The following dialogue was presented on Radio National, a part of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in 1998.
Robert Theobald & Robert Stilger
Robert Theobold: Each of these Healing Century programs starts from the assumption that you can’t get there from here. We need to recognise that the profound shifts in realities which have already taken place force us to change our concepts of success.
Our ability to create a high quality of life in the 21st century depends on our ability to look at the new situations which have thus emerged, clearly and honestly.
It is particularly easy to see some of the driving forces which have altered the situation of families, neighbourhoods and community. Let me start by looking at two of them. The first is the growth in mobility. In the past, people usually lived in extended families. Their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, were around them and provided a rich context in which to live. Today the normal family is nuclear, meaning that it consists of parents and children. And the prevalence of divorce means that we have a large number of single parents and also a rich and complex mix of blended families, where divorced parents interact with their ex-partners as well as their new ones in highly complex and often tension-filled ways.
The second issue that has shifted needed future dynamics is that we are reaching the limits of growth both in population and in the amount of stuff that can be produced without damaging the environment. At the beginning of the century it was reasonable to act as though the purpose of marriage was to have large numbers of children. Now the need to limit family size is abundantly clear. The absolute necessity to stop the commitment to maximum economic growth is also obvious. The point at which these trends will damage ecological systems dramatically is not yet clear, but the fact that it will do so cannot be argued.
The shift in family and community realities is also enhanced by the dramatic lengthening of the average life span. In the past, the norm was for parents to be worn out by childbearing and child rearing. They often did not live much beyond the time when their children were ready to look after themselves, and often not even this long. Now continuing marriages may have as long without children in the home as with them. On the other hand, couples often move from having to look after their children to having to look after their parents. Indeed they often have to do both at the same time because many children cannot afford to buy homes of their own.
I’ve sometimes tried to shock people into awareness by arguing that middle age is the five minutes between rousting your children out of the home and committing to the care of your parents.
Despite all these obvious shifts, the rhetorics of family and community are very slow to change. There are strong voices which actively oppose any limit to birth. The dominant communicators of our time are still arguing that the only way to manage the future is to commit to endless economic growth despite the growing evidence that people are more interested in their quality of life than in the pursuit of materialism and consumption.
This program will aim to open up the alternatives which seem possible once we admit the need for new directions. Here are some of the topics on which we shall touch: we’ve always seen families as being united by blood or marriage. Do we need a looser definition with a family being any small group of people willing to commit to each other’s needs? What community processes will provide people with the opportunity to feel they belong, and that their activities make a difference to the directions and quality of life of their neighbourhoods?
We clearly face profoundly difficult questions. Both our deeply embedded patterns of behaviour and our societal norms challenge those families which do not have children. They tend to be seen as odd or unfortunate. In a world where population growth must be limited, and where probably we shall need to reduce the world’s population over time, it will benefit society if some families decide not to have children. On the other hand there are some people who are natural nurturers, who are able to raise healthy children for the future and should have large families.
At the other end of the age spectrum, we need to ask questions about retirement. This pattern developed when the life span was far shorter and when people of 65 were truly exhausted. Today many people of this age are still very vigorous and the population over 90 and 100 is the fastest growing population cohort. Nations throughout the world are wondering how to support the growing number of old people. Could it be that we need to abandon the very idea of retirement, and provide people with opportunities to contribute throughout their lives, although at a lesser intensity?
These are the topics we shall take up. My guest this evening is Robert Stilger who is a colleague with whom I have worked for almost 30 years. For most of this time he has served and led North-West Regional Facilitators, a multi-purpose organisation. Much of its activities have been around tonight’s topics of family and community.
Bob, I thought we might start from a meeting we organised a number of years ago when we brought together an extraordinarily wide range of people to talk about the family. You tell from time to time a fascinating story about the learnings we achieved as a result of this session. They seem to me to have broader implications for how we may be able to get dialogue between those who seem to have incompatible ideologies.
Robert Stilger: Robert I’m glad that you went back to that meeting. It was now I think probably about ten years ago when we brought 100 people together back in the east coast of America to talk about issues facing families in the ’90s, and as we were designing it one of the main questions was: How do we get people with diverse viewpoints to really engage with this issue in a creative way? How do we get people beyond the sort of polarised positions that many people know they have and that cling onto desperately? And what we decided to do was we began the conversation with people in what we called home-based groups that were organised for their diversity. So I always remember one group where we had a lesbian mom from Washington State, a leader of the Mormon Church from Florida, a Lutheran Bishop from the mid-west, a Muslim working on media decency issues from California, a newsletter writer on families at home from Washington, D.C., and a few others that don’t come to mind right now. But people who typically would not be able to sit down in a room with each other for more than ten minutes talking about family without being at each other’s throats.
