Particularly in the criminology/sociology literature is the idea of social control, that having enough people who know you or who are at least keeping an eye out on you or for you can be enough to curb crime. One of the studies I read said neighbors really only needed to see each other once a year (such as at a neighborhood cookout) for there to be a significant drop in burglaries and robberies.

I wonder if, by creating a personal community of long-time friends, we’re creating a form of social control for ourselves. That can be bad as well as good, but it does kind of externalize the ideals we’d like to think we believe in. (But then when you leave a community…when I stopped attending Southern Baptist churches, I lost touch with many people I’d grown up with.)