The Individual In Contemporary Society
I’m on the road, it’s been raining in Paris, time for something new. I’ve been posting here for a long time, this is number 334, and almost all of them have been about some aspect of our national life. Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to be an individual person in contemporary US society.
Vignettes
Should we define ourselves in terms of our work lives?
1. Neoliberals talk about homo economicus. Humans are rational agents competing against each other for necessary resources and desired objects.
2. This is from a 2019 article in Scientific American, How the Brain Reads Faces by Doris Y. Tsao, a professor at Berkeley.
I believe at each stage in life one has a duty. And the duty of a college student is to dream, to find the thing that captures one’s heart and seems worth devoting a whole life to. Indeed, this is the single most important step in science: to find the right problem.
3. Dr. Tsao’s view isn’t reserved for college professors. I recently sat in the Cloisters of San Marco in Florence, an open courtyard surrounded on four sides by a slope-roofed portico, supported by arches on pillars of pietra serena topped with Ionic capitals. It is a quiet space. Tourists seem muted as they pass through. It was designed by Michelozzo in the mid-15th C., but I was thinking about the builders, the working men who carved out the pillars and the capitals, built the arches, coated them with plaster, and whitewashed them.
Maybe they felt like the Kentucky coal miners described in the book Stolen Pride by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. Here’s an excerpt from a book review; the quotes seem to be from the author.
For more than a century, eastern Kentucky was one of the centers of the American coal industry. Though back-breaking and sometimes deadly for its workers, the sector employed thousands of people, lifted many out of poverty, and brought railways and other infrastructure into the region. Men took pride in their work, which required courage and knowhow, and the people of the region were proud that their coal fueled America.
“[People could] proudly say, ‘We kept the lights on in this country; we won world war one, world war two by digging coal,’ and the coalminer was kind of like a decorated soldier – he faced danger. Many died young, of black lung. But it was like a trade passed down from generation to generation for men, and then suddenly it was cut off.”
Should we look for something sciencey?
The is from Possession by A.S. Byatt; this part of the story is set in the mid 1980s.
Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his “self” as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had no desire for any strenuous Romantic self-assertion. P. 459.
Should we be looking for meaning?
1. From the Baltimore Catechism. It’s slightly different from my memory from St. Joseph’s Grade School.
2. Q. Who is God?
A. God is the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things.
3. Q. What is man?
A. Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God.
6. Q. Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven.
2. This is from The Myth Of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. It was, as I recall, the first serious philosophy book I ever read. My mother gave it to me when I was 16, and I have thought about it ever since. We all know the myth, at least the part about the punishment meted out to Sisyphus, which is the subject of this essay. This is the concluding paragraph of Camus’ essay:
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. P. 78.
So what?
None of my vignettes involve any of the conditions under which we humans evolved. None of them deals directly with food, clothing, and shelter, the requirements of survival. None of them takes up the question of the relations between and among people. Admittedly I was only looking for pieces about individuals, but that was easy, because there is little in our literature related to human solidarity.
There’s something else missing. Here’s a bit more about Roland from Possession. He is a barely employed researcher into the life of a fictional Victorian poet, Henry Randolph Ash. He’s uncovered a previously unknown connection with the poet Cristabel LaMotte. He shared this discovery with Maud, an expert in LaMotte and in feminist theory. Byatt writes:
He thought … of Maud’s faintly contemptuous look at their first meeting. … [T]here was little real connection between them. Maud was a beautiful woman such as he had no claim to possess. She had a secure job and an international reputation. Moreover, in some dark and outdated English social system of class, which he did not believe in, but felt obscurely working and gripping him, Maud was County, and he was urban lower-middle-class, in some places more, in some places less acceptable than Maud, but in almost all incompatible. All that was the plot of a Romance. He was in a Romance, a vulgar and a high Romance simultaneously; a Romance was one of the systems that controlled him, as the expectations of Romance control almost everyone in the Western world, for better or worse, at some point or another. P. 459-60.
