A List of Values

I ask that you read the list below 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.
• 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, free them from flattened, dogmatic interpretations, find new life in them, but without any anxious need to sanitize and rationalize them, to disavow the supernatural; 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: buying 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.