Parent Groups

To summarize the ideas from the last three crumbs:

 

The utopian impulse to wipe away everything, to start from scratch, puts theory too far ahead of practice. This is dealing in fantasies. Even if such a project could get off the ground, it would be doomed to recreate the worst aspects of everything it sought to leave behind: only by engaging in a dialectical relationship with a set of cultural practices can we hope to pass beyond them. But, at the same time, incremental reform and small changes in lifestyle (attending protests, voting in local elections, buying organic) are incommensurate with the scale of our problems. These things are worth doing, but they cannot satisfy our sense that something must be done.

 

We need to change our form of life fundamentally but gradually. We must rebuild the house room by room, while living in it; not once and for all according to a perfect plan, but trying now this, now that, in a process of ongoing experimentation, so that practical problems and abstract ideals are worked out together. This cannot happen in anything so big as a modern city. It is something that only groups of willing individuals can carry out. If the experiments succeed, more people will follow; but even if they fail, it will be better to have tried.

 

What matters finally is not whether individual experiments succeed or fail. An individual experiment will always be a stab at one piece of the vast problem of modern life; its success will not save us, its failure does not doom us. My radical hope is that many individual experiments conducted by interconnected and overlapping groups of people coalesce into a process of ongoing cultural rebuilding, so that it once again becomes possible to think that we have a future, so that human civilization as a whole may once again become a project we can believe in. Only then will the mass of despair be converted (according to Einstein’s famous equation) into the energy of hope.

 

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Keeping this general picture in mind, it will be helpful to turn to some particular examples. I’ll start with a fairly modest proposal, which I alluded to in the last crumb: parent groups for people concerned about children’s relationship to technology.

 

Technology addiction is a major problem in contemporary child-rearing (I take this as obvious, not requiring any argument or illustration), but although many parents are at least nominally aware of this, very few do much about it. We keep buying kids devices at younger and younger ages, using these devices to pacify them—and then, when we take them away, they scream so horribly we give them right back. The solution, as with any addiction, is to keep them away from the drug in the first place. 

 

This is not as easy as it sounds. If all the other kids have smart phones, play videogames, etc., then the kids who don’t will be isolated, lonely, and bored. A kid ought to play with other kids, and if all the other kids are playing videogames, what’s there to do but play with them? At age three or four, this already creates pressure on parents. By seven or eight, the pressure is almost irresistible. So each parent is trapped by the inaction of the others, and no one can take the first step.

 

The exception is parents in strong religious communities. These communities are precisely groups of people who have chosen to live differently from the mainstream together. Their members are already outsiders to the surrounding culture and not afraid of that condition. They offer ready-made peer groups of kids from families with similar values, as well as mutual support, both emotional and practical, for parents. This is why, until recently, almost the only schools that actually had strict policies about screen use were Waldorf schools.

 

But if you’re not Anthroposophist or Amish or etc., then you need a secular (or at least non-denominational) group of likeminded parents to provide all three of these crucial supports: a sense of stable identity outside the mainstream (so that you feel you’re part of a way of life, not just a lone crank), peer-groups for kids, mutual support for parents. 

 

The internet is full of websites and articles for parents about technology addiction—but these articles are all about what you can do within your nuclear family; there’s virtually nothing about peer groups. The oversight is glaring, and therefore it’s telling: it reflects the general orientation away from group action, towards the privatization and self-helpification of problems; a mentality in which problems are seen not as arising from the conditions of life but as isolated disorders. Everything I am saying in these crumbs is based on the opposite outlook. (Update: this is no longer so true; the online world of parents concerned about screentime is increasingly group-action oriented.)

 

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Technology addiction is not the only collective action problem in child-rearing. Peer pressure also makes it hard for individual families to opt out of habits of (over-)consumption of goods marketed to kids. The buy-nothing movement is taking off among parents of babies, but it's easier there, because babies don't get envious of each other's parambulators (though parental peer-pressure can have an influence too, even on parents who might want to opt out). As kids get older, it gets harder. And not having the "right" clothes, for example, can really become a social negative as kids enter the later elementary-school grades.

 

A very different kind of peer-group effect occurs around the issue of supervision. Many of us feel that we (middle- and upper-class Americans) monitor kids much too much. Just as they need to know how to behave according to adult mores in restaurants and theaters and classrooms, they need time when they can follow their own impulses; they need space to make mistakes and figure things out on their own without being either helped or observed. And we need them out of our hair sometimes (but not glued to a screen). Now, a big pack of kids out together in a park are pretty safe: the older ones can look out for the younger (from which they will learn responsibility and gain self-confidence), there’s always someone to go get help if anyone gets hurt, and predators will be intimidated by the numbers. But if all the other kids are inside where their parents can keep an eye on them, then the one or two kids out by themselves is not so safe at all. 

 

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With these issues as with almost any other, individual families may try to create their own culture, but as they grow older, kids need wider worlds to move in; they must come to feel at home in something larger than the home. So they should pass beyond parental influence and reexamine their parents’ values in the light of larger experience. If outside the home they find nothing but the addiction, materialism, and paranoid safety-ism that their parents have rejected, then they will begin to see that their parents are weirdos (and in fact to hold out alone against mainstream values, the parents will have to be not only weirdos, but probably snobs and cranks too). If the kids are socially comfortable and get on well with their peers, they will reject their parents and embrace the mainstream. If they are socially isolated and feel at home only with Mom and Dad, will reject their peers. Neither outcome is happy.

 

To hold onto a set of values opposed to the values of the mainstream, without allowing those values either to fray and dissolve or else to harden into cranky isolating snobbery, one needs a little world of people who uphold those values. 

 

Through the very simple and modest mechanism of the parent group, the critical consciousness that would otherwise be impotent and frustrated becomes the basis for an evolving form of life. The theoretical becomes actual, and both the merits of the theory and its challenges come to light and are worked out in a living practice.

