Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      This was the nub of the fear they were feeling. They were a group of professional people and therefore useless if left to fend for themselves in this bush full of dangerous animals. They needed a fantasy to assure themselves that, if abandoned by the ranger, they could survive.

      Their fear was not just about abandonment in this alien place. It also had to do with the hierarchies in the group. In the conversations amongst the tourists not just on the drives but over meals there was constant jockeying for position. Evidence of position, power and wealth was cunningly presented by being implied not just in their statements about their nationality and work but also in the extensiveness of their travels. ‘When we were in Botswana’ could be topped by ‘We much preferred Namibia to Botswana’. Such conversations were not merely to improve one’s position in the hierarchy. Along with the conversations about cameras and computers the conversations were aimed at showing that the person speaking was knowledgeable and in control.

      The rangers were well aware of this. One of them told me, ‘The South Africans are the worst. They always want to make out that they know more than the ranger.’ A hierarchy might be established over dinner with, say, a captain of industry or a judge claiming superiority, but such a hierarchy would be thrown into doubt the next morning, when the ranger became the leader on whom the tourists’ lives depended. This was a particular problem for some of the people in the group which I had joined. They did not like being dependent on a twenty-two-year-old, no matter how skilled and conscientious he was, and one of them at least made sure that before he departed he had patronized our ranger and reasserted his authority to his satisfaction, even though it meant being offensive to his hosts. This man had built his identity – his meaning structure – on being a powerful leader. No matter what the reality of the situation was, he could not cope with feeling helpless and dependent.

      At the game park tourists came and went every two or three days so the groups and the hierarchies existed only briefly. At the Skyros Centre twelve of us had committed ourselves to being together for two weeks, so forming a group and sorting out hierarchies and allegiances was tremendously important. None of us had ever met before so it was very much a matter of stepping into the unknown.

      When Janna was a university student she had recognized that she had anxieties in joining a group. Like most extraverts she had feared that, as she saw alliances being made, she would be left out completely. She said, ‘Everybody else might come together and I’ll be the one on their own.’ However, she discovered that ‘Things do shake down and you find yourself with the kind of person you want to be with.’ Years later, at work or when she went on retreats, she realized that this was always the case. She knew that out of that amorphous crowd of people one or two would emerge with whom she would connect straight away. When she met a number of people for the first time they had for her a certain ‘feeling tone’ which grouped certain people together, and then out of these groups individuals emerged. At Skyros someone who stood out immediately became a close friend. Janna told me, ‘Sandra and I connected up early on. We laughed a lot together, so that’s a good start. And she had interesting things to say. So it’s a take on the world. That’s what I’m looking for, I suppose, an interesting take on the world, which is maybe complementary or different to mine.’

      Understanding how we operate in groups is not easy. Robin Dunbar, in his book about language and gossip, commented, ‘It’s now clear that understanding the social world is a far more difficult task for children to master than understanding the physical world.’¹ Adults have the same problem. It is much easier to understand the physical world than the social world because we can separate ourselves from the physical world and observe its behaviour. In the social world we might like to think that we can separate ourselves from other people and observe their behaviour but there is one crucial difference. When I observe the workings of an internal combustion engine that engine is not observing me and forming ideas about me. When I run a workshop and observe the behaviour of the participants they are busy observing me and one another, forming interpretations and adjusting their behaviour accordingly. We do not just interpret one another’s behaviour, we interpret one another’s interpretations, and so on.

      My workshop which Janna had joined was about how we make sense of the social world, but, of course, while I was trying to give the participants some tools for understanding their social world, their actual social worlds were evolving and changing. Each of us entered that workshop at a certain point in our life story. Initially each of us was drawn to the people whose life story had some features similar to our own, what Janna called ‘a take on the world’, but this disparate collection of people turned into a group because they listened to each other’s stories and saw similarities and contrasts with their own story. With this the group gelled. Once this had happened no one left the group and no outsider was allowed to join. We knew that the group would fragment at the end of the fortnight, but while we were at Skyros we stuck together and enjoyed the security of the group.

      We like to think that belonging to a particular group will give us a sense of security, but groups, like everything else in the universe, are changing all the time. A group of friends have life stories which overlap and intertwine, but as time passes the stories change, both in their present circumstances and in their expectations. Then the group might not survive. A television documentary on BBC2 called Modern Times: Friends² captured some of the tensions in a group of friends who, as thirtysomethings, led a very enjoyable social life. Now the threat and the promise of marriage loomed. One man said, ‘It’s difficult for men. The pressure is on for men to stay a player for as long as possible. There used to be pressure to marry and settle down. Now the pressure is to stay a player.’

      Another man said that his friends are ‘a big cushion behind you all the time. If you fail yourself you’ve got these friends to back you up.’

      One woman said of her boyfriend, ‘He uses the group of friends as a marker. That’s made it difficult for me to move on in our relationship as I would like.’

      The men showed a great need to hang on to their youth. They were unable to decide whether this period of their life was over and that they must move on. The women knew it was time to move on. They were strong and wanted children, and they could, and probably would, inveigle the men into getting married and settling down, but if they did this they were likely to be dissatisfied because their man had not made the decision to change himself but had merely drifted, tugged along by her. He had shown himself, in the last analysis, to be weak, indecisive, childish, and in time she might come to despise him.

      How easily a man goes from being ‘a player’ to being ‘a married man’ depends on how he defines ‘a player’ and ‘a married man’. Does he define ‘a player’ as ‘what a man should always be’ or as ‘a good experience, but something you have to grow out of?

      How we define our groups determines what we do in them.

Defining Yourself and Your Group

      To know something we have to know its opposite. To define something we have to define what is not that something. Thus we define our groups in terms of those who are excluded from them. The group ‘golfers’ is defined by those who do not play golf. If everybody played golf we would not need a group called ‘golfers’. We do not talk about ‘breathers’ because everybody who is alive breathes but we do talk about ‘drivers’ because not everyone drives a car. When asked to define Britain the film-maker Terry Jones said, ‘We are set apart as Britons by our lack of French-ness, German-ness or Italian-ness.’³

      No doubt, if asked to list the groups to which we belong, each of us СКАЧАТЬ