C6: Hope

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Introduction

The Jampacked Bible focuses on the Jewish experience and living a Jewish life in today's society. This chapter is different. This chapter is about all of society and deals with one of the most naive, but vital, questions that people have ever asked of each other: how can we learn to live together?

The Problems

On 13 March 1996, Thomas Hamilton walked into the classroom of a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and shot dead sixteen school children and their teacher. It was a shocking and tragic moment. For days the media could speak of little else, but most people found it difficult to know what to say. An entire nation grieved. In recent years, other events have shaken us: the killing of two-year-old James Bulger in Liverpool, the bombing in Oklahoma, the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin... the list goes on. Something of a larger significance is happening. We are living in a violent society.

In the summer of 1996, during only one week, a girl of 13 killed herself with anti-depressants belonging to her mother's boyfriend, a boy of 13 shot an elderly woman in the face with an air pistol because she had told him off for swearing, head teachers announced that children as young as four are being expelled from school for bad behaviour, and two 12-year-old-girls were tied to a tree and raped at knifepoint after an afternoon picnic. It's not easy being a young person today.

Scratch the surface and you find immense problems. Something is going wrong with the way we live. Ours is a more random, chaotic, disordered world than our grandparents knew. Whole neighbourhoods in Britain and America have become an underworld of drugs, theft, assault and brutality. Much of this may not even surprise you! "Of course elderly people are mugged, streets are unsafe at night and over one in three marriages end in divorce, we are living in the 1990s!" How did this ever become normal? Does it really have to be this way? Where did we go wrong?

Finding a path

There can be no quick and easy answers. But looking at different ways that people live together can help us to deal with the many problems. We will look at two models: one we will call political, the other civil. Understanding and comparing the two will point us in a new direction.

Living together

These issues can be thought about simply without being simplistic. Think of all the many different ways that people have found of living together and you can put most of them into two general categories. There are nations, states and governments - these are political groupings. Then there are communities, religions and families - these are civil groupings. One has strict rules and regulations, the other is about caring, honesty and spiritual relationships. We clearly need both for a workable society. The problem is that we have relied too much on one and forgotten about the other.

State solutions

In the last fifty or so years, Britain has tried to deal with the problems we have talked about in two opposing ways. First state intervention and then state withdrawal. After W.W.II, the government tried to build a more compassionate society. Institutions controlling the economy, education, health, welfare and the arts were heavily state funded. In the last twenty years, the opposite has been tried. The government has become less and less involved in controlling society and relied on people's individual responsibility and personal free choice. The problem is, neither have really worked. Society's ills have increased despite both approaches. Maximal government and minimal government have both failed to produce a healthy, confident and safe society. The reason is that the other essential kind of living together has been neglected. We need to rebuild civil society...

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