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.

Phases of Life

Does my depiction of young adulthood at the end of the last crumb seem unkind—even bitter? Does my depiction of people with children seem too rosy? They do to me.

 

We always judge most harshly the phase of life that we most recently left behind. We see its illusions and contradictions clearly, for we have lately escaped from them, and we have not had time to forgive ourselves for those follies. Whereas the phase we are now in is always partly a mystery to us. (And maybe this is why we are still in it: could we see it all clearly, its illusions and contradictions, maybe we would transcend them and enter a new phase.)

 

So let me try to take a fairer look at the comparison I made at the end of the last crumb.

 

I accused young adults of an “unconscious self-involvement,” whereas parents, I said, “have bound themselves to and taken responsibility for others; …they have some experience … in putting other people’s immediate desires ahead of their own.” Now parents clearly have done all that—but only for a very select group of people very near to them. And this selfless caring for immediate family, and especially for children, usually entails a diminished regard for the needs of the rest of the world. Often, in fact, parents’ denial of their own desires, the fact they are working not for themselves but for another, becomes justification for a ruthlessly competitive promotion of their children’s interests. So parenthood (and often marriage) can mean both an expansion of one’s interests within the narrow realm of the nuclear family, and also a contraction of those interests away from the wider world. The young adult, by comparison, is more automatically self-interested and at the same time is more concerned for, has more of a feeling of kinship to, the whole world.

 

I do not yet have children, but four years ago when I got married I felt myself shifting into a new phase of life, in which my concerns, my thoughts and my dreams were all differently configured. The Sanskrit term for this phase is grhastha, which is usually translated as householder. The question for us householders will be whether the contraction or the expansion of interests will be the dominant force in us: whether the family becomes really just an extension of the self, so that we are more selfish and greedy than ever, only with a three- or four- or five-headed self, all the hungrier because it is trying to stave off the loneliness of its egoistic seclusion; or whether the care of the family teaches us to care for others, and we learn from the process of these new relationships, so much more inescapable and deep than the relationships of our youth, to see others a little better and to look at ourselves a little less. Either outcome is possible for each of us.

 

For the young adult (or, say, the youth), the question is again which will become the dominant force in her: the capacity (which arises from her free-floating unattachment) for a sense of obligation to the whole world, even and especially towards people and creatures very unlike herself, or the unconscious self-involvement, which is equally an effect of unattachment and freedom. This question is closely connected to another. The young adult (if he has the leisure to enjoy—or shall we say wallow in—his young adulthood and not immediately have strict material needs pressed upon him, and especially if he has that dubious privilege that gives a young person too many options and not enough needs) is plagued by a feeling that his life has no solidity, that he is a kind of wraith floating lonely and rootless in the anonymous crowd of the modern city; he longs for reality, for genuine experience, for recognition, companionship, solidity, for something that does not feel artificial and false. The question is to what will this painful ache and longing lead him: to empty pleasure- and thrill-seeking; or to an ardent but confused rebellion that is half posturing and play-acting and half impossible hopes; or to participation in a communal life that can channel his abundant energy towards meaningful ends?

 

 

The way in which all these questions arise, and the conditions of their answers, have to do with the isolation of these age-groups within themselves—i.e. age segregation. It is a peculiarity of our culture that people socialize largely with people around their own age. And the relations they have with people in other phases of life (parents, teachers, bosses, etc.) are structured so as to discourage them from taking these older people into their confidence or trusting them to offer a useful perspective on their own condition. Younger people feel sure that older ones have nothing to teach them, and older people often confirm this by speaking in a manner that wards off confidences and shows a lack of sympathy with the conditions of the younger person’s life. (In fact, wasn’t this just how I was speaking at the end of the last crumb?) 