And what we asked them to do was to begin by introducing themselves to each other in terms of their current family and their family of origin. And we knew that that process would have some power, we didn’t know how much it was going to have. The extraordinary thing that happened was that people stopped talking from their roles and their labels and their hats and their stereotypes, and went into their own personal experience and talked about what was important to them. And once they got back to that personal base, we were able to begin getting people into dialogue.
Robert Theobold: And I remember them coming to us; like all meetings there isn’t enough time, and I remember them coming to us and saying ‘We know we can agree; we know that there is common ground somewhere, you’ve got to give us more time’ and we said, ‘Well we don’t know where to find it. We set this up and you’re going to have to go home at a certain point’. But that extraordinary commitment to believe that under the ideologies, under the hats, under all of the things that they normally knew they knew, there was a commitment to finding common ground; it was an experience which I think I’ve been in some ways processing for the last ten years and continuing to struggle towards what that means at a huge range of levels, which are some of the things I think we need to talk about this evening because I think it talks about the incredible shift in the ways we’re going to have to manage both one’s personal life and the societal life.
Robert Stilger: You know, I think for me that one of the biggest shifts is that certainly the trend in this country has been one of institutionalising almost all of our different problems and issues. We’ll have an institution that will take care of educating our children, or have another institution that will take care of providing childcare; we’ll have other institutions that will take care of health; we’ll have other institutions we call jobs that we go to to do work and get income. And we’ve depersonalised so much of our lives, it seems to me that the heart of the struggle right now is to discover ways to bring personalisation of personhood back into our lives and move away from the abrogation of responsibility out to those different institutions.
Robert Theobold: We were just in a conversation in fact where somebody who works very much in the systems was saying that she feels that that understanding is increasingly shed; in other words, people know that that the institutions aren’t working. But the step of realising that it’s going beyond improving the institution, that what you do is you make the institution better, to recognising that it is the institution itself, it is the setting up of rules and structures and boundaries and barriers which we have to look at and move beyond, is I think the step where a lot of people are still blocked, and I think as you and I have struggled in this conversation, and we’ve been having it. We find ourselves constantly booby-trapped by it and saying ‘Well this is the old answer, this is the one we used to know’ and to keep ourselves clear on it really is this movement away from the rule-based culture, from the institutionalised culture to a more intuitive culture, more willingness to go on a journey together to accept that one doesn’t know what tomorrow will bring; that there aren’t neat rules for things where you can say, ‘Well if you fit in this box you can be helped, and if you don’t fit in this box, tough, and we’re very sorry but the rules say we can’t help you’.
Robert Stilger: A dilemma that I find I struggle with too is that I recognise all that and I buy into totally, but we still have the problem of what the hell do we do? It’s not enough to say that we can’t use the institutions that we have right now, because at least as far as I’m concerned there’s a very definite need for a massive safety net at this point in time. I remember a numbers of years ago a colleague of mine once told me that if you work on addressing the problems, things are going to get better before they get worse. But if you work on addressing the underlying symptoms, things are going to get worse before they get better. And I think part of the dilemma that we’ve got right now is that the problems we’ve got are overwhelming enough that if we don’t address them we’re going to be in big trouble. But at the same time if we don’t find some ways to come in at the underlying problem level, we’re lost. So how do we do both simultaneously? How do we encourage people to move in new patterns in terms of seeking individual solutions within their own families and within their own communities, that are not institutionally based and at the same time build and protect the institutions that we need for that safety net?
Robert Theobold: And I think that’s the hardest question of all because those institutional structures themselves recognise they don’t work. I remember talking to the Arizona State Social Security system. They were saying, ‘Look, we really cannot do it with our rule-based system, and we know we can’t. So we’re always fighting against this.’ For example, they were talking about the fact that more and more people have multi-problem systems and the whole thing’s set up and it says if you have this problem, we can do this for you; but you can’t look at several things at once, the rules don’t allow you to do that. So this gets into I think this incredibly complex issue of what does it take to move us through this transition in a way which is as little damaging as possible.
