CROWD ENERGY
I’ve had some great experiences in crowds. Football games when Eagles were winning! Joining a throng following giant French puppets through the streets of Perth a few years ago, along with a multitude of people also fascinated by them.
In the London crowd during Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee as she and the royal family appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.
I’ve also had some bad ones. Supporting protesters on a Town Green in the US during Black Panther trials. In India a long time ago, when our blond-haired children were a novelty and attracted frightening attention. Trying to get onto a crowded bus with my suitcase in China and being pushed and pulled.
But in recent days, even in our country, we have seen crowds turn violent in a way new to us. People acting in ways that in a more sober or individual moment they would never contemplate. Smashing shop windows, for example, or overturning cars. Some joining in without knowing what grievance was being protested. The crowd giving them anonymity.
I remember a TV program about the Cronulla riots on their 20th anniversary. Interviews revealed some could name what triggered the riots, but most confessed they did not have a purpose for their actions. Except provide an outlet for their pent up anger – anger at perceived discrimination.
I’ve been dipping into Elias Canetti’s 1984 best seller, Crowds and Power. In a tour de force that won him a Nobel Prize for Literature, he explores the good and the bad of crowds and what draws people together. He suggests that the basic human desire to belong, to relate to others, even touch skin to skin with others in the crush, gives crowds their energy. Creating noise by breaking windows or setting things on fire attracts people into the mob in the early stages of a demonstration, but belonging holds them there.
The downside is that personal responsibility for one’s behaviour is abandoned in a crowd.
Western society loneliness
In my book, Home with the Good Father, I describe some consequences of our Western society focus on the self as the source of all we need. We suffer growing loneliness and the ache to belong. Our social hunger comes from lack of connection with others. Is the crowd with its closeness and freedom from responsibility the answer?
In the Christianity where I find a home, the individual is given great emphasis. The call to respond to God, to follow Jesus, is personal. So is the expectation we listen to and speak with a loving Father. Individual choice; individual journey. That is the story which Jesus told about a prodigal’s return.
But in our inherited human nature we need others. Henri Nouwen says real loneliness comes when we have lost all sense of having things in common with others. In the Scriptures, there is also a crowd, a gathered church. We are brothers and sisters bonded to each other in the family we share.
Where loneliness is epidemic, the church community provides acceptance and friendship. We dare not ignore this opportunity and turn away. We are called to belong to each other, to live in love, honouring one another, joining together in significant endeavours. If some past experience of hurt within a church has left its mark, God’s grace is wide enough to make belonging possible for us now we have, like the prodigal, turned and come home.
An open set
Canetti asserts that to have energy, a crowd needs to be open to others joining. In sociological terms, be an open set, held together not by hard boundaries or hurdles to jump but by a common purpose. Christians believe that our singular focus is Jesus and our shared relationship with him. Moreover, at the return of this God-man to us in power, we anticipate a crowd of witnesses, a festal gathering, over-riding every ethnic and status and gender distinction which human society uses as boundaries.
We are seeing many socially hungry westerners, especially young people, finding community in churches. Let’s keep the doors open, the barriers down, and experience together the good energy of the crowd centred on Jesus.
Jennifer Turner
