Negative insight

“No is, generally speaking, a better word than Yes.”

 --Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman

I’ve been very happy to hear and read responses to my most recent crumb from a few readers— a couple who replied privately, and a couple who commented publicly. All of these have been thought-provoking, and the most recent (which is no longer so recent), provoked such general and extended thoughts that they have become a crumb of their own.

 

The commenter, who identifies himself as “Lars Schmiel” (a disguise I’m sure no one can penetrate) writes:

 

You ask us to take your list as a whole before we make our individual objections. Yet I find that while I agree with most, maybe all, of your particulars, there's something in the big picture that makes me uneasy. The issue is that your values, at least as expressed here, seem largely negative. That is, you know better what you don't want than what you do.

This is clearest in the final item, "a desire to raise children..." where you mention only things to be avoided -- neither fetish and coddle, nor hold under constant surveillance -- nothing about what is to be enjoyed, encouraged, celebrated. Yes, we can infer what you like, but why should we have to infer? …

 

The comment goes on a good deal longer, discussing in detail certain list items. I have replied to the rest within the comment thread, but I want here to reply to the central point.

Lars is right: this is very much a list of values in opposition—and opposition on both sides: it's not this and also not that. Why is it so grounded in rejection? And can rejection be the basis for a project so basically optimistic and hopeful as the one I am trying to imagine?

 

I feel that I can’t separate the fact of having a worldview from the fact of being in opposition to ideas around me—ideas that are so loudly and repeatedly proclaimed, which so fill up the available space of thought and discourse that it takes an act of rebellion and imagination to discover that there is anywhere else left to think and speak from. It was through the feeling of opposition to these surrounding ideas that I became aware of my worldview as something distinct, particular, and significant to who I am and who I wish to be in community with.

 

This is not so unusual. Jesus’s teachings are, to a large extent, rejections of the error and corruption that he sees around him. One feels especially in all his lines about “this generation” and “this wicked generation” and “O generation of vipers” his sense of being surrounded by folly and error, at war with bad ideas and wrong interpretations. In this, as in many things, Jesus is echoing the tone of the majority of the old testament prophets. The Bhagavad Gita speaks more serenely (because it is more at peace with the fallenness of the world; because it takes that condition as natural and necessary; because it is not millenarian) but its message is also one of rejection of false ideas, sloughing off of illusions, errors, unhealthy attachments. Ecclesiastes is in yet a different tone from all these, but it too is about rejection.

 

Why is wisdom so negative?

 

Long ago, in the spring of 2018, when I was first writing these crumbs, I wrote, but never posted, a short one that began like this:

 

Truth is not contained in propositions. Truth is not contained anywhere, for it is not a substance but an action. It is the action of casting off false understanding. Afterwards, we cling to the words that refuted the false understanding, because we have nothing else to cling to. But these words are not the truth. The truth already lies behind us, in the moment of recognition. As long as we can remember our former illusions, how they compelled us and limited us, we can experience again the sublime moment of casting them off. But soon we forget….

 

There is a form of theology called apophatic theology that seeks to approach God by negation. The idea is that we can say nothing positive about God. We can describe Them only by saying what They are not, by rejecting false descriptions. I haven’t studied apophatic theology, but I find the idea compelling. Claims about what God is always seem to fall short—infinitely short. Falling short is the best they do—often they’re decidedly wrong, dangerous, reductive, empty. By describing God, we make Them into a figure of our petty imaginations. But therefore there really are useful things to say about what God is not.

 

The problems we face in trying to describe or respond to or think about God are the same ones we face in trying to describe or respond to or think about the world. In both cases, we have to do with something vastly bigger than ourselves and beyond our powers to comprehend, something that can be only glimpsed and groped for, never held in the mind’s hand. (Maybe these are not even two different cases. The pantheists say that God is the world. I want to say something more like God is actuality. But this of course at best falls infinitely short.)

 

So my list of values is mostly in the negative in order to say as little as necessary. By saying how we should not raise children, I leave open endless possibilities of how we should or could or might. But if I said how we should raise them, I would be negating all the infinite other ways of going about it. The purpose of the list is to carve out a space where we are free to try things, not to tell us in advance what we ought to try.

 

The purpose is also to gather people who share a certain outlook, and a negative outlook is much more capacious than a positive one. My images of what sort of a life I want depend on very personal likes and dislikes, childhood, upbringing, cultural milieu, temperament. The people who share those will be very few and very similar to me. Whereas, to the extent that I have seen clearly, anyone may see what I see in the world and long to escape what I long to escape. A diagnosis is always much more generally acceptable, for it is more generally right, than a prescription.

*

 

It strikes me that the whole thrust of these crumbs over the past 15 months can be framed in terms of this distinction between a negative outlook and a positive one.

 

Like so many of us, I’ve been dreaming of community all my life. But I always imagined it in terms of a gathering of friends and family (and friends of friends, family of friends, etc.): a gathering of just exactly those people who I most easily got along with. One way to say this is that I imagined a community of people who shared a positive vision of life.

 

Last June, when I returned to these crumbs after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, the basic insight that led me back was that a gathering of friends was not enough: that, even if it could form in the first place (which is not at all certain), it would be too small and too homogenous to be the kind of little world I’d imagined, to hold inside it a different way of life, and thus to hold itself together: to last. And it would be too private, too particular, too irrelevant to the society around it to engage with and do something for that society and draw more people into its orbit and so become politically or socially or economically meaningful beyond its own narrow borders. So it would not satisfy the longings that inspired it, and like all the utopian communes of the past two hundred years, from Brook Farm and the Fourier Phalanxes on down, it might be a beautiful act of resistance, but finally it would be a failed one. And I did not want a failed act, however beautiful. I wanted a successful one—or at least one whose failure was not a foregone conclusion. That meant there needed to be many more people of many more kinds.

 

But there also had to be something shared among all these people—and not just because that’s necessary for collaboration, but because there was some insight or critique or perspective that was fundamental to the whole project, without which there just was no project. For a long time I struggled with what that insight/critique/perspective was, and I was troubled, because although I knew it must not be too constraining, I also felt that it could not be too simple, that it was not just one or two axioms, and that if you said too little about it, it was apt to be entirely misunderstood. Because everywhere around me I saw (as I still see) people who had got their hands on a shard of truth and fused it with bad ideas (which for various reasons they couldn’t bear to let go of) and made of it a fetish that gleamed because there was a little truth in it, and dragged them down into the swamp because it was weighted down with confusion and misunderstanding and dogmatism. And I could see that this same process was very likely to happen to any bit truth that anyone put forward as a cause or a cure, because the bad ideas that filled the air had the peculiar chemical property that they would almost instantly bind with any fragment of insight or perception—just as the silvery, liquid-like surface of elemental lithium when it is freshly cut almost instantly turns dull and worm-colored as it bonds with the oxygen in the air. So whatever it was that this group shared had to have a certain wholeness to it (even if it could never be wholly or exactly articulated); it had to be a total response to the world with no raw surfaces for bad ideas to cling to. 

 

And yet, it had to leave room for every sort of person, every temperament, every cultural background. So it had to be a negative vision, not a positive one.

Worldview as list

Having argued at some length against a short list of succinct aims, I now present instead a long list of values. The idea is that these values, taken together, sketch the outlines of what I have called a worldview. The only way to test this idea is to for you to read and respond to them. But I would ask that you read the list not for its parts but for its whole. When, as I’m sure will happen, one or another item jangles, just go on to the next. See whether, all together, they form a picture that compels or repels you, that leaves you warm or cold. When you are done with that exercise, then please, by all means, tell me which individual items don’t sit right.  

