Crafting Identity

Over the weekend, I met one of the most unusual individuals one could meet. Believe me- I’ve known some characters in the life. There was Robert, an American in China, who was slow-talking from a decade of English teaching, completely benevolent and dearly loved prostitutes. There was Elvin, a Welshman in Thailand, who could not read, but had inhuman cross-cultural charisma and pool skills. There was Christian, a Belgian in Morocco, who was a French legionnaire dying of cancer giving his last bits of wealth to the widows of his fallen comrades. There was Nikka, a Japanese rapper who was completely convinced that my meeting him was part of a Buddhist cycle of destiny. And there’s Shoffy in DC, who truly hates no one and has never lost touch with a friend.

I went with my sister to a party hosted by her friend, Stephanie. One could best describe this woman as an 85-year old grandmother in the body of a 33-year old. Her voice wavered up and down like a whooping crane and she puttered around her apartment like a panicked mother on Thanksgiving. She dressed like Judy Garland in a red polka-dot dress complete with a high-riding belt and a bow in her hair. We were offered cupcakes and tea with very fine rice-paper napkins.

Her apartment was consistent in theme and style. The sofa and table were antiques. The chairs, the fan, the frames, clock and the cabinet were all retro as if out of the twenties or thirties. Her coasters sported Shanghai flapper girls and even her cat was a long-haired Himalayan that fit perfectly with his surroundings.

It took me a while to put it all together, but I got. Stephanie had just finished her Ph.D. in women’s literature. Her lifestyle, her dress and her apartment were all post-feminist expressions. Rather than feminism being equated with an androgynous woman, her interpretation was a throwback to the very strong and very feminine woman of the twenties.

My sister said that it all reminded her of Nora Dinsmoor from Great Expectations. Loony and living in the past, she wore an old wedding dress and had her mummified husband in her bed. The weird thing about Dinsmoor is that she spent so much effort on preservation. Many elderly, through laziness or fatigue, quit paying attention to new trends and fall behind. To Dinsmoor’s extreme, though, one would need to put intense effort to keep it up.

I recall the beginning of college when people put a lot of effort into image. Eventually, the various styles faded into t-shirts and jeans. People couldn’t be bothered to work so hard on their identity. It’s that or people conclude that identity cannot be faked.

Still, Stephanie is not alone in her lingering desire to craft identity. Many of may feel we should read the Post more and watch TV less. We may want to get into opera or jazz music, but just can’t seem to actually like it. We are pretentious and hope that if we practice being something long enough that we will eventually be it.

Code

Socrates believed in an unchanging universal good that people found through truth. His belief in absolutes led to stubbornness and he essentially allowed himself to be executed rather than go against his beliefs. Socrates is lionized as a man of conviction and much of western society would probably claim to agree with his beliefs.

Paradoxically, while claiming to be a master of logic, Socrates was more a master of rhetoric (and, yes, when we say Socrates, we really mean Plato). In a very sophist manner, Socrates was able to make people contradict themselves in order to destroy their arguments and assumptions. Of course, the dialogs in which Plato is part of are comically staged. Socrates’ opponents constantly say things like “certainly,” “precisely,” and “true.” Ironically, it is their belief in absolutes that allows Socrates to make connections that eventually contradicts.

In the real world, morality, goodness and truth are messy. They exist in the relative and universal simultaneously. They exist in the theoretic and the practical. For this reason, we mistrust the legal system for its casuistry, yet a simultaneously, we dislike inequity.

Morality is affected by all sorts of complicating factors. For instance, opportunity is a huge part of morality. A man may believe he would never cheat on their wife, but if Angelina Jolie actually came over and attempted to seduce him, he may act differently. Luck affects things. People drive home drunk all the time, but if a child jumps out in the street and is hit, the driver suffers a very different consequence.

In the end, it is impossible to live by a set universal code. Instead, our codes are personal, dynamic, relative and ever-changing. They are living and changing things that allow us to deal with a living and changing universe. Being a good person is difficult because not just because people may disagree with you or because you may harm yourself. Being a good person is difficult because it is mentally exhausting figuring out the right thing to do.

