Relationalism
How much of who we are is finite, unique, and independent of our social interactions?
This question seems to be at the core of many of my questions on how we should live and how society should operate. For instance, if who I am is fixed and finite, determined by my choices alone, then objectivism, libertarianism and modern capitalism seem to provide excellent ways to see the world. On the other hand, if who we are is not fixed, but rather a product of our interactions, then any sociology that allows for isolationism seems a bit misguided.
First, a little background. Things I've read lately about the Trinity on Anglican + Calvinist, as well as thoughts by J. Morgan Caler and a few traces of neuroscience I've been reading lately have opened my mind up to the possibility that maybe I'm not quite who I think I am. The central idea is that the self you know as "you" is really very largely dependent on the social context in which you're operating. Individuals aren't merely the product of their choices, but also quite literally defined by the people and culture in which they live. I know this idea isn't anything new, but it's been pretty revolutionary to me; up until this point I tended to see my "self" as completely under my control to define. While I still think my choices are important and have an impact, I'm starting to think that maybe the impact is somewhat smaller than I'd realized before.
I think this sort of relational view of the self explains a lot of things about human behavior that are very difficult otherwise. A lot of weird social phenomenon, such as the infamous mob mentality, or some of the other famous and controversial psychological experiments, like that thing with the guards and prisoners or the electric shocks, seem to point to the idea that we become what our society tells us to become.
For decades individualism has fought this idea, telling us to rise above the mob and think critically about what's going on around us. While I agree that this is good and true and what we should really try to do all of the time, what if we simply can't?
I think this has some pretty big implications for how we should live. First, social isolationism isn't an option. If society's heading in a direction you don't approve of, you're heading in that direction with it whether you like it or not, so do something about it. Second, you are more responsible for your actions and their implications than individualism allows. Who you are is quite literally part of who your society, and thus everyone else, is, and so you are accountable to your society and to your peers to the sort of person you allow yourself to become. The combination of these two does more to reinforce the virtue of citizenship than any sort of "free exchange for mutual benefit" ever could.
Thoughts?
posted by RJ @ 9:54 PM
12 comments
12 Comments:
Excellent post!
I think you do a great job navagating two extremes here that are both prevalent in American and also devestatingly simplistic. The first is the rugged individualism of the (largely white) middle-class who really do believe in the fixity of identity and the immutability of agency. They really think that outcomes are determined primarily if not exclusively by choice (so they, for instance, explain poverty in terms of poor choices, bad habits, and shortsighted decisions). The second is the structural determinism of the (largely white) upper-class who really do believe that human agency has very little if anything to do with outcomes (so they, for instance, explain poverty in terms of bad schools, broken homes, and other structural inequities). The reality is that both work together towards outcomes and simply ignoring one side of the dialectic doesn’t get us very far.
Our social institutions and culture really do have agency. Our selves really do have agency. Neither of them are fixities, but are both in a dialectic of continual redefinition with each other. In other words, we both shape and are shaped by our culture. Neo-Cons and Marxists both miss this give and take and, as a result, oversimply the relationship between self and society.
I think you have it just right here. There is a sophistication in your post that both preserves the individual’s responsibility to self without diminishing the individual’s responsibility and indebtedness to society.
If j. morg's take on your post is correct, then I agree--we are culturally situated beings who can't swing completely free of our surroundings, but are not determined by them, either.
The trick with the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments is that they don't easily yield principles for us to follow. "Question authority" is not something you should always do; conversely, we're not always responsible for our actions. The surrounding culture is largely what determines how much questioning of authority needs to take place--for example, Chinese and Iranians desperately need to question authority right now.
I'd also say that for the most part, when I talk to people or give advice I try to get them to be more existential about themselves, their lifestyle and their choices. Despite that fact that individualism is all up on in America right now, I find myself constantly telling people that who they hang out with, how much they travel, how they treat their families, whether or not they go to church, etc. are up to them, are changeable, and are not part of a script that was written for them. Maybe that's something different, though...maybe that stuff doesn't follow from this American pseudo-existentialism. It just seems to me that despite the range of choices available to people in America today, people still don't seem to understand that they have a choice. So, whatever my beliefs on poverty or structuralism or Sartre happen to be, I usually fall on the side of personal responsibility in conversation. Does that mean anything?