 

The challenge is scale. In general, the bigger these groups are, the more stable they’ll be, the less prone to schismatic conflicts (because more people means less pressure on individual relationships), and the more effective at producing the feeling of what I have called “a little world.” One couple and their friends with kids will be too small. (This is why the “pods” of the pandemic mostly dissolved even before the pandemic was over.) To form a large enough group, you will need to cast a considerably wider net than immediate personal acquaintance. So we return once again to the question of where and how to find and gather the people.

 

But our example of parent groups clarifies the question considerably, because in this case it is easy to see what kind of people we’re looking for: parents who share a set of beliefs about how to raise kids—or, maybe more saliently, a set of critiques of how they see other people raising kids. 

 

But equally important, and less obvious, is what these parents don’t need to share. For example, do they need to share views on social justice, on gender and sexuality, on immigration, on religion, on Israel and Palestine, etc.? More or less all parental beliefs affect kids, and there is a part of us that longs for a community of absolute agreement: a group of people who think exactly how we think. But obviously (a) we can’t have this and (b) we shouldn’t have it. Some diversity of opinions is important. But how much? 

 

How to play

In ancient times, people unhappy with a particular way of life or ruler or set of laws could just go off into another part of the woods (or whatever landscape); this is not possible now. But the reason it is impossible is not that there are no woods to go off into. (Yes, all land is owned, but some of it can be had very cheap.) The reason is that we don’t live in the woods. Off in the wilderness, ancient people could get food, shelter, clothing in the same way they had back home but arrange their community a little differently; they could experiment without starting from scratch. But for us, to go off into the wilderness would mean to throw away everything, to hurl ourselves into a kind of life we know nothing about. This is not at all the spirit of playful and pragmatic experimentation that I had in mind, but something entirely different: a wild rejection of all civilization—starry-eyed, fantastical, most likely fanatical, culty, lunatic.

What I had in mind was to play with and within the forms of life we know, to try out variations or even inversions of them, to treat our institutions, our mores, our way of life as plastic—not to destroy them. I mean things like: alternative schools, parent groups for people who don’t let their kids on social media, networks of local production and consumption, alternative systems of healthcare, interfaith reading groups, conversations across political lines, support groups for technology addiction, etc.

Of course, some of these things already exist, but they lack robustness: they are sparsely attended; they struggle to get off the ground, last a few years, go slack, fizzle. They appear as isolated and marginal phenomena. Or, when one of them gains a foothold and becomes self-sustaining (I’m thinking, for example, of certain alternative schools founded in the 1960s), they gradually become normalized: their distinctiveness slips away, and they come to resemble the ranks of established, mainstream institutions that they have joined. These various experiments never coalesce into a solid way of life, a movement, a culture of experimentation, or a viable alternative culture of any kind. They do not gather enough mass to hold themselves together, to give people a feeling of something solid, real, and reliable, something that can withstand the relentless disintegrating force of marketing, ease, abundance, safety, convenience, entertainment, lethargy, and despair.

 

They do not gather enough mass—what is the mass in this metaphor? It is people. There are just not enough people conducting these experiments, in communion with one another. This is in part because many of these experiments self-marginalize—because they are founded by young people with limited perspectives, radical politics, the stubbornness and narrowness of idealism; or by cranks; or by crackpots; because they have bad ideas baked into them; because they are created in a spirit of anger and rejection; because they are more vanity, theory and play-acting than plain practical doing; and maybe, besides all these other reasons, because they lack an element traditionally provided by religion and which we now don’t know quite where to access: an ability to reach towards fundamentals, to bind people by something deeper than ideas. 

 

So, the first question is, as I said two crumbs back, where and how do we find and gather the people. But entailed in this question is another question: which people are we trying to find? How will we know them? Because, obviously, when we say “find the people” we don’t mean any people; we mean people who share something, some set of values, principles, vision, willingness to act. But we also don’t want people who are too alike. We want a diversity of viewpoints, temperaments, backgrounds, skills, professions—as great a diversity as possible—and yet, with some core something in common. What is that something?

Play with life

I spend a lot of time thinking about how we might live differently (better) than we do. What this usually means is trying to imagine some other arrangement of property, production, education, etc. that would be stabler, happier, more sustainable than the one we live in. I know perfectly well that it’s hopeless and really misguided to try to dream up a way of living, that forms of life must evolve gradually and ad hoc through the working out of practical problems by living people. But I also know that the way we’re living now is bad and getting worse, and we seem to be trapped in it: it keeps evolving but always in the direction of more dehumanization, mechanization, alienation, waste, destruction, hysteria. It seems clear that, without some radically new idea, things will keep going the same way. So I keep dreaming and scheming, even though I know that’s the wrong way—because what’s the right way? 

 

We see this same dilemma in the debate between the radical and the reformer: the radical (nowadays—I don’t pretend to speak for the past) sees that things have gone terribly and irrevocably wrong, that all the best efforts of reformers can hardly slow, certainly never stop, a relentless march towards dystopia. The reformer knows that there’s no such thing as tearing down and starting from scratch, that this is not merely impossible but really meaningless, and that attempts to do it produce nightmares if they don’t just fizzle. They’re both right.

 

This dialectic longs for a synthesis.

 

Graeber and Wengrow’s book on the history and possibilities of human society, The Dawn of Everything, contains many oversights, hasty conclusions, and suspiciously loose argumentation, but it is full of good ideas, of salutary thoughts, of things that feel like they must be true, and if they’re not, well, they ought to be.

 

One of the central claims of the book is that we typically imagine “primitive” humans (hunter-gatherers, say) as living in fixed, static social and cultural conditions, conditions that are “natural” to homo sapiens, are not chosen or theorized by their inhabitants, and which differ from place to place mainly just because of differences in available resources, weather, terrain, etc.; and that this image is wrong. According to Graeber and Wengrow, prior to the development of the kinds of political structures we’re familiar with (kingdoms, empires, bureaucratic states, etc.) people had great freedom to choose their social and political conditions and exercised this freedom with plenty of conscious intention.

