13. The treachery of togetherness
For tens of thousands of years, during our hunter-gatherer days, our unit of togetherness was our tribe because that was our unit of survival. In those days, we lived among a familiar and stable cast of characters. Now we live in nations made up of millions to hundreds of millions of strangers. And we’ve become a very transient people, moving from place to place, making it hard to maintain supportive, close-knit communities. In reaction, many of us turn inward to our families to find home and belonging.
And family has a lot to recommend it. It’s our escape from a scary world, it’s our refuge from the hard knocks of daily life, it’s where we go to let down our guard and relax into unconditional love. That’s the hope anyway.
But reality is not so kind. Family is not sanctuary. It’s in the fire. It’s the place of our fiercest confrontation with our operating system. It’s where we wrestle most intimately with the core human dilemma—me versus we. It’s where we struggle with conflicted choices: How much do I give, how much do I take? When do I put myself first, when do I put others first? When do I cooperate, when do I compete?
We have to weigh our own needs against the needs of father, mother, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters. And when those needs clash, we have to decide who will win and who will lose.
No wonder being human is exhausting. Our lives are a nonstop balancing act. We’re eternal jugglers.
There’s an old Bedouin saying: “Me against my brother; me and my brother against our cousin; me, my brother and our cousin against the stranger.” I first read this twenty-five years ago and it’s stuck with me because it’s the best one-sentence description I’ve ever seen of how family members can shift from allies to adversaries and back and forth again and again.
For example, Brad and Ben compete for their father’s love, but their father doesn’t give it out easily. He’s emotionally impoverished and doesn’t have enough to go around for everyone, so the brothers contend against each other for scraps. Their cousin, Grant, drops by. He’s a serious sports fan, which is more to their father’s liking, so approval flows more easily to Grant and he doesn’t even care if he gets it or not.
Suddenly Brad and Ben are fierce allies. They gang up on Grant, snipe at him and treat him like crap, hoping he’ll go away and stay away and leave their father to themselves. And when he goes, they’ll instantly be competitors again.
But at their high school, a buffed-up bully is harassing Grant, and Grant is family, so Brad and Ben come to his defense and together the three of them scare the bully off. You’re welcome, Grant, but still don’t come around our dad.
Robert Frost said, “Home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Have to. There’s something about family that provokes a feeling of entitlement: “If I need attention, you have to give it to me. If I’m distressed, you have to let me dump my anxiety on you so I can be free of it. If I’m hurting, you have to fix what’s wrong. You have to serve me. You have to be willing to sacrifice for me.”
But when this entitlement is acted out, bad things happen.
Take Josie for example. Being a mom is the most important thing in the world for her, but she’s got an empty place inside. She believes she’s unlovable. She doesn’t know this is what she believes, but it’s gotten worse since her divorce. She feels like all she has left in the world is her daughter, Jordan, and Jordan is growing up fast. Someday she’ll leave home for a life of her own and then Josie will have no one and that’s intolerable.
So Josie does everything she can to bind her daughter to her and make Jordan dependent on her, because then maybe Jordan will stay home long after she’s done with high school. Or, at the very least, if she moves out she’ll still serve her mom as an emotional crutch.
Josie pushes hard to merge their identities so Jordan doesn’t feel herself to be a separate person. Jordan’s needs get submerged in the unconscious demands of her mother. These two will have a remarkably intense closeness, but the heart of it will be rotten.
Take Everett as another example. He drives a delivery truck and feels like he hasn’t made much of himself. So he pushes his son, Ethan, to achieve. The house is filled with trophies and awards Ethan has won. He’s gotten top grades at school. He was elected class president this year. And still his father pushes him, because there’s never enough Ethan can do to satisfy his dad. That’s because what Everett really needs are achievements of his own to resolve his feelings of inadequacy and emptiness.
And empty is what Ethan feels despite his nonstop successes. Everett was hoping to gain self-worth from his son, but instead handed down his despair. And he doesn’t understand why, having made his son so successful, Ethan isn’t grateful. He doesn’t understand why he feels no warmth or affection from Ethan.
Then one day Ethan comes home with an F on his report card. It’s in math, his favorite subject. He’s only ever gotten an A+ before. He stands squarely in front of his dad and glares at him as he holds out the card. And now there’s open bitterness. Everett doesn’t know what to do about Ethan and Ethan doesn’t know what to do about Everett, so they’re on track to nurse poisonous feelings about each other for years to come, maybe for the rest of their lives.
