On Conflict and Community Fabric

Recently I mentioned to my closest friend that I was planning a sit down with someone we both know — another friend — to talk through something the other person wanted to discuss.

She said she respected that we were taking the time to do that, as not everyone would, when life has work to do, emails to answer, kids to feed, cleaning to do, all of the commitments that keep an adult life running.

I shrugged and said, “well it seems important to me that people are able to work things out,” but I couldn’t articulate why. She nodded supportively and said, “You value the relationship.”

I found myself replying, in a thoughtful tone, “well, I do, in this case, but that’s not why I’m doing it. I would sit down and have a conversation with someone whether or not the relationship was that important to me.”

I’ve heard it many times in recent years, that step one when deciding whether to take the time to get back into right relationship with someone is to ask ourselves “do we value that person or that relationship.”

I have heard this idea so many times in the last six or eight years and it has been pushed so hard on so many different fronts in my life that I’ve felt forced to default to it out of the sheer pressure and ubiquity of the idea, even though it shocked me the first time I heard it, and it has never truthfully sat right with me.

That night, as I thought through the conversation, and the many other times that I have encountered this idea (for this was certainly not the first time), I felt an inarticulable resistance to this framing.

I couldn’t articulate — I couldn’t remember — why the idea that I would work out challenges or conflict with someone based on an assessment of whether I “value the relationship” did not feel right to me. Other than that it seemed a bit ruthless, I had trouble figuring out why.

There was, in the back of my mind, an older value that I had forgotten, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

This approach takes several things for granted. Be patient with me, as I’m thinking this through and the description isn’t perfect.

This exhortation to “assess whether the relationship matters to you” as one of the first steps in deciding whether to deal with and resolve a conflict, an idea that I think has spread with the spread of neoliberalism, ignores something that to me appears crucial.

In healthy human community, the kind that so many people say they want, and the kind study after study suggests people living in Western countries feel is missing in their lives, human beings are often in community with people with whom we aren’t individually or personally close, but who nonetheless form part of the larger circle of human bonds that forms the anchor and soilbed of our belonging.

Human beings need to be able to be authentically ourselves, without having to sacrifice authenticity to keep belonging, and that, it is clear to me, needs the skill and ability and willingness to learn how to deal with the inevitable human conflicts and challenges that arise when people relate with each other as their genuine, authentic selves.

I think it assumes several other things as well, things that I do not personally agree with:

1. That people are interchangeable, that they serve a purpose for us that we can assess, that relationships are utilitarian, and that the culture that we live in agrees that we all see them this way

2. That relationships exist in a void and are all envisioned as individual – one relationship to the other, not part of anything larger that holds them all (or as Margaret Thatcher so famously said in an an interview in 1987, “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families,” Doesn’t that sound an awful lot like the underlying framework of an exhortation to begin with the question “do I value this relationship” when deciding whether to work things out? How has this neoliberal logic penetrated this deeply into all of our relationships?)

3. That we choose freely whether we are in relationship with these unitary others, that humans have total say over whether and when we have to deal with each other, which is a useful management strategy for the complexity of relationships in an industrialized society, but the thing that it’s managing is the very fact this conception isn’t, usually, true. Lots of us have to deal with other people that we would potentially prefer not have to deal with, and that’s…. kind of a fact of life. It’s also what lends richness and empathy to our lives, because when we’re in real community, we can love and know well people who may not have identical values and worldviews to our own, and that’s a healthy thing.

4. That choosing to ignore a difficulty between two people will have no impact on the others who know them both, or that that impact doesn’t matter to the community fabric, because there is no such thing as community fabric, or because that fabric cannot be comprehended or remembered even as it continues to exist, which means that like a plant that we deny needs water, it will continue without being tended. What happens to plants, or gardens, that aren’t tended? They don’t cease to exist; they may live, but they become tattered, weeds grows up where you might prefer food and flowers, and the results are more haphazard and chaotic than might be ideal for supporting a lush healthy life that we likely all prefer.