 

The primary mechanism of political choice was movement: if an individual or a group didn’t like a particular legal system, authority, set of laws—they would just go somewhere else. These societies were generally mobile anyhow, there was usually plenty of unoccupied wilderness, and no authority had a long enough reach to stop anyone from leaving.

 

Even if you didn’t opt out, pre-state societies typically had a lot of social, political, and economic experimentation built into them. Many were highly variable from season to season, with people living in large settlements during one season and in roving foraging bands in another. The social structures, political systems, mores and laws were often radically different in these two environments, with, e.g., a rigid authoritarianism prevailing in one and a highly anti-authoritarian horizontalism prevailing in the other. People moved comfortably back and forth between these, accepting each in its season.

 

Graeber and Wengrow argue that these societies were playing with notions of authority and social structure: putting them on, taking them off, obeying them within their purview and season, openly flaunting them or forgetting about them altogether in other times and places. And they argue that a lot of political structures, economic arrangements, modes of production, settlement, tribal affiliation, etc., developed and persisted for hundreds or thousands of years within these modes of play and experimentation, without becoming fixed and inescapable. If there is something G & W see as “natural” to human societies, it is this flexible, playful relationship to socio-political structures; what is peculiar, what needs explaining, they claim, is how we got “stuck” in one particular arrangement.

 

Whether or not the anthropological claim here is true (and, from what I’ve read, this is not one of the claims under attack by critics), it suggests a useful way of thinking about projects for social and political change in the contemporary world. If we are trying to live differently (start a commune, a collective, a school, etc.) we should think not of building one thing to last into the future, carefully crafted and ideal, but of trying out an arrangement, of playing with social relations, child rearing, pedagogy, organizational structure, values, obligations, etc. We should think of whatever we’re undertaking as the first of many experiments, as the beginning of a way of life based more on experiment and less on accepting (feeling trapped in, at the mercy of) fixed and dysfunctional forms and institutions.

 

There is no question of fighting against or destroying worn out forms and broken institutions; we will simply pass beyond them and render them irrelevant. 

 

But how do we acquire the power to do this?

The first question

Where do I find these parents, who will risk their children’s futures on my school?

 

This is the first question facing any project of building community or alternative institutions: where do you find the people? Many schemes are never begun for lack of an answer to it; and of those that are begun, most fail for lack of a good enough answer.

 

I do not mean to answer it now. At the moment, I only want to point out that there is no question whether the people are out there. There are plenty of parents who would like to abandon the anxieties and obsessions of mainstream education, just as there are plenty of people who want to build communities, plenty who are fed up with mainstream culture, plenty who believe our institutions are broken and want better ones, plenty who long to step off the path into the wilderness. 

 

The people are there but there is a problem finding them and convincing them that here at last is something real, something worth trying. And why shouldn’t they be skeptical, amid this perpetual clamor of false promises? Anyone who is not wary is not to be trusted: they lack critical faculties.

But before I can pursue this problem any further, I need to frame the issue in a more general way. The school is a real example (in that I do really want to start a school) but it is still only an example. What exactly is it an example of?

Overcoming Mistrust

A group of people may at any time choose to enter into agreements, agreements that are not legally enforceable, whose basis is trust.

Take the example with which I began: say I’m a teacher with particular ideas about education, and I want to start a school. I don’t want to start a big, highly funded, world-class school for rich kids. I want to start a little, odd-ball school for kids whose parents share my values and like my ideas. (All this is in fact true.)

 

As we've seen, there are major legal barriers to this—but if the parents were prepared to trust me, and I them, it could be possible. The kids could be officially homeschooled, so that the school would, legally, be only a learning center, which means a lot less regulation. If it was small enough, it could be run out of someone’s home—mine or one of the students. If it got larger, we’d have to rent a space. But if I trusted the parents—trusted them not to sue me—maybe I could do without all the insurance.

 

- Trusted them not to sue you? You’d be a fool to do that.

- I think what you’re calling a fool is just what I want to be. And if, god forbid, a kid gets injured or killed, and their parents break their word and sue me, and if it ruins me, then let me be ruined. Ruin is something we need to be less afraid of if we want to begin to trust, if we want to live differently. A precondition of trust will be a different way of looking at misfortune. Ruin—especially financial ruin—is a holy state. I can’t choose it, but if it chooses me, I’ll try to learn to be glad of it. When Jesus tells the rich young man, “Give away all your possessions and follow me,” he is not recommending charity but poverty itself; and the man goes away sadly not because he lacks the will to help others but because he had great possessions and cannot bear to give them all away. Everything I think I own is a burden and a lie: nothing is mine for keeps, and when I know that I’ll walk lightly over the earth.

- It’s easy to talk about the holiness of poverty when (a) you don’t have any dependents and (b) you have family and friends who can bail you out in an emergency. 

- True. But we all should have people to fall back on in a crisis. This is part of what it means to be in community with others. Imagine you were sending your kids to a wonderful weird little school, and then one of the students got injured in an accident, and a parent sued, and the school was in danger of going under—wouldn’t you do what you could to keep the place and the people who ran it afloat?

 

But it’s stupid—or it’s wrong, it’s nonsensical—to trust someone to keep a promise they never made, so the parents would have to take a kind of oath not to sue in the case of an unforeseeable accident. But doesn’t that sound like a weird thing to ask people: give me your children, let me educate them off the grid, and promise not to sue me if something goes wrong. Who would agree to that? Well, only another fool: the kind of fool who knows that a pile of money will not heal their child nor bring her back from the dead, that it will only profane, degrade and mock their grief. These parents must be fools anyhow to risks their children’s futures, their college prospects, on a weird little home-school run by a nut like me.

 

So, I must find a group of parents as foolish as I, and as affirmed in their folly, as determined to persist in it, to see it through. 

 

But where do I find these parents? That is the question.

Mistrust (part 2)

Maybe mistrust is the wrong word: after all, the question is not really whether we trust but what we put our trust in: individuals and relationships or a vast impersonal apparatus that regulates and coordinates.