Psychologists call families like Josie’s and Everett’s “dysfunctional.” But these families are made possible by the fully functioning human operating system. And what’s happening is worse than dysfunction. We have to call it exploitation. That’s a harsh term, but accurate, because Josie is using her daughter and Everett is usinghis son.
Both of these parents are acting out. They’re trying to meet their real need for love and self-esteem, but they’re going about it in a backward way that has no chance of success. And no one, not the parents and not the children, asked for this kind of trouble. And what right does the plodding dumb beast of our operating system have to trample over such vulnerable beings who want so badly to just simply love each other? What right does society have to push a fantasy of family entitlement that seduces so many people into so much pain?
When we study the tribal unit, we get to see how our operating system sets insider against outsider. When we study the family unit we get to see how our OS sets insider against insider.
What about happy families, though? Are there any? Of course, but evolution has not helped with this very much. It’s got a single-minded agenda. It drives families to raise their kids to reproductive age so they can have kids of their own and raise them to reproductive age. Evolution doesn’t care about happiness. It doesn’t care how much parents have to sacrifice. It doesn’t care how much trouble goes on inside a family as long as the priority purpose of continuing the genetic lineage is achieved.
So how does happiness come about? We humans have the ability, which we’ve developed over the millennia, to form alliances. And we can form them inside our families. Sometimes everyone in a family is naturally so well aligned in terms of values, beliefs, interests, and goals, that conflict is rare. So they get to have long periods of tranquility during which they enjoy each other’s company.
Other families are so scared of conflict they do whatever it takes to make sure it doesn’t happen. Their highest value is playing it safe, so they suppress their needs and don’t ask for much and keep their relationships with each other shallow, and this is their attempt at happiness.
Then there are families which have developed resilience. Not only are they generally happy, but they’re able to withstand stresses and they know how to work through conflicts. What’s the secret to their success? It’s moral labor.
Family relationships are on a continuum. At one end is the me-extreme where I focus totally on what I need and not at all on what the family needs. At the other end is the we-extreme, where everyone puts family needs first and ignores personal needs. But right in the middle of the continuum is the sweet spot of togetherness. That’s where me and we are in deep partnership, and neither one is sacrificed to the other. If you decide to do what it takes to live in the sweet spot, that’s a moral decision you’re making. That’s a moral challenge you’re taking on. You’re asking for more out of life than what the baseline of evolution has prepared for you.
Oddly enough, it’s a paradox that makes sweet-spot togetherness possible. Murray Bowen, a pioneer of family systems therapy, wrote a book with Michael Kerr called Family Evaluation. The writing is restrained but the ideas are revelatory. Bowen says the best kind of closeness comes from the best kind of separateness.
He calls this “differentiation.” I like to call it personal moral development. As you grow up, if things are going well, you separate more and more from your family of origin. You go out in the world and discover who you are apart your family. You become your own person with your own inner life. You develop your own moral core which guides your decision-making.
When you were a child you were a part of your family by the accident of your birth. But as a differentiated adult, you get to choose to be close to your family. Or not. Mature closeness is not forced on you, it’s not a default.
Differentiation is the opposite of merging. Merging means you sacrifice your values, your desires, your very soul to fit into the family system. Merging means you can’t tell where you end and your family begins, so you get swept up in their moods, especially their anxieties. Merged relationships stay shallow because when everyone homogenizes themselves to fit in, no one gets to be a whole and complex person, so there’s no way for relationships to go deep.
But imagine a family where everyone embraces differentiation, where each person is so strong in and of themselves that significant differences with the people they love don’t threaten them. And more importantly, they’re not threatened by intense closeness. Each person is so well-developed and so well-grounded, they’re pretty much ready for anything.
A differentiated family is a wonder to behold. But it’s not beheld nearly often enough because, again, evolution doesn’t help us with this. In our small bands throughout most of our history, differentiation was not considered a virtue. We suppressed individuality because fitting into our small band and our tribe was the highest social value and the essence of survival.
I wish we weren’t born with this core dilemma inside us. I wish it weren’t such a challenge to really trust each other. I wish family happiness, the deepest kind, were easy and natural and a given. I wish living in the sweet spot were everyone’s birthright.
But that’s not how it is, so some people hit an impasse. Suppose you’ve done everything you know how to do to go deep with your family of origin, but your family doesn’t respond. They ignore you. Or maybe they actively push back against your requests for closeness. Or maybe they go so far as to cast you out because they can’t handle what you’re asking of them. Now what?