Let me give you a very perhaps low-level example, again from the work we’ve been doing together around child care. Because there are really two types of thinking around child care. One is to improve the capacity of people to deliver personal parenting as child care. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, it isn’t totally safe etc. etc., it’s people doing the best they can within their own system. And then there’s the rule-based system which says ‘We can create a child care system which is perfect, where nobody will ever get damaged, where nothing will ever go wrong.’ Which is obviously impossible. And yet that gets in the way of the spontaneity, it gets in the way of the potential of those people to really care for the kids. And I think it’s a wonderful example of the clash between the two processes, one which is hoping for full safety, for everything to be organised, for everything to be got right. And the other one which says ‘But that isn’t how life works, that life does have risk in it’.
And another one that comes to me is a tragic story about a friend of mine who lost one of their kids when they were out on one of those adventure-based systems. Things went wrong. And it made me think that there’s no way if you’re going to bring up kids with risk, which I think you have to because if they don’t take risks when they’re growing up they won’t know how to take risks or make sense of their lives when they’re grown up. But then the risk will sometimes go wrong; there’s no way that you’re not going to if you really have risks in this, that at some point something isn’t going to happen, which is nobody’s fault.
And another thing our culture has to do is when something goes wrong is to say, ‘Well we’ve got to find somebody to blame for this’, where in a sense probably there’s no blame attached to it because it was just something that couldn’t have been anticipated because it’s such a different way of dealing with the whole world in which we live.
Robert Stilger: So how do we begin to move more effectively around and away from systems that are rule-based, as you put it, towards ones that really do encourage people to seek out their own individual path?
Robert Theobold: Well my gut sense and part of this is some of the things that are happening in my life is that they’re really two very different levels. One is for each one of us to get more comfortable with in a sense, living a journey and not living a destination; being willing to say ‘I don’t know where I’m going to be a week, a month, a year, five years from now’. But to go with what comes along, and that’s not how we’ve lived our lives. We’ve known we’re going to have X amount of money, we’re going to have this sort of job, etc. etc. And that’s one piece.
The other piece it seems to me is to begin to admit that you’re going to have to rebuild at much smaller levels than we have normally thought about. We think about the community level or maybe sub-communities, but I’m really inclined to think that we have to get back to the neighbourhood, the village, the face-to-face interaction where the groups are small enough, that you literally know each other and you can evaluate people’s character in terms of personal knowledge rather than what we’ve got into in our whole political system, which is image-making. I mean we don’t know the people we vote for, we know the image that people have either done more or less well to create something which we sort of resonate with and say ‘That’s the person we want for Senate or Congress or dog-catcher for that matter’. Because we no longer have a contact.
So I think it’s really in a sense, both being able to make a soul connection with somebody else at a very personal level, which is a personal growth issue but it’s also setting up much smaller systems where that personal connection can be made and where people can have a village again. You know it is that old one, it takes a village to raise a child, and we’ve lost our villages. And as more and more people move into the labour force there’s less and less of a village around because again we were talking to somebody this week who said ‘Neighbourhoods are hollowed out. In some neighbourhoods there’s literally nobody home all day.’
Robert Stilger: So in some ways what you’re talking about or what we’re talking about, is how do we begin moving towards a society that’s based on relationships rather than based on policies. How do we begin to stimulate the connections between people that recognise and deal with individual situations rather than trying to push everything out to a rule level, to a policy level, to a general case kind of level.
Robert Theobold: I think that’s absolutely right. But how, as you try and work that through, how do you find that playing, if you like. I mean how comfortable are people when one says ‘Look, we can’t make this rule based anymore’, or ‘That doesn’t work, you’re going to have to rely on your guts, your intuition, your own perceptions, rather than saying there’s an expert who will make it right, or a professional who’ll come in or whatever’.
Robert Stilger: I think we’ve all been so well trained to rely on the fact that there are right answers, there are experts, there are rules, there are nice, neat, clean, tidy objective things that we can organise our lives around; that it’s a huge, uphill battle to move away from that kind of consciousness. I also think there’s some interesting things around gender that are built in here. I remember there’s one study that’s done from time to time with schoolkids where it’s a story that’s told about a man who has a spouse who is deathly ill, needs some medicine, they’re broke, he goes to the pharmacy with a gun and robs the pharmacy and brings the medicine home to his wife. And you ask a group of kids in the third or fourth grade what do they think about that, what was right, what was wrong? And typically what happens is you get very different reactions from the boys in the group, and the girls in the group. The boys in the group tend to say ‘Well what was the rule? The guy broke the rule therefore the guy’s got to be punished.’ The girls in the group say ‘Gee, you know it’s too bad that he couldn’t have gone to the pharmacist and talked about the problem. Wasn’t there another way around this? Isn’t there some way that we can really talk about the people that are involved in this?’