But, then again, we do not so much trust in the latter as rely on it—an unhealthy reliance, an over-dependence. The suspicion of governments and corporations that has become so glaring since the late ‘60s, which shows itself in the most wild conspiracy theories and in the most sober cynicism about the motives of our leaders, is in part an expression of our feeling that we are letting these institutions do too much for us. We are letting them—asking them to—do what communities of human beings ought to do for and among themselves: uphold and adjudicate norms of behavior, decide who is responsible to whom for what, tell us what is safe and what is not, look after the poor and the sick and the destitute—even tell us what is real and what is not.

 

But for all our mistrust of our institutions, for all our awareness that they are bad substitutes for a social fabric and culture, we are afraid to do without them, afraid to rely on individuals, on relationships, on judgment—afraid to go on trust.

 

We do not know who will betray us or when. We misjudge people. We sour relationships. And the worst of it is, when things do go sour, there is injury on both sides, so that we are judged and reviled by the very person who we think has done us wrong. 

 

Whereas the state is consistent: we know it will be infuriating, stupid, robotic, but we know that it will act according to its rules; it will do to each of us what it does to everyone in our position; it will not be resentful or vindictive, only impossible, byzantine, unjust but systematically unjust. We will not wonder if we have acted badly; there will be no misunderstanding to straighten out; it is not a person. Its cruelty is mindless.

 

I can be angry at the government or at a business, but I cannot argue with it. I will speak to various agents and customer service representatives, and they will be helpful or unhelpful, understanding, rude, competent, stupid. But I know that they are not the institution they represent. My anger or gratitude towards the agent is only for the agent. And the more I observe this, the more I think that perhaps it is meaningless to be angry at the institution itself. What is the institution? I almost want to say that I am angry at fate, which has trapped me in this hall of mirrors, this endless labyrinth of phone-calls and websites and mysterious charges and denials of service and threats and promises. I am angry at the world that has produced this institution, angry at my impotence in the face of it and my dependence upon it—but not at it. It is not there to be angry at. It does not exist in that sense.

 

Reliance differs from trust in that it entails no risk, or none that I must worry about: if the institutions I rely on fail, then I will come to harm, but so will everyone around me; there will be no losers and no winners, only a general chaos; and anyhow the collapse of institutions is something I cannot really quite imagine, even if I know it’s possible. But if I trust another human being, I may be betrayed, humiliated, made a sucker and a fool, either in small ways that they will never acknowledge or in large ones that they flee from; and on the other hand, I may become someone else’s villain, probably without even meaning to, through misunderstanding, carelessness, cowardice. In fact, if I trust another human being, some of these things are more or less bound to happen.

 

Trust implicates me: my character, my dignity, my judgment. Reliance does not.

 

But if, knowing all this and longing to become human, I wish to choose trust over reliance, I discover that there is no longer any way to do this. We have lost the social fabric, the systems of personal obligation on which that form of life depends. 

They are lost because we unmade them. They existed once because we made them. The guiding principle behind these crumbs is that it is in our power to make them again; and if we have not begun to remake them, it is because we lack the courage, or lack the desire, or lack the imagination.

Mistrust

Hardly anything in our culture is so glaring as mistrust.

Out of mistrust comes all the vast apparatus of contract, lawsuit, insurance, and safety regulation. It is through this apparatus that all that was free and creative has gone out of capitalism—that capitalism has become an anti-human force.

 

Imagine it’s 1800 (or 1700 or 1900, really anytime from the Renaissance to about a hundred years go).

 

Say I’m a teacher with radical ideas about education and I want to start a school. I rent a cheap room, find a few students, and begin giving classes. Between my own modest living expenses, books, paper, art supplies, and rent on the space, maybe I spend $3,000/month (in 2022 dollars). I need maybe $10,000 in savings to start my school. If my ideas are good, my students thrive, the school grows. If not, they go somewhere else. Maybe my school lasts a few years or a few decades. A few students have had an interesting education. Maybe they’ve been inspired, nurtured, given moral strength.

 

This story is legally impossible now. There’d be all kinds of licenses and insurance, mountains of paperwork and fees. My “cheap room” will have to be correctly zoned, inspected, certified. This will require lots of capital. To cover costs, I'll have to attract a large number of students and charge lots of money. This means plenty of marketing, a much bigger and more attractive space, a faculty with impressive credentials, an admissions officer, a college counselor, and so on. Instead of $10,000 to start my school, it will take ten million. Instead of focusing on planning and running the school, I’ll have to spend my time courting donors or investors. It cannot be the odd-ball endeavor I had imagined. It must be up to all the latest trends and standards. It will be a thoroughly ordinary sort of school.

 

But even if my little shoestring-budget school were legally possible, what parent would trust me to educate their child by odd-ball methods in a private room? They’d think: “What if she doesn’t get into a good college? Am I going to gamble my child’s future on this weird little school?”

 

It’s the same in every industry. Permits, inspections, licenses, and insurance inflate every undertaking. So nothing can be small, personal, informal, homemade, weird. Just to be legal, it all has to be big, polished, regulated, normalized, and therefore capitalized, branded, marketed. A couple months ago, a student club in the school where I teach wanted to hold a bake-sale. They were told that they must not sell any food cooked at home; they had to buy the baked goods from a supermarket and sell them at a markup. 

 

From this we get the peculiar character of American capitalism, where everything is big business, and everything tends towards a norm of polished blandness. But there is no reason why this is what “free market” has to mean.

 

On the streets of many cities in the so-called “third world” (where “first,” “second,” “third,” refer to the order in which the devil takes possession) you see a very different kind of free enterprise: bustling market places, people peddling wares and services of every kind on street corners and down alleyways—food, clothing, shaves and haircuts, dentistry, mechanics: a vast, unregulated economy of tiny businesses run on personal relations and practical knowledge learned on the job (not in classrooms, not paid for with tuition dollars, but learned while earning money).

 

To have an economy, an urbanism like that, you need trust. But we are afraid: that our child will get injured, that our food will be contaminated, that our barber will not sterilize his implements. These concerns are real: children do get injured (and mistreated, and exposed to toxins); people get sick from bad food; barbers fail to clean razors; doctors practice bad medicine. Regulating these industries probably makes errors less frequent—but of course, they still happen and always will happen.

