/research/hss/index.htm#surveys
[vii] Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (Jonathan Cape, 1998), quoted in Hypermobility: too much of a good thing, John Adams (PIU Transport Seminar, 2001)
[viii] Social capital’ is not easily defined and comes in a variety of terms such as ‘social energy’, ‘civic virtue’ and ‘community networks’ but it is generally accepted to mean “networks, norms, and trust that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives.” See Robert Putnam, quoted in Office for National Statistics, Social Capital A Review of Literature, 2001.
[ix] John Adams, The Social Implications of Hypermobility, p. 127
[x] ibid., p. 107
[xi] ibid., p. 107
[xii] Mayer Hillman (ed), 1993, Children, transport and the quality of life, (Policy Studies Institute, London), quoted in The Social Implications of Hypermobility, p. 124
[xiii] DETR Transport Statistics (http://www.transtat.dft.gov.uk/index.htm)
[xiv] The Social Implications of Hypermobility, p. 110
[xv] ibid., p. 110
[xvi] Genesis 12.1-3
[xvii] Leviticus 25.23
[xviii] Matthew 8.20
[xix] John 4.21-22
[xx] Matthew 28.19
[xxi] Luke 8.39
[xxii] John 1.46
