The questionnaire that follows is designed to help people to take note of the extent to which they are detribalised and rootless and whether or not they are getting their Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) of what I term Vitamin T, the tribal vitamin. My rating today, as I type this, adds up to 69 – so I am getting a mere 69 per cent of the Vitamin T RDA, although I suspect I am getting a good deal more than the average person.
Most people do not seem to realise that they have near-starvation levels of Vitamin T. I know that I’m deprived of Vitamin T simply because I was lucky enough as a young man in the 1960s and 1970s to experience feeling part of a tribe as an active participant in community-based organisations in London’s Notting Hill. So I feel what I’m missing now in my middle aged isolation. For others, the nearest equivalent may be looking back fondly on their time at university when their immediate surroundings were suffused with the possibility of interesting casual social encounters; and socialising didn’t involve making appointments and getting in a car to visit friends in distant places.
What I miss most is the possibility in the evening of just dropping in on a convivial neighbour for a chat and a meal.
‘Each nod they receive from a neighbour counts towards their RDA of Vitamin T’Solitary elderly people trying to survive on a state pension are amongst those most in need of such informal neighbourhood contacts. Each nod they receive from a passing neighbour in the street, each chat with a local shopkeeper, counts towards their RDA of Vitamin T.
In our evolutionary past, we lived in small groups of 50 to 250 or so people, and we still need that intense level of inter-communication and sense of place and neighbourhood. The Rev John Papworth who edits Fourth World Review (with its slogan of ‘small nations, small communities and a human scale’) used to give sermons on the theme of Jesus’ commandment to “love your neighbour” whilst complaining that nowadays most people don’t even know who their neighbours are.
There’s no word in the English language which quite means lonely – lonely despite having your happy nuclear family around you – lonely in the sense of feeling without a tribe, isolated, rootless and alienated. A new word such as kithless – as in without kith and kin – is needed. For kithlessness is, I believe, today’s most unrecognised feeling. Almost every urban dweller feels it deep in themselves, but hardly anyone recognises or verbalises the feeling.
Some people even go to great lengths to keep apart from their neighbours. They believe that their tribe consists of those who share the same interests as them, in however far flung places they may live, or just the people they work with, or just their cosy nuclear family. No doubt in the past people could feel very trapped in their isolated, stultifying village culture, but now the pendulum has swung the other way, and we have only too many ways of escaping from our locality, through travel, work, holidays, telephone, television and the web.
But Vitamin T is based on the assumption that we have an inbuilt need for a tribe we live in proximity to, for kith and kin living co-operatively within a geographical neighbourhood.
‘A strong social network is a predictor of long life’
Doubtless Vitamin T is essential for our health too. There is accumulating evidence that a strong social network is a predictor of long life – and a stronger predictor than our smoking and drinking habits (see for instance
www.globalideasbank.org/wbi/WBI-70.HTML).
In the future that’s rapidly arriving, where computer programmers and web designers and their ilk will be the aristocrats lording it over the rest of us, who will be either out of work or providing them with their luxuries, it will be ever harder to feel part of society, and it is only within cohesive neighbourhoods that we will be able to receive recognition for who we are as people, whatever our job or lack of one may be.
Please note that in this questionnaire, ‘nuclear family’ means ‘you, your spouse and your children’; and ‘local’ means ‘within 15 minutes’ walk from your home’. The questions only address encounters in your neighbourhood or at work which take place within this 15 minutes’ range and which are outside your nuclear family. It is a neighbourhood rating, not a test of how many friends you have in distant places or how happy you are with your partner and children.
Vitamin T questionnaire
• Roughly how many local people (neighbours, local shopkeepers, waiters, hairdressers, local co-workers, etc) have you chatted with in the last week (apart from your partner and immediate nuclear family)?
• Roughly how many others have you nodded to or greeted whilst, for instance, passing them in the street? (For scoring purposes, divide this total by 2.)
• How many local people (apart from your partner and immediate nuclear family) would be likely to notice and regret your death, if you were to die now (only include those whose deaths you would also notice and regret)? (For scoring purposes divide this total by 3.)
• If you were seriously ill, roughly how many local people (apart from paid carers, your partner and immediate nuclear family) could you count on to visit you, to do your shopping for you, etc? (For scoring purposes double this total.)
• How many households locally do you feel you could drop in on for a chat or a meal, almost on impulse, without it being a big deal? (For scoring purposes multiply this total by 5.)
• How many local people are there (apart from your partner and immediate nuclear family) whom you tend to treat as confidantes, people you can discuss and share your innermost fears and worries with? (For scoring purposes multiply this total by 10.)