 

The question is how much in the way of freedom, of energy and activity, of immediacy and practical inventiveness and thrift we are willing to sacrifice to protect ourselves (but never completely) against injury, sickness, and malpractice. 

 

There are two ways to “ensure” yourself against the negligence, dishonesty, and incompetence of others: regulation or trust. It seems to me this choice is all about scale: it is harder to regulate many small businesses than a few large ones, and it is harder for small businesses to meet regulatory standards. On the other hand, the smaller a business is, the more its customers are personally acquainted with ownership and staff and the more the business is accountable to individual customers, so the more basis there is for trust. So a regulation-based economy favors big corporations and a trust-based economy favors little mom & pop shops.

 

But the thing about mistrust is, once it begins, it takes over. It becomes the only available mode.

New Life

Again:

We are all frantic, but frantic about different things. We feed off our differences and forget that we’re all in the same mess. We learn to speak so as to affirm our allegiances and our enmities, to prevent any crossing of lines. But in separating ourselves from “them” we corrupt our own ideas. All our truths become half-truths. Their clarity shows their partiality: nothing whole was ever so clear.

 

When we escape from this, we will discover new ways to think and speak and live, but we will be unable to live them alone. We will need others who wish to see and think in the same way—not see and think the same things, but see and think by the same method: free themselves from the same traps.

 

When this happens, when people who wish to forget what they think they know and begin to think and live in earnest find each other and come into community, many old and degraded things will take on new life. Their new life will not be like their old life. We cannot imagine it in advance. It will come upon us in the course of things.

Go back, catch hold again

I’ve lost the thread. I don’t know where I am. I hardly know what I am. Let me go back, try to catch hold again. I'll end up repeating things I've already said, and probably in a more confused and feverish tone than before-- but there's no way around it.

Almost everyone now feels what some of us have felt for a long time: that the world has taken a bad turn, that everything is falling apart, but they have many conflicting ideas about what exactly is wrong. It breaks down along political lines: this camp is fixated on this set of issues, that one on that set. And since the other camps are all “enemies,” whatever they’re worried about must be only hysteria, or else a smoke-screen for nasty ideas.

 

And everyone feels helpless: no one can think how to begin to fix things, so everyone continues to participate in a way of life that they know is terrible and getting worse.

 

A woman says to me, “White people would have to sacrifice a lot to give up their privilege.” I say, “But how do you give it up? If you were prepared to make any sacrifice, what would you do?” She says she was talking on a large scale not about individual action. “But even if you had ten thousand white people who wanted to give up their privilege, what could they do? What step could they take?” She smiles. She says she doesn't know.

 

Everyone is full of criticism. No one knows anything about solutions. We do not know where on earth they are found, or if they exist at all. They are mythical beasts. 

 

When I try to write fiction, I begin with the ordinary world, everyday reality: this is the soil of all dreams—and then an impulse always takes hold of me, like a kind of demon, to put in some magical element. Only later do I realize that the magic has ruined the story. Magic was never what I wanted to write about, I wanted to write about reality. And then, with the next story, it happens again. Why? What is this magic I’m drawn to, like a moth to a flame? It is hope. It is possibility. It is the idea that the world could contain what I do not know, what does not seem possible. 

 

Our so-called knowledge paralyzes us. We would be better off if we knew much less—or, better still, nothing at all. 

 

I do not know if it is through pride or morbid fantasy that we imagine that we know so much so definitely: whether we are comforting ourselves or torturing ourselves. In fact, we know only a little corner of reality, and the more we refine it, the littler it is. 

 

This is why the conservatives are right when they say not to trust the experts—wrong, perhaps, in every particular case, but right in general. For example, maybe the experts know best how to preserve lives, but they have forgotten what a life is or why or when or at what cost it should be preserved.

 

We must forget in order to remember. We must free ourselves from knowledge so we can begin to think.

Wiser, if not more sagacious (26)

I posted all that on Friday, and I do not at all retract it, but on Saturday I read something in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance that seemed to have been placed there for me, to remind me of the other way of thinking. Blithedale is a novel inspired by Hawthorne’s experience at Brook Farm, the Transcendentalist utopian commune that he helped found in 1841 and which lasted all of six years. I’m reading it for the reason I read most things: because Tanya said I should. She picked it out—she even ordered me a copy—because she’s been reading these crumbs.

The novel opens with the narrator leaving Boston for Blithedale, the fictive stand-in for Brook Farm, “in quest of a better life.”

 

A better life! Possibly, it would hardly look so, now; it is enough if it looked so, then. The greatest obstacle to being heroic, is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt—and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

   Yet, after all, let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious, to follow out one’s day dream to its natural consummation, although, if the vision have been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure. And what of that! Its airiest fragments, impalpable as they may be, will possess a value that lurks not in the most ponderous realities of any practicable scheme. They are not the rubbish of the mind. Whatever else I may repent of, therefore, let it be reckoned neither among my sins nor follies, that I once had faith and force enough to form generous hopes of the world’s destiny—yes!—and to do what in me lay for their accomplishment; even to the extent of quitting a warm fireside, flinging away a freshly lighted cigar, and travelling far beyond the strike of city-clocks, through a drifting snow-storm.

 

This is all true. I do not for a moment regret the four months I spent working on Occupy Wall Street, though I consider that a failed project. Yes, it had its political impact, but it failed on its own terms, failed in terms of the dreams and visions that drove the people who worked on it—failed absurdly, enormously, embarrassingly. When I bring up Occupy nowadays, if people have anything to say about it at all, it’s usually that we did it all wrong, that we should have had a vision, a strategy, a clear set of demands—but they don’t know what they’re talking about. It was much worse than they think—and much better too: much more wild a dream, much worse a reality. And I say that, of course, with a kind of pride.

