Maturing In US Society
In the last post I offered a story about human evolution. In this post I offer a framework story for how we mature in US society.
Introduction
I’ve read a lot of philosophy material trying to define human nature. It seems to me that almost all those accounts start with adults. They start with a fully mature male (because of course they do), and you can almost feel the self-examination at the root.
One obvious example is René Decartes with his skeptical doubt of everything, leaving him with his “I think therefore I am”. He never seems to think of asking himself what he was before he could think, and then what he was when he first started to think, and then, wait, when did I start to think and what was that like? All those questions seem more interesting than his trivial proof of his own existence as a first step to deriving the world.
When I read this material, or listen to podcasts like Philosophize This by Stephen West and The Partially Examined Life. I often find myself asking the air “What is the pathway to that view?” The absence of a pathway permits all sorts of answers that seem ill-suited to our day.
And that’s what attracts me to Pragmatism. It tells me that those old guys are asking interesting questions, but that the answers aren’t always connected to the way we actually come to be ourselves, or the way we actually are. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, who seems to think all philosophers asked interesting questions for their day. He says we need to ask questions relevant to our own times, taking what we can from our predecessors. (Disclaimer, I haven’t read Deleuze, and rely solely on outside sources.
Becoming
So, here’s a story. It’s not a universal story like the one in the last post. Instead, it’s a kind of individual story that might apply to us.
Cat Bohannon writes a lot about nursing babies in her excellent and very readable book, Eve. One critical part of the process begins shortly after birth when the mother offers her breast to the newborn. As Bohannon describes it, the two have to work together to get the breast to provide sustenance. The newborn has an instinctive behavior, rooting, but the mother must help and the newborn must respond to the assistance. This might be a very early example of the cooperation that I think forms part of our wiring.
Through the next year or so the infant takes in all sorts of information without using words, without knowing what a word is. (H/T commenter Gruntfuttock). This information is experiential, not formal.
Then the little one learns to talk. This is also a cooperative process. It has already heard words, and maybe even worked out what they mean, like its name and mama and dada. As the vocabulary grows, the child can take in information from parents and others, including information about the use of language. Hopefully our little person stops licking everything in sight.
Then the questions start. Why is the sky blue? Why do I have to go to eat these green things? And more and more. And then they get harder. Why doesn’t X like me? Why can’t we go see Grandmother? Why do I have to go to school? Kids expect their questions to have answers, and to expect that the parents know the answer. Gradually they learn that other people have answers.
Then they learn that their parents don’t have all the answers and that they have given incomplete and misleading answers, and even wrong answers. They turn to new sources of information and answers. Hopefully they don’t get many wrong answers.
The point of this story
None of us made the world we live in. We didn’t create social norms, we didn’t generate any of the material goods we have, we didn’t create a morality. We just showed up. Our parents first, and then everyone else in our lives helps us grow accustomed to the social, physical, and moral world we inhabit. Hopefully we become able to survive in it, to succeed in it on its terms, and maybe even to add something to the accumulated store of human understanding.
We get used to living in a certain way. As Pierre Bourdieu explains, we develop a habitus, a set of practical responses to the things that might happen in our world. Once that habitus is in place, we have stock responses for almost all events. We don’t think. We just respond.
So how do we react when something happens for which our habitus is inadequate? What happens when something arises that raises doubts about the assumptions behind our habitus? I turn to the early Pragmatist C. S. Peirce (pronounced “purse”). I discuss his seminal 1879 essay in this post. Peirce says we don’t like to think. It’s hard. It’s no fun. And besides, we were just fine before that stupid doubt appeared.
Peirce says there are four responses to doubt. First, we could just ignore that irritating doubt. That works more or less well, depending on how important the belief is to our daily lives, and how irritating the doubt is. For example, we can do just fine with “the sun rises in the East”, unless we hang around with normal people who know better and laugh at us.
Second, we can look for an authoritative source to force other people to agree with us. Galileo found out about that.
Third, we might get together with other people and try to create a new view by consensus. That might work, depending on who we talk to. Hint: avoid QAnon people. Also people who you just found online.
