The Curse of Comfort

I've spent the past few days staying in Potts Point, Sydney.

It's a wonderful place.

Clean. Attractive. Walkable. Everything you could possibly need sits within easy reach. The cafés are full. The streets are tidy. The harbour sparkles in the distance. Much of Sydney around the CBD and across the North Shore feels the same.

Very urbane.

It's also staggeringly expensive. To rent here costs a fortune. To buy here costs even more. Unsurprisingly, the people who live in these areas tend to be highly educated professionals, successful business people, or those fortunate enough to have inherited wealth or bought property before prices went completely mad.

Walking around, I couldn't help comparing it with my home in regional Queensland. I also thought about my daughter's home overseas in what would still be considered a developing country. The contrast is striking.

There is very little want in places like this.

People aren't wondering where their next meal is coming from. They aren't worried about clean drinking water. They aren't worried about political instability or whether they'll have electricity tomorrow. Most of the basics are taken for granted because they've always been there.

That's when you start noticing the other things.

The posters featuring ethnic faces with the word "Aussie" underneath them.

The "Local and Proud" rainbow stickers plastered across shopfront windows.

The co-working spaces proudly declaring themselves climate-friendly.

The endless messaging about diversity, inclusion, sustainability and whatever the fashionable cause of the month happens to be.

You see enough of it and a thought occurs.

Maybe this is what happens when people no longer have real problems to solve.

Human beings are problem-solving creatures. We don't cope particularly well with comfort. Give us security, prosperity and stability and before long we'll start inventing new causes to fill the void. Some of those causes are worthwhile. Plenty aren't.

Academics have spent years studying the political divide between cities and regional areas. They've documented it across Australia, Britain, Europe and the United States. Affluent urban centres drift further towards progressive politics while rural and regional communities often head in the opposite direction.

You don't need a university study to notice it though.

Spend a week in Potts Point and then spend a week in Longreach.

The conversations are different.

The priorities are different.

The concerns are different.

People in regional communities tend to spend more time worrying about practical realities. Energy prices. Water. Roads. Employment. Crime. Whether the local businesses are surviving. Whether their children can afford to stay in the area.

In wealthy inner-city suburbs, politics often becomes something else entirely. It becomes a form of moral performance.

I don't think prosperity alone explains it though.

There's something about modern cities that has always struck me as oddly artificial.

Millions of people packed together, yet many couldn't tell you the name of their neighbour. People live on top of one another in apartment towers while simultaneously feeling isolated and lonely. It's a strange way to live when you stop and think about it.

Even nature feels curated.

The parks are manicured. The gardens are designed. The trees are planted according to council plans. Wildlife mostly consists of ibis, pigeons and possums rummaging through bins after dark.

Everything feels managed. Controlled. A little disconnected from the world that shaped human beings for thousands of years.

I suspect that has consequences beyond what most people realise.

When people become detached from creation, they often become detached from the Creator as well. As faith declines, the need for meaning doesn't disappear. It simply finds a new home.

That's one reason why so much modern activism resembles religion.

It has its sacred beliefs. Its approved language. Its public rituals. Its sinners and its saints. Some people seem to derive their entire sense of purpose from demonstrating their allegiance to whichever cause currently dominates the cultural conversation.

Then there's the question of place itself.

Most city residents have little connection to the land that sustains them. Food appears on supermarket shelves. Water arrives through pipes. Electricity comes from a switch on the wall. The realities underneath modern life remain largely invisible.

The same applies to family and community.

People move constantly. Families become scattered. Neighbours come and go. Few people expect to spend their entire lives in one place anymore.

That's where blood and soil become important.

The phrase is actually quite simple.

Blood refers to kinship, ancestry, family and inherited culture. The ties that bind generations together and give people a sense of belonging.

Soil refers to place. The land itself. Its history. Its traditions. The connection people feel to the country they call home.

Those two things have held nations together throughout history.

A shared people and a shared place.

When either weakens, national identity becomes more fragile. When both weaken at the same time, people start looking elsewhere for meaning and belonging.

That's part of what we're witnessing now.

People detached from family, faith, community and place often end up attaching themselves to ideologies instead. Politics becomes identity. Causes become tribes. Activism becomes purpose.

Meanwhile the cities keep growing.

Every year more people are drawn into the major metropolitan centres while regional communities struggle to hold their populations. Governments encourage it. Corporations encourage it. The economic incentives all point in the same direction.

Democracy follows numbers.

As the cities expand, the values of those cities increasingly shape the future of the country as a whole. The bloke running cattle in western Queensland gets less say. The family in a regional town gets less influence. Decisions affecting the entire nation are increasingly made by people whose lives bear little resemblance to those outside the urban bubble.

Maybe that's inevitable.

Maybe it's simply the direction modern societies are heading.

But after spending a few days in Potts Point, surrounded by immense comfort and endless virtue-signalling, I found myself wondering whether we've mistaken prosperity for wisdom.

The two aren't necessarily the same thing.

“The nation is not merely a collection of individuals. It is a partnership between the living, the dead and those yet to be born.”
– Edmund Burke