This is a great post, and very timely (at least for me). It hits not only on a lot of the things I've been thinking about in planning for my dissertation (yeah, I'm a little ahead on that one), but also hits a lot of issues that have been coming up in my sociology of culture class. Here are my thoughts in no particular order.
1) It is undeniable that who we are is a product of our environment. (Of course, as a Christian we have to make room for our being created in the image of God...but beyond that, everything else is constructed socially.) There is a long line of theorist on this one, G.H. Mead and C.H. Cooley being probably the most foundational. We learn who we "are" through a process of interaction and identification with others (significant others, and the generalized other, which is society). This processes inevitably acts upon us and shapes us to a far greater extent than we'd like to admit.
2) On the ever-present culture/structure/agency debate, here's my take (and this is supported by others to whom I could direct you if you are really interested.) Culture and structure are mutually contingeny categories. In some sense culture comes before and shapes structure, but once defined, structure perpetuates culture. (vague jargon laden sentence, I know...sorry. I'll try to elucidate.) Adding agency to the equation obviously leads to the question of how human action fits in to it all. I would have to say that human actors posses a great deal of agency, but within a limited range of cultural and structural constraints. So, can we choose who we are and what we do? Yes. But, we don't have unlimited choice.
3) Speaking to Charles point on personal responsibility - yes, we have choice...but the things we are "choosing" to choose are culturally determined, in a sense. For instance, why we think you should treat your family in one way versus another, or why going to church is even on our radar maps...these are conditioned by our particular historically contingent time and place, and we have a range of options within these confounds. For instance, when you are talking to people about personal responsibility, you aren't saying, "You can choose whether to eat horse or cat for dinner" because those aren't legitmate cultural choices for us. You can say, "You can choose to eat beef or be a vegetarian." Those are legitmate according to our system of meaning.
4) So, I guess to sum it all up, I'm saying. YES, we are socially created and YES we have agency in navigating our culture. But, that agency is limited by cultural and structural fixities that we were not a part of creating...but that have been perpetuated in our society over time, and beyond any functional necessity.
And...I could say a lot more, but I think I've already gone a little off track from the original point, which was that our identities are not our own...or something like that.
Thanks j. morg! And thanks for reiterating it so eloquently - I had to write this post three times just to get it as cogent as it is, and I still feel like it's too long and abstract.
Charles: I use these studies as examples of times we've been absolutely stunned by human behavior. From our individualist mindset, it seems baffling that people would follow their micro society into such hideous behavior. My point is that if we understand the individual as partly the product of their society, it becomes a lot less baffling. Of course they'll tend act they way their "supposed" to - to do otherwise would be unhuman.
Yet the choice does still exist, and this is the important thing to teach people: by exercising choice, they can change what "supposed to" is for their society, micro or macro, and this will have a huge impact on the lives of everyone else.
So I think you do "mean something" and it's something important: personal freedom and individualist elements of a person are very important. I just think it helps a lot to realize that there's more to a person than just their individual choices, and that this can give us a good platform to advocate socially responsible personal choices in those same conversations with others.
Mair: thanks for the excellent thoughts! I'd love to hear where I could read more about this, especially if there's a good source written to sum it up for non-sociologists.
I think that, if nothing else, understanding how much culture impacts our identity frees us to have more agency over it in the sense that we can then begin to identify and choose which elements to keep. Ultimately, while we can't escape culture, we have the choice of which cultures to particpate in most, and which cultures to avoid, and how to change the cultures we can't escape. I think this says a lot on the topics of why Church membership is important, why having good friends is important, etc.
You also mentioned being made in the image of God. You might have been referencing this, but I think this topic of "relationalism" can be seen as directly related to the divine image, namely the inherent relationship of the trinity. Hans did a great job describing this on his blog, which, combined with a lot of things you and your hubby have posted over the past year or so, finally made sense to me and sparked this post.
-Mair-
"It is undeniable that who we are is a product of our environment."
I have more I'd like to say on this post in general (and I'm working on it) but I'd like to take issue with this before it gets passed by. Based on the smattering of reading that I've done (the most applicable book being Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate), it appears that genetics are much more important in determining who we are than environment, contrasting the Locke-ian/empiricist view that who we are is largely (perhaps solely) dependent on our experiences (environment). The data supporting this comes from the extensive research on twins and the realization that identical twins raised apart are much more correlated when it comes to factors such as IQ and personality, etc.., as compared to unrelated siblings raised in as close to an identical environment as possible. Do we disagree with this or am I on a totally different tangent here?
