Thursday, 28 October 2010

The City and the City: Thoughts on selective blindness and radical community

In a city as full of life and activity as London it is all too easy to turn a blind eye to those individuals, places and realities that threaten our comfortable, middle-class experience. China Mieville’s recent book, The City & The City deals with this very issue – the human tendency to train oneself to ignore the Other; to edit the poor, needy and undesirable out of our daily narrative.

In Mieville’s book, two strikingly different cities co-exist in the same space, interwoven in a complex tapestry where citizens of each city studiously do not perceive the people and places which belong in the other place. Consequently, residents of Beszel walking through the streets of their faded industrial metropolis must unseeingly navigate their way among citizens of Ul Qoma – the thrusting new technopolis which is geographically (or ‘grosstopically’) present among them and yet politically alien and therefore distant.

In each city, citizens are trained to identify the cultural idiosyncrasies of their countrymen – the fashions, styles, and gait – enabling them to discern who in the crowd is part of their own society (and should be seen) and who is from the other place (and therefore should not). Some streets and spaces are duplicated in both cities (so-called ‘cross-hatched areas’), but other places are exclusively in one city or the other – entirely invisible and off-limits to residents of the other city.

Mieville’s novel is a gripping and creative thriller which tells a story unlike any other I have read. Moreover, it makes a provocative argument about the extent to which city-dwellers (and indeed all societies) turn a blind eye to those people and places which disturb their world-view; those people who don’t fit neatly into our preferred experience. How easy it is to ignore the beggar, the rough sleeper, the drunk, the person in need. Like the citizens of Beszel and Ul Qoma, we are well trained by society to read the habits, behaviours and attire of others and therefore engage or erase them as appropriate.

As followers of Jesus, we develop spiritual eyes that help us see through our culturally-imposed blindness. Rather than confining the poor to another place beyond our sight and responsibility, we seek freedom from that unconscious training which renders the deprived and unwelcome invisible and, in seeing them, we allow ourselves to be impacted by their suffering. For only when we see and understand those in need can we love and serve them.

The selective blindness described in Mieville’s parable is not limited to our relationship with the poor. It also challenges us about our interactions with those who are different from us in other ways – the veiled Muslim, the city banker, the conservative evangelical, the elderly, the struggling single mother. As city-dwellers it is easy to retreat into tribal cliques which exclude and deride non-members of our own homogenous club; groupings which define themselves as much by who they are not as by who they are. For Christians, the risk is that we too find ourselves living in exclusive communities – holy huddles – that seek to advance the interests of our own tribe (the Church, or worse, our own church) at the expense of other groups. This is not the way it should be. As William Temple said, “the Church is the only organisation on earth that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members”.

At my church in Finchley we are actively grappling what it means to exist for our non-members – to serve the whole community and create spaces that are welcoming to all. This is an exciting and uncomfortable journey as we seek to transform our current models and structures to reflect the needs of the thousands of C21st Londoners who live around us.

In The City & The City, citizens seeking to bring down the invisible walls between Beszel and ul Qoma are deemed to be in Breach. As we seek to pierce the veil that condemns the capital's poor to another place, and also bridge the divisions between London's various tribes, we consciously step into that dangerous space which straddles cities – a foot in each camp, drawing the two together. After all, Christians are used to living with dual citizenship - resident here and now, but citizens of another Kingdom and another City that is now but not yet.

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