 

Given that phases of life have characteristic challenges (exploring sexuality, finding a job, navigating romantic relationships, raising children, etc.), it seems on the surface silly that people should be unable to make any use of the experiences of those who have already been through the challenges they’re now in. This odd situation depends on the idea (part myth, part reality) that the world is changing so rapidly that sexuality and work and courtship and child-rearing are all completely different now from what they were half a generation ago. It depends on other ideas as well, and these ideas are in turn generated and encouraged by the structure of our social relations, especially by the segregation of age groups. The ideas enforce the structure and the structure encourages the ideas.

 

I do not profess to understand the whole system of causes and effects, but I will mention one other that seems to me important. What I called the “characteristic challenges” of each phase of life are things about which we are very vulnerable and guarded. This is not only because many of them are on explicitly intimate topics (sexuality, romance) but also because the very fact that they are central challenges of the age we’re in means that our pride and sense of self are wrapped up in them. So an encounter where the younger person is able to speak openly about such topics and listen to advice about them will necessarily be an intimate one—and intimacy across age groups is something that our culture is deeply suspicious of. (In a strange way, this is even the case between parents and children. Think of the conflicts that arise when parents try to give their adult children advice about childrearing. Or picture parents trying to give their kid some perspective on middle-school social relations; note how irrelevant the parent’s advice seems to the kid; and yet, think how much the parent actually does know about what the kid’s going through. In this second case, we may feel that the distance is necessary, that parents just are not the right people to give guidance on this issue; but this only highlights the need for other kinds of relationships across age groups.)

 

There are many bad effects of this segregation of age groups. It leaves young people turning to peers for information about things none of them understands (picture middle-school boys giving each other advice about hooking up with girls). It dissolves tradition and custom. It creates a strange feeling of disconnection from the past, of existing in a frightening immediate present, like a precipice overlooking the abyss of the future. And, of course, it deprives people of perspective on the challenges they’re in and practical wisdom on how to navigate them. 

 

What “perspective on the challenges they’re in” means is not only the active statements of older people who have gone through those challenges and can see them from without but also (what would probably be the much more effective medicine) direct observation and participation in the work and difficulties of later phases of life, in which the challenges that loom so large in this our current phase have been left behind and shown themselves as partly illusory. Thus, for example, the parent of school-aged children, coming into close contact with the lives of older people whose children are already in their mid or late 20s, might observe that who did the best in school and who went to the best college are not of such immense and final importance. But lacking this close observation, they imagine these questions as immense; they are consumed by them. 

 

So a group or network of groups experimenting with forms of life must expand beyond whatever age group it begins with. If it begins with a group of parents in their 30s and early 40s, it must find ways to make itself useful to people both older and younger, to undertake experiments they can participate in or foment them to undertake experiments of their own. I have already suggested some ways in which this might happen.

Formality & Informality

I was planning to write more about the kinds of experiments these groups could undertake, the kinds of functions they could serve, but I find myself thinking instead about the difficulties they would encounter and the pitfalls they must avoid. I see no reason why I should “remain on topic”; it will be better if I follow where these thoughts lead me. It may seem at first that the considerations below are excessively speculative—that I am thinking in too much detail and much too far in advance about the dynamics of a group that does not and may never exist. But I think it worthwhile, maybe even necessary, to consider these issues in advance. The fact is that any level-headed, worldly person, imagining the sort of project I’m describing, will have some ideas of the ways in which it would be likely to go awry.

 

Maybe the most fundamental challenge is the balance between formality and informality: to what extent the group understands itself as an official entity and operates by formal procedures and to what extent it sees itself and functions as an ad hoc association of individuals. A group intentionally gathered to pursue particular ends cannot avoid at least an element of formal self-recognition. But an excess of formality is deadly, and the group will need to carefully resist moving too far in this direction. We do not want to become institutional and legalistic. These are qualities we’re trying to escape from.

 

Thus, there should be no strict boundary to these groups. There will be a core of people who meets regularly but around that a large penumbra of others who come to gatherings often, sometimes, occasionally, rarely—perhaps even some who never come but are curious and keep tabs from afar. There should be no official membership and as many ways to be associated with the group as there are people interested in it.