Finally, we can try what we now call the scientific method.. This approach has been elaborated and partially formalized since Peirce’s time. For a good discussion, see Jonathan Rauch’s book, The Constitution of knowledge, discussed here. Because the same method, modified slightly, can be used for most subjects of expertise, we now generally think that expert knowledge is always contingent on new information and new ways of thinking about old information.
Individuals as individuals
1, So this, I think, is the way people mature. Of course, specific people can stop anywhere along the way. But the goal is always to find a place in a complex society that was there before us, will be there regardless of what we do, and will remain when we’re gone. But the process of maturation isn’t in itself a satisfying answer to the question of what it means to be an individual in the context of our society. I’ll offer a tentative answer in my next post
2. I don’t think this description is judgmental; it wasn’t meant to be. I think judgment of individuals has to be based on criteria outside the process of maturation.
3. I didn’t mention individual agency in this story. One element of habitus is the range of responses available to each of us in response to specific events. One of the goals of the people who raise us is to shape the rane of responses we consider in confronting an event. For example, our parents don’t want us to hit a sibling for taking a toy. That is a restriction on our individual agency.
Depending on the way we are raised, and the reactions we get from our responses to events generally, we limit our agency so that the responses are at least bearable. As an example, if we repeatedly do badly at school, we might form a habitus including the proposition that we aren’t very smart, and that limits the things we think we can do. This amounts to limiting our own agency. There are many ways in which society operates to limit our exercise of individual agency.
“Peirce says we don’t like to think. It’s hard. It’s no fun. And besides, we were just fine before that stupid doubt appeared ”
Ed, I guess the contrary voice is not universal. I teach thinking — and like the scarecrow, got me an honorary doctor of thinkology. If it doesn’t hurt, then you’re not doing it right. I sure know I don’t like to think. Usually it’s very fucking painful. A lot of my students are happy go luckys. Good for them. It’s Great! to be 20.
Not so great to be 69 and grading finals. Another snort of gin will get me through this, and I will be a kinder, gentler (maybe even human) being
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG3mJcUzwaI
Typo : Pierre Bourdier for Pierre Bourdieu. American education is very good at expanding the realm of possibles for young people. As a foreigner, I always found that striking.
Also, “rane s.b.”range”.
Great post, thank you ever so much, Ed! And wonderful questions in your introduction, notably “…and then, wait, when did I start to think and what was that like?” I think children are often underestimated, they often have a better understanding or at least a true feeling about what’s going on around them than adults believe they can. Therefore it always hurts me when I make observations of the type: a kid asks a question and only gets the answer “Don’t ask, you wouldn’t understand.” (Personally I was and am lucky that my parents never denied me an answer to my questions, even encouraged me to ask and, later, to try to get answers elsewhere, i.e. through reading and talking with other people.)
After reading your post I even venture this hypothesis: The less seriously human beings have been taken as kids the more susceptible they will become to believe lies and conspiracy “theories” as adults.
My youngest son and DIL are raising their 18mo daughter with these kinds of ideas at the forefront of their approach to it. They talk to her in the same tone and tempo they use for themselves and other adults, and in complex paragraphs. Granddaughter never had to process that “Hmm, they make different sounds to me than they do to other humans” conundrum, I believe – such that she didn’t have to learn two sets of language skills: one directly from parent interaction with her, and one indirectly from parent interaction with others.
I was visiting them a couple months ago and son, granddaughter and myself went to visit my son’s boss and family. They were blown away by her verbal and social skills, and I mentioned her parents’ way of talking to her. The boss mentioned a child development theory (which I can’t remember the name of) that posits just that.
We were getting ready to leave and son says “Say goodbye to everyone, Violet.” Violet walks over to me looks up at me and says, “Goodbye Everyone!” That brought the house down and Violet understood that she had done that, and she reveled in it, i.e., she had agency and grokked onto it. Maybe she’ll end up doing standup, lol.
My own childrearing career was very hodgepodge, with not a lot of consistency on my part, so I really admire folks who pay attention to these underlying issues.
In my experience individuals do not learn or grow, as adults, when things are going well. It takes some sort of problem or hurdle to get people to evolve.
I feel like the same is true of society, and I’m hoping the next 4 years will be the impetus for our society to grow up a bit more.
I like that idea, DIFFPAUL.
Never thought of it in those terms.
I’m grasping for hope.