So I think that all of us have got different kinds of programming as we get older, that force us more and more into used to being in a rule-based culture with tremendous resistance to saying ‘We’ve got to solve this individually’. But I think there’s some room to work with there, and I wonder how we really work on these issues without accessing the kind of gender diversity, kinds of cultural diversity, kinds of racial diversity that we need.
Robert Theobold: You raise a couple of things for me.
Robert Stilger: At least.
Robert Theobold: At least a couple, yes. Now the first one I think is this incredible importance of your feminine-masculine issue in our culture, and I find more and more women basically I think unhappy because I see them feeling that too many women in a sense have adopted the male-based culture.
Robert Stilger: Oh absolutely.
Robert Theobold: Margaret Thatcher comes to mind as the extreme case, and rather than women having moved into the male world and said ‘We have a different image of what the world should be like’ many of them have felt they have to adopt the male-based culture in order to succeed. And it seems to me tragic because if there’s one of the themes that I find so much of these days is that we need what has been defined as feminine thinking for the future. And so that’s one piece.
The other piece it seems to me, is that I find at this point that really the first thing you say to a group almost determines the reactions you get from it. In other words, you can go into a group and you can give them the clue that they’re meant to do it the way they’ve always done it, and that we’re an industrial era group and we’re going to play the old game, and they’ll do it. But if you go in and say ‘I believe in a different game and I’m willing to stand up and play that game’, it is amazing to me how many people are willing to play the alternative game. In other words, we’ve really got two games going on in the culture and the game that people assume is the right game is the old one. But if they’re given almost it seems to me sometimes half a chance to say ‘But I don’t like this game’, they say, ‘Oh wonderful! Isn’t that great? Yes!’
Robert Stilger: You know, what you remind me of is one time when I was doing a series of focus groups for a Chamber of Commerce on what the role of the Chamber should be in responding to children’s needs in the community. And we did the first focus group, and frankly it was a disaster. You know, it was one of the most flat discussions I’d ever been in because everybody started trotting out what they thought they ought to be saying or doing. We decided to do a little bit of a re-design. So the next one, I took a clue out of that Families in the ’90s session, and I began the focus group by asking people to talk about one child that they knew that had a real need, that they felt they wanted to be able to respond to. The discussion that occurred was totally different because it was grounded once again in their personal sense of needs based on a real and direct experience.
Robert Theobold: Well you know, that reminds me of what I’m told started the Russian process, and that is a great many of the people who went to Russia said ‘We will not talk to you as bureaucrats. We’re sorry, that’s not what we’ve come to do. We’ve come to talk to you as babushkas, which is grandparents, and we’re going to talk to you about what you want for your kids and your grandkids.
Robert Stilger: What Russian process is this?
Robert Theobold: Well this was right at the beginning of Glasnost, in fact some friends of ours Robert Goondye and Diane Gulman were part of this, and they were part of the process by which they went over and they started opening up the question of whether the Russian culture could continue in the direction it was going. Now the whole question of what’s happened is a whole other issue, but the ability to open up people’s heads when you take them out of the hats, and increasingly it seems to me if we’re going to do any good work at all, it is going to be as we can allow, (I was going to use ‘force’ but it isn’t the right word) allow people to talk out of their experience, to talk out of their concerns, to talk out of this common feeling that the society ought to be more compassionate, and that there is at least one child that they know that deserves help. And it then enlarges; if they know one child, then in a sense they have to admit that there are lots of others they don’t know. Whereas if you make it a stereotype that all well-fed kids are – etc.etc.