 

It would be Hawthorne who reminded me of this, that great defender of failures, outcasts, sinners, lost causes. For a long time now, I have felt myself aligned with failure. I mistrust success—maybe it was admirable in the past, but nowadays it always comes with an ugly habit of self-promotion, an unwarranted self-confidence, an excited attachment to the latest trends. I mistrust the hip, the cool, the trendy. I love those who don’t know what to do with themselves in this world, who have brains and talent but can’t seem to put them to use, who would rather lose with their intellect and moral sense intact than win on the world’s terms.

 

But there is no contradiction between this and what I wrote on Friday. They are two sides of the same coin. To think practically about one’s dreams is exactly to risk failure. What remains perfect and abstract can never fail. It is only in the real attempt, in the encounter with reality, that we can meet with failure. When we fail, we know we’ve tried something.

 

To the questions in my last crumb (How can we be both radical and pragmatic? How can we radically reject and at the same time meticulously salvage?) the only possible answer begins with actually trying to make something.

The radical and the pragmatic (25)

But doesn’t the preceding thought lead straight to centrism? Isn’t the center the realm of pragmatic compromise, of detailed understanding of the actual workings of government and economy, of dealing with the world as it is? And isn’t this whole trail of crumbs precisely radical, theoretical, idealistic?

I would like to get out of this easily, by saying that the center is controlled by special interests and bad philosophy, a degraded and reductive materialism, that it does not serve anyone’s interests except for those of the economic ruling class. All this is true, but it does not quite resolve the contradiction, because, for one thing, actual practical governance always does involve power, moral compromise, interested parties. It is, by definition, not ideal—and this is precisely its virtue.

 

In fact I think I am face-to-face here with a very deep problem. The situation we are actually in is bad. Incremental change is no change at all. Things keep getting worse, and all the best efforts of activists and nonprofits hardly slow it down, much less turn it back—half the time they seem to be contributing to the problem. Everyone knows it’s getting worse, left and right, liberal and conservative, but their stories about how and why grow ever more one-sided, divisive, hysterical, hateful. Meanwhile, those who present themselves as, and in some sense are, dealers in practical realities, in the compromises and needs of the real everyday world, are the ones who are leading us (confidently, proudly) further and further, faster and faster, into disaster. So we want to live differently, yes really differently—but this must mean to imagine a new mode of life, to reject reality in favor of theory, fantasy, abstraction. And we know how dangerous and flimsy that is.

 

So how can we marry these insights? How can we radically reject a great mess of corrupted, confused ideas, destructive habits, etc. and at the same time meticulously salvage and conserve so much that is necessary and valuable, that has the solidity, detail, and texture that can come only from long usage over generations? To ask the question in a different way: how are we to make sense of our horror of our past and our love for it? 

(I have a friend who believes that nostalgia is a disease of our generation, a neurosis instilled in us by our culture. But I think nostalgia is our way of registering everything that has been and is being lost. That loss is so great we can’t really face it and take it only in little diluted doses, as a particular nostalgia for this or that time. Once, driving back from a wedding in Vermont, we passed a highway with a sign for Boston, and I suddenly thought how it might have been two hundred years ago, passing an unmarked highway winding off through woods and fields, not knowing for certain where it led, and having days to travel to reach Boston, and I thought how big and unknown the world was then, even the little corner of it in which one lived, and how good it would have been to live in a world that big, how humbling, how invigorating, and deep down how comforting. What is misleading in our nostalgia is only the narrowness of its scope.)

Doing versus imagining (24)

You can’t answer these questions (the one about economics and production or the one about culture and conformity) in advance. You’d have to work them out on the ground, in an actual town, or in a group of people that is in the process of forming a town. What does it mean to be “in the process of forming a town”? What does that look like? That also is something that needs to get worked out.

That we cannot answer these questions in advance is not a problem but a virtue. This working things out as we go is just the sort of work we need to be doing.

 

A few years ago, a friend of mine made an interesting observation about the current political situation. He had been reading about the French Revolution and in particular about The Terror. For those who don’t remember high-school history class (I didn't before this conversation), The Terror was a period in which the newly formed Republican government carried out thousands of executions and massacres of prisoners. The targets of these executions were not only nobility and royalty but former members of the Republican government itself who were found to be not radical enough, not revolutionary enough. The question as to why this happened, what factors produced such a bloody process of ideological purification, was one of the major historical preoccupations of the 19^th century. In his book on the revolution, de Tocqueville sets out to answer this question. His answer goes like this:

 

Under feudalism, governing power had been widely distributed across a large class of local lords and their ministers. But as France moved towards an absolute monarchy, power became more and more centralized, until, under Louis XIV, the state was run almost entirely by a small cadre of loyal bureaucrats of common birth who could be easily replaced if they didn’t do what the king wanted. The result was that the educated classes were no longer involved in governing. Cut off from the messy, pragmatic details of actual governance, with all their compromises and negotiations, their thinking became increasingly theoretical, idealistic, and extreme—or so de Tocqueville argues. So when the revolution came, they were all already, on an intellectual level, fanatics.

 

My friend’s point was, this is exactly what’s happening in America (and maybe all over the world) today. With almost no political agency, a strong sense that something’s wrong but no access to the real levers of power, insulated from opposing views, our political ideas are becoming increasingly ideologically pure and intolerant of disagreement. We view opposing positions are analyzed as fundamentally corrupt or diseased—the result of racism, greed, hysteria, cowardice, sexual repression, cruelty. I’m thinking not just of left vs. right (terms whose meaning is quickly breaking down anyhow) but of almost every one of the various camps that have emerged in the space where the old left and right once existed: the “identitarian” left, the “Bernie bros,” the old-style liberals, the neo-cons, the alt-right, etc. 

 

When, on rare occasions, I peek with squinted eyes inside a newspaper, or against my better judgment read an op-ed someone has sent me, and even more when I scroll down to the comments section, what I find are people shouting from one position or another, and their tone (sometimes shrill, sometimes sneering, sometimes “let’s cut all the BS”) is always the tone of people who can do nothing but shout (or at least speak), who make no compromises because there is nothing to compromise on, because they are not at work on something concrete, because their “participation” in governance consists only in expressing opinions. And this is not their fault.

