Two
of the basic ways that people can identify themselves are by who they are and
by what they do. Who they are assumes
that a person is not so fragmented, so pulled in different directions that he
lacks an essence, a coherent sense of self.
It deals with what a person is when he is still and temporarily free
from activity. It includes his lasting
relationships with other people. Such a
state of being is hard to come by in a modern technological society where the
tempo of activity and the shifting of relationships seems to continually
accelerate. Perhaps this is why people
today increasingly identify themselves and others by what they do, by what they
are like when they are in motion, in activities. People feel a need to keep doing things in
order to block out all the activity that surrounds them, activity over which
they feel no control, and replace it with the stimulation of their own activity
over which they do feel control. People
today frequently adopt a posture of what has been called in this column
conative acceleration – a speeding up of the will – in order to keep moving
forward in spite of the stimulation generated from all the activity around
them.
But
there are consequences from all this preoccupation that people have today with
what they do rather than who they are.
Not focusing on who they are means leaving out of both their
self-assessment and their assessment of others a very important aspect of
identity.
People
move around quickly today in the vacuum and tension-pocket environment that has
been created by all the complex technology in modern living environments. These modern machines exist in order to
facilitate the flow of modern life activities.
These modern machines, particularly the consumer technology with which
people intimately interact on an ongoing basis, and the robots that are
projected as examples for the performance of an increasing number of work
activities, all become both mirrors and models for how humans behave. These machines and robots subtly influence
people to shift their bonds with other people to more instrumental
connections. The focus on the connection
is in terms of how a person functions. Does he do what he is supposed to do in
different situations? Can he be relied
on to fulfill his obligations?
And, of course, there
develops a similar focus on one’s connection to oneself. Rather than focusing on who we are when
thinking about ourselves, we focus on what we do. We increasingly look at ourselves as a series
of defined functions and activities rather than as a coherent sense of
self. As a result of this, the value by
which we judge ourselves is instrumental value.
We approve of ourselves if we are reliable in what we are supposed to
do. And we love ourselves primarily in a
conditional way, based on our success in our actions.
One problem with this approach is that it does not
provide a consistent flow of self-love and self-grounding. Success in performing functions and
activities leads to temporary spurts of self-love and self-grounding that then
dissipate and leave a person in a vacuum in terms of love and grounding. These periods of relatively pure vacuum are
periods when a person is vulnerable to a range of feelings from self-criticism
to self-doubt to self-hatred, as the person tries to pump up his will to be
successful at more tasks, so he can give himself more love and more
grounding. Or if a person despairs at
his capacity to be successful when he performs, he can fall into a lifeless
numbness. All of these vacuum emotional
states are causes for concern and can create enormous destructive stress. A person needs to balance out his self
conditional love and his appreciation for his instrumental value with self
unconditional love and his appreciation for his intrinsic value, in order to
give himself the strong emotional grounding that he needs.
Another problem is that
once a person defines himself too much by his functions and activities, he
fragments his sense of self. He loses
his core. He becomes subject to being pulled
apart psychologically by the forces of entropy that exist in an experiential
vacuum. He no longer has the quiet
comfort that comes from having a coherent sense of self.
A similar problem occurs
in the creation of connections based exclusively on conditional love and
instrumental value with respect to other people. There are spurts of both love and grounding
in these connections, but they don’t last.
And during the spaces between the spurts, a person feels alone in a
social vacuum, and he experiences the destructive entropic effects of this
intermittent isolation. There is no
sustained emotional connection, no sustained emotional grounding when
relationships are based entirely on contingent conditional love. If a relationship is to have deep meaningful
roots, there has to exist some sustained emotional continuity. And this means it can’t be built exclusively
on a valuation of a person’s efficacy in the execution of particular functions
and activities.
So both intrinsic values
and unconditional love need to be an important part of the equation of how
people identify themselves and others.
Who a person is is as important as what he does. There has to be balance between these two
orientations. Too much focus on who a
person is can be just as harmful to a person and to the people around him as
excessive focusing on what he does.