Robert Stilger: I know that one of the other programs you’re dealing with in this series is going to be talking directly about work. But I want to get into that a little bit today, because it seems to me that we really can’t talk about family and community very well or very much unless we recognise what’s going on with work. And in particular I guess what I mean is that right now, at least within America and I don’t know if it’s as true in Australia, but people’s work lives are the dominant feature of their daily life. And I was really astounded a year or so ago when I read one book by a sociologist named Julia Shaw called ‘The Overworked American’ and maybe we can talk about the overworked Australian as well, but one of Julia’s points is that if we go back 40 years or so to our patents’ generation, that if we were willing to have the same standard of living now that our parents did 40 years ago, given the level of technology that we have, we would be able to have that standard of living, with people working 20 hours a week, or working every other month or working every other year basically with half of the labour output that we currently use. But that in the American culture, each time there’s been a chance to choose between which would you like: more time or more money, the choice that we’ve ended up making has been the choice in favour of more money rather than more time.
Robert Theobold: But it’s even more than that, isn’t it? We’ve never even put it on the agenda.
Robert Stilger: Of course not.
Robert Theobold: It used to be on the agenda. It’s extraordinary. Up till the Second World War, up till 1939, there was a conscious discussion about less hours, more money, less money, more hours, whatever. And suddenly after World War Two, we got into ‘We want money. Money, money, money, money.’ And we got into we’re going to drive the culture by credit, and we’re going to buy more than we need; we’re going to have stuff, lots and lots of stuff.
Robert Stilger: We’re going to drive it by consumerism.
Robert Theobold: Right. And we’re going to drive it by debt, and in the last few years, we’ve not only not taken less time, we’ve taken more time for work. And one of my slick ones is we’ve doubled the size of houses, halved the size of families, so we have to fill four times as much space with stuff for each person. Now that’s a little exaggerated, but not much when you think about it. And it really is extraordinary that we have chosen a culture which is creating what I’m calling the decades of stress. I think the overwhelming reality of the last two decades is the increasing level of stress people feel around their lives, around their personal lives, around their institutional lives; somebody was talking about ‘Well why don’t communities work very well? By the time people get home they ain’t got any energy for their communities!’
Robert Stilger: How can you have time to build communities or build families if you don’t have any time? How can you take a person who is totally stressed out from trying to make as much money as possible, deal with all the things that they have to confront at work, and come home and have any quality time to put into a family or to put into a community.
Robert Theobold: Yes and there was a really awful article that came out saying work is becoming the escape from the world. In other words, people want to be at work, it’s tidier, it’s more convenient. I mean it’s the rule-based system you see, that’s the only rule-based system that’s left in a sense. When you’re there you know what you’re meant to be doing. Now actually that’s breaking down too, because more businesses say you can’t play rule-based systems either. But we expect more. You know, we still expect people to have coffee breaks and we expect people to be able to chat. That’s growing too, with the number of places where you’re under extreme pressure in your work job, but many workplaces are rather civilised places and then you come home to a crying baby who isn’t civilised and a neighbourhood meeting that doesn’t work very well, so why go out? And then you add to that that more and more neighbourhood meetings just sort of seem to go round and round in circles and nothing ever happens at them, and you say ‘I don’t need to sit here’. Or you go to a meeting where in a sense, all you’re being asked to do is look at a policy that the city has already decided and decide whether or not you want to do any of this, and say ‘Well what’s the point in doing that?’ And in my more cynical moments I think about systems trying to perpetuate themselves, and this obsolete system we’re living in, the industrial era system has been brilliant at it because what it’s doing is preventing anybody from having time to stop and say ‘I don’t want this, this isn’t what I want. I’m so tired!’ I see so many of our decision makers literally so absolutely fatigued and stressed that the thought of having a new idea is too much.
Robert Stilger: It seems to me there’s a couple of things going on that maybe open up some areas of hope. One is that I think that there are more people who have succeeded within the typical work environment, who are starting to say ‘Is this really what I want? Do I really want to be continuing to spend this many hours working to earn money to buy stuff, or do I want to begin finding some other alternatives in my life?’ And are starting to have those dialogues with more employers. And employers are starting to say, ‘Hey, if I want to have the kind of quality work that you can do, there are some ways in which I’m willing to bargain here, and let’s look at how you can take more time off or you can go to three-quarter time, or whatever else, and to make that trade-off of getting more time into your life and giving up some of the money in your life.
