Home, sweet home

Reaching for roots

In this period of instant communication, global network and travel, what does ‘home’ mean? Is it a geographical entity or just a concept in the mind? Is modern society suffering from a 'homeless mind' syndrome, whereby we are more rootless, confused and exposed to so many more ideas and concepts than before? Colin Todhunter attempts to find answers.

‘Home, sweet home’ or ‘home is where the heart is’. A multi-storey penthouse or a rural cottage? A place by the sea or a mountain retreat?

Take your pick because cosy notions of home are almost ten a penny. Home is, ideally, the welcoming nest, a place to relax in and return to the family after a day’s work. It’s a place of familiarity and security.

Over the years, however, our perceptions of home have been shaped by various influences. Town planners and urban designers are well aware that spaces become places because of how they are laid out.

Similarly, houses become homes as a result of how much of themselves people invest in them. People develop strong emotional bonds with their home and there is a whole industry out there playing to these emotions, telling us what homes should be like, how they should be furnished, what type of house we should aspire to live in, in what area and so on.

Home furnishings, carpets and tilings, ceilings and floors, kitchens and bathrooms, walls and fittings, gardens and patios… you name any one area of the home, any one perceived need within it, any single dream anyone ever had about a dwelling, and a market has been created and sold back to every one of us, seeking to create a world of aspirational home dwellers who crave salvation via the here and now comfort of their finely tuned, colour-coordinated living room.

Homes have been gradually transformed by the impact of every technical gadget ever known to humankind. As each new device came through the front door, the ‘home’ and what we did in it changed. And, as a new invention marched in, wiped its feet on the mat and sat itself down, others made an unceremonious exit through the back door, never to return, and lost in the annals of time.

My mother had a mangle and clothes rack when she was growing up. The washing machine and tumble drier did away with them. She had a hearth for burning coal in the living room. Central heating got rid of that. Relatives would make their own music for home entertainment (or even converse!). The radio and then the TV saw to the death of that. And now we have the internet.

The invasion of home

If this tells us anything, it is that the home was never really a sanctuary, providing respite from the world at large. The world has always been on the doorstep, ready to enter.

While it might be nice to regard the home as a place for nurturing private thoughts and feelings and for developing personal character, away from the often negative influences of the wider public domain, this has never really been the case. In modern times, the advent of the radio saw a major blurring of the private domain of the home and the public domain, as the world beyond the front door was invited in. TV accentuated the trend much further.

Is this a problem? You bet. German sociologist and philosopher Jurgen Habermas argues that public discourse should be open to criticism and systemic evaluation. The public is not an equal participant in the discourse being pumped into their living rooms, though, and is now misinformed on any number of issues — politics and the media have been hijacked by state-corporate concerns, with citizens having had any sense of responsibility for society’s goals ripped from them as they sit bedazzled in front of the TV.

Bombardment of messages

Communication should be emancipatory and not repressive or based on achieving passive consensus that legitimises injustice and inequality. In the comfort of our own home, however, we are now subjected to a relentless bombardment of messages that try to tell us who we are or who we should be, what to think, how to act and who to praise or condemn. The home and the local community have been invaded like never before. Their traditional role in the shaping of personal character through the dissemination of values and standards now has to compete with what comes out of the idiot box.

These days, it is difficult to ascertain what is real and what is fantasy anymore. Vote for your favourite act by pressing this or that number on your cell phone. Vote for who you think won the political debate between the two presidential hopefuls. Who had the nicest smile, whose intonation was more appropriate, who looked better? Wait a minute, are we voting for the latest Simon Cowell protégé or the next leader of the US? Who cares, it’s just feel good factor stuff. Join in the media-led cheerleading from the safety of the arm chair. Sad but true.

The criteria used to evaluate a talent show and political events have been boiled down to knee jerk emotion. A 24/7 stream of world events and infotainment are beamed directly into the home. Private emotion and public discourse have become blurred into some kind of a meaningless unreality to produce enforced consensus. 
 
The lines between rationality and emotion, politics and entertainment, news and gossip, became all but lost within the home as the ad industry, political spin doctors and the marketing people all read from the same mind manipulation script, all learnt from each other and all used the same tug-at-the-heartstrings, guilt-trip tactics to convey their messages straight into the living room via the TV screen. We didn’t give the thieves the keys to our homes, they just took them.

The internet has hacked away at any distinction there may have been between the domestic and the public domain even further. We have been encouraged to think of spaces on the web as our homes, from personal home pages to Twitter and Facebook.

We surround ourselves with people and images in order to give our lives meaning in an age of increasing rootlessness. People create web environments that symbolise belonging and identity. Creating a place on the web is home DIY by any other name.

The web has become another place for expressing the idea of home that has as much effect on our sense of well-being and who we are as the fully furnished, fully gadgetised bricks and mortar version where we live. But, as with TV and radio, the web has also allowed the outside world to invade our domestic space. Through the web, our homes connect directly to almost everything and everyone.