There is more to this, but I don't have the time to put it up at the moment. I know Charles has read a lot of the same stuff- so hopefully he'll come to my rescue?
jacks: I think you're right--I just don't think your and mair's points contradict each other. Pinker and others are talking about deep traits that can cross cultures easily--our propensity for violence or risk, what kind of work we'll like, etc. So when mair says that we're products of our environment, she's talking about surface level things--and by surface I don't at all mean shallow; I mean in terms of the choices we make every day. Reread this:
"We learn who we "are" through a process of interaction and identification with others (significant others, and the generalized other, which is society). This processes inevitably acts upon us and shapes us to a far greater extent than we'd like to admit."
Our self-knowledge of our deep traits, and the outworking of our deep traits, emerges through these interactions. We'd be different people if we grew up in different cultures, with different family structures, or even alone, to take an extreme example.
So your point is well taken--it's just skew to hers.
Mair, am I right?
I have two questions, then.
(1) Mair, you wrote:
"The things we are "choosing" to choose are culturally determined, in a sense."
Not only do I like the way you phrased that--"choosing to choose"--but I completely agree. Let me ask you, then: how do sociologists, or different theories, account for people doing things that look like they're not on the table, like white Americans becoming Buddhists, or John Walker Lindh becoming Taliban?
(2) redhurt, you wrote:
"I use these studies as examples of times we've been absolutely stunned by human behavior."
What, then, are the lessons we should take away from the experiments?
Jacks - I agree with Charles here, and my wife said much the same thing last night. I think Mair's point was that you only know how to be the sort of person your culture allows you to be, and it's through interaction with culture that your choices and genetic traits are formed into a self. This doesn't mean that culture completely determines who you are - only that you don't have much option to be someone culture doesn't allow. Also, how different were the twins tests cultures? If one was raised in the ghetto of India and the other in high society Westchester, cultures as different as they possibly get, and they still turned out "the same", I might be able to see this as a contradiction to the cultural influence.
Chuck - I think the lesson is the entire point of this post: that individuals strongly tend to become the sort of people their society tells them to be. Other evidence suggests our choices can, sometimes, supercede such cultural influence, especially if we realize it's occuring. So we ought to both strive to expose how our culture negatively impacts individuals and be mericiful towards individuals whose culturally perscribed roles lead them to do evil (lesser nazis, for example.)
Charles - You and Red effectively dealt with the challenge that Jack posed, so I'll skip that one for now (though I could probably say more about it). As for your question regarding how we deal with outliers, here's what I think (and this is just speculation).
First of all, I think that in America right now, pretty much everything is on the table, especially when it comes to the type of examples you gave here. Cultural pluralism and tolerance are HUGE values that are supported right now, so it's not that far-fetched to think that someone would exercise agency to become a Buddhist, even though most white Americans aren't Buddhists.
Also, I want to emphasize here that the framework from which I'm working doesn't define "culture" in any hard and fast way. We use the word in popular terminology and we mean things like, ideologies, behaviors, pop culture type things, etc. Sociologists (especially those influenced and appreciative of anthropology) would employ a much broader definition of culture - one that is similar to the idea of meaning-making, and symbol creating.
That said, the idea of a white American becoming a Buddhist isn't really a problem for the issue at hand. Following a particular religion is a completely legitimate action in the boundaries set up for us by culture at large. One of those boundaries encompasses the usage of various systems for ordering our lives - some of us choose Christianity, some choose Buddhism, and some choose a-religious, secularism as a guiding force. The point is that, culturally, we are all engaged in meaning-making behavior at one level or another.
In addition, Clifford Geertz and Ann Swidler both sort of draw on the same idea – that is, that culture become most evident during “unsettled times”. For Geertz, one of these such times occurs when the over-arching system of meaning is broken down or destroyed (such as the idea of an all-powerful monarch in the French Revolution). It is during these times that we resort to ideologies, which may potentially become a part of the cultural make-up of a particular time and place (Nazi Germany, for example…or more relevant to today, Iraq, post-Sadaam.). So, it doesn’t seem outrageous to me that we could work this theory down to a micro level, and say that people who do something seemingly outside of the realm of culture (such as convert to Buddhism) are responding to the failure of a particular cultural system to order their lives in a meaningful way. In this respect, even their “counter-culture” actions are shaped by culture.
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