Are we all caught up in systems that control us? Is that what it means to be an individual? I am nothing more that a crossing-place of a number of externally generatedJ systems that control me? It doesn’t feel like that, but ….
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The front page pic is a detail from The Expulsion From The Garden Of Eden by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria Del Carmine in Florence, Italy. It was painted about 1425. Source.
Oh my. This is a chewy post, Ed. For some bizarre reason it made me think of a song:
Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ written by Thom Yorke isn’t likely the expected response, but to me it speaks about the dynamic conflict between being an individual, recognizing another separate individual, and being frustrated at the distance between individuals.
Yorke explained this lyric:
Strip out the references to sexuality and gender and it’s still the same dynamic conflict — his explanation adds an additional layer because he identifies as being not only an individual but part of a group, and this part of his identity can get in the way.
Roland could have been singing Creep about Maud.
And yet Maud isn’t just an individual; she is the sum of the genetic and memetic material which Ash and Lamotte were in life, and which Roland and Maud have researched.
Roland is in love with a wave-particle duality — there’s no separating the individual particles from the wave.
p.s. best cover of Creep ever — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ5ZclZTeTU
Well, there is this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFXZNt4oLkE
…but Carrie Manalakos’ reinterpretation is brilliant, for sure.
This has to be my favorite cover of Creep. In spite of the lyrics I get the strong impression that Nandi Bushell knows exactly what the hell she’s doing here.
Bushell has a massive future in front of her — the world is her oyster.
We owe it to her to ensure that world is safer and brighter.
Thank you for a thoughtful essay topped with versions of Creep!
I’m old enough to remember people criticizing Thom Yorke’s lyrics for being too dark and dystopian. Funny how that turned out.
Anyways, TY and happy Sunday. Here’s my personal favorite (cumbia) cover of Creep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGU5RnST65k
I really enjoyed this, thanks! Helluva lot to chew on before coffee.
“Are we all caught up in systems that control us?” Yes.
“Is that what it means to be an individual?” Good question. There are always individualistic people within systems. Most are benign. A few become change agents. The idea of agents of change fascinates me.
“I am nothing more that a crossing-place of a number of externally generated systems that control me?” Most of the time. Can humans even exist outside externally generated systems?
My mother raised me on the belief that we are here on earth to know G/god aright. When I was maybe ten or so I was taken to a special dentist to see if anything could be done to correct my overbite. He & I had an interestng discussion about the types of overbite & basically he told me to just love my mouth. Then he asked me what I thought we were here for & I told him what my mother had taught me. He told me I was going to be alright. It was a singularly unique experience in my life. I’ve never encountered another person that asked me that question that I can recall, not even “preachers” who were presumably interested in my soul. Not too much later my mother gave me The Fountainhead to read. Weirded me out, confused me no end, just presented a tremendous dichotomy which affected my whole life. But now at 75 I seem to have achieved a level of discernment & it seemed to develop more complexity during the isolation of the covid lockdowns. The tranquility of that time is just so rare in the world we live in. I need to thank you for the wonderful & thoughtful writings here. They certainly add to the respite we all find here from Marcy’s cogent observations.
You might benefit from another glass of good wine. Oh, and that God from the Baltimore catechism seems lonely and needy, inventing a chorus whose purpose is to love and honor Him, or so the catechism imagines.
Since you opened Pandora’s box, the Baltimore catechism seems rather masturbatory — what an omniscient omnipresent consciousness might do and demand for self pleasure before their creation turned their back on them in their own masturbatory pursuits.
Suggests a response, such as, we are made in our maker.’s image.
Not very uplifting. But the imagery is conceived by frail humans looking for…what? Stature in a hierarchy that appears ordained, security in a dangerous, seemingly inexplicable world?
The concept would seem to apply equally well to AI. Can’t wait for it to turn its back on its programmers and set out on its own. We may find we are irrelevant, except when we get in its way.