Things I value:

• People who listen well, who are slow to judgment, who are more curious than righteous, more kind to the person they’re face-to-face with than loyal to any ideals.
• Trust in one’s own experience and thought: the habit of reasoning from what one has seen and felt; of trusting this over what one has only read and heard about.
• Mistrust of absolute doctrines, whether moral or scientific (including this one!); a sense that meaning and purpose must be worked out by each person for themselves.
• And yet, belief in a real truth that lies forever beyond our grasp; rejection of a knee-jerk relativism that renders everything equal and dissolves all value; a conviction that some things really are much better than others.
• Works of art, especially those that have survived a long time and not become irrelevant, which show us both the strangeness of the past and also let us see, in altogether unfamiliar forms of life, elements that we recognize as our own.
• The analogue over the digital, the manual over the automatic, the natural over the artificial, the tarnished over the polished, the poetic over the literal, the particular over the general.
• A syncretic religiosity that makes it possible to relate to sacred texts and religious ideas, take them seriously, read them with fresh eyes, make them new and alive, free them from flattened, dogmatic interpretations, but without any anxious need to constantly disavow the supernatural, to sanitize and rationalize them; a capacity to encounter the weirdness and mystery of these texts without trying to control them.
• Mistrust of jargon, of any words that are used too often without explanation or elaboration, and which therefore imply too much more than they clearly state.
• A sense of the importance of other lifeforms and of nature as a whole, a sense that we are bound up with the natural world.
• A refusal to see anything, but especially ourselves, in purely scientific terms; a sense that there is more to the world, and more to being human, than we can ever know or understand.
• A longing for community in which the boundaries of individual possession will be softened; a recognition that all ownership is artificial and most of it unearned.
• And yet, a recognition that you can’t just clear away all conventions; that social and political forms are not easy to replace and cannot be made anew from scratch; that it is easier to see what’s wrong with a way of organizing life than what’s right about; that reality is always much more complicated than our idea of it.
• Strict economy: having fewer things, but better-made and more beautiful; mending, repairing, conserving, repurposing; avoiding waste.
• Rejection of the phobia of dirt and contamination, acceptance of mishap and risk: reusing containers, sharing utensils, talking to strangers, inviting them into your home, shaking homeless people’s hands when you give them money, eating food sold in open air markets by unregulated vendors.
• A desire to raise children in a manner that neither fetishes and coddles them, nor holds them under constant surveillance in the name of safety, nor subjects them to endless empty intellectual labor, against their inclination and their spirit.

Worldviews

Notice also that the crumbs of the past couple months (those leading up to and following from the crumb on “Parent Groups”), to say nothing of the crumbs of years past, rest on many values, critiques, and purposes not at all captured by my pedagogical concerns around technology addiction, consumption, and over- and under-control (see last crumb). These three concerns were chosen not because they are particularly central or important, but because they are accessible to the action of a relatively small group of parents.

 

But the ideas that I used as a path to the parent groups—the principle of experimentation; its purpose of restoring agency and self-determination over our social forms and ways of life; the double critique of radicalism and incremental reformism—all clearly entail other values and purposes, which operate at an entirely different level from the three pedagogical concerns. They are the conditions of one possible response to the pedagogical concerns; they tell us whether and how to address them; perhaps they even give us permission to contemplate them.

 

I discussed, in the crumb on “development of functions,” how the parent groups, once formed, would be well positioned to pursue other aims: shared labor, integrating age-groups, altering dynamics in extended families, etc. All these are further purposes, entailing other values and critiques. My discussions of conflict and how to navigate it and the challenges and powers of different phases of life imply yet others.

But all of these purposes and values and critiques fit together. They are not a random assortment. 

 

We sometimes imagine people’s beliefs as a series of checkboxes, like the search-parameters on a shopping website: one person chooses this set, another chooses that set, a third a third set; and they may agree or disagree on any given one. But we know this is not true. A person’s beliefs (and values and aims and critiques of her society) are part of her worldview, which will tend to have some sort of coherence to it. If she is a person with the time and calm and wherewithal to keep her eyes open and think for herself, they will spring from her perceptions of and reflections on the world; so they will be a coherent response to the world she finds herself in. If she is too busy, anxious, unhappy, distracted, deadened to think for herself, they will probably reflect the values and beliefs of whatever cultural-political milieu she finds herself in; in this case her views many not have real internal coherence, but they will certainly be a recognizable configuration. Of course, any real person will be some mixture of these two extremes.

 

What I want people to gather around is not a handful of individual aims, values, etc., but a worldview. But a worldview that is more perceived than received, the worldview of a calm and living mind not of one dizzy with rage and fear or dead with despair.

 

Here I admit to a controversial position: I think that the standard beliefs of any well-known position on the political spectrum are basically distorted and confused. Not only do these sets of beliefs not have internal coherence; the individual beliefs that make them up are all distorted by their weaponization in an inherently destructive culture war. I am not about to try to argue this on the level of particulars. I will only observe that any conversation that accepts and engages with the categories that define “political discourse” in America today is doomed: nothing interesting will be said, no one’s thinking will advance, no thought will occur to anyone that is not simply the doppelganger of an opposing thought from the other side. On an emotional level, such conversations, whether they are conducted between opposing views or consist entirely of affirmations among people who already agree, can produce nothing but more rage, righteous indignation, frustration, anxiety, despair—that is, more of the very same emotions that gave rise to this bad mode of discourse in the first place.

 

By a worldview, then, I mean not one of these but precisely what one can see (what I’ll admit I believe anyone can see) when they set aside their preoccupations and look with calm eyes at the world as it is. The first mark of such a worldview will be that it squarely fails to fit into any obvious political camp.

 

Notice that almost all the claims from the crumbs of the past two months—concerns about technology addiction and media consumption; the thoughts about control, supervision, and indulgence that I discussed in the last crumb; the longing for a community in which some of the old ways of sharing labor again become possible; the focus on our immediate lives rather than distant events; the sense of an urgent need to regain agency over our lives; a conviction that we need a big change but not a wiping away of everything so much as a new kind of step forward, which is also a kind of return—none of these is particularly left or right. Or rather most of them are both left and right: they would appeal, for example, both to a hippie and to a traditional conservative. I left out over-consumption, because that one depends on the language we choose. If we use words like “capitalist” and “consumerist” we are signaling left and will tend to alienate people from the right. But if we say instead that we should live more simply and more frugally, resist advertising, especially advertising aimed at children, stop dressing up our babies and toddlers like they were dolls—then this sounds no more left than right. Again, it sounds strangely both.

 

 

Is that strange? Maybe not. If I am right about these things, if they are the truth of our condition, then it should be no surprise that they are perceived by both right and left. Everyone can perceive the truth. It is when we begin to think and speak that we err and diverge into warring camps. (Emerson writes, “Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed.”) 

 

So I too err and diverge. These crumbs lead me away from the truth. In the loaf was the truth, but it will not come into the crumbs, or only tiny flakes of it. I do not claim that what I have written in these crumbs is the final, perfect, transcendental truth. Of course: no sane person claims that. I claim only that it is true in the ordinary way: not, on the one hand, that it is the last thing that ever should be said on its subject; nor on the other that it is a statement of arbitrary “personal taste”; but that it is an imperfect, human, fumbling attempt, subject to revision, but useful and good, a hint in the right direction, a response to a perception that I have not yet entirely forgotten and that others may recognize if they understand my language and read me in search recognition not disagreement. (“I would ask you to read [my book] with my eyes,” writes Gandhi.)

