‘Who are we really?’ It sounds like a simple question doesn’t it? But wrapped up in the question are some difficult notions. For example, is our identity anything more than a buy-in to a concept of self that is illusory?
What gives most of us, most of the time a strong sense of self? Arguably it is a combination of:
· a sense of place; we wake up in the same immediate surroundings we went to sleep in, with the same people, objects, sounds and smells, even if we’re in a boat cabin or a plane or a car seat (unless of course we are abducted by aliens);
· a sense of continuity, enabled by consciousness, reflection and memory. We remember and know ourselves and the key events from the day before, the year before and the decades before. We have agency and purpose and spend most of our time in familiar surroundings. We know what it feels like to be…….well us.
All this leads to and supports a strong sense of self, an identity. In other words, “I think therefore I am.”[1]
Most of the time we don’t ponder the metaphysics of identity overmuch.
In our day-to-day lives we just get on with it; we go to sleep with a strong sense of self, rest our tired bodies and minds for 6–8 hours and wake up in the same body and the same room and with the same feelings and thoughts we went to bed with and carry on: we know who we are. Perhaps that is what the true horror of Alzheimer’s disease is — the loss of memory, of awareness, of familiarity with a place, of chronology and, because of all this, the loss of self. Carers speak of losing a loved one and sufferers of being lost. Everything that anchors identity is lost and so the person is lost.
In my younger days Satre almost convinced me, in an aside in what I think was his Doctoral thesis, that, a strong sense of self not-withstanding, the idea of an identity, a fixed and permanent persona, an us, was no more than an accident of language and consciousness.[2] These days I can as easily believe that the language came because of the sense of self rather than the other way round.
As an aside, for a species which, at least in western cultures, places so much emphasis on self and personal identity we do have an extraordinary need to be part of a tribe, community, gang, club, congregation or nation. Our ability to think and act in opposition to our group is generally not great; think of small-town America, that nice village in the Cotswolds, national mindsets, the far right, the far left, those of a devout religious persuasion, Man. U supporters and so on. At the extreme our group membership releases us from personal responsibility — we can forget or lose ourselves in the excitement and freedom of belonging in the moment. Think of Germany in the 1930s or MAGA supporters at Trump rallies. We can be carried away, be Dionysian rather than Apollonian (if I’ve remembered my Nietzsche correctly), governed by the Id not the Superego (if I’ve remembered my Freud correctly) and be part of a good ruck or riot or mass killing (if I’ve remembered recent and more distant history correctly). So identity and sense of self are somehow bound up in group-think and external culture and norms, not just something inside us. We need our tribe and our tribe will reinforce what we think and feel — and change it. Humans are intelligent pack animals banding together against ‘the other’ pack animals — that’s what we are programmed to do. Have a look at the Asch Conformity Experiments in the 1950s and the Milligram experiment findings in the 1970s if you need convincing: https://tiredandemotional.org.uk/what-if-the-hokie-kokie-is-what-its-all-about/
“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. ……….when they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.
I think we might need to reflect on how we can educate men and women to sustain their truth whatever the situation.”
Stanley Milgram, 1974
It is difficult for any of us to go against the shared beliefs and values of our group whatever the consequences and not having a group, not belonging, being a loner, can have consequences for the individual and his/her community. How many school mass shootings in the land of the free involved one or more young men whose only friend was a social media portal?
But I don’t really want to torture myself or any reader with a deep dive into these issues and am happy to concede we have identities. What I really want to know is how did we become who we are? First though, let’s just recognise the incredibly unlikely happenstance that we exist at all.
Bill Bryson has something to say about that. First, think about the astonishing physics of our being here.
“…for uou to be here at all now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialised and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once.” [3]
As far as I know atoms are not alive so how does this work?
Then consider how our species (and therefore we) evolved over aeons.
“To get from ‘protoplasmal primordial atomic globule’ (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient, upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long time…..The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls….or disgorging air through a blowhole….”[4]
Of course, those of an extreme religious persuasion ‘know’ none of this is true. But, if you believe in evolution, you know that the journey from protoplasm to sentient (more or less) mammal was a long and tangled road with lots of blind turnings and cul-de-sacs. Even if we just take our journey from the time of early humankind to this point the odds on our being here are incredibly low.
“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years…..every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so…….to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result….in you.”[5]
It is something of a miracle of generational survival that we exist at all. If you think today’s world is a tad dangerous think about what life-chances were a couple of thousand years ago.
So we are very, very lucky to be alive; atoms aligned and ancestors survived to breed and someone was around to care for the offspring — plague, famine, violence, natural disasters, fatal accidents, and the rest somehow passed us and our ancestors by or at least didn’t kill them before they managed to procreate.