So that’s one thing that’s going on. Another thing that’s going on is that in some of the conversations that I have with people who are in their late teens or early 20s; we have that colleague of ours who talks about how things are getting better and better and worse and worse faster and faster, and so I think within all of these there’s people that are going in exactly opposite directions. So I think you’ve got some people in that 18, 19, 20, 21 year old age group who really do believe they’re going to get out there and they’re going to make a bunch of money and they’re going to have a successful job and a successful career. But there’s also a growing number of people who are saying ‘Wait a minute, is that really what I want? Look at what that did to my parents. Look at what that did to people that are 20 and 30 years older than me. I’m not sure that I want that kind of lifestyle.’ So people are looking at ‘What do I need to do to get by? What kind of part-time jobs (and incidentally that’s the only kind that are available for most people in that age group) can I piece together to give me enough income to do what I want to do so that I can work with other parts of my life. Now I’m not going to say there’s a trend in that direction but I think more people are starting to explore that question, and I personally believe that it’s only as people begin to explore that question, create some of that non-stress time reserve within their life, where they’re able to start concentrating on what they want to do at family level, or a community level, that we really start to see change, because any other kinds of changes that we’re talking about in families, or in communities, are going to happen because one individual at a time says ‘This is something that I need to do. This is a vision I have. This is something that I’m willing to work with. This is a direction that I’m willing to move in, and I’m willing to provide some leadership to my family, to my neighbourhood, to whatever else, to get going in that direction.
Robert Theobold: Well I’m delighted you’ve shifted to hope, because I think it’s really important that the last part of this program is about what’s going on. And I think what we both believe is that there’s far more happening in positive ways than we see. And the reason it’s not very visible is that again it doesn’t fit the images that our dominant communicators get. I mean it’s not what the academics and the media and the politicians talk about seeing etc. And I was reflecting on the fact that I remember talking to one of the great accounting firms in New Orleans who was bitterly bemoaning the fact that they were getting to the point where the people who used to be driven would be called up and said ‘Well you’ve got to work over this weekend’ and they say, ‘No’. And they’re finding out that that is sufficiently common, that they can’t afford to say ‘Well that’s the way the game gets played.’ They have to start saying, ‘OK you don’t want to work this weekend, you don’t work this weekend.’ And I think that actually the trend around young people has gone further than perhaps any of us recognise, that more and more people are putting together what’s called a portfolio career where people work some of the time, they work harder when they feel they need to, they work less when they feel they need to. And some young people find it incredibly stressful and other ones find it just wonderful. And they don’t want the 40-hour job, and the narrow commitment and that is, ‘You come to work’ etc. etc.
But another thing I see happening is people redefining family. We used to talk about family as blood and marriage relationships and that was the only sort of family that you conceptualised. And yet I see people creating all sorts of new families just because of commitment, and I’m really intrigued with defining family as any small group of people who really commit to each other. Now it’s got to be a small group because you can only deal with so many people because with family you’ve got to drop everything. If somebody has a crisis and you have to say ‘OK that’s more important than my work, that’s more important than anything else. I’ve got to deal with that.’ You can’t do that with a lot of people.
But I see more and more that happening, people saying ‘Yes you’re not related, you’re not married to me, but we have created a strong enough linking between us that this is family. This is something where we mutually commit to each other.’ And so this loss we’ve had for so long where you’ve just had the parents and the kids sort of feeling isolated seems to me to also be beginning to be cured in our culture.
Robert Stilger: I think you’re right Robert, and part of that is given that we have gone to the nuclear family level, there just aren’t enough people around. There’s not enough people within a nuclear family to provide the kind of support that you’re talking about. There’s not enough redundancy. When something goes wrong, when somebody has a crisis you need more than one or two people to be able to respond. And at one level what you’re talking about is how do we recreate the extended family where people who are not bound by blood become the grandparents and the aunts and the uncles and the cousins and everything else.
Robert Theobold: And you see, this gets even more interesting when you start saying that a lot of families will not have kids in the future, will not be able to have kids if we’re going to have a viable universe. So we’re going to need those people to be aunts and uncles because they need to have kids around them. And so in a sense that’s another pressure towards how do you find that broadening experience in your life. I mean people need kids to keep them honest, is one way of putting it. But as you know I have to be grateful to you because you’ve been my family recently, particularly after my illness, and to watch how that integration takes place, particularly with a young woman of ten in the process, it’s fascinating to watch. But I think we’re all learning from that, just as we’re learning from a small group which also came out of my illness, which was a group of people which originally came together to talk about how to cope with my illness and has turned into something totally different where we have really started just spending two or three hours a week, or every two weeks, just listening to each other and deepening our capacity to be personal with each other.
And finally I think, two things: first, skills; but secondly at least for me, some extraordinary resonance with this level of conversation we’re doing today, that it’s a richer conversation not because we’re doing anything in that room for this conversation.
