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.