THE UNITED SELF

2 Aug 2022

If you want to know what we humans are really like - well I expect you know already - just look at some of those wildlife films on lions and hyenas.

They have no compassion or remorse, they take what they think they can get away with, the fight is over territory, food and mates, the dominant emotions are fear and greed.

And they have instinct, which is the accumulation and lessons learnt from the experience of survival over hundreds of thousands of years.

Here's how we adapted...

1. Introduction

- The video "Personality, Modernity, and the Storied Self" explores the evolution of self and identity in modern times.

- R.D. Laing's book written in 1960, The Divided Self, explores connection and alienation and, as I see it, how to write a good autobiography.

- Modern, especially in the West, includes capitalism, markets, democracy, nation-states, and the dominance of science and technology.

2. Characteristics of Modern Western Peoples

- Scepticism Towards Tradition: Preference for data-driven approaches over traditional religious or authoritative beliefs.

- Coherent Self: Challenges in maintaining a consistent sense of self across different times and contexts, particularly in diverse societies.

- Emphasis on Uniqueness: Balancing the desire to be unique with the need for connection.

3. Six Characteristics of the Modern Self

- Work in Progress: The self is viewed as an ongoing project, continually improving and adapting.

- Agency: Individuals now have the responsibility to define their own identities and roles, unlike pre-modern times.

- Multi-layered and Deep: Modern individuals juggle multiple, overlapping roles, leading to a complex self-discovery process.

- Self-Development: Lifelong process involving various phases and evolving roles, requiring continual self-adaptation.

- Coherence: Maintaining a coherent narrative across different life phases to construct a unified identity.

- Connection and Pure Relationship: Striving for authentic, self-actualising relationships that fulfill personal needs and desires.

4. Conclusion

- The modern self is a project of self-discovery, adaptation, and improvement.

- It involves seeking uniqueness, connectedness, and authenticity through various life stages and relationships.

Glossary of Terms:

- Modernity: The quality or condition of being modern, characterised by changes brought about by the industrial revolution and beyond - capitalism, markets, democracy, the nation-state, the dominance of Science and Technology - economics drives social, psychological and political changes (though currently we are in an inverted change curve where politics drives economics - a very strange time to be in where the elite is attempting to control populism at home and is trying to assert "world hegemony" abroad).

- Self-actualisation: To use Maslow's term, the final realisation or fulfillment of one's true talents and potentialities, a drive or need that emerges in everyone as more basic needs are fullfilled.

References:

1. "Personality, Modernity, and the Storied Self," YouTube, August 2022.

2. "Impact of Modernity on Identity," Sociological Review.

My notes

self and identity - a biography of our self - who we are - our identity

"personality, modernity and the storied self"

modern

modernity means modern times. Especially in the West ("The West" by this time in the 21st century includes many non Western countries like South Korea or Japan, according to the following framework...).

we have to make a difference between pre modern or pre-industrial times and times since the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries.

what makes our time "modern" is: capitalism, markets, democracy, the nation-state, the dominance of Science and Technology.

We must thank the Liberal Thinkers, classical and modern, for our ideas on Liberalism and propelling individualism. I'm going to summarise them here and write another piece at some point:

John Locke (1632-1704) on natural rights: life, liberty, and property. 

Adam Smith (1723-1790) on free markets and the invisible hand. 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) on popular sovereignty and the social contract. 

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) utilitarianism and individual liberty. 

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) for civil society and political liberty. 

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) negative and positive liberty, pluralism and individual choice.  

Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) free-market capitalism v. Socialism, warned against totalitarianism. 

John Rawls (1921-2002) justice as fairness.

These liberal values condition our self-development projects.

drivers

and we should look at social, political and economic changes as causing, driving, the changes to our idea of self, of who we are.

characteristics of peoples living in modern Western times

1. a scepticism towards religion and other traditional sources of authority and a preference instead for a data-driven approach based on science, reasoning, objectivity, evidence, positivism etc ... a belief that if we take an evidence-based approach this will lead to improvement in our world

2. difficulty in keeping a coherent sense of one's modern self across the past, present and future and across even yesterday compared to today or tomorrow. Sense of self -read "who we are", "identity".

also keeping up that coherence or integrity across the different roles and contexts and situations that we operate in. Transactional view of who we are - we are what we do.

it's especially challenging for people living in societies with a lot of diversity or to put it another way, a low homogeneity.

For example, societies with different ethnic and religious mixes.

3. there's also more emphasis on our uniqueness rather than on conformity with the tribe, group or herd, and this is challenging because at the same time as we seek to be different we also seek to remain connected.