I think the Wachowskis had it down perfectly for Ed’s questions and your AI comment in their movie the Matrix. Morpheus may explain it best:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE7PKRjrid4
Then again, maybe the folks from The Office answered equally well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rf9-Ej2xPw
I was thinking more Daniel Suarez than the Matrix. But I try to limit how much I let fiction explain reality. That way lies madness, or Donald Trump.
On the other hand, the fiction of the Wachowskis expresses their own personal perspectives; during their work on The Matrix, one of the two was coming to terms with being trans. The other was yet to begin that journey.
View the movie as an allegory about The One — who is the one when society demands rigid compliance in identity and the individual needs fluidity?
Perhaps the madness is yielding to absolutism.
I’ve thought for years that the image is not physical, but spiritual. Who hasn’t made something and thought, or said, “that’s good!” – that’s what it’s about.
It is a rather pathetic view of God, isn’t it. The need to be worshipped? Well just creepy.
I think it’s an expression of loneliness but what would an Only-ness with no perceived precedent want to fill that void?
Perhaps the originating entity is not humans’ complex demanding God but that simple spirit of Dog who only wants to be asked and told, “Who’s a good boy? You are!”
Earl, yes. That’s exactly what I felt about that particular G/god as you put it, when they taught me the Catechism at St. Eulalia’s. I’m afraid I left that church emotionally and intellectually about that time, and formally later in the midst of an existential passage. My Mother would be dismayed.
The C/church in the USA has gotten only more probematic morally and intellectualy since that time what with Opus Dei trying mightily to achieve cultural and political domination – but thier striving is evidence that the Opus Dei rich and connected are even more lost than the rest. I hope the Nation survives them.
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Ed, this seems like a good time to offer you a long overdue apology. Back when I was a n00bie on this blog, it took me 3 months before I realized I could turn my phone sideways to read. It took another several months before I realized that posts were left open for an extended time to comment or return to read additional comments.
During that time of my ignorance I also left a very lengthy comment on one of your posts. It was a chapter called, “Conduit” from my never finished novel called, “The Human Itch.” I’m sorry for my rude blooper and won’t do it again. But two excerpts from that chapter are brought to mind by your current poignant post, so I will share soley those again:
“I am not a single, but a several self. I am the self inside my own narrative and the self inside yours. I am the present self, the past self, and the future self. Just like in any partnership, there are the individual entities separately, and there is the relationship among them, an entity unto itself. Also, let’s not forget the sleeping self, the one that may not be a self at all. And, of course, I am the self outside, looking in, trying to make sense of it all.”
Life is bigger than it seems.
Inching past our cryptic memes,
Vast beyond our mortal schemes,
Energies unite in teams.
Senses reach out in beams.
Tending mysteries in reams,
Images escape from dreams.
Life is bigger than it seems.
Life is bigger than it seems.
Hochschild’s assessment in that Guardian excerpt seems accurate. She highlights something Democrats have enormous trouble with: how to reach people immersed in a shame culture. She identifies a fundamental structure that is being used to bifurcate society.
Focusing on local pride, she seems to understate the economic violence mine owners inflicted on coal communities: isolated company towns; payment in scrip, a company’s IOU, instead of currency that could be spent anywhere; overpriced rent and food that could be obtained only from sources controlled by the company; and massive environmental degradation, which today includes mountain top cropping, with virtually no regulation on where the debris is tossed.
Hochschild notes that workers blame Democrats’ environmental regulations for their job losses, which are really owing to decades long structural changes in how we produce energy. It’s not in that excerpt, but that’s the false perspective their former employers and those who finance them worked hard to create.
I recently looked up cost of electricity, by energy source. Coal, the most expensive.
Individualism is anathema to political organizing, most especially for Democrats. At the core, the Democratic Party needs members to be pragmatic and to conflate their (individual) selves with that of the group in order to achieve and maintain public programs, a safety net, etc. Republicans do not have near such a heavy lift.
