Reply to comment

I second the various ideas on commitment being expressed here. Here is my take on it.

In the meeting last Wednesday I expressed my sense that it is unclear to me what we are doing in this group, and that it might be helpful to engage with big questions which are easily accessible to non-academics (like "Does religion matter anymore?" "Is there objective truth?" and so on). I was very grateful for the open space of the group and for our conversation. I have thought since the conversation that perhaps I didn't then fully put my finger on what I wanted to express.

There is something about our group dynamic which still strikes me as very traditionally and unhelpfully academic. And in the following sense: we don't put any direct emphasis on developing inter-personal relationships among the various members. My sense is that we come together to talk about some thing big, abstract and general (be it ideas, books, processes, modes of thinking, etc.), and very rarely do we ask each other, "What do you care about? What does your life look like? What would you like your life to look like?"

I liked everyone in the group, and I am happy to say that there are things about each person which I admire. But I also felt that I didn’t learn (at least in the group conversations) anything deep or important about any person. Relatedly, I didn’t feel that people learnt anything deep or important about me, or at any rate, nothing which I expressed, since it felt like I didn’t really express myself. I am not sure any of us did, other than in the well worn academic sense of expressing some ideas or values which we like.

I have often felt that conversations with academic collegues (no matter how smart or well intentioned they are) are rarely as intellectually vigorous as a deep conversation one has with a friend. With a friend one knows in one’s life the whole of one’s life is in play and there is a vivid sense that this conversation means something about how my life will be lived. The conversation makes a difference to my life, because something I take away from the conversation might change how I interact with some people or brings closure to some aspect of my past or opens up new relationships for the future. Did I feel something like this with the conversations of our group? No. Did I enjoy the group conversations? Yes. Did I learn something from them? Yes. Was I inspired by them? A little. Did they make a difference in how I lived my life? Not much.

During the course of this year I had a couple of times coffee or lunch with different people in the group: Paul, Alice and Anne (not with all of them together). I tremendously enjoyed these conversations, and always felt empowered by them. These were conversations in which I felt myself as a whole person engaged. But in the group conversations I never felt quite as if I was talking with the same Paul, Alice or Anne. And the same is true for myself: I never quite felt as if I was being the same person in the group that I was normally or what I would be in a one on one conversation. And I image that this might be true of the others as well.

This is what I mean by saying that I feel the group is still too academic. It felt like in entering the seminar room we had to leave at the door our ordinary selves and put on the “scholar”, “thinker” identities. Perhaps we were doing this less in this group than in a departmental colloquium, but less is not the same as not doing it at all, and for my taste, it was still too much like a department colloquium. I would be interested if there are ways in which we can self-consciously try more to leave the academic identities at the door, and try to forge new identities together. That might mean not worrying about what books we read or what the process will look like, but simply turning to each other and being with each other.

It is in this sense that I was not a fan from the beginning of the multiple layers of the evolving systems: the core, the morning groups and the web. It seems to me that this is just multiplying complexity and actually makes it harder to have real inter-personal conversations, which thrive in a smaller group setting. And since developing inter-personal relationships means being emotionally honest, I will take a step in that direction here. I think it feels good to us to say that there are meetings happening every two weeks and every month and on the web and so on; it makes us feel like we are producing something, creating something, contributing to something. But this strikes me as a false hope and not a real sustainable gain. I think the only real sustainable growth and emergence comes from developing inter-personal relationships; from creating communities. And that means accepting all the time and energy it takes to get to know a few other people, and that means accepting that one will make room for such interactions by cutting back on some other aspects of one’s life and even academic identities. I don’t think it happens simply by going to a meeting for an hour or two on an intellectual topic, no matter how many times a month one does it.

It seems to me that a community gets built through people giving up something for the sake of that community. What did we give up in order to have the conversations in our group? Did I give up anything? No, I don’t think I did. I wish I did, and I wish we held each other accountable for such things.