You might join a small community and look to the group to serve as a substitute for family. Of course such a community would have all the challenges of the core dilemma of me-versus-we. And to solve it, members of your community of choice would each have to be dedicated to doing the kind of moral self-development that makes vigorous, enduring cooperation possible. Such communities are a treasure, but, as with deeply happy families, all too rare.
What happens more often is that a community retreats from the demanding paradoxical challenge of sweet-spot togetherness, and settles at one end or the other of the dilemmic continuum.
For example, the hippies of the 1960s and 70s set up communes where people came together by choice instead of kinship. They “tuned in and dropped out.” They rebelled against the restrictive authoritarian mandates of mainstream society. They did their best to maximize personal freedom, which meant their culture was me-first.
In 1968, I moved into Haight-Ashbury just as the hippies were moving out and being replaced by the hard-drug scene. I heard the stories about people heading to the country to join idyllic communities. I saw the pictures. Sexy earth mothers with wildflowers in their hair. Gardens burgeoning with hunky vegetables. Workshops where people made beautiful things out of leather, wood, and clay, things you wanted to caress. And at night, everyone took hands in a big circle under the starry sky to dance their way into bliss.
I was jealous. I wanted to live there, too. But no hippie ever mistook me for one of their own. I was too uptight, as the phrase went. And I was too much of a political activist to be content with dropping out. Still, I wished I had it in me to run away and become a free spirit and go with the flow and have that kind of fun.
One young woman in a video interview described it like this, “Here on the commune, we’re all together as a community. We get to pursue what we each believe is best for ourselves. There are no limiting rules. There’s no higher authority to tell us what to do. We each get to do our own thing.” It sounded so perfect—until I started hearing stories about communes imploding. Implosions that left people damaged. It made no sense to me at the time. Everyone had such good intentions. Why wasn’t that enough?
But now I look back and the problem is clear. In the communes that fell apart there was a critical piece missing. They were good at individual freedom, but they didn’t master the discipline of cooperative decision-making. And you need that if you want to sustain a community over time.
In the cases I heard about, emotional bullying became the norm. There was no workable system of conflict resolution, so if you wanted something and people weren’t giving it to you, you’d throw a tantrum. And people would let you bully them because the point of the commune, after all, was for everyone to have whatever they wanted all the time.
Political collectives, a few of which I had contact with, often had the same problem with emotional bullying. I remember one which I was fond of, a group of strong women up in the Sierra foothills, who were being run helplessly in circles by the bully in their group. They had no way to stop her because they wouldn’t consider making any non-consensus decisions. So the bully could always veto any proposal designed to set limits on her bad behavior. They kept doing good work in their community for years, they were loved and respected, but their group process took an awful toll on them.
At the other end of the continuum from the hippies are tight-knit, long-lasting religious communities, like the Amish, which are we-first.
The Amish came to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s and from there moved into Ohio, Indiana, and other states. All these years later they’re still maintaining the core of their tradition. Thinking of them, I just remembered the barn raising scene from Witness, the film with Harrison Ford, so I clicked over to YouTube to find it.
You see wagons loaded down with lumber drawn by sturdy, willing horses, arriving at the farm of a newlywed couple. You see the men wearing their blue shirts, straw hats, and tool belts, and the women with their long plain dresses in quiet, solid colors and their demure white caps. So many happy faces.
The work starts. Men drill holes in the beams, join them together with wooden pegs pounded in, then use ropes to pull the frame of the barn piece by piece up into the air and into position. There’s a break for the midday meal the women have been preparing and now serve on long plank tables flanked by wooden benches. In the afternoon, the men and boys put up the outside walls of the barn with a whirlwind of busy hammering. The women quilt, accompanying their stitching with subdued conversation.
As the sun begins to set in rosy pastels, the long day of labor is completed. There’s a glow of well-being as families drift back out onto the road heading home. The background music swells in an emotional crescendo.
The Amish touch something in us that longs for a peaceful way of life. They touch our need for belonging of a kind that’s not easy to find in mainstream society. Yet, despite how compelling movie portrayals of the Amish are, we don’t see millions of Americans flocking to join up with them. And why not? Because behind the romanticizing there’s a sober reality. In order not to get swamped by the aggressive, dominant culture all around them, the Amish follow a serious, even severe discipline. It’s what holds them together; it’s what protects them from outsiders.