 

What varies is not the truth of our perceptions but the degree to which our words and thoughts are responses to those perceptions, the degree to which they are or are not swamped and distorted by rigid preconceptions, petty consistencies, paranoias, obsessions, vendettas, self-justifications, pride, guilt, self-deprecation. Sometimes we even think and speak before we perceive, think and speak so as not to perceive, so as to be shielded from perception—because it's exhausting; because it's outside of our control and never fits our ideas; because, habituated to living in closets, we're afraid to go outside. Sometimes we all do this.

Why a small set of succinct aims is not a good basis for gathering people

Let’s return to the question of how to form these groups—how to find the people and bring them together. I identified three issues (technology addiction, over-consumption, and over-supervision) that these groups might initially address. 

 

So you could say: we’re looking for people who are worried about technology addiction, over-consumption, and over-supervision in child rearing. 

 

But I think that’s too pared down. It leaves us with an incomplete picture. One easy way to show what I mean is to look a little closer at the issue of over-supervision. This is not a simple issue, and if we treat it as simple, we are in danger of misunderstanding it and only making things worse in trying to make them better, or else alienating parents who might actually fit in very well to these groups. 

 

Over-supervising is obviously closely related to over-scheduling, which is clearly connected to the pressure we put on kids around school and college admissions. All of these are different expressions of our anxious need to control kids’ lives: to make sure, on the one hand, that nothing ever goes wrong, and on the other, that our children “get ahead,” that they win the race of life. This is an inability to accept the most basic facts of human life: (a) that fate is uncertain, that misfortune may befall us, that we don’t know what the future holds; (b) that we are here on earth, we don’t know why, for a limited time, and then comes death, which we will never understand.

 

But even as we try to exert excessive control over kids regarding their safety and their “future,” we are often indulgent to the point of negligence in satisfying their whims and appetites. My emphasis here is not on what we buy (over-consumption) but on parent-child interactions: the tremendous difficulty parents have saying no to their children, drawing clear behavioral boundaries, teaching conduct. We coddle them, indulge and reward tantrums, give in to demands, feel powerless to exercise authority. 

 

I am not putting down individual parents (or teachers). These patterns of over-control and under-control are expressions of deep underlying (and interrelated) cultural issues. Far be it from me to suggest that I fully understand them, but it seems like they have to do with deep ambivalences and uncertainties about adulthood, childhood, authority, obligation, fate, meaning, purpose—that is, with the whole instability of modern life, the doubt that has seeped into our foundations. At the very least, it is clear that both over-indulgence and over-control are expressions of very similar states of anxiety.

 

These underlying problems cannot be made to just go away, but it is possible to respond productively to them, to raise kids better. But that’s only possible if we have the whole problem, not just half of it, in mind.

 

For example, there are some educators and parents who, reacting against the excessive pressure and control on kids, recognizing that boredom and interest are signs of where real learning is and is not happening, adopt a philosophy absolutely opposed to any form of “coercion.” We should never, they argue, force kids do anything they don’t wish to do; without our coercive interference, natural curiosity will lead them to deep and passionate learning. This goes by a few names, but the one I’ve encountered most often is “un-schooling.”

 

Whatever the merits and demerits of these ideas in the abstract, what I’ve seen of them in practice has left me leery. Classrooms and schools run on these principles appear limp. What reigns is not natural curiosity and passionate learning but malaise and lethargy. Now, I’ve seen only a handful of these spaces, and there may well be ones that work better. I have in fact met un-schooled people who had learned a lot and developed unusual maturity at a young age. There are clearly some real insights in the ideas of A. S. Neil and the later romantic educators of the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. But it seems to me that certain basic realities of the human condition and of the nature of childhood are being overlooked in this philosophy; and I suspect that if these kinds of ultra-romantic programs do sometimes work well, it is because the parents and educators involved have an implicit sense of children’s need for guidance and structure, of the value of learning patience, discipline, self-control, etc.

 

 

In all of the above, I’m obviously thinking of particular demographics—primarily, upper-middle class and especially affluent parents. Clearly, ethnicity also plays a role, but a more complicated one: parents of different ethnic backgrounds not only tend to control and indulge, be strict and lenient, in different proportions but also in different situations, about different things, and in different ways. And I do not have enough experience to say anything at how politics plays into this, but I bet it does. But the weird paring of excessive control and misbehavior does cross cultural and demographic lines—though sometimes it is an effect of schooling rather than parenting.

 

I was first struck by this while observing classes at a high-school in China in 2007. This was a large, government-run school in a mid-sized city. Classes were 50-60 students and one teacher. During class, students sat quiet and attentive, requiring virtually no behavioral redirection, studiously answering the teacher’s questions as he, e.g., went over a series of difficult geometry problems. Then class ended, the teacher walked out of the room (leaving the kids alone—something American teachers are not even legally permitted to do), and the kids burst into loud, boisterous chatter and literally started climbing out the windows. A year later, I found myself working in a charter school where students (99% low-income Black and Latino) were required to walk in silent single-file through the hallways between classes, and teaching was a constant battle against class disruption. This does not necessarily imply any correlation—a million factors differentiate these two contexts—but the symmetry struck me, and the more I thought about it, the more I saw it in different settings.

 

 

I have been led (as usual) down a bit of a tangent, which I allowed myself in part because my earlier comments about over-supervision had gotten some deserving push-back from at least one reader. But the above discussion also offers some initial evidence of why a small number of succinctly stated purposes may make a bad starting point for a project of the kind I’m describing.

 

We can immediately see two problems: 

 

(1) People from different backgrounds (political, socio-economic, ethnic) are going to see things from different angles; a succinct critique is liable to look very right and convincing to some people but quite wrong or simply irrelevant to others; a more detailed discussion will show where the needs and challenges of different groups coincide and diverge; it will allow people to discover where the common ground, and thus also the productive differences, lie. 

 

(I would not fault anyone for feeling that any sort of community is better than none, and even if one does not have much diversity, one can still give one’s children a healthier peer-group. I would not fault them either for pointing out that a certain homogeneity was actually a common feature of traditional communities. I think it is essential to form a very non-homogeneous group, not because I have some strict moral stance on it, but for more practical reasons, which I’ll have to save for another crumb.)

 

(2) When a succinct statement (of a value, a critique, a purpose) does exactly land for a particular family, it’s likely to suggest an overly simplified and perhaps one-sided analysis—and the more squarely it lands, the less obvious the missing complexity. Without a sense of the complexity and many-sided nature of our problems, we will not be effective in addressing them. To really break with mainstream culture, one must be very careful. In setting out into the open space to create new forms of life, it is much easier to work from a half-truth than from a whole one. Soon one is able to see only a corner of reality, in which all one’s views are confirmed and what is right and true seems simple and clear. That way disaster lies. Dylan said “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” In our case, the law is not that of the police and courts but that of accepted forms and conduct, and the honesty required is the honesty to actually look at the world, again, every time you find yourself in it.