A person who bases his
assessment of himself and others exclusively on intrinsic value and
unconditional love, is a person who has no motivation to actively engage the
external world and form a meaningful life narrative. It is like the person lives in a womb-like
world with no sense of his mortality and no need to make and preserve organic imprints
and prepare for death with a surrogate immortality. More fundamentally with too strong a sense of
intrinsic value and unconditional love, a person feels no impelling need to
define himself properly in relation to others as a separate defined discrete
figure.
Most people up until
recently have lived in situations where there was a reasonable balance between
unconditional love and conditional love, between intrinsic value and
instrumental value, both in attitudes towards oneself as well as attitudes
towards others. In more traditional preliterate
societies where a person is very strongly identified according to a series of
community classifications like tribe, moiety, phratry, clan, extended family
and immediate family, he has a lot of grounding in his social world, a lot of
confidence that he has a very specific place in the wider social arena, a
strong sense of his intrinsic value as a result of his specific place, and a
strong sense of the unconditional love that both he feels towards himself and
that others in the community feel towards him.
The same is true for his attitudes towards the other people that
surround him in the community.
Now this unconditional
love and intrinsic value are balanced by the presence of conditional love and
instrumental value based on a person’s skills in the social role he is supposed
to perform in society. These skills can
be in areas as diverse as practical work skills, skills in the arts, skills as
a lover, and skills in the area of magic (although sorcery and witchcraft would
be frowned upon). And the moment that
measurable skills are present, at that moment there is going to be some
competition usually among people of the same sex and the same age with regard
to the demonstration of those skills. It
is within the competition among persons displaying skills that some of the more
meaningful personal organic imprints are made and preserved within the memories
of groups ranging from different social organizations to whole communities. The key is the collective memory, because
preliterate groups by definition do not have the means to write down
outstanding records or other outstanding events.
Among most of these groups, warfare also has provided a
meaningful method to obtain conditional admiration and a strong instrumental
value. And among some of these groups, there
have been grotesque tangible souvenirs that reinforce group memories such as
scalps, heads, and captured slaves. All
of these combat prizes are totally repulsive to us members of modern civilized
societies, but they have played a meaningful role in determining prestige in
some preliterate societies. At any rate,
these members of preliterate tribes are definitely people who have identified
themselves by both who they are and what they do, with probably a greater
emphasis over all on who they are, because of all the memberships in different
sub-groups in their tribes.
A different balance
between unconditional love and conditional love, between intrinsic value and
instrumental value was created in urbanized civilization. As people left their folk societies to seek
out opportunities in city centers, they left behind them the different layers
of support they had in their home group.
No longer did they have easy access to the tribes, the clans, the
villages, the communities that had helped to identify their place in the world,
to give them secure emotional attachments and secure opportunities for
work. In the new living environment,
people were relatively anonymous, free from many of the obligations that were present
in the larger traditional cohesive social groupings, but also free from the
support, from the grounding that came from those groups. Nevertheless, group life in the form of family
units was still present in these cities.
Often it was both extended and immediate family, and people definitely still
played a more important role as mirrors and models for other people,
particularly children, than did complex machines. But work moved more and more away from the
base of family and family contacts. And
people had to prove themselves and demonstrate their worth to strangers who
were hiring people for specific jobs. If
a worker didn’t do his job right, he was fired and wouldn’t have the money needed
so that he and his family could eat. Yes
there were still families and other social groups built around the church, the
synagogue and the local community. But
by necessity, conditional love and instrumental value began to play a more
dominant role in the way people identified both themselves and others.
The discussions of
preliterate traditional societies and urbanized civilizations here presented
were brought in to show two different configurations of intrinsic value and
instrumental value, of unconditional love and conditional love, both of which
configurations represented balances of these different qualities that allowed
people to maintain their humanity. In
both kinds of human groupings, people could give reasonably good answers to
both who they were and what they did.
Today, that is no longer the case.
As people focus more and more on their instrumentality and on giving and
receiving conditional love, both in regard to others as well as to themselves,
they become more and more like machines. As they focus on what they do to the exclusion
of who they are, they increasingly lose their core organic selves and become
like robots. People have to find a way
to get in touch with who they are again, if they don’t want to lose their
humanity.
(c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow
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