Like the hippies, they retreat from society to make a refuge, but whereas the hippies were extreme in supporting individual expression, the Amish are extreme in putting the group first. They suppress individual expression.
In a strict Amish community, the group tells you what clothes to wear, what kind of work you’re allowed to do, and what to believe. The group lays out your way of life and makes your moral decisions for you. There’s no such thing as a free spirit. Everyone is bound by the Ordnung,the rules of behavior.
In some districts the bishops are so scared of people having their own thoughts they forbid individuals from organizing unauthorized Bible study groups. Because if people developed their own personal understanding of the Bible it might be different than the doctrine the bishops approve, and that might cause rifts in the community, which absolutely cannot be allowed. The coherence of the group is actually more important than the sacred book which the community counts as its spiritual foundation.
Amish communities rebel against the world outside but within the community rebellion is not tolerated. With one exception: Rumspringa.
I used to have a sound-bite understanding of this custom. It was supposedly a time when teenagers, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen years old, went out into secular society to experience the worldly life of smoking, drinking, drugs, and amped-up rock concerts. And when they got to the end of their experimentation they would make a decision to return to the community for the rest of their life or to leave forever.
It’s a gutsy thing for a community to follow a tradition where they risk losing members, especially their children. But this fits in with the discipline of cooperation. The Amish lose about twenty percent of their teens to the outside world, but those who choose to stay are serious about making a commitment. The losses are hard but the process sustains the community. So all in all a nice, neat system.
That’s how I thought things worked. But then I read Rumspringa by Tom Shachtman and found out that the situation is messier than that. There’s no set program to follow and no deep guidance, so Rumspringa is very much improv. Most teens still live at home during this period. Some go out on weekends and turn into party animals. Some do nothing more outrageous than go to Amish community sings.
As for making that final, fateful decision, that’s not so clear-cut either. The Amish do not baptize babies. You get baptized when you make the decision as a teen or adult to join the community permanently. This is the biggest decision you’ll ever make. But there’s a problem. You’ve grown up with the group making all your decisions for you, and now, without preparation, you’re supposed to make your one big decision on your own.
But not really on your own because there’s a lot of pressure from the community for the teens to take baptism. And there’s a lot for the teens to lose if they don’t. If they choose to leave they will have a limited relationship with their families and everyone they’ve grown up with. And if they take baptism, but then later change their minds and leave, that counts as betrayal, and they’ll be shunned for the rest of their lives.
What do the teens say about why they choose baptism? They would miss their family too much if they left. Or the person they want to marry is staying. Or they like the slower life. Or they want to belong to a community where people will show up to help you whenever you need help.
But there are other reasons, too. They don’t want to disappoint their parents. They don’t want God to send them to hell. They don’t know how to live in the outside world, and this one’s a big one.
Since the Amish only attend school up to eighth grade, they’re not prepared for a modern, competitive work environment. And this limits the professions in the Amish community. For example, I’ve never read about Amish therapists or counselors who help teens figure out their Rumspringa decision in a thoughtful, deliberative way.
If you want the deep and beautiful belonging that’s the essence of Amish communities, you have to sacrifice a part of yourself that is also deep and beautiful, namely your own personal moral decision-making.
Now let’s shift gears. Instead of trying to turn a small community into a family-like refuge, what about going big, as in the strategy of the widening circle? It’s a decidedly evangelical proposal and a salvation strategy as well.
The idea is to start with a strong, cooperative core community, then gather people in, more and more, year after year, scaling up, until one day in the future everybody in the world is on the inside and we’ve got one big happy global family, a single unit of togetherness.
To see how this is supposed to work, let’s look at the biggest family in the history of the world, the Abrahamic Family. With 2 billion people who identify as Christian, 1.6 billion who identify as Muslim, and 15 million who identify as Jewish, that one family makes up somewhere around half the world’s population, all of them spiritual descendants of Father Abraham.
The salvation hope goes like this. If only every Christian, Muslim, and Jew would just realize they’re all members of the same family, they could pull together and live in contented harmony, and so many of the world’s problems would be solved right there. Then the rest would be solved once everybody else sees how great this family is and rushes to join in.
But the Abrahamic Family is not a place of harmony.