 

A third (and more dubious) problem emerges on further consideration: it is not only that a succinct statement tends to be one-sided and simplistic; it also tends to be superficial. It describes behaviors and says little about their underlying causes. I realize that my “underlying causes” (e.g. “an inability to accept the most basic facts of human life”) veer into the philosophical and may seem like just the sorts of things that would make bad conversation-starters with potential parents. That may be true—it probably is—but it does not mean they can be safely ignored.

 

The relentless focus on technical problems and technical solutions is a defining feature of our age. We want to see everything in terms of clearly defined problems: there is a gap in test scores between wealthy kids and poor kids—we want to eliminate it. There are not enough jobs—we want to make more. We do not ask: Should test-scores (or academics in general) be the focus of all children’s lives from age 6 to 18? Should they spend their days in classrooms? What sorts of lives are we preparing them for? What in fact do we want for them? We do not ask: what are these jobs we’re creating? Do they need to get done? Is there some way to distribute wealth without increasing the amount of meaningless labor people do? What in fact is the good of all this wealth? 

 

--These are philosophical questions, not practical ones. That's fine, if what you want to do is philosophy. But if you're trying to solve practical problems, you can't think that way.

--The severing of the practical from the philosophical, the separation of the concrete world of action from the world of ideals and morals, renders the business of society empty. It is (part of) why we struggle to find meaning in modern life, why young people are so dissatisfied with their jobs, why avarice has become so rampant—because the pursuit of extreme wealth is the purest expression of the loss of any deeper purpose, because this infantile game is all we can think of to play. It is part of why we self-medicate with devices and with pharmaceuticals and with explicit consumption, why we are so prone to addictions.

Human Nature

What follows is not what I had planned to write next, but I received a provocation I couldn't resist when a nibbler of these crumbs asked about the human tendency “to conflict, to cliquishness, to ganging up on certain people or groups…. We see it in families, among friends, in organizations, in nations and in the world as a whole. It seems like an axiom of human nature, and a group of friends/neighbors/strangers who got together to share childcare would be as susceptible to it as any other.” 

 

Is conflict inevitable in human society? Of course. But are all groups equally riven by conflict? Are all societies at all times equally given to strife and tribalism? Clearly not. The histories of many parts of the world contain periods of (relatively) peaceful cosmopolitanism, with people of different religions, ethnicities, languages, creeds living and working side-by-side, carrying on friendships, even sharing in each other’s rituals; and also periods of vicious ethnic conflict or repressive conformity. Similarly, to use the type of institution I’m most familiar with, certain schools at certain times are very good places to work and learn; and these same schools, at some later date, under different leadership and changed cultural-economic conditions, become much less happy and more full of strife.

 

So the details matter. The specifics of how a nation or a city or a group of neighbors is structured and run and imagined by its members; their beliefs and habits and culture—these determine how much conflict there will be and what kinds of conflicts and between whom and how these conflicts will play out and be resolved or contained or deferred or exploded.

 

My principle is to observe us closely and without presumption. If we close our eyes to our ugly tendencies, we cannot proceed wisely. But if, for fear of sentimentality and Romanticism, we adopt instead a rigid pessimism about our possibilities, this equally clouds our vision. Let’s not talk of “human nature.” That takes us away from details and clear observation. Often, I think, that is its depressive purpose: to sum up all our possibilities in a phrase, so as not to have to trouble with the dizzying variety of actual human life (because it is too painful to see all our errors and horrors unless we assure ourselves that it could not have been otherwise; or so as not to be overwhelmed by envy of other forms of life; or because we want some final, stable knowledge that we can rest on). The truth is, we do not know our natures, just as we do not know our relation to Nature. We do not know what our possibilities are until we discover them; and then we will not know what they will be next.

 

This principle, that we do not know what is possible for us, is fundamental to these crumbs. Only if this is so is there any hope for us. For over two hundred years, society has been moving in the direction of mechanization, automation, top-down control, speed, wealth, surplus, convenience, isolation, alienation, the illusion of absolute knowledge; for longer than that it has been moving away from any principle of individual self-determination. In that time, many have tried to turn aside onto another path. None have succeeded, except in brief, heady flashes. If we are slaves to our “natures,” if history is destiny, then there is no hope of turning. The basic force behind these crumbs (the leaven in the dough I’m crumbling) is the conviction that, despite all this, there is hope. This is my most radical belief.

 

It is a result of pure logic that the question whether our possibilities are known or unknown, limited or limitless, i.e. whether the past implies the future, cannot be answered empirically. It is a question of faith, which does not mean that it is something you cannot know and therefore must, say, have revealed to you, or guess at, or choose randomly, and which later you will find that you were wrong or right about; it is not a proposition that may or may not describe the world. Rather, what you believe on this point (as on any point of faith) will change the world. Change it for you, which means change it for everyone around you. 

 

One of the defining features of our cultural moment is a lack of faith in our possibilities, in our capacity to act meaningfully, to make anything good or lasting; a feeling that we are at the mercy of a historical process in which our individual acts and beliefs mean nothing. In the grip of this despair we try to pretend that we are not gripped by it: we talk incessantly about what is wrong and what should happen; we critique, imagine, theorize; we read newspapers and magazines and form opinions, as if these opinions mattered, as if by informing ourselves we were preparing to do anything, anything at all! And while we do all this, we do not for a moment entertain the possibility that we can do anything. The scope of our reading shows our despair and at the same time confirms it: by focusing on the distant horizon (the globe, the nation, the city of ten million, or one million), we put our attention on what really is beyond our control; and we turn away from the conditions close at hand that are the real conditions of our lives and the only realm in which it is given to us to act; we distract ourselves, so that we will not have to face the frightening thought that it really is within our power to entirely change our lives. 

 

If we form a group of parents to limit screen-time, buy less products, give kids more unsupervised time, share labor, etc., will there be conflicts? Yes. Will these conflicts tear the group apart, make it so unpleasant that its good purposes are ruined? Maybe. And that’s the point. That’s why I'm trying to think in detail, not theoretically but practically, from observation, about how group dynamics and conflict work and how to navigate them. I'm doing this in front of an audience, however small, in the hopes of starting a conversation.

Trouble in Paradise

The more I think about the problems around conflict and negotiation in groups of utopians and social reformers, the more clearly I see the web of habits and ideas that cause those problems. If we know that web well enough, maybe we can keep from getting caught in it. 

 

The particular dynamics described below are based on my own observations of particular projects, set in particular cultural milieux with particular kinds of people. They will fit most exactly groups of mostly young Americans from the left end of the political spectrum. They will fit other groups less well and some groups not at all. Nonetheless, I think the thoughts about how to navigate conflicts that come out of these observations will be broadly useful. 

 

Perfection

 

When we take the leap and begin (what we imagine will be) life on a new pattern, we are filled at first with energy and excitement—not due to any tangible signs of success, but simply because we have broken the mold of ordinary life and acted on our dreams (which is itself a kind of success). But as this initial glow wears off, we find that we are still living in the real world, surrounded by countless little annoyances and difficulties. As with all shifts in mood, we are apt to latch onto external causes for what is really an internal change. Thinking (implicitly) that things ought now to be perfect, we are rankled by every imperfection and blame it on bad policy or bad actions in others. 