Robert Stilger: No, but because we’ve created the space for the conversation, because we’ve allowed it to come to life, and wherever it goes is where it needs to go. It doesn’t have to have a direction, but making the space for those kinds of conversations to occur seems to me what we need to be desperately struggling to do.
Robert Theobold: I think that’s right. But it’s another place where the two cultures clash dramatically.
Robert Stilger: Of course.
Robert Theobold: I remember when I was last in Australia, people were saying, ‘Well you can reduce Bob Theobold’s message to You ought to talk to each other, and I said ‘At one level yes, that sounds awfully trivial’.
Robert Stilger: It might be a good idea.
Robert Theobold: But in a sense I think that really is the core. But it is ‘talk with each other’, it’s to have conversation, it’s not to chat. And we are so unused to a conversation which gets any deeper than the total superficialities. Again this is a real flashback for me, but I remember somebody at lunch saying ‘When men used to get together, they used to talk about things that mattered, and the world has become so booby-trapped that now all they talk about is sports. Because you can’t talk about politics because you don’t know who’s going to get angry about it, and you can’t talk about religion, you can’t talk about –‘ And you know, the space has gone out of the world so we can talk about the things that matter to us.
The other thing that I see is this incredible gap between the elites who have one set of subjects which they think we ought to be talking about, and the subjects which I hear people being excited about which are very, very different. They want to deal with work, they want to deal with learning, they want to deal with family, they want to deal with community, they want to deal with health, and all of this discussion about how well the economy is going doesn’t really relate very well.
Robert Stilger: It feels like somebody’s trying to convince you or something?
Robert Theobold: I think it certainly feels like that to me, but I think it feels like that and I think more and more people realise that the only people who are really doing well are the top 1% or top 10% and everybody else is struggling.
Robert Stilger: Yes, just getting by. And both want to talk about how we try to create, how we try to open up that sort of space. And I want to recognise that at least as I look at where creative change comes from now. It comes from conversations that have occurred in those kinds of spaces where people say, ‘I want to do something. I have an idea. I have a vision. I have something that I have passion about, that I want to make happen.’ And it seems to me that change comes from that level rather than coming from the top level down. And I remember a conversation years ago when we talked about how if anyone had told us that Northwest Airlines would become the first airline to make money by having no smoking flights and become the leader in the industry that is all non smoking flights on national flights at least in this country, we probably would have said, ‘You’re nuts! Why would anybody want to do that? Why would anyone want to create that kind of restriction on themselves?’ But Northwest saw that it was a way that they could go that was going to work, that they thought was important, for whatever set of reasons, I don’t know. But that was how that change occurred. You talk about things like the environmental protection movement in this country. The environmental protection movement in this country didn’t start because government said ‘We have to protect the environment’, it started because large numbers of people said ‘We need to do something, and this is the first step that we’re going to take’.
Somehow that leads me to thinking of one of my most famous quotes in the world from Willis Harman, who many years ago said, ‘The world changes when large numbers of people change the way they think a little bit. It changes when large numbers of people change they way they think.’ So what we’re talking about here, and I think this applies directly to family and applies directly to communities, is we’re talking about how do we create the space that allows people to change the way they think a little bit.
Robert Theobold: Then there’s another piece in Spokane which is very exciting about this, because what has developed in Spokane which I think is fairly unique, is something called the Health Improvement Project, which probably is not the most specific way of talking about it, so we’ve got to explain it. But what the Health Improvement Project does is to say ‘If you have an idea, if you have something you want to accomplish, whether it’s going to be something that improves your block, or really almost your family, or the whole community, we will work with you to find the people, the resources, the tools, to make it happen.’ So that when people first change their thought which leads them to a new action, then they aren’t just left on their own to say, ‘Well I’ve got this neat idea, now how on earth do I go about it?’ which in that case usually ends up with ‘Well it’s too big for me, I can’t cope’, but they’ve literally got somewhere to go and say, ‘I’ve got this idea, will you work with me?’ and while obviously there’s limitations on how many can be done at a time etc etc, it is a very remarkably different way of organising a community. And it was called the Health Improvement Project for a very interesting reason, and that was that the hospitals where a lot of this started from said ‘If we can make people more self-propelled, have more self-esteem, we don’t believe that we will have as many medical problems’, and that’s another topic we’re going to get into later in these programs, the belief that health solves problems, that healing solves problems, that a healthy community is going to be a lot easier for everybody to run. And so that’s part of this whole flow of the discussion.