The bloodiest page in the Bible is not in the chapters of Leviticus or Deuteronomy, which are abundant with killing. It’s the page between the last verse of Malachi and the first verse of Matthew, the boundary between the Jewish Testament and the Christian Testament. It’s a page without words because it’s beyond words. It’s the Holocaust Page—a holocaust which took place within a family.
When Protestants split off from Catholics in the mid-1500s, the bad blood between these two familial branches of this single religion culminated in the breathtaking violence of the Thirty Years War. The result? By 1648, there were eight million casualties plus widespread disease and starvation, all brought about in the name of Christ.
Sunni and Shia Muslims originally split over who was the legitimate successor of the Prophet Muhammad following his death in 632. Sunnis follow the lineage of Abu Bakir, Muhammad’s closest companion and father-in-law. Shiites follow the lineage of Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s son-in-law and cousin. Talk about a family business. Talk about family bitterness. This split has now lasted more than 1300 years and has erupted into violence over that time, as we’ve seen most recently in Iraq with Shiites killing Sunnis, and then with the radical Sunnis of ISIS, killing Shiites, and anyone else they didn’t like who they could get their hands on.
To Christians and Jews, the Quran might seem like an alien document. But there are 93 verses in there that speak of Isa ibn Maryam. And who is that? That’s Jesus, son of Mary. Muslims don’t consider him divine, but they do honor him as a major prophet. And then we find the names of Adam, Noah, Moses, Jacob, and Isaac from the Old Testament. And of course there’s the progenitor, Ibrahim, or Abraham. So the three great monotheistic religions have an interwoven spiritual genealogy. There is unmistakable familial closeness.
But closeness can be perverse, it can be dangerous. When Christians and Protestants were fighting, they hated each other more than they hated Satan. The radical Sunnis and Shiites hate each other more than they hate infidels.
Someone who has been close to you, someone who is very much like you, but then splits from you, turns their back on you, attacks you, and calls for your death is so much more enraging than an enemy you’ve never once considered family and never cared about in any deep and personal way.
Why does this sacred Abrahamic Family splinter into warring factions? Why does it generate endless internal conflicts? As a species, we’ve invested so much in it—resources, hope, our hearts—but we’re getting a negative return. A scary return. What’s gone wrong?
The hopeful gospel of Abrahamic unity says we should look to him to bring us together. It says whenever his children attack each other they’re failing him. But the contentious descendants of Abraham are, in fact, fulfilling his legacy faithfully. Maybe he was only ever a mythic figure, maybe he was a real man, but in either case he was the quintessential tribal chief. It was a very tribal people who created our monotheistic God. With the best of human intentions, but with the limitations of the human operating system, they gave him a fatal flaw. They made their deity in Abraham’s image. Yahweh, God, and Allah are sourced by tribalism and trapped in it. These three—the Abrahamic trinity of tragedy—have not been able to solve the tribal divisiveness of our species because they are themselves fundamental expressions of that divisiveness. They can’t help us prevent our extinction. They can only serve to hasten it.
Since the religious version of the widening circle is failing us, what if we turn to the secular, biological version?
In 1955, the Museum of Modern Art in New York published a book curated by Edward Steichen called, The Family of Man. It’s a collection of 503 photographs of people from 68 countries, documenting ordinary lives in their extraordinary diversity.
My parents bought a copy when it first came out, and during my teen years I leafed through it many times. Why did I find it so compelling? I just went over to the library to go through it again to see if I could answer that.
What I noticed first was the quiet tone. The photos are black and white. And I noticed the simplicity. People are engaged in the basics of life—weddings and work, births and deaths, worship and play. Neither fame nor fortune are the focus. There’s little glitz and no hype. In fact, there’s sadness on a lot of the faces. And in this context even the happy pictures seem to have a somber undertone. And now I understand the message I took from these photos as a kid: Being human is not that easy, and joy is precious because it’s not a given.
But that’s not what the book was designed to convey. It was published just ten years after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fear of nuclear warfare with the Soviet Union was running high. In that unsettled context, Family was an argument for hope. It showed us that despite our different customs and appearances, under the surface we’re all the same. And if we could just grasp that fact and recognize ourselves in each other, wouldn’t we then create global harmony instead of destroying ourselves?
And it’s true. We share the same operating system. So under the skin we are all the same—but we’re the same in being compulsively divisive.
Human togetherness comes broken out of the box. It pits my group against your group. It fractures our closest relationships. It defeats our attempts to save ourselves. We long for it to mend our hearts but it breaks our hearts. And this is treachery and this I will never forgive.
