DOES COMMUNITY BUILDING HAVE A HEART?
by Mike Roth
Community Building in Britain Newsletter, No. 106, Spring 2009Obviously my title is a bit paradoxical - since, to me at least, community building is about opening up a heart space and learning how to inhabit it.
So the question is really: does community building have one heart - is there some unity of intention or aspiration, that we have in common, we who feel we have some commitment to "Community Building"? There is many a time when I feel that this is so, but from the earliest days
of my involvement I have been aware of a
continuing ebb and flow of whispered disquiet amongst
the CB constituency. For instance, there was something less than
beatific gratitude towards the bestowers of the miracle: the Foundation
for Community Encouragement. 
Why did we have to
pay so much for these
workshops? and what was the invisible curtain which kept the American
facilitators and a tiny English elite aloof from the hungry herd of
participants? Later, when we had our own established UK base, I
felt a continuous sense of undeclared war between the management
("Holding") group and the facilitator training group. (My
personal diagnosis is that each group was trying to convince itself
that it had the Holy Grail in its possession - but in the absence of
such item on either side, each group began to look suspiciously like
"the problem" to the other group.)In the earlier days of the facilitator training group, I became increasingly aware of an invincible undeclared hierarchy of advanced and backward members of this group.
It was a group that
was
well-schooled in the rhetoric of community building, but had no
vocabulary that might enable it to tackle issues of one-up-manship or
of mutual personal distress. So the semi-visible hierarchy could
only be
challenged in code, or in generalities - never in terms of specific
behaviour or mutual personal impact, because we didn't have the words,
the wit, or the will, to deal with the real personal stuff.
And more recently,
there is my sense that the more lively
and
successful Community Building events in recent years have - as often as
not - been followed by significant levels of back-biting and
recrimination which does not seem a good advertisement, on the face of
it, for the effectiveness of our process. (On the other hand I have
heard it
said: if they're shooting at you, then you know you're doing something
right!)I do not simply wish to stir the pot of bad vibes here. I think there may be clear cut issues behind the malaise, and that it is worth having a go at identifying these.
For me, it comes down to a near unbridgeable gap between the practice and the rhetoric of community building.
By "rhetoric" I do not simply mean "what is said" - but those
utterances that
carry persuasive
messages: that the speaker is a kosher community builder for instance,
or that they are speaking in the prescribed inspired manner: indicating
spiritual purity or road-less-travelled-further-on-hood. Or messages
that seem to flag the agreed values and received ideas, so as to imply
that the speaker is "doing it right" or "knows what they are talking
about".I call it "rhetoric" because it is language that seeks to influence the other person's reality, rather than share one's own.
(Not to deny that a great deal of
everyday communication manages to do both these things at once, as
indeed all honestly expressed emotion tends to do. Also, if I see a
doorway that I would like you to come through with me, and I
passionately point you towards it or even grab you by the arm: this is
quite clearly an attempt to influence your reality, at the same time as
I am sharing something of mine. I use the word "rhetoric" when the
communication seems to me to be doing the first thing at the expense of
the other).I do not think the two layers of community building - the practical and the rhetorical - exist by accident. To me they are the natural outcome of Scott Peck's style of communication, and the
way he used it to
attract followers. I think he gave us a complex package. It included a
brilliant practical discovery (that
community actually
happens, and that we can learn to manipulate the
factors that move us towards, or away from it), together with his own
unique fervour and sense of mission. This, however, is intertwined in
the fabric of the writing with a whole raft of barely spoken
assumptions and received ideas that are not easy to pick out or
criticise. Because this is so complex, people are attracted to it for
complex reasons,
and their passion and commitment to the package is
likewise complex. But also, since it
depends far more on rhetoric, rather than on clearly stated or
demonstrated positions - it lends itself to complex patterns of
misunderstanding. Also, it tends to leave strange and complex wreckage
behind, when the commitment and passion is disappointed (and this is a
common enough outcome, given the muddle from which the commitment and
passion have been born).I think I have to a great extent been protected from this muddle by my largely negative response to Peck's rhetoric. But this has always been combined with my intense interest in the process: what it does and how it works. Also, the decided focus of my interest has been on the actual relationships I am making (or messing up, as the case may be) - and on using Peck's main categories (pseudo-community, chaos, emptiness and community) to illuminate where I am in these relationships. And I have the good fortune not to have a "spiritual path" that can distract me from the question: how are we getting on? Is there any real hope here, in this interaction, for a better life?
This is not to deny the spiritual
dimension of life, but it is to
insist that it is inseparable from our relationships in the
making. Peck had a genius for implying spiritual virtue in all
sorts of things (stones, blessed moments, dramatic events at
workshops). I believe this has a devastating rhetorical
consquence - that it detaches the sense of "spirit" from the ongoing
flux of life and relationship. So, for instance, there seems to
be a widely held belief in CB-world that "emptiness" and "community"
are somehow more spiritual than the other stages of relationship. What
absolute rubbish! 