Six characteristics of the modern self

1. work in progress. we are all a work in progress, we are a project we are working on, the "I" is forever improving a "Me". it can be thought of as a reflexive project reflexive because we are turned towards our self, we are changing our self.

this is modern because compare with pre modern times where a person was given a role or a position or a post and told to get on with it. they were not responsible for creating a unique self or innovating and updating a persona, there was little need, for most people at least, to think about the future or themselves

2. Agency. in pre-modern times it was the king, or the church or mosque or synagogue, or "the tribe", that assigned us a role; but today, we have to work out our own identity and roles in a more day-to-day context of family and work and friends - social media is just an endless series of launch pads, picket fences and ditches, to build and project an identity to friends and fellow professionals

3. multi-layered and deep. compare the simple role that Hindu people in Bali have and live by, compare that with the situation in which modern man or woman find themselves. A modern person has multiple roles and overlapping roles all depending on the group context and the person and so on and this complexity creates a challenge to even know who we are and is why many people are forever on a voyage of self-discovery and why self-help groups are so popular

so before it was the church or mosque that was a moral authority, before it was shame but nowadays it is guilt, in the absence of that moral authority, it is us, we ourselves, who decide our own beliefs and values and who judge our actions, finally who create and project our own identity and it is the search for this authentic identity that drives the projects to modernise ourselves

4. self development. we saw in the points above that the self is a project, for which we are responsible, and this project of ours is a voyage of self-discovery, adaption and improvement - a work in progress. now consider how this is a series of projects, across rhe phases of the longer life that we live - think especially about what this could mean now that we enjoy an extra 50% life expectancy in the form of a phase called retirement or the Third Age.

At the start of the 20th century, the average lifespan was maybe 50 years, but by the end it had reached 75 years and splits into different phases.

We go through different "economic" phases in that time span, we have evolving roles and contexts and thus projects with different objectives for our self, as we mature and develop.

5. Coherence. we go from childhood to adolescence to young adulthood to middle age to older age or maybe more phases than that (cf "the seven ages of man") and we have different roles and contexts to adapt to -  we look for a coherence across all those phases so that we have a story to tell, a narrative, which stitches everything together and brings us one coherent picture of who we are, what we are about that we can then tell others ("project"), taking care to cover the ego.

this coherent narrative is our auto-biography and it's really important, this sense of coherence across the different phases of our life, because it's how we construct our idea of who we are, in other words our identity, our sense of self... we are not, after all this, split personality schizophrenics!

6 connection and the "pure relationship". the 6th and final characteristic of modern selves is that two separate selves can connect to each other to form what we all look for, which is a pure or perfect relationship, in terms of connectedness, love and intimacy, the ying and the yang. The metaphor "two balls of clay brought together into one" encapsulates the essence of relationships, focus is on unity, transformation, and the blending of strengths. Understanding this metaphor can offer valuable insights into the dynamics of forming and sustaining meaningful relationships.

Modern love is not something dictated to us by our parents or arranged by the group or determined by the church or mosque, it is something we choose for ourselves in order to fulfil our deepest needs and desires that we have defined and which are part of our uniqueness.

the two persons, each true and authentic to themself, have a relationship which is honest and open and flexible and negotiable between the two of them. The focus is on both parties achieving what you might call self-actualisation or self-transcendence ( care not to confuse with wokeness). Of course, anyone who's been in a modern romantic relationship knows that this is a pure fiction! ... but nonetheless it is an ideal and a vision that an enlightened modern person can aim for.

Summary. we saw in the points above that the self is a project about constructing our sense of identity, who we are. We are responsible for this project. It is a voyage of self-discovery, adaption, improvement and projection - a work in progress seeking uniqueness, connectedness and authenticity. It is a series of projects, over the longer life that we live. Like ying and yang, we seek union with another complementary soul.

Footnote

"The Divided Self" by R.D. Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist. 

Laing argues that a lot of mental unhappiness (especially schizophrenia - his area of expertise) arises from a division between an individual's "false self" (the outward persona) and their "true self" (the inner, authentic identity).

The result is feelings of alienation and disconnection from oneself and others.

The way to deal with this is to try to understand "the personal experience and subjective reality of individuals". This takes some listening and empathy - he thinks psychiatrists are cold and dehumanising.

He sees everything as starting and finishing in the head, but it might be more realistic to see the effect of the outside world - social, political, economic and so on, on our inner world ...

...Whatever, his idea is to pull the different parts together into a coherent story that we ourself write, a kind of ideological view of our self, that joins up the parts and can be understood by us and by others. It's about connection v. alienation.

V1.3