The social world that this recommendation envisions is one that views humans as — if you’ll excuse the dip into a different metaphor — seemingly free floating, unitary individualist particles with nothing connecting them, that sort of drift around randomly in a vacuum and are all of equal ‘value’ but that don’t equally ‘value’ one another, and that might bump into each other and interact when they do, but that are not understood as existing within any larger whole that connects them other than their free choice and perhaps some degree of vacuumy happenstance.

These particles might form up into a molecule of sorts, in the form of a nuclear family unit, and within that structure, bonds matter. Beyond that nuclear unit, we might be encouraged to make utilitarian assessments of the relationships that affect our family, assessments that look like community, but that I argue do not cultivate the real thing. Is this person’s kid friends with my kid? Am I going to have to see them at that next community meeting? These kinds of assessments have become taken for granted as a kind of utilitarian first principle in this culture, and to me that feels gross.

The assumption that beyond that unitary structure of the family, bonds are optional, interchangeable, and subject to a slider of valuation and devaluation as a determiner of whether we bother cultivating trust or safety culturally, strikes me as a shocking devaluation of human bonds. (And if we’re really honest with ourselves and take a good look around, that value system has so thoroughly permeated this society that it is now being applied within the nuclear family as well, which tells us something about how societies and loving relationships break down.)

I work things out with people whether or not we are close, not based on some slider of whether I “value” them, but because I value the fabric of the community that we are part of.

The biggest resistance that I feel to this recommendation that conflict resolution begin with a sort of decision making tree — does this relationship matter to me? Would it be a great loss to me, would I grieve or not even notice, if this person and I never spoke again? — is that it encourages the ongoing and continual forgetting of how humans form stable durable communities, or enduring relational bonds, the very thing that we need not only to thrive and be healthy but also to resist authoritarianism, which relies for its power on the fear that humans feel in isolation.

Coming back to the conversation with my best friend, I found myself replying, “I mean, this person matters to me, as in I like and respect them, and enjoy being friends with them, but I’m not sitting down with them for that reason. I’m not close with them in the way that I would be destroyed or hurt if we never saw each other again. I think I would be a bit sad, but I don’t think either of us are intimate to the point that either of our lives would be irrevocably changed if we never saw the other person again for whatever reason. I’m not really taking the level of closeness into account when I’m deciding whether to meet with them.”

My friend asked “Well, then, why do it? People usually work out conflict with the people who matter to them,” and I tried to articulate that it was my values that were guiding me. All I could say then was “I think I have a value that people should work things out.”
She asked again, “yes, but why?”

I couldn’t remember. Neoliberalism is a great eraser, blanking out what humans have known for thousands of years.

Later that night, up late packing for a flight back from this visit, it came back to me, what I had known all of my life until the values I hold were erased and replaced with neoliberal ones:

I work things out with people whether or not we are close, not based on some slider of whether I “value” them, but because I value the fabric of the community that we are part of.

I want to live in human society in which each person doesn’t have to ‘earn’ their ‘worth,’ through putting on some huge effort to be valued, but has inherent worth simply because they exist and are alive in the community that I am in.

I don’t want to be constantly aware that whether others will sit down to work things out with me will begin with some kind of sliding scale assessment of whether I’m worth it, a metric that slides very quickly into narcissism, with superficial markers of value.

That kind of culture doesn’t feel healthy to me. I want to know that I’m worthwhile to the humans I am in community with by virtue of us all understanding that we have an indestructible fundamental being that connects us, not based on some utilitarian assessment of worth, which can easily become about pretty pictures of our latest vacation or car, or about people feeling frightened and trying to keep up the image of the perfect family, or about posting photos of us partying with the cool kids, whoever the cool kids are to you and whatever ‘partying’ might mean for you and your ‘scene’ (take that metaphor as you will).

None of that feels healthy and I don’t think that emotionally healthy cultures value and devalue human beings in this way.

And if I want to have the kind of community around me that values tending the cultural fabric, then I have to live that set of values.

Now, are there exceptions to this proposal that we work out conflict even with those we’re not that close to, when they’re part of the communities that we’re in? Yes. Big ones. Absolutely absolutely yes.