 

But if such groups exist in multiple places, they ought to be in touch with each other, and this suggests a certain formal self-definition. If someone comes into a new town, there should be an easy way to find and get in contact with the group in that town. But maybe this can be done entirely through word of mouth. 

 

Some things may need to be formalized, though. If a few parents are looking after all the kids each afternoon, we will probably need a schedule of how these duties rotate, so that they don’t fall more heavily on some parents than on others, and so that people can plan in advance. Whoever’s looking after the kids on a given afternoon is going to have to serve snacks, so if a kid has food allergies or other dietary restrictions, everyone will need to know that, and it’ll be easier to have all that information collected in one place.

 

But food is also a good example of where things can easily get too rigid and formal if we don’t explicitly guard against it. Parents will inevitably have some differing ideas about nutrition, sugar intake, conventional vs. organic produce, and so on. There should be and no doubt will be conversations about these issues among parents. But I think we should stop well short of making any formal policy about it. Even the idea of an official “meeting” on the topic makes me nervous. Official meetings are dangerous. But they have an opposing danger: that people will talk in small cliques, complaining about others without ever talking to them.

The Discussion Fetish

 

Here then are twin evils, each in its way quite deadly: (1) A petty factionalism in which enmity flourishes like mold in the darkness of private discussions, never exposed to the sunlight of a real encounter between opposing views. (2) A swamp of “group meetings”—tedious, conflictual, and interminable.

 

Groups formed around alternative ideas of how to live often come to fetishize their own processes. I’ve seen this in communal houses, where “communicating” about feelings can turn into an obsessive exploration of tiny grievances that does nothing but multiply and enlarge these grievances. I’ve seen it in Occupy Wall Street, where the technical procedures by which meetings were conducted and decisions made became themselves matters of perpetual conflict and discussion. In these contexts, the act of talking—about what to do and how to do it and what we believe and what we feel and who has acted badly and so on—becomes a fixation that overwhelms all other purposes.

 

Ironically, I think one of the major causes of this fixation on group discussions is the very desire to get things done, to fix problems, to make things as they ought to be. Everyone has their own notion of how things ought to be, their own pet issues and peeves. In their anxiety to get everything right, to solve every problem, they become lost in bitter and eternal debate.

 

This is partly a cultural problem. Ours is a culture of relentless self-interest, and even (maybe especially) people who have set out explicitly to reject that culture as an economic and political paradigm end up reproducing it in their personal conduct and private thoughts: obsessing over their private grievances, seeing vividly their own virtues and their own labor, blind to others’ virtues and labor. Our system for mediating disputes (courts of law) and our political process are based on competition and function by designating a winner; and though we may consciously reject all this, it is deeply lodged in our thinking.

 

There is no way to suddenly exorcise these habits, but it will help to be aware of the problem from the outset and to try to guard against it. We must keep reminding ourselves of the trick of perspective: that whatever is close to us looms large, whatever is far away appears small. We must sooth ourselves with the thought that everyone is trying and no one is perfect. We must, if they have not been spoiled for us by bad religion, remember the words of The Sermon on the Mount: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” In a different mood, we must remember that the world is full of endless variety, and if we seek perfection in an exacting code of right conduct, we will find ourselves alone in a passageway so narrow and dim that no one else can join us there. So, a certain parent is always giving the kids sugary snacks. Well, they’re young, the sugar won’t kill them, and the variety of experience will do them good.

 

It is also partly a conceptual problem: if we see ourselves as trying to do things perfectly, to get them exactly right now, then we’re compelled to argue every point to death. If we see ourselves as trying out a series of experiments, as agreeing only on a preliminary plan for now, to be revised and re-revised, then it is easier for the discussion to stop. 

Finally, it is partly a demographic problem: most projects to build a new form of life (communal houses, anarchist collectives, social movements) are filled with people who are not tied down—either because they are still very young or because they are for some other reason unattached and footloose. This is why they are able and willing to take on these projects, but it also means that they are often still in that phase of life characterized by unconscious self-involvement at the personal level and abstracted idealism as the public level. Such people are not ideally suited to compromise and acceptance of differing opinions.