If home ever could have been regarded as an exclusively private domain, you can forget about that notion entirely now. Through Google, Facebook and the like, the authorities and large corporations can track your internet use to find out where you are, what’s on your mind, where you have been, where you plan to go, etc. This time around, they are not taking the keys to our homes, we are actively giving them away. In a quest for individuality via the net, we are in fact surrendering our privacy, giving away our identity and becoming yet another piece of data to be analysed, scrutinised and evaluated by powerful state-corporate interests. 

Home, identity and culture

We may try to salvage at least a shred of comfort from all of this by noting that a strict distinction between the private and the public domains was always a false one anyway. Home was never really just a physical structure cut off from everything around it.

As a broad concept, home has always been regarded as something more than just a space to seek refuge from the wider world. It embraces notions of personal, social and even national identity and is imbued with ideas of birthplace, ethnicity, citizenship and culture.

Think of the people around the world who yearn to return to their ‘homeland’ or who fight to the death to call the strip of land they reside in ‘home’. Think of the refugees who yearn to return to their native places, or those people’s whose homeland is under occupation from foreign powers. And think of those who lead nomadic lifestyles and perceive ‘home’ in the broadest possible sense.

From Gaza and Kurdistan to Kashmir and Manipur, the underlying cause of many a conflict has over the years been related to asserting the right to an independent home, and I don’t just mean in terms of bricks and mortar. These conflicts make us realise that the relationship between home and the wider world is complex.

Psychology of home

According to sociologist Peter Berger, religion has often been central to the psychology of home. Bound with notions of culture and ethnicity, religion is a canopy of sacred objects and rituals, a universe of built meaning that projects itself into the personal beliefs of the individual and the wider group. Religion can pervade every area of life, and it’s no coincidence that people rally around religion when they feel under threat.

In the West, Berger’s concept of the ‘homeless mind’ has for many been central to explaining the effects of secularisation. Due to the decline of religion and the rise of individualism, people are seen to live in a meaningless state, and human life is less easy to bear. The mind has become homeless, as people search for meaning and belonging in a world cut free of religion, community, tradition and the cultural glue that used to bind them together. In the place of religion, though, secular ideological approaches have been nowhere near as successful in reaffirming communality or giving meaning to life and our place in the universe as religion has been.

The Soviet Union’s Marxist-Leninist symbolic universe of meaning never provided the depth of explanation required to enable people to come to terms with their questions about the ultimate meaning of life, death and the universe. Similarly, the great civil religion of our time, shop-till-you-drop hedonism, just doesn’t cut the mustard either. In the never ending quest for meaning, belonging and ‘ultimate reality’ in an age of secular modernity, people have often turned to any number of ‘New Age’ belief systems… or even Facebook.

In many regions of the world, however, in part as a reaction to modernity, religious beliefs have become more strident, reflecting the need to reaffirm tradition, the need to secure a sense of identity, the need to reassert a sense of ‘homely comfort’ for the mind. The rise of fundamentalism is in part a reaction to creeping modernity and social change, whether Christian, Hindu, Islamic or any other type.

Displaced people and diasporas re-find their networks and a sense of place also often via religion, but not necessarily of the fundamentalist variety. Certain communities have retained their sense of cultural identity through religion. For example, Italians did not give up their roots upon arrival in the US. In many cases, when people migrated to the US, they wanted to settle around people who shared religion. They wanted to create a home from home. Small surprise then that Little Italy in New York developed around Catholicism.

In London, there are many areas that are home to large populations of South Asians and other British cities have their own ‘little Indias’ as well. Leicester’s Diwali celebrations are legendary and are often said to be the biggest outside of India. Leicester is a small city with around three lakh inhabitants, but it boasts 22 Hindu temples, 28 mosques, seven Sikh Gurdwaras and a Jain temple. People didn’t leave ‘home’ behind. They brought it with them from the subcontinent.

Home really is where the heart is

In the 1980s, the British politician Norman Tebbit seemed to be irked by the fact that many British Asians supported India or Pakistan when either team played England. Their ‘Britishness’ was called into question. After all, so the argument went, was England not now their home? This raised all kinds of heated debates about national identity, ethnicity and culture, which still rage today in the UK.

If those debates show one thing, it is that a sense of belonging, a sense of home, doesn’t just change because you or your parents are handed a new passport for a different country. Home is history. Home is ancestry. Home is a deep rooted cultural and ethnic cocktail, which is difficult to define, difficult to pin down. The concept of home is not necessarily where we are physically based at any one point, but somewhere where we feel we belong.

Whether we feel a sense of belonging on the net — home is where the hub is — or whether we end up on the far side of the globe in a ‘home away from home’ location, many of us still tend to possess a memory of what and where home really is. And it usually involves a notion of where we started out, where we were raised, where our earlier personal history and memories are located and where most of our relatives still live. 

For lots of people, it’s the ‘idea’ of home that counts. Home comprises a place, an area, and certain people with whom we have some kind of affinity. It’s the notion that is carried around in our heads that matters. Even if when actually there, at home, the idea doesn’t match the sometimes disappointing reality, home is still home… however we care to define it.

That’s why millions struggle endlessly to assert their right to it. It’s where we ultimately belong.