Theatre and the Good: The Value of Collaborative Play By Mark Fe ...

Now we are all Quentin Compsons. A complex of social factors have lured us away from community, if we ever had it to begin with, and a new normality has arisen in which it is seen as right and good, inevitable even, that we exist as radical individuals, free agents cut loose from the bonds of family, town, tradition, religion, and even nostalgia for the geography of place. Economic success has come to be coincident in our thought with the willingness to chuck it all and move on. A young person who chooses not to “go away to college” is looked down upon by this new normality as lacking in ambition. The worker who declines to move around the country in pursuit of a better salary and status is seen as sentimental and old-fashioned, lacking what it takes to “make it” in the “big world.” After “relocating,” (a ubiquitous word in contemporary speech), the alluring myth of the automobile and its promise of limitless mobility has pulled us ever farther apart, with the suburb and now the exurb forming the dominant temporary destinations of all these people who came there from somewhere else.

At the same time that the economy and the new normality have drawn our houses farther apart, the attractions of television, film recordings, and computer simulations have drawn us ever inward into those distanced houses, every dwelling a private cinema of imaginary reality. Fictional characters are far better known to us than are the people in the house next door. Our ability to converse suffers, as does our wit. We can hardly tell stories anymore. Who needs to tell stories? To whom would we tell them? The backyard fence is scarier and riskier than the passive reception of tales on television. I do not even need the fence. I do not go out of my yard, and no one comes into it. We are occupied indoors. Walking through my “neighborhood” at night, I can see the artificial glow of a hundred separate screens.

If one removes the ambiguous factor of “generational change,” Robert Putnam’s research identifies television as the single greatest killer of civic engagement between 1965 and 2000. The changes he identifies are massive and apply to every ethnic, economic, and religious subset of the American population.