 

A group of parents is at a very different phase of life. They have bound themselves to and taken responsibility for others; they have already willingly embraced conditions that strictly limit their perfect freedom; they have some experience in making practical compromises where there is no perfect choice and in putting other people’s immediate desires ahead of their own. Such a group will naturally be better at navigating the variety of opinion and the practical negotiations that are inevitable in a group of people who are trying to work together on matters that are of great personal importance to everyone involved.

 

What is unusual, of course, is that parents or any group of people familiar with all of the pressures and imperfections of adult life, would enter into a project like this one. But this is possible now in a way that it has not been in the past. This is the opportunity of desperate times: even those who are materially and spiritually invested in ordinary social and economic life begin to feel that that life can no longer sustain them.

Development of functions in a self-determining group

Parent groups make a good starting point for group formation. Raising kids is a consuming projecting for those who undertake it, and parents typically make new friends and acquaintances through parenting, so it’s not hard to imagine groups of strangers connecting and deciding to meet in person just on the basis of shared parenting ideas. But once groups begin to form on that basis, there are many other functions they can serve.

 

Some of these are the basic functions of any traditional community: sharing labor (child-care, cooking, etc.), bringing people together, helping out in a crisis. It is interesting to consider in some detail how these basic community functions would grow out of parent groups.

 

I also see the parent groups as a starting point for other experiments in response to particular aspects of the modern condition. I’ll consider those in a later crumb.

 

Labor Sharing

 

Once families are regularly spending time together, it becomes easy to, say, have a few parents look after a larger group of kids each afternoon, keeping each other company while giving other parents the afternoon off. Since there’s already a lot of agreement about child-rearing philosophy, the parents would be more likely to trust each other (than, say, a babysitter) to make decisions they’d approve of. This might even extend to dinner, with one family providing food each day. (With enough families, your turn would only come very couple weeks—and preparing one giant meal is less work than preparing many small ones.)

 

This would in turn lead to another good: as in a traditional village, kids would not always be under their own mom and dad’s authority when not in school. They’d get used to different parents, with their varying personalities and styles, freeing them from the loneliness and claustrophobia of the nuclear family. Without their parents around to cater to their individual demands, maybe they’d get used to eating what was put in front of them and overcome the immense pickiness about food that is characteristic of American children.

 

Now most people with kids develop circles of friends with kids around the same age, who could share these kinds of duties, but they usually don’t, except in occasional, ad-hoc ways, under special circumstances: say, a parent is sick and can’t pick up her kid and the babysitter’s unavailable, so she asks one of the other parents to do it. The sick parent would see herself as asking a favor of the other. She would be apologetic beforehand and thankful after. This shows that this kind of “mutual aid” is seen as out of the ordinary, a deviation from the self-contained nuclear-family organization of mainstream life. To suggest that labor exchanges of this kind become a regular thing (one parent pick up all the kids each day and serve them dinner, say) would feel like something weird, a crossing or blurring of boundaries. People might like the idea but never try it. But for a group that has come together and constituted itself in order to experiment with different values and different ways of living, it would be natural and easy to experiment with labor exchanges.

 

Age Desegregation

 

I believe that age segregation is a huge problem in contemporary child-rearing. There are many subtle effects of age segregation—this could be its own crumb—but the most obvious is that older kids cannot look after and help socialize younger ones, and this is a real loss for both the older and the younger. Schools of course explicitly group kids by age, but these groupings then propagate into other contexts. For example, parents often make friends with parents of other kids in their child’s class, so even parent social groupings end up segregated by children’s age. 

 

But since our intentional parent groups are formed around shared ideas, the kids will tend to be of varying ages, making for the pack-of-kids-of-many-ages that is a standard feature of more traditional cultures and is still often seen in lower-income neighborhoods and other contexts, but is dying out in many places and is almost altogether gone in middle- and upper-class America.