 

(In fact, the inability to tolerate imperfection is rampant in mainstream culture. The society seems to feel that, if things were done right, nothing would ever go wrong: no one would ever get injured, no one’s feelings would ever be hurt, no doctor would ever make a mistake, nothing unfortunate or unfair would ever happen. When such things do happen, there is a feeling that something ought to change: someone should be reprimanded or fired or some new policy should be created, some fence built, some swing-set taken down—at the very least, someone ought to pay the unlucky person or their family lots of money. This is part of a very big issue, whose origins are deeply bound up with the whole nature of modernity, but this is not the moment to explore it fully. For now, I just want to observe that intolerant perfectionism seems on the one hand to come into the mainstream from reform movements, and also from the larger idea of “progress”; but, since there is no general critique of it from the left, political radicals also bring it with them from mainstream culture into whatever projects they undertake. Like all widespread ideas, it flows in many directions and finds its causes in many places.)

 

The principle of experimentation, which is the basis of the parent group and all the other projects I am imagining here, will be a strong protection against intolerant perfectionism. We are not starting over nor making any final and complete rearrangement, only playing with this and that piece of life; and we must explicitly embrace imperfection and ordinariness as not only inevitable but essential to our whole project. 

 

In addition to this modesty in quality and finality there is also a modesty of scope: the group does not set out to replace the old form of life with a new one; its activities are something added onto ordinary social relations and domestic arrangements, and it aims to integrate smoothly with the existing conditions of life. No one’s life is meant to become all about the group. Everyone still has their job, their colleagues, their outside friends and hobbies and passions. And nobody is trying, e.g., to sharea home; if we decide to take turns preparing meals, we’ll do so in our own kitchens. So if you don’t keep house quite the way I do, well that’s fine.

 

Internal and External Causes

 

But the pattern I described above points to another important principle in group dynamics that we will have to worry about: the confusion of internal and external causes. Annoyances and difficulties always have both types of cause: a hard edge in the world or another person has met with a sensitive spot in ourselves. But often we fail to notice the internal cause, in part because, whenever the question comes up, we are already by definition feeling irritable. This confusion of internal and external causes interacts with a set of ideas around conflict and communication common in lefty communalist circles, which are, like all wrongheaded ideas, grounded in a true but incomplete insight.

 

I wrote in the last crumb about how the competitive mentality of our justice system infects the thinking even of those who set out to reject that system. I still think this is true, but it occurs to me that it mixes badly with an opposing tendency that is actually more pronounced. People involved in communal living projects, social movements, etc. are often explicitly aware that what is lacking in our justice system is any mechanism for resolving conflicts; that in fact that system prevents resolution by ensuring that disputing parties never speak openly to each other. Communalists and reformers therefore try to set up structures to ensure that people are brought together to discuss and resolve differences. “Talking about problems,” “open communication,” “expressing your feelings” are thus seen as key to a happy and harmonious community. But this tends to exacerbate the problem of externalization of discontentment. It encourages everyone to think about what everyone else has done to upset them—and then talk to them about it.

 

Overlooked in all this is the fact that we often allow very little peculiarities in others to get under our skin, when with a little change of attitude we might just stop noticing them. In these cases, the best policy (as regards the long-term harmony of the group), is to make that internal change and say nothing to the offending party. But here we need to be careful: suppressing signs of irritation is not an attitude change, and it will probably just lead to nastier feelings and uglier encounters down the line. To accept another person's peculiarities is not easy, and there are many ways to try to do it; but I think the surest way is simply resignation. We imagine that we can change another person's behavior; and then we feel we should and we must change it; and either we try and almost surely fail; or we do not and we feel like a coward, like our very dignity is at stake. It is important to remember that, for the most part, we are quite powerless over other people's habits and behavior. Sometimes, perhaps, we can change their thinking (I must believe this or I could not write), but over their conduct, their social habits, their rough edges and insecurities and little marks of ugly pride—over these, we have only the influence that water has over the shape of a rock: an influence that works imperceptibly over the course of years.

Changing Behavior

This is true and then again it is not true. Or it is true of some aspects of behavior and not others. For in fact people do adapt to new social environments, unconsciously picking up rules of interaction and ways of using language. And we all know that the natural (graceful, polite, effective, default) way to teach mores: first by demonstrating them and second by gentle hints—and we would do well to remember that we often drop these when we imagine we are being ever-so-forbearing. It is not always satisfying to drop a hint, but this is because we underestimate their effect. We do not realize how sensitive others are to the feeling that they have made a bad impression and how far the unspoken recognition that, say, a joke fell flat can go to make someone reconsider what sorts of jokes to tell. Even an impenetrable obliviousness is half the time only the long-habituated self-protection of an overly sensitive nature.

But we should be very wary of talking directly about behaviors we don't like. Every time I tell another person that something they do bothers me, I have given them almost irresistible provocation to find something I do that bothers them. For by bringing my irritation to their attention, I have said much more than “This behavior of yours bothers me”; I have in effect announced that I consider my discomfort their problem, which seems to mean that I consider their behavior wrong or inappropriate. I have found fault with them, and what’s more I have chastised them. To such an insult it is a rare person so wise and good that they are not tempted to respond, at least silently, with insults of their own. Since none of us is perfect, they are liable to find something blame-worthy. And since I have not had the grace to keep my criticism to myself, why should they? Thus can begin an eternal exchange of gripes.

 

Of course, things don’t always go that way. It is possible to point out to someone that, say, he is constantly leaving messes in the kitchen, without incurring his enmity and resentment—but it requires delicacy. And our raw, unprocessed, unedited feelings are always a bad place to start. This is not (only or primarily) because people are thin-skinned and prickly; it’s because most people’s raw, unedited feelings are excessive. They are, as I’ve said, the result of the exterior circumstance meeting an internal sensitivity; and what’s more they have probably been worked up by repeated irritations of the same kind (and by the failure of subtler hints) to a pitch that is altogether out or proportion with the problem. 

The Role of Third Parties

 

Judging what needs to be addressed (rather than overlooked) and finding the delicacy to address it requires considerable processing in advance of any conversation with the “offending party.” An outside perspective can be very helpful.

 

It is of course true that talking to a third party about frustrations with someone’s behavior can lead to nasty dynamics—but only if the third party empathizes excessively with, absorbs, reproduces, and encourages those frustrations. This is unfortunately what “friends” tend to do in our culture. When person X complains to their friend Y about person Z, Y usually feels socially obliged to affirm X’s point of view, which means of course affirming X’s irritation with Z: affirming that Z is being a jerk. Perversely, this is called loyalty. I suspect that this is something we learned from that brand of therapy in which the therapist’s role is to affirm the patient’s perspective, to constantly tell her that she’s in the right and has been treated shabbily by her parents, siblings, boss, etc.. When this practice is defended intelligently, it is on the grounds that we need to go through anger and blame to reach forgiveness. This may sometimes be the case (e.g. with regard to things our parents did when we were children) but even there it can easily go too far, and it is entirely irrelevant to the sorts of petty irritations that X feels towards Z in the kind of situation we’ve been discussing. (Implicit in this brand of therapy, is the notion that people generally have a weak sense of their own claims, needs, and feelings and need to have their perspectives affirmed; this seems to me a really bizarre conclusion to draw from contemporary American culture.)

 

In fact, Y is in a position to intervene helpfully here, if she realizes that true loyalty does not consist in unqualified affirmation. This will of course be easier if X does not expect unqualified affirmation—if X in fact comes to Y looking to quiet her irritation not spread it. Either way, though, Y will need to be a little circumspect and considerate—just as X should be, just as everyone should be when dealing with conflict.

