One of the things that can be difficult in modern life is figuring out the place of individuality and self identity. By that, I mean that the perennial questions about the meaning of life have not gone away, but some of the social structures that have helped earlier generations answer those questions–albeit imperfectly–have not necessarily diminished in importance, but they are found in an increasingly complex social space. Whereas before the Internet and cell phones existed, folks could get global media in the form of radio and TV or even newspapers to some extent, this generation is the first for which active interaction in global media occurs. In other words, rather than having the majority just passively watch TV or turn on a radio, we actively send emails to “pen pals” in Singapore or wherever we like. You also have major global phenomena organized through the Internet. An absolutely wonderful example is the woman who organized the NO MORE MINES treaty against widespread opposition from major world powers.
We see this difficulty mirrored at a wider level in what businesspeople have spoken of as a crisis in leadership and what the 9/11 report called “lack of imagination” in our political leaders. Basically, it comes down to the fact that when we do not have a diverse-yet-integrated self identity, we get confused about how to act and feel about ourselves. That’s natural, we’re social animals, and our emotions help regulate social interactions, so when we feel out of touch with the people around us, we feel weird about ourselves. When we feel weird about ourselves or confused, it’s natural to seek social support–and this can lead to coordination, connection, getting our bearings, feeling more certain, etc.
A simple way to understand what is happening at this time and what to do about it is to consider self identity as involving four “collections”. These are four collections of various characteristics, influences, and processes. I’ll explain. The first collection involves genetic endowment including temperament. In the nature versus nurture debate, the first collection represents nature. The second collection involves what most people think of, then, as the nurture side of this historical debate. This collection is comprised of early family influences such as attachment processes and habits, languages learned early on, cultural identification, etc. When people think of identifying themselves as workers within a single professional career, this is part of the second collection as well. My dad was a high school teacher and my mom was a nurse, for example, but I doubt I will ever have a single job that I identify with. Of course, just as we will never evolve beyond a certain amount of genetic influence (although technology will eventually change just how much genetics affect us), even if the trend in the labor market is away from single lifelong careers, lifelong careerists in certain positions will still be very influential. Everyone is familiar with these first two “collections”, and our society, education, culture, and assumptions in communicating with one another already include these first two. National identity is also part of the second collection.
At this point in history, we’re struggling with the third level or collection like never before due to the effects of globalization, cultural exchange, and technologization. The third collection involves how we identify ourselves as globally interactive human beings. Now, people have always been human, and they’ve always had a certain cumulative worldwide effect ecologically; but, people have never before on such a widespread scale faced the pressures to understand how they, as individuals, act on the world stage. We’re asking ourselves directly now not just about how to manage local forests and farmlands but also about how my personal choices affect people in other countries, economic growth, national interactions (what is my role as an American citizen in the relationship between the USA and Iraq?), Brazilian rainforests, the worldwide population of fish, the ozone layer, etc. Until now, people have often not needed to feel global change as global change, so the earlier generation in relatively stable settings felt the changes in the world through younger generations, as generational difference. Younger generations felt this as the tension between pressures they felt which the older generations did not address or address adequately.
It is helpful to recognize that our societies and cultural customs are geared around the first two collectivities. In other words, my parents are not all that clear on how to guide me as a global citizen. That’s okay; their parents didn’t teach them either, but we will learn together whether we learn well or not. Traditional universal education as we know it–reading, writing, and arithmetic–are geared to industrialized national educations, not towards technologized international students and citizens. As companies come under more direct pressure from global competition, they find their managers under-educated for this new sort of environment. Parents find themselves often uncertain about how to moderate the effects rapacious advertising (which was not much of a problem just one hundred years ago) and exposure to all sorts of information. And while our political leaders may have more support and better access to information than the rest of us, they have still been socialized by traditional influences. That’s not necessarily bad, but it may lead to frustration with being told to imagine better. If we imagine traditional solutions to current problems, the solutions will probably not look like progressive leadership whether we are speaking of family situations, business contexts, or politics. We will do better to envision progress if we include awareness that we need to grow, as individuals and societies, into an understanding of this third collection.
The fourth collection of influences has always been addressed, and because this is in some ways the most advanced collection, its affect on how individuals integrate these collections can obfuscate the importance of the third collection. The fourth collection of influences involves a sense of eternity, divinity, reverence, wonder, etc. When people are not exposed to many cultural influences, their family of origin, first language, and where they’re born orient them to spirituality. They might reject any of these local influences, but these local influences offer the idioms or the conceptual-emotional “shapes” that they will originally use to develop a personal sense of spirituality. Things are different in a globally interactive culture where various languages and cultural influences are easily available. Globally interactive media do not diminish the influence that early local influences have, but they affect how convincing and deterministic those early local influences are.
The reason I’ve ordered these collections this way is because this is how we experience them developmentally. Our actions of psyches, our self identity and experience of self, are most basically affected by genetics (if we do not have the basic physical integrity to survive gestation and birth, nothing else will matter), secondarily influenced by caregivers (whose emotional and attentional input will be directly affected by their place in society, degree of affluence, status, education, language, local culture, etc.), thirdly by global circumstances, and lastly by how we develop into personal actualization and possibly spirituality. I personally have little interest in supporting any particularist religion but I am glad that religions have been bastions of personal potential. The fact that they have often been repressive is simply par for the course, and I think that can improve.