You see the other piece I think is that people are almost desperate for this opportunity for small-scale discussion. It’s just that it’s dropped out. We don’t have it really anywhere in the culture, the church doesn’t do it very much, service clubs don’t do it very much, and I sometimes play with the idea that we created service clubs at the end of the 19th century to look after people because the economic condition and social condition of people was so terrible. We almost need a new set of service clubs which say ‘It is our responsibility to get people talking to each other’ that that’s the core challenge of the current moment, and at least in my experience, while some of this is going on and more than we know again, and some of our email processes are showing this, it’s not seen as a movement yet, it’s not seen as something that people do. And I think part of it is we’ve got to get over wanting to run large meetings. There’s this tremendous tendency to want to bring 300 people together rather than saying that five or six or eight people are going to learn everything 300 people can and you’re going to have air time, and you’re going to learn from each other.
Robert Stilger: And I think too part of the difficulty is being able to keep in mind this idea that we have to work on two fronts at the same time. And it goes back to what I was starting to say much earlier in this discussion about working both with the problems and the with the symptoms. Let’s use your health example as one really good one. I’ve become totally convinced, especially over the last five or six months in working with you, that we absolutely have to begin moving in directions that are helping people with their own healing, helping people work in terms of their own energetic bodies, in terms of nutrition, in terms of lifestyle, in terms of personal vision, and that that’s where health comes from. It doesn’t come from our western medical model, but at the same time right now we’re totally dependent on that western medical model working well, as well. So we’ve got to do both: we’ve got to have the western medical model, our hospitals and our doctors and everything, working as well as they possibly can, at the same time as we promote healing.
Take it to other levels: we need to have our schools functioning as well as they can to educate, while at the same time we’re developing better ways to be co-learners with each other. We need to have folks that are able to give the best possible care to our children while their parents are working, while we’re learning to find ways of putting together these broader, more expansive, non blood related families that you’re talking about. And the list goes on and on. I think one of our most difficult challenges right now is we’ve got to be working at both of those levels doing the best job we possibly can simultaneously, and that both are incredibly important, and if we let either one lag behind, we’re in big trouble.
Robert Theobold: I think that’s fascinating because let’s take the health one for one minute: what I would like to do because of my cancer is to set up a system where when somebody comes in for the first time with cancer, you can give them the option of saying, ‘Look, we can take you through the medical model; we can have you listen to the doctor, the doctor tells you what you want to do. If you feel comfortable with that, that’s fine.’ A lot of people are still at that point: they don’t want to know about the cancer, it’s going to kill them. It’s literally going to kill them.
Robert Stilger: Absolutely. Right.
Robert Theobold: Because they can’t cope with the level of options which exist around cancer at the moment. But on the other hand we ought to do a much better job with the person who says ‘I will need to understand this in order to be able to cope with it.’ So it’s almost a door into the two levels, but actually we’ve reached a point (and this was not planned, you should all know) which really I think speaks to how we want all of these programs to end up. And that is to say that if you want, you can’t change things immediately, but you won’t change them at all unless you have an alternative vision of where you eventually want to go. So if we want families that are more based on passion and compassion and caring, that’s a different way of running the family then we’ve done it. If we want communities that are more personal… And then you say, ‘Well now we can judge which of the things that are being proposed to change our culture are moving us in the right direction rather than the wrong direction. So go back to the schools.’ Yes, clearly our schools need to change. But we clearly don’t have a vision of what we want our schools to be in the long run, so an awful lot of what’s going on in the schools at the moment (at least in my mind) is going in the wrong direction rather than the right one. Because we haven’t got a clear enough vision about what we want learning to be in our culture in the long run.
Robert Stilger: So instead what we often do in that whole arena is we play games with structures rather than concentrating on what it is that we want to learn and what our vision is for education and learning in a community. So we look at how to re-combine different universities rather than what our real learning goals are, as one example.
Robert Theobold: And this is where this one comes to an end. No closure, as we knew there wouldn’t be, but there is a question that I hope you will consider over the next week: Is there a need for family and community strategies to be focused around the needs of the individual, the family and the neighbourhood, rather than to be rule-based as it is at the current time? What positive steps do you know about which is happening around you, and how could you support what you find most appropriate and positive?