 

Adults Socializing and Courtship

 

If the group “works”—if it becomes a warm environment where people know each other and kids have fun—people without children who share the values of the group will naturally begin to get drawn in. They’ll get invited to a gathering (a dinner, a cook-out) because they’re friends with one of the parents in the group; they’ll like the atmosphere, come to more events, start attending afterschool hangouts, enjoying hospitality and contributing labor of their own. 

 

Because all these people are drawn by shared values (and especially shared ideas about child-rearing), gatherings of the group will be a good place for adults to make friends and for single people to find partners (offline!). But because the gatherings will be regular, it will be possible to meet the same people again and again without having to make dates with them. Under these circumstances, affections can grow more organically and without so much pressure. The presence of children and older people (see below) will make for a sweeter and more integrated social environment, where courtship will feel less like shopping and more like looking for family. And meanwhile friendships can form of a loose but pleasant kind often absent in the modern world, between people who don’t want to get together one on one but like seeing each other. 

 

Extended Families

 

Clearly the intention is for these groups to function a bit like traditional extended families (in some ways—clearly, we don’t want to romanticize or reproduce the old hierarchies) and it seems likely that blood relatives, especially grandparents will tend to get drawn into them. Now, it’s usually recognized that there’s something very healthy about the traditional extended family: multiple generations living together, eating together, etc. A lot of people long for this in the abstract, but they can’t quite imagine living with (or even down the street from) their own parents and siblings. Those relations are too strained. They are strained primarily from the intense pressure of the nuclear family, where the core of life rests on too few relationships. When families gather, old dynamics and old quarrels reemerge. But the bigger the gathering, the less true this is. That’s partly just because a bigger group means less pressure on individual relationships: it’s easier to avoid anyone who’s getting on your nerves. But it’s also because we see one another so differently: old people who are cranky, maddening, selfish, or tyrannical in the eyes of their offspring are often funny, charming, quirky, or full of old-fashioned dignity in the eyes people who didn’t grow up with them. 

 

In gatherings of our parent group, grandparents, aunts, and uncles will often find themselves able to fit in more comfortably than they can in the smaller family gatherings. Adults whose families are not around will be brought into contact with people far from their own age group. And the parents of young kids will be able to give their children time with the grandparents (meeting needs on both sides) without the usual tensions and aggravation. They may even become able to see their parents through their eyes of their friends, helping them to forgive old wrongs and hurts, which will mean in the end forgiving themselves for their faults.

 

*

 

What I hope emerges from all this is how a great many of the social benefits that we think or imagine existed in traditional community life, or in village life, can be got back in the midst of the modern city—not by suddenly enacting some elaborate plan, but by a gradual process of experimentation and evolution, aimed at meeting the everyday needs of real individuals. If the group can be formed, then all this may follow.

 

But my aim here is not to recreate community. My aim is to rediscover a principle of self-determination in modern life, whereby people can begin to make choices about how they live, instead of waiting on and feeling themselves at the mercy of a paralyzed and decaying government and a political process that, without radical rearrangement, can only produce more strife and unhappiness.

 

I describe the creation of (what I take to be) some aspects of traditional community as an instance of how the a self-determining process of group experimentation might work. That the community is formed in this manner (gradually, experimentally, in-process) is essential, because our notions of what traditional community was like are vague: a mixture of distant observation, hearsay, conjecture, and fantasy. Much has perhaps been romanticized, and the ugly parts of that old way of life are often painted out of our mental pictures (or inflated so as to occlude all else, depending on our disposition, or even on our mood). By trying one thing and another, by responding to immediate needs as well as abstract ideals, by watching and adapting, by talking and comparing notes, we may find our way back to some of the old forms or led away from into something quite different. Likely things will not go as I have described them. Perhaps they will go entirely differently. My point is not to predict but to sketch out possibilities, to try to show that many things are possible which now seem out of reach.

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.

 

-

 

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.)

 

-

 

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. 

 

-

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.