I’ve been feeling a bit “blah” today - probably a bit of a comedown from last week’s workshop. As exhausing as that work is, there is something that is also energizing about it. It may be, in part, because I am not “alone” in my work there. It’s not simply that other people are around, but rather that it involves engagement in a community. Last year, I was thinking a great deal about groups, and had come to see them as essentially bad things. Community was a sort of contrast case, but at the time, I thought of this as a sort of ideal where the “badness” of groups was just controlled and the group was able to function optimally.
I think now that I may have been wrong about community - that it is something else entirely than a group, which I understand in an almost functional way (a group comes together for some purpose, and functions in a group toward the furtherance of that purpose as an end). My difficulty with groups comes in connection to the Kantian stream in my ethical thought - because it seems impossible to get together and function as a group without subordinating the nature of the members of that group as ends in themselves. At best, there is no conflict in the members as ends in themselves, and the group’s end goal (it’s reason for being). My exposure to the facilitation community last summer really reinforced that particular view of groups and group process, and I found the whole thing distasteful. Community, on this model, was a group in which no one was violated as an end in themselves.
In the past week, however, I’ve had a different experience of community - which would take the idea of “non-violation of persons as ends” not as an end-point, but as a beginning. I’ve reread Parker Palmer’s “The Courage to Teach” which is no doubt inspiring some of this thought - where he talks about community as extending outward from “authentic showing up”. This authenticity is roughly where we are living in a way that responds to “who we are” and is especially undivided - we do not put on a false public face to appease outside constraints. A community can form around that authenticity, and in Palmer’s model, people draw together for mutual support in that authenticity, then decide to do something about it. The “end” of the group emerges from the community, rather than the community coming together in order to do something.
My experience last week, however, felt like one of community, but where people really did show up for a purpose (to become facilitators). However, the purpose was not one that directed the group in any strong or recognizable way - it certainly influenced the selection of people who came together. After that, however, we let the thing grow - we invited authenticity in various ways, and we all worked to make the space comfortable enough for people to really and truly “show up” - and indeed we all did. The work came “after” the people in it - though because of how everyone showed up, there was no tension between the work and the people.
Now, I suspect that community is going to be more “unruly” from certain perspectives, than a group would be. Certainly, the “ends” of a community will be much more difficult to influence from outside. For example, a group might meet to “determine the land use” of a certain particular piece of land and come to consensus, dividing up resources among interested parties, etc. However, I think a community could not be brought together for such purposes at all. At best, a community could discuss the problem of land use, but insofar as it was a community, any possible outcome could be available - including one interest getting everything, and none of the other interests being satisfied at all. For example, if one interest was looking to exploit and use land for the interests of a few, the other wanting to maintain it for posterity and natural us, I imagine a community process (if the groups could be brought into community at all) would lead to the abandonment of the aims of exploitation. A “group process” as I’ve seen them arise in facilitated environments would be about limiting the exploitation, but certainly allowing some - all involved being subordinated as ends in themselves to the “end” of coming to a decision about land use. I suspect that genuine community in this sense does not serve the powerful, because its power is from its roots, which are dispersed and spread and tangled.
I think this is a helpful and valuable perspective that I’m going to need to think about more deeply. I’m glad I can, to some extent, see inside this perspective now.