It would feel like a cult (23)

It would be claustrophobic. It would feel like a cult.

 

This is also a fundamental concern, and it was to ward off this feeling that I included the train station and the trips to the metropolis, that I insisted the town not be insular and cut off from the world around it. We’re on the electrical grid. We have a movie theater. We buy books from Penguin-Random House. And we’re subject to the law of whatever land we’re in.

 

But we are, after all, an intentional community with an unusual way of life. And this introduces problems of two kinds.

 

First there are the classic problems of small-town life: one does not have the (for some, at least) soothing anonymity of the city. One cannot go out on the street without meeting people one knows. One cannot keep one’s doings entirely to oneself. And there are social pressures and conformities that come with this.

 

Of course there are social pressures and conformities in urban life too, driven by advertising, mass media, mass culture. But these operate differently. We are, or seem to be, free to choose or reject them. (Indeed, subcultures of people who rail against and flout these conformities are an essential part of modern urban life—and maybe this is a clue: either to how to make conformity tolerable or else to the falseness of these resistances, I’m not sure which.)

 

The second problem is that of artificiality. A group of any kind—a religion, a town—that grows up “naturally,” “organically” has, in its social relations, its rituals and institutions, a certain solidity and genuineness that it gets from time, habit, tradition. One may find it oppressive, but it does not appear false or ridiculous. But a group that is created intentionally, according to a plan and with specific aims and values in mind, is always at risk of feeling artificial, forced, affected, uncanny, corny, embarrassing, absurd. Those outside it laugh or cringe; those inside, struggling unconsciously to overcome the feeling of falseness, compensate with an overblown and even more embarrassing sincerity.

 

But this conformity and this “newness” and intentionality are not side-effects of having a town—they are direct consequences of the whole project, maybe even the intended effect: we want to live differently, and we want to do so as a group. I don’t know what that could mean except that we want certain norms of conduct that are agreed upon initially but also upheld, which is to say enforced, socially; and that we want them to be not traditional but newly defined.

 

I point this out not in order to suggest that there is not really a problem with claustrophobia, conformity, artificiality, intentionality—but to say that these problems are essential. They are built in, not to the specific idea of a town, but to the basic problem (the degradation, material and spiritual, of our immediate surroundings) and the basic longing (to live differently) with which I began. They are fundamental to the modern world. Their appearance does not indicate that our project is misguided; indeed, it indicates that it is exactly the right kind of project, the kind that will bring us face to face with the right kind of problems.

Facing these problem must mean, in part, deciding just how much freedom we're willing to give up. But it also has to mean figuring out what it is that makes certain social contexts feel so artificial. I want to say, there is something missing from these contexts—maybe a sense of the difficulty and complexity of human life.

What would people do for work? (22)

Two problems strike me right away:

1.     It wouldn’t work on a practical level. What would people do for work? How would they afford to buy goods from outside (like computers or olive oil or mechanical pencils)? Who would do all that farming? Etc.

2.     It would be claustrophobic, it would feel like a cult.

 

I present these not as objections to be resolved but as issues that are fundamental to the desire I have (that I think many of us have) to live differently—and to the more ambitious, more fantastical desire for a better world.

 

What do people do for work? At one level the answer is obvious: Some are teachers, some doctors, some farmers. We need plumbers and electricians, butchers, bakers, carpenters, tailors—maybe, if we take the local production thing far enough, blacksmiths, cobblers, joiners, and so on. But all of these jobs are internal to our town: they are hired by and paid by citizens of our town—which means they don’t bring in money from outside.

 

So presumably there are things like graphic designers and software engineers too, who work remotely or open offices in our town. (This already opens up potential contradictions with ideas we may have about the ethical validity of the larger economy, but let’s accept such compromises, for the time being at least.) But clearly, more labor has to go into food-production than in most places. And more labor has to go into everything else that we want to do on a smaller scale or with less automation: raking leaves, cleaning streets, transporting goods, making tools and fences and so on.

 

This presumably means we’d have to make do with less—less excess, less luxury, fewer amenities—and that makes sense, because less waste should mean less to waste. There is no principle so good, so effective, so honest as necessity. It is admirable not to waste because one is conscientious, but it is much better not to waste because one has nothing to waste, because one needs everything one has. To quote something I quoted long ago in these crumbs: “superfluous goods make life superfluous.”

 

But how much less is too much less? Because, for one thing, I think we are not prepared to do without everything—to never have olive oil again; to make our own fabric, our own paper, our own pens and pencils; to do entirely without microchips. And what if we want to travel outside our town, visit the city, buy a book published elsewhere? Complete isolation is no good. We would like to be a city on a hill perhaps, but not a city in a bubble.

 

Part of the point of thinking of a town is that it forces these questions to arise. If we take this town not necessarily exactly as I’ve described it but as an instantiation of any particular set of ideas about how a city ought to be run, food produced, buildings built, etc., then the questions raised here (how much would we have to do without—and are we prepared to do without that much, in the interests of sustainability, community, non-alienation?) is quite simply the question of whether that set of ideas is viable.

A town (21)

Say there were a town without cars. People walk or ride bicycles. Produce and milk (grown largely on nearby farms) are brought in on ox-drawn carts. The street lamps are few and not too bright, stores turn out their lights at night, and although the town is busy and lively, it is possible on a clear night to see many stars. When it snows, classes are canceled, and young people go out in teams to shovel the streets. There is a general view, promoted by the local schools but shared by most parents, that young people should not carry phones nor spend a lot of time looking at screens; of course, each family interprets this view in their own way. There is a train station nearby, and citizens of the town sometimes travel to a nearby modern metropolis—because they have business there, or just for a day trip. (If you don’t like some of these details, feel free to alter them to your liking. I’m only sketching.)

 

Would you want to go live in this town and raise your children there?

 

I think many of us would say, well, yes.

 

Of course, this town does not exist, and somehow it seems impossible. But why? What exactly is impossible about it?