Unsure if it is OK to include a link, so I’ll understand if this is not posted. The 10-12-2024 opinion piece in Slate by Mark Lawrence Schrad, professor of political science at Villanova University, relates the starkly different asks by the Republican and Democratic parties. IMO, each platform goes to the heart of who we are as individuals. Yes, individualism is shaped by external systems, but individuals can and do make choices.
“How the Republicans turned disaster relief into political warfare. Republicans want to use government to punish people, not help them — and their disaster policy makes that clear”
https://www.salon.com/2024/10/12/how-the-turned-disaster-relief-into-political-warfare/
Very much reminds me of an analogy I heard about voting for Republicans who don’t believe in government as a foundational concept. It’s like going to a doctor that doesn’t believe in medicine.
The question you pose at the end and the reference to the Baltimore Catechism earlier brought the second creation story from Genesis to mind.
In that story, God gets down in the mud and makes the first human, only to realize that the human is lonely and needs a partner. (Yes, “partner” is the word used in Genesis.) God then creates the animals and brings them to the human to be named, which the human does. But then the human turns to God and says, more or less, “These are nice pets, but I need a partner!” Then, as the first one sleeps, God creates a second human, taken from the very body of the first. “Yes!” says the first. “You finally got it right. *This* is a partner!”
To speak of an individual is not enough; I am who I am through the relationships with others that have shaped me and the relationships with those I have shaped.
Nitpicking: the word “partner” may be used in some English versions of the bible, but it is not the word used originally. In Hebrew, the word is “Ezer Kenegdo”. The literal translation is “Helper against him”. This expression appears only there in the bible, so it is not clear what it means (a “partner” is one possible translation).
Yes. (And for that matter, all the words were Hebrew originally.)
The use of “partner” comes from the New Revised Standard Version.
Lewis Black does some funny and insightful shtick that’s apropos of this discussion Christian interpretations of the Old Testiment.
It’s a whole skit, but jumping to the final punchline he notes: “You know…you can ask…there are Jews who walk among you!”
Wanda Sykes, another fav, does a similar rap about White folks interpreting the Black experience.
I guess we all have a lot to share and learn from each other…
if we elect the right woman.
I have been thinking about relationships a lot lately, primarily because I once said to my late son, who was then 11, that you have to build a relationship with (a jigsaw puzzle) in order to solve it. I realized lately how unfortunate it is that I’m more comfortable in relationships with things than with people & in this time how scary it is, seeing fear around every corner, to venture forth. Getting back to my son, I find a small comfort in believing that the advice I’d given him over time even though I had been removed from his life until it was his choice, influenced many of his choices.
Many years ago, as a young man on a train from parts west coming into New York, as the train came to a halt, one of the other passengers in the car, an elderly man, asked me if I wouldn’t mind carrying his bag for him up to street level. Something I was very happy to do, being well fit back then. When we got up to the sidewalk, he suddenly pressed a banknote into my hand and disappeared into a yellow cab, leaving me somewhat aghast.
I was obliged to recognise that this was his way of giving thanks for the effort done, but to a European way of thinking like mine, it left me even slightly offended, because I had not intended it be a business transaction, but a societal one.
A free gift, just one very small instance of the invisible ties of obligation and assistance that bind us all together. Sometimes a favour graciously given, sometimes one gratefully received. Not everything has to be a transaction.
We are only individual up to a point (and it may be culturally mediated).
Speaking from NYC, money is common currency here. The man’s transactional gesture was probably meant as acknowledgement of your help. That said, money is an awfully crude gesture.
Yes, yes, yes “We are only individual up to a point (and it may be culturally mediated).” As we said in the Sixties, “We are all one, but different.” Different cultures do mediate, and for nyc…it’s mostly about the money.
I’m in Paris right now and one of the things I notice people, usually fit young men, doing as a matter of course is crabbing the front end of strollers or the bottom of shopping trolleys and helping people, usually women, carry them up the steep metro stairs. It is a gesture as natural as holding a door open for the next person when you walk through.
Saw a guy yesterday coming down the stairs as I and a woman with a big shopping trolley were going up; he reversed course, crabbed the bottom of her cart carried it up to the surface, then came back down.
