When Peter Maurin talked about "that kind of society where it is easier for men to be good", he meant a traditional or perhaps Distributist self-sufficient small village community, either permanently or as a retreat. Some of these projects such as the Amish or Aurora Colony have been successful to a degree, but the story of human history has been cities, from Babel to the New Jerusalem. What kind of "Place Where It is Easier to Do Good" can we make in our modern metropolitan areas?
It is certainly possible to do good in suburbs, where the plurality of Americans currently live. Many good works begin in suburban churches and synagogues, but something feels a little wrong to me about driving down to an urban food bank, dropping off some food for "those poor people", and heading home. Notre Dame graduate student Davey Henreckson summarizes at Theopolitical what makes suburbs politically successful in A theology of suburbs:
This isn’t to say that if I raise my son in suburbia he will never meet a homeless person or make friends with immigrant peers. But suburbs that "work" usually do so because they manage to stake out a demographic and economic niche. In other words, suburbs are not civic societies so much as civic clubs — they exist because of vast similarities in membership.As another example, Eric Jacobsen provides a retelling of Luke 8:40-56 taken from his book Sidewalks in the Kingdom (p 90-91) for a 2006 Spring Institute for Lived Theology at UVA:
Jesus is in a private home in a subdivision, where he gets a call from an elder of the megachurch, twelve miles away, whose daughter is sick. He and his disciples hope into their Suburban and drive twenty miles across town to another subdivision and heal the elder's daughter. The other parts of town they encounter at 40 mph through shatterproof glass. The hemorrhaging woman is in one of these other parts of town, perhaps in a seedy motel, alone in her pain and convinced that she is not important enough for someone like Jesus.
Jesus, or our food bank volunteer, speeds by his neighbor. And another thing, in this story Jesus or again our food bank volunteer is spending a large amount of time and gas money just to get to and from the place of need. (Incidentally, a driver of a vehicle at 40 mph is four times more likely than one traveling 30 mph to kill a pedestrian in a collision.) In other retelling by Jacobsen, only a Samaritan child in the back seat notices the beaten man on the way to Jericho--her dad is paying attention to the road, speeding by on the other side, and the girl is powerless to stop the car.
Of course, living near a food bank certainly does not automatically connect you with it. However, I do know that when I went to a fundraiser breakfast for a neighborhood service organization here, the director thanked volunteers from a high-end retirement community a couple blocks away. Maybe that included some folks who used to drive in from the suburbs, I don't know. Maybe the food bank neighbors and volunteers see each other around.
I don't want to minimize the challenges of connecting people of different incomes and lifestyles. In fact, in June 2010 a veteran Canadian reporter spent a month "embedded" in a condo tower in Vancouver's downtown East Side, wondering "whether the city’s richest and poorest residents can share the same space." (I haven't made it through the whole series; it starts at the bottom of page 3.)
Opportunities for doing good are not limited to people in proximity, but it makes it easier and leads to incidental connections.
Update: local urbanist Roger Valdez put it this way: "Finally, we believe that many of Seattle’s greatest economic an social problems—poverty, crime, homelessness, poor academic performance—can be significantly and positively impacted when people live closer together because, if nothing else, our proximity to each other makes the suffering of our fellow person intolerable."