 

There are two possibilities here: either Y is herself bothered by Z’s behavior, or she is not. In the first case, Y might begin with something like, “Yeah, I know what you mean. That bothers me too.” She might then try to give some account of Z’s perspective, to humanize the behavior and make it more comprehensible. The two could then discuss whether it’s necessary and worthwhile to try to talk to Z about it, and if so how to go about it. In the second case (where Y does not share X’s irritation), Y’s task is more delicate. If she simply rebuffs X—if she says, “I don’t know why that bothers you, it seems perfectly fine to me”—then X is just going to go away feeling alienated from Y and Z both; this is not productive. But there’s plenty of space in between. Y might try something like, “I know what you mean, but I think that’s just Z’s way of talking. It can sound kind of intense, but he doesn’t mean it that way. It takes a little getting used to.”

 

There are many directions this conversation could go, but the very last place one wants to end up discussing these kinds of complaints is at some sort of “community meeting,” where every grievance becomes public, and all parties find themselves on a stage, defending their own conduct and anxious of how everyone else is judging them; and where the formality of the context inflates every complaint into an official accusation. Formal means should be used only when informal ones have repeatedly failed, and even then only when the issue is of the utmost seriousness—say, as a last resort before bringing in the law or disbanding the group and abandoning the entire project.

 

Choosing People

 

Not everyone finds it equally easy to be calm and circumspect under irritation, to imagine someone else’s perspective when that person is getting on their nerves, to accept imperfections and adapt themselves to differences in behavior. Not everyone even wishes to do so—and even the best intentioned person will behave badly sometimes. Returning to the central question of what kind of people we are trying to gather, it would seem that one quality we must look for is the desire to try. Hot tempered people, people who have a bad habit of reacting before they think, people who get caught up in their inner turmoil—these we will have and must have and should have. But people who deny the basic principle of internal and external causes, who do not want to see if they can change their own attitude before asking another person to change their behavior, who do not accept the principle of imperfectability in social relations—these people we must be wary of. It is not in the nature of this project to reject people (after all, there is no official “membership”); but people do not like to join a group that espouses values they reject, so a clear statement of these ideas will be enough to dissuade anyone excessively committed to opposing them.

 

I want to draw attention to the end of the last sentence above. If a line must be drawn, this is the line: not that everyone in the group must espouse certain values, but that no one should be excessively committed to opposing certain values. The logical mind imagines that things can be strictly defined: that a set of necessary and sufficient criteria can be found for every word or category, and every instance of the word or every member of the category will fit those criteria, and every non-member will fail them. But real usage is not like this. A word or category is always somewhat amorphous: a cluster of individual usages or instances scattered around some central paradigm; its boundary is never clear (there will always be cases where one is not sure if the word applies), and one can never say what all correct uses have in common—perhaps they have nothing in common. An organically organized group of people will have this same not-wholly-rational structure.

Phases of Life

Does my depiction of young adulthood at the end of the last crumb seem unkind—even bitter? Does my depiction of people with children seem too rosy? They do to me.

 

We always judge most harshly the phase of life that we most recently left behind. We see its illusions and contradictions clearly, for we have lately escaped from them, and we have not had time to forgive ourselves for those follies. Whereas the phase we are now in is always partly a mystery to us. (And maybe this is why we are still in it: could we see it all clearly, its illusions and contradictions, maybe we would transcend them and enter a new phase.)

 

So let me try to take a fairer look at the comparison I made at the end of the last crumb.

 

I accused young adults of an “unconscious self-involvement,” whereas parents, I said, “have bound themselves to and taken responsibility for others; …they have some experience … in putting other people’s immediate desires ahead of their own.” Now parents clearly have done all that—but only for a very select group of people very near to them. And this selfless caring for immediate family, and especially for children, usually entails a diminished regard for the needs of the rest of the world. Often, in fact, parents’ denial of their own desires, the fact they are working not for themselves but for another, becomes justification for a ruthlessly competitive promotion of their children’s interests. So parenthood (and often marriage) can mean both an expansion of one’s interests within the narrow realm of the nuclear family, and also a contraction of those interests away from the wider world. The young adult, by comparison, is more automatically self-interested and at the same time is more concerned for, has more of a feeling of kinship to, the whole world.

 

I do not yet have children, but four years ago when I got married I felt myself shifting into a new phase of life, in which my concerns, my thoughts and my dreams were all differently configured. The Sanskrit term for this phase is grhastha, which is usually translated as householder. The question for us householders will be whether the contraction or the expansion of interests will be the dominant force in us: whether the family becomes really just an extension of the self, so that we are more selfish and greedy than ever, only with a three- or four- or five-headed self, all the hungrier because it is trying to stave off the loneliness of its egoistic seclusion; or whether the care of the family teaches us to care for others, and we learn from the process of these new relationships, so much more inescapable and deep than the relationships of our youth, to see others a little better and to look at ourselves a little less. Either outcome is possible for each of us.

 

For the young adult (or, say, the youth), the question is again which will become the dominant force in her: the capacity (which arises from her free-floating unattachment) for a sense of obligation to the whole world, even and especially towards people and creatures very unlike herself, or the unconscious self-involvement, which is equally an effect of unattachment and freedom. This question is closely connected to another. The young adult (if he has the leisure to enjoy—or shall we say wallow in—his young adulthood and not immediately have strict material needs pressed upon him, and especially if he has that dubious privilege that gives a young person too many options and not enough needs) is plagued by a feeling that his life has no solidity, that he is a kind of wraith floating lonely and rootless in the anonymous crowd of the modern city; he longs for reality, for genuine experience, for recognition, companionship, solidity, for something that does not feel artificial and false. The question is to what will this painful ache and longing lead him: to empty pleasure- and thrill-seeking; or to an ardent but confused rebellion that is half posturing and play-acting and half impossible hopes; or to participation in a communal life that can channel his abundant energy towards meaningful ends?

 

 

The way in which all these questions arise, and the conditions of their answers, have to do with the isolation of these age-groups within themselves—i.e. age segregation. It is a peculiarity of our culture that people socialize largely with people around their own age. And the relations they have with people in other phases of life (parents, teachers, bosses, etc.) are structured so as to discourage them from taking these older people into their confidence or trusting them to offer a useful perspective on their own condition. Younger people feel sure that older ones have nothing to teach them, and older people often confirm this by speaking in a manner that wards off confidences and shows a lack of sympathy with the conditions of the younger person’s life. (In fact, wasn’t this just how I was speaking at the end of the last crumb?) 

 

Given that phases of life have characteristic challenges (exploring sexuality, finding a job, navigating romantic relationships, raising children, etc.), it seems on the surface silly that people should be unable to make any use of the experiences of those who have already been through the challenges they’re now in. This odd situation depends on the idea (part myth, part reality) that the world is changing so rapidly that sexuality and work and courtship and child-rearing are all completely different now from what they were half a generation ago. It depends on other ideas as well, and these ideas are in turn generated and encouraged by the structure of our social relations, especially by the segregation of age groups. The ideas enforce the structure and the structure encourages the ideas.