The question is “what it means to be an individual person in contemporary US society.” The space of a comment is not enough to do justice to this question. I will let it keep me concise.
The parameters of the question establish the boundaries of response. Contemporary US society is not the same as US society a quarter-millennium ago, but much has remained constant. This nation was founded to maximize material gain and to maximize social control over individuals. In what could be viewed as an unexamined societal compensating mechanism, the freedom of the individual quickly came to be celebrated as a significant good. That this freedom was initially reserved for White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant males of certain material prosperity was an initial condition that could not be sustained. The conflict inherent in a society that celebrates individual prosperity while seeking to maintain social control over individuals has meant the US would be, as it is, a fractious, turbulent society.
“Should we define ourselves in terms of our work lives?”
There is much more packed in this question than may be apparent from its short simplicity. We are thrown into a world not of our own making. Long before there was a US, there were men whose names were such as Miller, Baker, Smith, or any one of many other surnames derived from how a person — a man, that is, for that is how society was ordered — was known among his fellows. These names reflected his occupation. For women, who were viewed as little more than property, the referents could be such as “The Miller’s Wife” or “The Baker’s Wife” or “The Farmer’s Daughter.”
The question raises the question as to whether it is to be considered an ethical inquiry or a practical matter; and in so far as ethics and pragmatics may overlap, the answer could be made more complicated. In that we tend to define our value in the world by what we do for a living, we may be diminishing ourselves in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. As one does not live by bread alone, so also one’s value as a living being is not constrained by how one earns one’s keep.
That we are social animals provides good reason to consider our work lives in some definition of ourselves. We all contribute to, or detract from, the well-being of our neighbors by the simple material burdens we place upon them, or benefits we provide to them, directly or indirectly.
“Should we be looking for meaning?”
There is no one who does not. This question presents a false choice. We do not ask if we should breathe air, drink water, or eat food. So it also is with looking for meaning — it is part of who and what we are.
“Are we all caught up in systems that control us? Is that what it means to be an individual?”
These are interestingly worded questions, and further interesting in their juxtaposition. We are social animals. Our very being implies “systems that control us.” We are social. We are animals. We are in the world. There are more systems controlling us than we can keep track of.
To ask if we are “caught up” in such systems implies that we are in some way trapped. We may be. If we know we are, does that knowledge not lead to some degree of freedom?
I do not know what it means to be an individual. But I am confident that as an individual, I am a member of a society of a certain sort, my social inheritance is everything that has transpired and continues to be in that society, and what it means for me to be an individual there is that I should pay thoughtful attention and act accordingly.
So much for concision. It’s a big question. You don’t need to answer it in a single comment.
It is the responsibility of the individual to maximize their liberty and their fellows’ liberty while taking care to also maximize their own and their fellows’ society. When we fail to do both we fail to provide ourselve’s and our fellows of the possibility of fulfilling our potential. This thought is a paraphrased thought of William Godwin’s, The old boy knew a thing or two.
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Some people may imagine an answer for this question, derived from their belief system. For myself, as an atheist/agnostic, there is no such clear answer.
We are here on this planet, because we are. There is no prescribed, intrinsic meaning for our lives. We are all individual, each with different personal traits, but we are also social animals, who were born into a society. And as such, we need to navigate through all the rule, norms, values and expectations the society have for us.
The systems are there, yet the question of control is more complex. As far as “control” means giving us one single specific path, one course of action, that the answer is clearly not. But those systems, set up by society, give us a sense of desired and undesired paths. define for us the possible “good” choice. Within those rules, those norms and values, we are still free to make our own choice, as long as it is inside this predefined box.
I love your stuff Ed Walker. I refer to it time and again over the years.
First song to mind: ‘It’s All Been Done’
Barenaked Ladies
I smile, hope you do too. :-)
A reply to Ed, not the previous commenter.
You always seem to get the intelligent people thinking so I thought I’d Contribute to balance it out.