 

(I am bracketing for the moment the question of how this town came into being. I want to explore how, having been established, it works, or if it works at all, and what its workings tell us about how we want to live.)

A society (20)

Alienation, ugliness, cheapness, materialism, subservience to our own technology, distraction, excessive haste, inattention, hideous cruelties carried out in secret while a finicky daintiness and moral rectitude governs in public, an accumulation of “knowledge” beneath which we can hardly breathe or see—none of these is new.

 

Except for the outdated technological references, Thoreau could almost be writing today when he says, “The nation itself, with all its so called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim… It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour… We do not ride on the railroad; it rides on us” (Walden).

 

Gandhi, sixty years later: “Only evil can travel by railways, because only evil wants to travel fast” (Hind Swaraj).

 

Something is wrong with modernity. It has been wrong all along, but it’s reached a new pitch. No prophet is needed now to warn us: we all feel the disaster upon us.

 

You can’t return to the past. But if forwards is terrible and backwards impossible, then where do we go?

 

*

 

Every project to turn back or remake modernity has devolved into nightmare; every project to respond gently to it with something other than its own logic has sputtered out and vanished. Its logic emerges supreme, unstoppable. I would like to call this the logic of capital, but that’s too easy. It is the logic of prosperity, of more for less—more goods, more entertainment, more information for less labor, less effort, less trouble.

 

The problem is not to defeat this logic, for it is already defeating itself: its promise is ease, comfort, certainty, happiness, whereas we are nervous, angry, confused and filled with despair. Even its basic premises are coming apart: the goods are cheap and ugly and break quickly; the food is unhealthy, the entertainment trashy, the work week keeps getting longer.

 

The problem is, what other principle is there?

 

What can organize human behavior on so large a scale, so powerfully, organically, and simply as the market? Nothing. Nothing. Let us think not of replacing it but of introducing other principles that adhere to different logics, principles strong enough to oppose it, to control it, to keep it from ruining itself. This was, by some accounts, to be the role of the state; the state fails to play this role not, as some believe, because it was hijacked by special interests, but because it never was a force opposed to modernity but a force of modernity. It is governed by the same logic: the logic of improvement, of efficiency, of growth, of material-political-economic power. The modern state, the modern system of private land ownership, the corporation, the principle of oversight and control from the center— all these emerge together, not incidentally but necessarily, outgrowths of the same vision.

 

What follows a fundamentally different logic must be of a fundamentally different kind: not economic, not legalistic, not contractual. It will not come from the state nor from any economic model or business initiative. It will not "succeed" in those terms. It will come, if it comes at all, from individual human beings entering into association with one another, based on agreements that are not enforced by law, but which are nonetheless felt as binding and are enforced by social pressure and by personal honor. So this new association will have exactly the same form (but not the same content) as those old, stiffling, prejudiced codes that we were so eager to shuffle off. It will not free us but constrain us. It will limit our actions, bind us to conduct that will not always be in our material “interests” or in line with our immediate desires. We will enter into these agreements, if we enter into them, because we understand that the constraints are necessary for the kinds of lives we want to live, for the kind of world (however small) that we want to live in.

 

Such an association could reasonably be called a society. (Whereas an arrangement in which people's obligations towards one another are wholly defined by contract and required by law perhaps should not be called that.)

Addendum to genuine encounters (19.5)

It is not only by categorizing someone’s views as irredeemably evil that one can avoid engaging with them. It is equally possible to do so by treating their perspective as transcendentally right. That is, it is possible to stultify a conversation, to nullify the possibility of encounter, not only by insisting that we have nothing to learn from someone but by insisting that they have nothing to learn from us. The first tactic is obvious, the second subtler, but its mechanism is not so mysterious: if a person has nothing to learn from us, then we have no reason to tell them what we think or how we feel, what we have experienced, where our views diverge. We cannot (are spared from having to) defend any position or action.

Maybe we have other even subtler tactics. Maybe all our political awareness has a second hidden function as a kind of innoculation against meeting one another—just as all knowledge of the world can be a barrier to seeing it. So that it is not only encounters across political divisions that we are lacking (and secretly longing for), but also across lines of race, ethnicity, class—indeed across almost any possible divergence of deep experience.

Genuine encounters (19)

Trapped in these two modes of engagement—the smooth politeness of the in-group, in which a set of moral/political judgments are assumed and perpetually reaffirmed (though sometimes half-feigned), and the belligerent moral/political outrage that is perfectly calibrated never to change anyone’s mind, never to risk a meaningful encounter between opposing points of view—our public discourse has become stultifying. If, in our private lives we are not always quite so trapped; if, at times we can float ideas we are unsure of or disagree productively with others, it is nearly always because we are in a group of people whose experiences, whose background, whose world-view are already close to our own.

 

Under these circumstances, a genuine encounter between people who are not alike, in which real differences of opinion and outlook can be explored, generates a lot of energy. This is not only the energy of stimulation and interest; it is also the energy of glimmering hope and relief at the lifting, however slight, of despair, because for a moment the political-cultural stalemates don’t seem quite so stale, the other not quite so other. Such encounters are not impossible to have, but they do require a lot of faith, good will, and readiness to try to understand one another, to search for common ground. Not everyone has these things to spare. Many are too frightened, too desperate, too angry-- but they are so by circumstance, not by nature. For not only do all our news outlets work perpetually to stir up exactly these emotions in their viewers, but the stupid wicked voice that chants out of the computer screen tells us that these are righteous emotions, that anger and outrage are the appropriate response. As if these were not already the warp and woof of our public discourse, like standing in a room full of people trying to shout over each other and telling your friends: we must shout louder, louder!

 

But some do have faith and good will to spare, some are or could be ready to try to understand the people they disagree with. These people must find each other and begin to talk. This is an idea someone suggested to me many years ago, as I was leaving Occupy; I think it’s as right and as good an idea now as it was then. Among its several merits is the fact that it’s perfectly plausible: it really could be made to happen. This is in part a result of another of its merits: if it began to happen, it would be a pleasure to those involved. They would want to keep doing it.