 

I do not profess to understand the whole system of causes and effects, but I will mention one other that seems to me important. What I called the “characteristic challenges” of each phase of life are things about which we are very vulnerable and guarded. This is not only because many of them are on explicitly intimate topics (sexuality, romance) but also because the very fact that they are central challenges of the age we’re in means that our pride and sense of self are wrapped up in them. So an encounter where the younger person is able to speak openly about such topics and listen to advice about them will necessarily be an intimate one—and intimacy across age groups is something that our culture is deeply suspicious of. (In a strange way, this is even the case between parents and children. Think of the conflicts that arise when parents try to give their adult children advice about childrearing. Or picture parents trying to give their kid some perspective on middle-school social relations; note how irrelevant the parent’s advice seems to the kid; and yet, think how much the parent actually does know about what the kid’s going through. In this second case, we may feel that the distance is necessary, that parents just are not the right people to give guidance on this issue; but this only highlights the need for other kinds of relationships across age groups.)

 

There are many bad effects of this segregation of age groups. It leaves young people turning to peers for information about things none of them understands (picture middle-school boys giving each other advice about hooking up with girls). It dissolves tradition and custom. It creates a strange feeling of disconnection from the past, of existing in a frightening immediate present, like a precipice overlooking the abyss of the future. And, of course, it deprives people of perspective on the challenges they’re in and practical wisdom on how to navigate them. 

 

What “perspective on the challenges they’re in” means is not only the active statements of older people who have gone through those challenges and can see them from without but also (what would probably be the much more effective medicine) direct observation and participation in the work and difficulties of later phases of life, in which the challenges that loom so large in this our current phase have been left behind and shown themselves as partly illusory. Thus, for example, the parent of school-aged children, coming into close contact with the lives of older people whose children are already in their mid or late 20s, might observe that who did the best in school and who went to the best college are not of such immense and final importance. But lacking this close observation, they imagine these questions as immense; they are consumed by them. 

 

So a group or network of groups experimenting with forms of life must expand beyond whatever age group it begins with. If it begins with a group of parents in their 30s and early 40s, it must find ways to make itself useful to people both older and younger, to undertake experiments they can participate in or foment them to undertake experiments of their own. I have already suggested some ways in which this might happen.

Formality & Informality

I was planning to write more about the kinds of experiments these groups could undertake, the kinds of functions they could serve, but I find myself thinking instead about the difficulties they would encounter and the pitfalls they must avoid. I see no reason why I should “remain on topic”; it will be better if I follow where these thoughts lead me. It may seem at first that the considerations below are excessively speculative—that I am thinking in too much detail and much too far in advance about the dynamics of a group that does not and may never exist. But I think it worthwhile, maybe even necessary, to consider these issues in advance. The fact is that any level-headed, worldly person, imagining the sort of project I’m describing, will have some ideas of the ways in which it would be likely to go awry.

 

Maybe the most fundamental challenge is the balance between formality and informality: to what extent the group understands itself as an official entity and operates by formal procedures and to what extent it sees itself and functions as an ad hoc association of individuals. A group intentionally gathered to pursue particular ends cannot avoid at least an element of formal self-recognition. But an excess of formality is deadly, and the group will need to carefully resist moving too far in this direction. We do not want to become institutional and legalistic. These are qualities we’re trying to escape from.

 

Thus, there should be no strict boundary to these groups. There will be a core of people who meets regularly but around that a large penumbra of others who come to gatherings often, sometimes, occasionally, rarely—perhaps even some who never come but are curious and keep tabs from afar. There should be no official membership and as many ways to be associated with the group as there are people interested in it.

 

But if such groups exist in multiple places, they ought to be in touch with each other, and this suggests a certain formal self-definition. If someone comes into a new town, there should be an easy way to find and get in contact with the group in that town. But maybe this can be done entirely through word of mouth. 

 

Some things may need to be formalized, though. If a few parents are looking after all the kids each afternoon, we will probably need a schedule of how these duties rotate, so that they don’t fall more heavily on some parents than on others, and so that people can plan in advance. Whoever’s looking after the kids on a given afternoon is going to have to serve snacks, so if a kid has food allergies or other dietary restrictions, everyone will need to know that, and it’ll be easier to have all that information collected in one place.

 

But food is also a good example of where things can easily get too rigid and formal if we don’t explicitly guard against it. Parents will inevitably have some differing ideas about nutrition, sugar intake, conventional vs. organic produce, and so on. There should be and no doubt will be conversations about these issues among parents. But I think we should stop well short of making any formal policy about it. Even the idea of an official “meeting” on the topic makes me nervous. Official meetings are dangerous. But they have an opposing danger: that people will talk in small cliques, complaining about others without ever talking to them.

The Discussion Fetish

 

Here then are twin evils, each in its way quite deadly: (1) A petty factionalism in which enmity flourishes like mold in the darkness of private discussions, never exposed to the sunlight of a real encounter between opposing views. (2) A swamp of “group meetings”—tedious, conflictual, and interminable.

 

Groups formed around alternative ideas of how to live often come to fetishize their own processes. I’ve seen this in communal houses, where “communicating” about feelings can turn into an obsessive exploration of tiny grievances that does nothing but multiply and enlarge these grievances. I’ve seen it in Occupy Wall Street, where the technical procedures by which meetings were conducted and decisions made became themselves matters of perpetual conflict and discussion. In these contexts, the act of talking—about what to do and how to do it and what we believe and what we feel and who has acted badly and so on—becomes a fixation that overwhelms all other purposes.

 

Ironically, I think one of the major causes of this fixation on group discussions is the very desire to get things done, to fix problems, to make things as they ought to be. Everyone has their own notion of how things ought to be, their own pet issues and peeves. In their anxiety to get everything right, to solve every problem, they become lost in bitter and eternal debate.

 

This is partly a cultural problem. Ours is a culture of relentless self-interest, and even (maybe especially) people who have set out explicitly to reject that culture as an economic and political paradigm end up reproducing it in their personal conduct and private thoughts: obsessing over their private grievances, seeing vividly their own virtues and their own labor, blind to others’ virtues and labor. Our system for mediating disputes (courts of law) and our political process are based on competition and function by designating a winner; and though we may consciously reject all this, it is deeply lodged in our thinking.

 

There is no way to suddenly exorcise these habits, but it will help to be aware of the problem from the outset and to try to guard against it. We must keep reminding ourselves of the trick of perspective: that whatever is close to us looms large, whatever is far away appears small. We must sooth ourselves with the thought that everyone is trying and no one is perfect. We must, if they have not been spoiled for us by bad religion, remember the words of The Sermon on the Mount: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” In a different mood, we must remember that the world is full of endless variety, and if we seek perfection in an exacting code of right conduct, we will find ourselves alone in a passageway so narrow and dim that no one else can join us there. So, a certain parent is always giving the kids sugary snacks. Well, they’re young, the sugar won’t kill them, and the variety of experience will do them good.

 

It is also partly a conceptual problem: if we see ourselves as trying to do things perfectly, to get them exactly right now, then we’re compelled to argue every point to death. If we see ourselves as trying out a series of experiments, as agreeing only on a preliminary plan for now, to be revised and re-revised, then it is easier for the discussion to stop. 

Finally, it is partly a demographic problem: most projects to build a new form of life (communal houses, anarchist collectives, social movements) are filled with people who are not tied down—either because they are still very young or because they are for some other reason unattached and footloose. This is why they are able and willing to take on these projects, but it also means that they are often still in that phase of life characterized by unconscious self-involvement at the personal level and abstracted idealism as the public level. Such people are not ideally suited to compromise and acceptance of differing opinions.

 

A group of parents is at a very different phase of life. They have bound themselves to and taken responsibility for others; they have already willingly embraced conditions that strictly limit their perfect freedom; they have some experience in making practical compromises where there is no perfect choice and in putting other people’s immediate desires ahead of their own. Such a group will naturally be better at navigating the variety of opinion and the practical negotiations that are inevitable in a group of people who are trying to work together on matters that are of great personal importance to everyone involved.