Me and Galileo

Galileo was the first to put forward the theory of relativity. He believed that there were infinite frames of reference, but within each reference, Newtonian laws applied equally and, in all frames of reference, time was universal. Galileo was in fact wrong. Newtonian laws sometimes do not equally apply and time is not universal. Things get all mucked up with special relativity and quantum mechanics. Oh well. Though Galileo was wrong, in every day life, he appears to be right. For nearly all motion and observance of time in our lives, Galileo is good enough.

Galileo’s ideas are seductive and people try to even pull them into our social world. We discuss and we argue in order to bring people around to our “perspective.” If someone disagrees, we assume that they are simply in a different frame of reference. If we bring them to our frame, they too will see the logic that we see. We assume that all people with the same information will come to the same conclusions.

After an hour of late night arguing with a friend about Reagan (I dislike the Gipper in case you didn’t know) and exhaustive attempts to find a common frame of reference, we finally realized it was far too late and quit. Time was universal in this case. Still, morning Dilettante was very angry at evening Dilettante. They have very different perspectives on time.

The social world is different from the Newtonian physical world in that we are not separate frames of reference. Who we are is dependent on who we are around. What we believe is dependent on what others believe. What we say is based on what others understand.

We are also creatures who grow and change. Ideas that we scoffed at earlier in life seem more rational later while others ideas grow to become impractical. Emotions dealing with our family, friends and mortality cloud every thought we have. They warp the truth like high-speed travel.

Additionally, we have subconscious minds that cause us to live with dualities. We have love-hate relationships and we want what we cannot have. We are scared and influenced by events we sometimes do not even remember and remember some events better than others for no logical reason. Like Schrodinger’s cat, ideas seem to exist and not exist in our mind simultaneously.

For our social lives, we must remember that Galileo is not good enough. In order to understand the social world, we need to grasp these other factors. Of course, to completely do this is impossible, even for an Einstein.

Loving Subjects

Recently, I came across someone asking, “why do kids love dinosaurs?” www.philosophersplayground.blogspot.com

Of course, questions dripping with presupposition anger me. Do kids really love dinosaurs? I am sure plenty of kids have no interest in them. Also, lots of adults have interest in dinosaurs as well. Is the percentage of adults lower than kids? What are the data? Kids have interest in sports, robots, guns, fire, TV, dolls, video games, horses, knights, cowboys, Legos, the military, space ships, planes, bikes, pirates, aliens, pools, tree houses, throwing rocks, whipping sticks through the air and million other things. Where in the ranking do dinosaurs make it? Are kids really choosing to be interested in dinosaurs or do school, toy companies and entertainment push it on them? Do kids really love them or do we just perceive that they like them because we gave them a bunch of toys and took them to the museum? Is it more pleasant to think about children’s love for dinosaurs versus their love of Indian burns?

In my opinion, a more abstract question must be asked first. Why do people love subjects? We like things that are interesting and our interests define what we like. It is circular reasoning at its purest. It’s equivalent to Beavis and Butthead’s claim that they “like stuff that rules.”

Interest in a subject, at its root, seems to be more about avoiding boredom. Boredom comes from tedium and from non-recognition. Cognitive psychologists commonly do experiments with babies involving their attention span. Say, you want to know when a baby can separate the sound “ta” from “da”. One starts by repeating “ta”. At first, the baby is interested and then it bores and looks away. Now, one says “da.” If the baby regains interest, one knows the baby can recognize the new sound. If the baby remains bored, one know she cannot recognize the new sound.

One can do this same experiment with adult human beings. Repeat the same information over and over again and they will get bored. Enter new familiar information and they will be interested. Enter information that they cannot recognize (it is unrelated to their lives) and they will be bored.

Why do people love subjects? Because they have some knowledge of it and have the ability to absorb new information on it. In a pursuit of not being bored, their knowledge of something grows and grows by adding new familiar information. A schema in their mind grows like a snowball rolling downhill. The most boring things are things we know everything about and nothing about; merely “something” gives rise to fascination.