And even more
absolutely rubbishy for the fact that it is implied and insinuated all
the time, rather than said
out in the open. (Saying it out in the open would make it a
worthwhile hypothesis. Then we could get on with testing it
through our actual engagement with it in life. Then we would be
in a better position to move on to better hypotheses as these become
available.)I could say a lot more, but since my main purpose today is to provoke and to challenge, I will content myself with tying the main threads together and winding down the argument from here on out. The burden of it is that we need to separate the rhetoric from the practice. In my view, rhetoric carries the seeds of muddle, division, and eventual disintegration of whatever commitment it is we actually share. It is especially likely to do this when it is not recognized for what it is. Instead I think we need a clearer emphasis on our practice, and an attempt to honestly reflect upon what we are doing together.
In my own case for instance, this
has propelled me into a quest to
understand several different aspects of community-building
practice. First, when I understood that Community Building is
about something that really happens in a group, and not just a bunch of
nice words written by a well-meaning popular psychiatrist, I needed to
decide whether it was a kind of mass hypnosis or the emergence of
something real and autonomous out of the collective life of the
participants. Deciding upon the latter, I needed then to
understand better what
it is to participate in this process, as well as to learn as
much as I could about what the facilitators do and how and why they do
it.So it is that I have been as much committed to learning to participate, as I have been in learning to practice and to teach facilitation. (If anything, it has seemed to me that real participation is
more
difficult and challenging than real facilitation.) In any case, I
am sure that both
of these are indispensable contributions to the
practice - in my view, anyone who thinks they can "just" be a
facilitator or "just"
be a participant is kidding themselves. I am painfully aware that
my own participation has been upsetting to some others
over the years, but I take solace from the belief that the intrusion of
any real unvarnished human being into any situation (and this naturally includes community building) is bound to upset some people.I shall try to expand a little on this question. What does it mean: to actually participate - in a CB circle or in a life-situation? This is the nub of what I have always wanted to learn about, in respect of community building. To me it is the fundamental question, and one that opens out into any number of subsidiary questions, such as:-
- Is there such a thing as participating well? If so, how would I know when I was doing this?
- Can I even be deceiving myself, in thinking that I am participating, when I am only going
through the motions?
- Is a thoroughgoing spontaneity essential for authentic participation?
- What should I make of negative reactions, when I receive these from other participants?
- What about my negative reactions to myself? How shall I deal with my own anxieties and self-criticisms, if/when I feel that I may have "behaved badly"?
Perhaps these, or suitably transformed versions of them, are useful questions for facilitators too. But I submit that these are key questions for all of us - effective at the level of our real practical decisions of how to interact in the moment. And also, I fear that this sort of inquiry has been thoroughly overshadowed by the pseudo-questions that result from our overindulgence in
community building rhetoric. For instance: what is emptying? What is
my barrier to community right now? what am I avoiding? In what way does other people's failure to "follow the guidelines" constitute a problem for me? (There is a simple practical answer to this last question: don't worry so much about the rights and wrongs of what other people are doing - focus rather upon what your own authentic response might need to be.)"Facilitating Ourselves" as a tool for learning
I developed the structure of "Facilitating Ourselves"
out of a desire
for a different arena, where learning about participation and about
facilitation could be released from the confines of facilitated
circles, and spread out through the entire time and space of our being
together. It was thus aimed firmly at the goal of enhancing our
practice, rather than expanding the theory or rhetoric of community
building.I hoped this would be a situation that would invite my own participation as well as other people's. And I wanted us to discover whether building community really does mean that space is available for each and every person in the shape God created them for (if they want to make use of it in this way) - to go beyond the everyday situation where space taken by one person so often seems to curtail or limit the space available to others.
This is still work in progress, but I put it to you that here is one of the places where our collective research is alive and kicking. (Also where the heart of community building is beating, strongly
and
with passion.) My own reading is that there really is space for
everyone at "Facilitating Ourselves", and that this is a wonderful
thing to happen, and to happen reliably in a series of 5 extended
community building events. (For the time being I am discounting
the minority report, that there would be space
for everyone were it not
for people like me 
- that is: people with bullyish, intolerant, manipulative
tendencies who make the environment unsafe for others). In spite
of the likely presence of myself at the next event, I would urge any
reader who hasn't tried it out yet: please come to our next Facilitating
Ourselves event in August and find out for
yourself. If you have tried it out, and didn't like it, please
come again and see if you can grapple with the real difficulties, with
the real people you will meet here. And if you have tried it out
already and you liked it, please come again and bring at least 2 friends! Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (blog)