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.
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