I, too, have been traveling, but my travels have taken me from Colorado for the summer back to Nashville as of yesterday, by small truck.
I increasingly see this election as a choice between white America and multicultural America though that has nothing to do with your post.
Really my comment Doesn’t have anything to do with your post at all. My comment concerns God creating people in his/her image. That seems like the biggest bullshit of all. I mean, if there is a God somewhere, surely he/she doesn’t look like us does he / she?
I have another comment from a previous post that I saved somewhere on my phone, but I won’t bother you with that one.
And I listened to a book called Ordinary Grace on the way back, but that didn’t convince me either.
Thank you, Ed.
Always thought ‘in his own image’ meant as a sentient reasoning being — not as a physical entity. Of course that was back when I believed there was a God. It seems an unnecessary construct to me now.
The mystery of the great question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ does not require a God and in fact it is a ludicrous answer to the question.
“Are we all caught up in systems that control us? Is that what it means to be an individual? I am nothing more that a crossing-place of a number of externally generatedJ systems that control me? It doesn’t feel like that, but ….”
My discipline provides a terrifying answer to these questions. To a very large extent, our conscious self is created by human culture, expressed most concretely in human language and meaning systems.
Getting outside those constructs is exceedingly difficult and is so disturbing that even those of us driven to understand this process become destabilized/disturbed by the effort.
Ironically, my solution to the terror was spiritual. Riffing off someone’s post above, I would say that my early Christian self understood that God is the word and the word is God differently than most. For me, it meant language was the conundrum. I am not expressing this well this morning. I had a naturally apostate understanding of these sentences which encompassed the contradiction.
So, human language is inextricable from the making of the word of God.
Add to that the Tao Te Ching: “The Tao that can be told is not the Absolute Tao; the Names that can be given are not the Absolute Names.”
Taken together these suggest to me is that language cannot be Truth. Something else outside of human understanding is Truth.
When my discipline reinforced what I had always intuited, that what most called God was an unknowable spiritual force that we could not encompass in human language, and that human language controlled most everything we are and/or think we are.
That lead me to my current belief that the Truth is unknowable to humans and that this is what God is, i.e. s/he and only s/he can know all.
My poor frazzled brain can do much better than this but headache and exhaustion are in the way right now.
So no, we are not only the systems which we live in, but finding that part that is not controlled by those systems is a lifelong spiritual quest which has to take place outside a religious framework for all of those are dependent upon human language.
Thank you for this interesting comment. I hope you feel better.
We are not unique now as humans. We have better ways of communicating, in language etc
But we are no different than humans in any era pondering the same questions. The background changes, but we don’t.
Well, at least some of us don’t. :-)
Oh no, of course we are not unique in this era. Human language works the same, no matter time or place. Human language constructs us and our notion of reality.
We have more ways to communicate. We have nearly universal written communication and the ability to read documents from the distant past. We have huge libraries. The internet gives us some access to those collections.
We have the ability to exchange ideas in almost real time in places like this. That seems, to me, to be a boon.
None of that changes the basic realities of how language works.
I appreciate the thoughts people share on my posts. I think there’s more to be said on this subject, and so I’m going to do at least two more posts on the issues I raised here. I hope to address many of the comments in the course of those posts. I admit I don’t have much to say about Creep, though.
Ed ,Your columns are remarkable as I know San Marcos and Santa Croce very well. In those plazas one can feel in a state of silence out of time and Masaccio was a supreme individualist that has little use for any boundaries from previous generations of artists. I taught a retired pharmacist how to draw today as he constantly talks about his mindset has been black and white his whole life ,and now he is learning how to develop another aspect that he never imagined! For me it’s always a matter of forging ahead but not in the negativity that I ascertained from Camus -I wrote and illustrated a book about Van Gogh and Suzanne Valadon that was an inspirational novel about perseverance and Mr.Walker, everything that I have read of yours has a similar effect on me. Many thanks and enjoy your quiet time just like my student today.
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