Why do kids love dinosaurs? If a kid does love a dinosaur, it can be assumed that someone introduced dinosaurs to him or her and allowed him to pursue knowledge on them. This first introduced knowledge allowed future knowledge to be unboring, making more and more dinosaur knowledge unboring.

In this question of chicken and egg, though, one must assume that society placed it on the child, in way or another, and not the other way around. Kids don’t love dinosaurs from nothing and people don’t love subjects from nothing. Society makes them interested by introducing a seed of knowledge in the first place.

Atlas

In the war between the Olympian gods and the Othryan titans, Atlas was on the losing side. He was punished by having to hold up the sky at the western edge of the world. He has been holding it up continuously ever since (save a couple minutes when Heracles held it). Now, we are supposed to feel pretty bad for poor Atlas, who we imagine must be in a lot of pain. Few consider that Atlas is probably used to it and not in much pain at all.

Every day, our minds also bear a massive amount of “weight.” It does not seem like it, but the stress of all our motor functions, our linguistic centers and our emotions is enormous. It takes a year for children to figure out how to use their legs and arms properly. It then takes a couple years for them to figure out language. It then takes them another decade or two to get a grip on emotions.

Piece of cake? Hardly. It takes a third of our day through sleep to rest and recover for a sixteen-hour stint of self-management. Introduce a small amount of alcohol or fatigue and our motor functions, language and emotional containment begin to slide. Now, imagine what people who go through strokes or aphasia deal with. With that much fatigue, it is no wonder they completely lose the ability to contain any part of themselves.

This containment is so routine that we forget it is there. We do not image ourselves struggling to walk, talk and stay logical. We have the audacity to assume that our moments of clarity and alertness are the steady state. When we stumble, it is a “breakdown” or we claim we are “not ourselves.” In truth, a staggering, slurring and raving mad individual is who we are all naturally. Through focused work, we suppress our true selves.

After years of doing it, we have become unaware at what a Herculean task it is. In fact, it is more than Herculean; it is Atlasian

Understanding, Observation and Empathy

Humans only truly understand themselves and their experiences. Everything else is an extrapolation. Say one is walking down the street and one sees a man hit on the head with a brick. One imagines that it hurts. How does one know? Well, one has been hit with similar objects to that brick in the past and that hurt. One also assumes that other people are similar to themselves. Other people walk, speak and react and the individual walks, speaks and reacts. Empathy is established. So much so in fact that one cringes when they see others in pain.

In addition to empathy, we have objective observation. In the past, one has seen that when other individuals are hit with objects, they express pain. This fact is confirmed in discussions with other people, books and movies. Even if one had never experienced pain in their life and is unable to empathize with others, a minimally observant person would still know that a brick on the head causes pain much in the same way we know a hole in the head causes death.

Empathy and observation guide us constantly, but each has a weakness. Observation is limited in that one can only judge situations that they have seen before. Empathy can handle new experiences, but people are often unlike us and empathy can create a misunderstanding of a situation. The Golden Rule only goes so far. When people are unlike what one has seen before and unlike oneself, there is true confusion.

Observation is perhaps more useful in our daily humdrum lives. With our vocation, we have a way we would like to do work, but there is an appropriate way to handle oneself in the professional environment that is only learned through observation. In relationships, we often feel one way about how the interaction should be, but only through observation do we understand that it is not appropriate. Our likes and dislikes do not necessarily apply to others and the only way to discover this is to observe the world (trial and error, someone telling you, observing other people’s interactions). One may like to put projects off, but one needs to understand that others do not. One may like to play video games rather than talk, but one needs to understand that others do not.

Observation covers for empathy’s failures, but empathy also covers for observation’s failures. Observation creates stereotypes, stagnation and an impersonal environment. New life can be infused in a situation by violating tradition and speaking with candor. Of course, this attempt at empathy can also lead to disaster.

But this is the fundamental gamble one makes any time they reveal their true self. By going with the status quo that one observes, one will produce a stable and mildly successful outcome. By switching to empathy, one will either make a true connection and really understand something or one will produce alienation