When someone is dangerous, when they have not demonstrated that they are capable of caring for the feelings of others, when they have demonstrated that they use manipulation, lying, or other forms of coercion to get their way rather than having the skills or characterological capacity to do these conversations safely, then you absolutely should make the decision to not be open to conflict discussions. Those conversations generally do not go well, and they may not be safe to have. That’s not who I’m talking about.

Secondly, a gentler yes, that in the time we’re living in, there is a serious question to be asked about who or what constitutes our community or communities. As someone smart said to me when discussing this issue some time ago, “you can’t swallow the ocean.” We live in a time when it’s become quite important to figure out where our community edges are, and how they differ from the relationships with people that we’re close to, like our children, partners, parents, lovers, chosen family, blood family, and friends. We need to determine where the container lies, but also to not be rigid or atavistic in those definitions. I can build solidarity with someone on the other side of the planet, and be a lifeline for each other, but relationships at some point have to have a physical, real life component to build meaningfully in an internet connected world that allows for instantaneous connection of some 5 to 6 billion of the Earth’s current 8 billion human beings.

What are the lines that will keep energies concentrated and keep community bonds from dissolving or devolving into the abstract? How do we understand the boundaries of our community bonds in such a way that the relationships are neither spread so thin that our energy gets dissolved like salt thinning out into the water, or built so rigidly that we become simply protectors of privilege, or builders of walls?

Maybe my community is 20 people. Maybe it is a few hundred, the people I’ve built lives with, built community fabric with over the 20 years that I’ve lived in my neighborhood, the 40 years of life on this Earth. Maybe it’s my extended blood family, all of the uncles and aunts and cousins that I grew up with. We don’t all think alike, but I love them, and if one of them came to me and wanted to work something through with me, I’d usually try to be open to that, because that’s healthy for the group. Maybe it’s the people I write with, the people I learn with, the people I play music with or dance with at gatherings. For me, certainly, it’s the people I love, and then a wider web of the people I organize with, or go to services with, and have long relationships with, who live in the two places that I consider my homes, relationships that matter that aren’t necessarily identical to friendships. I’d rather sit down and work things out, with those who want that, then just sweep challenges under the rug and walk around on a very bumpy rug.

So no, I won’t sit down and hear out every internet stranger who has an opinion about a post. True, I may decide that I won’t have a conversation about conflict with someone who has demonstrated that they don’t feel safe to me, for those conversations. But yes, absolutely I will sit down for coffee with someone I’ve known in real life for two or three or ten years who organizes with me, lives in my neighborhood, goes to gatherings with me, sings at spiritual or religious services with me, marches in the same demonstrations with me, brings groceries to my elderly neighbors when the unexpected pandemic lockdown strikes, and who does demonstrate that they are safe to discuss things with, even if we don’t know each other all that well and aren’t intending to be close personal intimates, or even if we wouldn’t necessarily notice the other person’s absence in any heart wrenching way.

The measure is not “do I value this person.” It’s “what do I owe those who I am in community with, and what level of tending does my community need to be healthy and life giving?”

Absolutely, I’ll sit down with these members of the fabric of my community, and work to return to neutral with them if we have gotten out of balance in some way, not because I first measure the worth of that person, but because I know that human beings need deeper belonging, solid belonging, and that the only way to create that sense of belonging is to recognize that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, the whole is of immeasurable value. The whole is a related healthy weave of connections and a flexible container that holds them all. It is a sacred fabric that fills in the relationships between the parts.

And the weave of bonds that form our communities have to be healthy, flexible, relational, truthful, and able to be repaired, for the community to be all of those things.

This is a value that human beings have known for a long time, and I do not want that knowledge to be erased and replaced by this culture’s emphasis on neoliberality (wait, is that a word? Ok, now it’s a word) in relationality.

Check out this excellent articulation of a related idea: https://www.instagram.com/p/DSsgwefD58W/?img_index=1&igsh=MXIzYXgwbmdyc3kxaw==

QFeatured Image: “Fabric of the Community” mural, designed by Jackie Kresak, located at 4202 Penn Ave, Garfield, Pittsburgh, PA.