Very thought-provking, concise post, Mr. Walker! Having raised three kids and now in retirement, this is a good time for me to reflect on how my maturation process occurred. No question that parents help form the initial “habitus” of a child but in my own experience, the early years (say, 4 to 12) that you spend with friends and peers in public or private schools is incredibly determinative of the way you socialize and interact with society more broadly. I was raised in a small Iowa town where people had never seen a black or Hispanic person. The “N” word was used freely and Lyndon Johnson was an ‘N-lover’. I had to unlearn years of small-minded, insular, racist hogwash when I went away to a large university. I guess your next post will address these influences. Thank you again for your thoughtful and broad-scoped view of the world – it is a nice respite from crushing details.
I think the developmental theories from the geniuses of psychology over the last 100 years do all have a kind of truth almost like how some myths or scripture are metaphorically true. Piaget gave us the most influential paradigm of development, his “cognitive development” which has the stages sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. In Piaget, it’s very hard to find the “impetus” or “will to development” aside from the sense of an unfolding script, but this “will to development” is very strong in Freud, where he finds this in “libido” and the underlying “pleasure principle”, where the development of “the psyche” goes through oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages. In Erickson, development is “psychosocial” to get us through Trust vs. Mistrust, Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt, Initiative vs. Guilt, Industry vs. Inferiority, Identity vs. Role Confusion, Intimacy vs. Isolation, Generativity vs. Stagnation, Integrity vs. Despair. Kohlberg says people have three stages of moral development: preconventional, conventional, and post-conventional.
In Skinner, development is simply the product of behavioral conditioning, but things like “latent learning” where a mouse remembers a maze without a reward, supposedly shows learning happens without a reward. That’s what psychologists will say. However, I brought home a bag of the cheap dog food the other day and imagined my dog saying “Ruff!” and it made me laugh. It gave me pleasure. A pun is like an extra-grammatical integrative complexity. One idea leads to another idea across frames of reference based on a third relationship, a phonological relationship. It has a very interesting phenomenology. Maybe own reward system, the dopaminergic pathways of the mesolimbic and mesolimbocortical systems, might provide a person their own Skinner Box to reward cognitive behaviors and increase their frequencies in scripted ways along development. I’m not a psychiatrist or neurologist, so I don’t know the literature, but behavioral scripts form efficacy and direction over speech, movement, ie motivated activity in basal ganglia under frequency filtering in a system using networks of nuclei, related cell body clusters of neurons, in different locations. Deep under the cortex where the cerebral spinal fluid is flowing there are all kinds of knobby little places.
We laugh at puns because the brain teaches itself to love complexity using its own reward system. I keep thinking maybe this has something to do with why positive symptoms of schizophrenia where clanging and word salad occupy the phonological loop may be an addictive process during development and explain my neuroleptic medications like thorazine, which are dopamine antagonists, relieve those symptoms. I have mania, so my unconscious always is doing dreamwork in the world where I can think up ideas.
Another interesting thing from neurology intersecting with identity is how facial recognition works. In the occipital lobe in the back of the brain there’s something called the fusiform gyrus (a gyrus is one of the hills on the cortex; a sulcus is a valley). When you meet somebody you already know, your brain is not going to expend the energy to rebuild their face in sense certainty. Identity cues combine with a few landmarks on the brow, chin, etc, and the face flows from the fusiform gyrus into sense certainty. Fregoli’s syndrome is a terrible disorder, from a lesion or problem with fusiform gyrus where what happens is the wrong face comes into view. It isn’t a psychotic disorder, but a neurological one, though almost all sufferers are likely being treated for schizophrenia. Many suffer greatly in their autobiographical self because they encounter people in the grocery store or wherever that don’t fit the year they are in. What occurred to me thinking about the facial recognition stack is that its hard-wire functioning, where a sensory stream here goes to identity cues there, seems premised on the idea that other people have names and a unique identity.
Thanks for the post.
If you haven’t read him yet, William James is worth your time. Both his Philosophy and his Psychology provide much food for thought along the lines of your inquiry.
You might also find Lacan’s perspective on Freud, in particular, how the infant becomes aware of itself…and then how a mature perspective might be created.
I think it would be valuable for Ed to incorporate the teachings of Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow into his theories of development.