 

What is unusual, of course, is that parents or any group of people familiar with all of the pressures and imperfections of adult life, would enter into a project like this one. But this is possible now in a way that it has not been in the past. This is the opportunity of desperate times: even those who are materially and spiritually invested in ordinary social and economic life begin to feel that that life can no longer sustain them.

Development of functions in a self-determining group

Parent groups make a good starting point for group formation. Raising kids is a consuming projecting for those who undertake it, and parents typically make new friends and acquaintances through parenting, so it’s not hard to imagine groups of strangers connecting and deciding to meet in person just on the basis of shared parenting ideas. But once groups begin to form on that basis, there are many other functions they can serve.

 

Some of these are the basic functions of any traditional community: sharing labor (child-care, cooking, etc.), bringing people together, helping out in a crisis. It is interesting to consider in some detail how these basic community functions would grow out of parent groups.

 

I also see the parent groups as a starting point for other experiments in response to particular aspects of the modern condition. I’ll consider those in a later crumb.

 

Labor Sharing

 

Once families are regularly spending time together, it becomes easy to, say, have a few parents look after a larger group of kids each afternoon, keeping each other company while giving other parents the afternoon off. Since there’s already a lot of agreement about child-rearing philosophy, the parents would be more likely to trust each other (than, say, a babysitter) to make decisions they’d approve of. This might even extend to dinner, with one family providing food each day. (With enough families, your turn would only come very couple weeks—and preparing one giant meal is less work than preparing many small ones.)

 

This would in turn lead to another good: as in a traditional village, kids would not always be under their own mom and dad’s authority when not in school. They’d get used to different parents, with their varying personalities and styles, freeing them from the loneliness and claustrophobia of the nuclear family. Without their parents around to cater to their individual demands, maybe they’d get used to eating what was put in front of them and overcome the immense pickiness about food that is characteristic of American children.

 

Now most people with kids develop circles of friends with kids around the same age, who could share these kinds of duties, but they usually don’t, except in occasional, ad-hoc ways, under special circumstances: say, a parent is sick and can’t pick up her kid and the babysitter’s unavailable, so she asks one of the other parents to do it. The sick parent would see herself as asking a favor of the other. She would be apologetic beforehand and thankful after. This shows that this kind of “mutual aid” is seen as out of the ordinary, a deviation from the self-contained nuclear-family organization of mainstream life. To suggest that labor exchanges of this kind become a regular thing (one parent pick up all the kids each day and serve them dinner, say) would feel like something weird, a crossing or blurring of boundaries. People might like the idea but never try it. But for a group that has come together and constituted itself in order to experiment with different values and different ways of living, it would be natural and easy to experiment with labor exchanges.

 

Age Desegregation

 

I believe that age segregation is a huge problem in contemporary child-rearing. There are many subtle effects of age segregation—this could be its own crumb—but the most obvious is that older kids cannot look after and help socialize younger ones, and this is a real loss for both the older and the younger. Schools of course explicitly group kids by age, but these groupings then propagate into other contexts. For example, parents often make friends with parents of other kids in their child’s class, so even parent social groupings end up segregated by children’s age. 

 

But since our intentional parent groups are formed around shared ideas, the kids will tend to be of varying ages, making for the pack-of-kids-of-many-ages that is a standard feature of more traditional cultures and is still often seen in lower-income neighborhoods and other contexts, but is dying out in many places and is almost altogether gone in middle- and upper-class America.

 

Adults Socializing and Courtship

 

If the group “works”—if it becomes a warm environment where people know each other and kids have fun—people without children who share the values of the group will naturally begin to get drawn in. They’ll get invited to a gathering (a dinner, a cook-out) because they’re friends with one of the parents in the group; they’ll like the atmosphere, come to more events, start attending afterschool hangouts, enjoying hospitality and contributing labor of their own. 

 

Because all these people are drawn by shared values (and especially shared ideas about child-rearing), gatherings of the group will be a good place for adults to make friends and for single people to find partners (offline!). But because the gatherings will be regular, it will be possible to meet the same people again and again without having to make dates with them. Under these circumstances, affections can grow more organically and without so much pressure. The presence of children and older people (see below) will make for a sweeter and more integrated social environment, where courtship will feel less like shopping and more like looking for family. And meanwhile friendships can form of a loose but pleasant kind often absent in the modern world, between people who don’t want to get together one on one but like seeing each other. 

 

Extended Families

 

Clearly the intention is for these groups to function a bit like traditional extended families (in some ways—clearly, we don’t want to romanticize or reproduce the old hierarchies) and it seems likely that blood relatives, especially grandparents will tend to get drawn into them. Now, it’s usually recognized that there’s something very healthy about the traditional extended family: multiple generations living together, eating together, etc. A lot of people long for this in the abstract, but they can’t quite imagine living with (or even down the street from) their own parents and siblings. Those relations are too strained. They are strained primarily from the intense pressure of the nuclear family, where the core of life rests on too few relationships. When families gather, old dynamics and old quarrels reemerge. But the bigger the gathering, the less true this is. That’s partly just because a bigger group means less pressure on individual relationships: it’s easier to avoid anyone who’s getting on your nerves. But it’s also because we see one another so differently: old people who are cranky, maddening, selfish, or tyrannical in the eyes of their offspring are often funny, charming, quirky, or full of old-fashioned dignity in the eyes people who didn’t grow up with them. 

 

In gatherings of our parent group, grandparents, aunts, and uncles will often find themselves able to fit in more comfortably than they can in the smaller family gatherings. Adults whose families are not around will be brought into contact with people far from their own age group. And the parents of young kids will be able to give their children time with the grandparents (meeting needs on both sides) without the usual tensions and aggravation. They may even become able to see their parents through their eyes of their friends, helping them to forgive old wrongs and hurts, which will mean in the end forgiving themselves for their faults.

 

*

 

What I hope emerges from all this is how a great many of the social benefits that we think or imagine existed in traditional community life, or in village life, can be got back in the midst of the modern city—not by suddenly enacting some elaborate plan, but by a gradual process of experimentation and evolution, aimed at meeting the everyday needs of real individuals. If the group can be formed, then all this may follow.

 

But my aim here is not to recreate community. My aim is to rediscover a principle of self-determination in modern life, whereby people can begin to make choices about how they live, instead of waiting on and feeling themselves at the mercy of a paralyzed and decaying government and a political process that, without radical rearrangement, can only produce more strife and unhappiness.

 

I describe the creation of (what I take to be) some aspects of traditional community as an instance of how the a self-determining process of group experimentation might work. That the community is formed in this manner (gradually, experimentally, in-process) is essential, because our notions of what traditional community was like are vague: a mixture of distant observation, hearsay, conjecture, and fantasy. Much has perhaps been romanticized, and the ugly parts of that old way of life are often painted out of our mental pictures (or inflated so as to occlude all else, depending on our disposition, or even on our mood). By trying one thing and another, by responding to immediate needs as well as abstract ideals, by watching and adapting, by talking and comparing notes, we may find our way back to some of the old forms or led away from into something quite different. Likely things will not go as I have described them. Perhaps they will go entirely differently. My point is not to predict but to sketch out possibilities, to try to show that many things are possible which now seem out of reach.