I’m poking at the idea that globalization is in some ways new, but at the same time, we are adjusting to universal influences that have always been around–if not in these current forms. Another way of saying this is: 1st, physics, chemistry, and biology have always affected people; 2nd, family and neighbors, local society and language, local economy and education have always affected people; 3rd, global changes like vast empires and ecological room for population expansion have always affected people; and 4th, God or spirituality or meaning by whatever names have always affected people.
Most traditional forms of social organization and social institutions are geared for dealing with the first two sets of influences, but technology exposes world citizens at this point to global changes directly as individuals moreso than has been recognized earlier in history. And while many people have focused on technology and cultural exchange, there is another factor that is at least s influential as technological progress: population size and density. When the human population was not large enough to cover the earth, people would work within different assumptions, and when the populations were not so dense as to devastate a wider ecological diversity, we could also work under different assumptions. So we are currently working on how to shape our societies and global interactions in such a way as to line up with a sense of personal happiness, the cultural values we were raised with and which we innovate, and whatever sense of greater meaning or spirituality we support. We have never had such personal pressure on us to be aware of the global affects of personal actions. Up until about a decade ago, traditional institutions pretty much sheltered people from needing to understand global changes.
There are two things we can count on. The first is that these four collections are not new and we do not need to create totally new ways of doing most day-to-day things we do. We still (1) eat, drink, and shit; we still (2) want friendly neighbors and a decent place to live; and we still (4) want to act ethically and live well. We don’t need to totally change most of our social institutions and customs. We can rely heavily on the past. But we have to take into consideration the second thing we can, and eventually must, count on. The second factor is that greater degrees of integration in self identity allow for greater resilience.
It seems to me that people feel pressured too much to choose between traditional sorts of conservatism or uncertain sorts of liberal progression. I think that’s a false choice, but it worries a lot of people. That’s why it’s important to realize that we can rely on our histories and what previous generations have done for us. But if we allow looking to the past for support to legislate traditional conservatism, we will not likely feel that we are making progress as a whole. Integration is important. When people feel fragmented, they get edgy and start making poor decisions. When we try to apply a 4th level solution to a 2nd level problem, we’re bound to miss the mark to some degree. When that happens, you get situations like someone spending time meditating when they really need to change the way they speak to their spouse or neighbor or kids. The meditation may bring a reasonable sense of peace, but this individual will go on to keep creating social fragmentation–which, if this person reacts habitually to this continued fragmentation, will likely push them to meditate harder and remain judgmental or avoidant of the people they need to interact well with.
The only thing that is somewhat new in this essay is that, if we cannot see the third level as unique and somewhat separate from the second and fourth levels, we continue to make mistakes about what we see as solutions when we see problems. When the solutions we suggest do not fit the level of the problems–and some problems are on many levels–we cannot solve the problems. When this happens, our leaders seem to lack “imagination” or clear direction forward. We get into ridiculous spirals of trying to justify techniques that cannot possibly solve the problems they are meant to. Or we try harder to force a 4th level peg into a 2nd level hole (or some version or mismatching proposed solutions with problems). This mismatching happens with individuals and with groups.
It is helpful to recognize the third level as unique and important, as something we need to actually think about and work on, and it seems most effective to have solutions which correspond to the problems they are meant to solve. Ignoring how this third level is directly affecting individuals right now makes it impossible to recognize third level problems and then develop third level solutions. When people feel that they are acting in accordance with their own basic drives, their immediate social groups, their humanity, and their sense of potential or divinity, they thrive psychologically. When people do not thrive, they depress or agitate and all sorts of mistranslations result. When we are not willing to account for each level of interaction, we make it impossible to understand what we’re doing within ourselves and with one another. When our actions do not accord, we feel conflicted and create conflict.
Children can basically be encouraged or forced by their parents, peers, and teachers to learn to mediate their basic impulses and go through the difficulty of sharing things and learning language. In the same way that we “raise” our children, we need to “raise” ourselves and our social institutions to integrate with this third level of influences. To overcome traditionalist rejections of that process, we will need to rely on that drive towards divinity, reverence, and wonder. But, to the extent that religious institutions are 2nd level social institutions rather than bastions of spirituality (think of the difference between the Roman Catholic Church as a political player in medieval Europe versus that same church as the bastion of Christian morality and spirituality), to the degree that their second level place in social power relationships trumps their emphasis on morality, they will place themselves as an obstacle to personal and social integration. To the extent that 2nd level institutions–families to schools to nations–reject the third level influences that diversify our societies, complicate our economies, and expand individual potential within almost every society, they will be experienced by individuals as obstacles to either world peace, ecological diversity, or personal inspiration. We will choose to raise up or we will inevitably break down. I don’t feel weird or confused about my place as a global citizen, but it’s taken some work to get myself here.
Copyright 2007 Todd Mertz