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.