But I am no nearer to working out how my identity/personality came to be. We kind of assume that physically we look like us, although most of us know too that we look like someone else don’t we? Has anyone not been told at some time or other how much we look like a parent? And our parents were told the same thing and their parents before them. Not an original thought I know but somewhat disturbing. Here’s Thomas Hardy’s take on it.
Heredity
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance — that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.
So whose faces are we wearing and can we really call them ours?
Beyond the fact that, physically, we resemble ancestors there is another question. If we look like s/he or them, could it be that we also act and think like s/he or them? The nature/nurture debate is an old one. It seems these days that science is leaning towards nature as having the strongest influence on our character, talent (or lack of it), and personality (or lack of it). That raw clay of the new-born me or you already carried the imprint of our predecessors and their experiences; it’s not written in our stars, it’s in our genes. It seems like a variation on reincarnation beliefs.
“The word reincarnation derives from a Latin term that literally means ‘entering the flesh again’. Reincarnation refers to the belief that an aspect of every human being (or all living beings in some cultures) continues to exist after death. This aspect may be the soul, mind, consciousness, or something transcendent which is reborn in an interconnected cycle of existence; the transmigration belief varies by culture, and is envisioned to be in the form of a newly born human being, animal, plant, spirit, or as a being in some other non-human realm of existence.
An alternative term is transmigration, implying migration from one life (body) to another. The term has been used by modern philosophers such as Kurt Gödel] and has entered the English language.”[6]
I struggle to believe that my particular collection of atoms is carrying around a soul which is immortal and will hitch a lift with another life-form once I’ve gone. I can accept though that my genetic inheritance is keeping alive a good part of what made my ancestors who they were….not so much ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ as corporeal inheritance. I’m fine with that. I am myself! My ancestors lived in very different worlds, encountered different challenges and were shaped by them as I’ve been shaped by mine. Bits of me (the good bits I hope) have already been passed on to my children, along with bits of my wife and quite a few, if not all, of the bits we gained from our predecessors, so a thankyou to them and to the primordial slime from which all life emerged.
We also know, don’t we, that our life experiences and particularly our childhood experiences shape and change us…for better or worse. There is no escaping our childhood and it colours our lives and shapes the way we view the world and respond to it; it plays a huge part in triggering the good and the evil that human beings exhibit and, of course, it often limits and defines our life chances. As an aside, if the physics of parallel universes is more than just another theory I don’t really understand, there may be other me’s out there living different lives and thinking they are unique……….
I am not the same person I was when six years old, or when sixteen years old, of twenty-six years old. And yet I don’t think of myself as having been many different people but as one evolving person. We grow and change over time so that a sixty-year-old adult is nothing like the six-year-old child s/he once was — only memory joins the two and the sense of self and identity it enables. As I get older I grow more child-like; I am more anxious, I do less, I am less capable, I grow weaker not stronger, my memory (never great) gets worse. Can it be that my adult working life was no more than the child in me managing to mask my fears and insecurities in a cloak of seeming confidence and competence? Do we simply learn to disguise ourselves as grown-ups and then, as the years pass, become less and less capable of, or bothered about, sustaining the illusion? Only we know how much of our public face is an act or illusion — a projection of who we would like to be. As for social media and influencers and not a few evangelical church leaders….well it’s a living I guess! The difference and distance between our pretensions and our ‘true’ selves is sometimes significant and constant honesty, with ourselves or others, is too big an ask for most of us. So are we who we’re pretending to be or the person doing the pretending? Most of us struggle with the discrepancy at some time or other between who we really (really?) are and the bullshit we put out; politicians must struggle almost all of the time. As for the likes of Trump…………………
Humans are intelligent pack animals banding together against ‘the other’ pack animals — that’s what we are programmed to do. We are complex combinations of what we inherited across the aeons, the family and culture(s) we were born into and reared within; our experiences as we grow, develop and decline and how we react, respond and change because of them. We are a conscious and evolving living individuals (probably of no great significance) connected to the past and, if we are lucky, to the future. Still there’s that nagging thought that ‘I think therefore I am’ might not be much closer to the truth than ‘I am therefore I think I think’.
[1] The Latin cogito, ergo sum, usually translated into English as “I think, therefore I am”, is the “first principle” of René Descartes’s philosophy. He originally published it in French as je pense, donc je suis in his 1637 Discourse on the Method, so as to reach a wider audience than Latin would have allowed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum
[2] ‘The Transcendence of the Ego’, an Existential Theory of Consciousness, La Transcendance de l’ego: Esquisse d’une description phénomenologique), published in 1936
[3] ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’, pp17, Bryson, Bill, Transworld Publishers, Doubleday, 2003.
[4] Ibid pp19
[5] Ibid pp19–20
