Adults don't do as much of the disciplining of neighborhood children as they did half a century ago. The tendency now is to use the police powers of the state to deal with juvenile miscreants rather than to rely on constraints applied by parents and neighbors. That replacement for the more traditional personalized cultural controls is sometimes not very satisfactory. Those of us who remember the neighborhoods of the past or are fortunate enough to live in similar circumstances today may value a sense of neighborhood community. But adaptable as people are, I suspect that if current trends continue, in another few decades such values will have largely disappeared.
Cultural evolution can be very rapid in some areas.
We badly need to consider what, if anything, should be done about this decline of geographic community. Perhaps if people became more accustomed to taking a long evolutionary perspective on culture and entered into a systematic social dialogue on cultural trajectories, society might steer a different course. We could seek strategies to restore the more stable and interactive communities into which we have evolved biologically and culturally to fit. One initial tactic would be to gradually redesign cities so that most people could live near their places of employment, to which they could travel primarily by foot or bicycle. That, combined with telecommuting, World Wide Web shopping, more carpooling and better public transportation, could enable the establishment of human-sized communities within cities and improve the health of individuals and the environment.