• How many local people (apart from your partner and immediate nuclear family) care about your goals in life and actively support you in trying to achieve them? (For scoring purposes double this total.)
• Last week, how often did you engage in the equivalent of a tribal ritual – eg religious service, meal with local friends or local co-workers, drink at the local tavern or coffee shop with friends – occasions, in other words, where there was active participation by all those present? (For scoring purposes double this total.)
• In general, to what extent do you feel that you are part of a local neighbourhood or tribe who care for each other? (Score on a range from 0 to 20, where 20 = ‘Just one big extended family’ and 0 = ‘no contact at all’.)
‘How about inviting your neighbours for a social meeting in your home?’Add up your total to arrive at your personal very rough-and-ready percentage of the RDA of Vitamin T. And if you’re over 100 per cent, don’t worry, there’s no danger of overdosing. A friend of mine rated himself on this questionnaire as regularly over 1,000 per cent for one of the most interesting and stimulating periods of his life when he lived in Christiania community in Copenhagen.
If your score is low, how about taking up John Papworth’s suggestion – photocopying a notice and putting it through the letterboxes in your neighbourhood, inviting people for a social meeting either in your home or in a neutral venue? We have an annual tea party in our street, meeting in a different house each year, which I initiated, and even this small token event is beginning to make a difference to the sense of neighbourhood and the way we help each other out when we have problems.
We would be interested to receive feedback and suggestions for improvements from anyone who tries this questionnaire out.
• Institute for Social Inventions, 6 Blackstock Mews, London N4 2BT, UK (tel Int. 44 [0]20 7359 8391; fax Int. 44 [0]20 7354 3831; e-mail: ideas@alberyfoundation.org; web: www.globalideasbank.org).
• John Papworth, editor, Fourth World Review (£20 p.a. subs), The Close, 26 High St, Purton, Wiltshire SN5 4AE, UK (tel Int. 44 [0]1793 77221; fax Int. 44 [0]1793 772521).
Comment from Rabbi Mimi Weisel
As a group of us were sitting together and enjoying dinner on New Year’s eve, we took your Vitamin T quiz and discovered that we have a large dose of Vitamin T in our lives. We attributed our relatively high score to our explicit, conscious choice to live as observant Jews, a choice which provides each of us with a great variety of the connections author Nicholas Albery says are lacking in most urban settings today even though we live in Los Angeles, one of the largest, most spread-out cities on earth.
As Jews committed to following the laws of our tradition, our lifestyle fosters community connections outside our immediate families, thereby providing us with networks for socializing and for nurturing. Perhaps the best example is our weekly observance of Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. We do not drive or ride in cars on Saturday, so we need to live within walking distance of a synagogue.
Part of our weekly ritual is saying “Shabbat Shalom” to others we pass on the way to and from the synagogue. On Shabbat we share meals and drop in on one another so our families can interact. Furthermore, living in a close neighbourhood such as ours also means that an infrastructure to support our observance is created: there are kosher restaurants and bakeries, Jewish bookstores and gift shops. Walking into these establishments, one is bound to run into friends and acquaintances and to create casual relationships with the shop owners.
Being part of an observant Jewish community, we are also involved in synagogue life, which promotes visiting the sick, comforting those who are in mourning, and welcoming others into the community. We work together to support schools, a variety of charitable causes, and social justice issues. We talk together and discuss our concerns for our community, our families, and the world as we sit together at shared meals and celebrations.
‘Jewish tradition helps us to achieve balance and connection, community ties and support’My friends and I are aware that many might consider our lifestyle to be restrictive and confining. Nonetheless, though we live in an open society with its plethora of choices and freedoms, all of us have chosen to live a life of observance. Each of us could have opted out of this life choice, yet we have all embraced it. Why? As modern individuals involved in careers and families, we are just as apt as others to be isolated by our computers, cell phones and cars, or to face the anonymity of the malls and movie theatres. In contrast, Jewish tradition helps us to achieve balance and connection, community ties and support.
Most organized religions offer strong support for creating communal connections. Not only synagogues but also churches and mosques provide networks for caring and friendship on an on-going basis. I and my friends feel blessed to have these resources as well as the tenets of our tradition, which have resulted in the physical creation of a small community within a large metropolis.
•Rabbi Mimi Weisel, Assistant Dean, Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles, California 90077, USA (e-mail: mweisel@uj.edu).
Summarised from an article by Jeevan Vasagar, entitled ‘Music hath charms to boost milk yield’, in the Guardian (June 27th 2001).
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