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| Yayoi Kusama's: Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity. |
Science may not be great at defining human limits, but society is.
The socio-cultural medium surrounds us from birth to death, extending
into our deepest trenches and to the top of our skyscrapers, telling us how to
speak, think, and good and bad ways to behave.
Groups enact laws, religious and civil, and constituent
members adhere, assume roles and tell personal identity narratives. All
cultures perform specific limiting functions – not because our base nature
requires suppression or a transcendent connective aura impels cooperation. Man
isn’t inherently good or evil but inherently, wonderfully, different.
The infinite (rather, some incalculably large finite number
of) variations of human born into the spectacular theater of this planet gifted
with moderate-to-severe innumeracy and dynamic neural systems are compelled to
move and act and grow, but to do so in a manageable way – a way our brains can
follow.
Making sense of reality is a process of recognition, acceptance
and negation. With complexity, and an unfathomable quantity of variables, we
limit, as social creatures, working, playing, exploring, learning and limiting…
together.
Of course, there are explanations beyond the neurological for
limitation, specialization and agreement bias, and why these things were
important on the African plain and remain so on the floor of a suburban city
hall meeting.
Evolutionary biologists like Changizi argue that in spite
of our most eccentric behaviors (Jeddiism) we are fundamentally biological
survival machines, adapted to survive and reproduce. Living in groups increases
our chances of both. Developing proficiency in an occupation increases value to
the group, and normative behavior promotes trust and trustworthiness, essential
for social exchange, heightening the probability that an individual will to continue
to exist within that group and contribute to it’s success.
An interesting corollary – agreement with the norm is typically
accentuated in our most vulnerable stages of life, as children are just
developing in the social universe and as the elderly advance in it there is
less evidence of deviant behavior. Kids push, sure, but it’s more of a test to define
limits than blow break them, until puberty.
Even deviance has been collectivized in discrete deviant
communities (furries) with separate flavors of laws and limitations; they
typically frown on harm, physical or metaphysical – remember, submissive
S&Mers get pleasure from those whippings – and in most cases, discounting respective
peculiarities, live lives not unrecognizable from the majority of society.
Common social agreement behaviors activate the same
neurotransmitters (dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin) mentioned earlier as factors
related to depression, anxiety, etc. For example, something as simple as a hug
releases oxytocin in the brain, so does orgasm. Some attribute this post
copulative chemical flush with the development of attachment and romantic love,
enabling us to limit ourselves to one sexual partner long enough to produce and
hopefully raise a child.
But it doesn’t always go that way. With (nearly) infinite
possibilities, there are extremes.
Psychology has a lot of names for abnormal states: from
extreme shyness to agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder
and paranoid schizophrenia. (For fun, I took three different autism quotient
exams and scored a bottom-border Asperger’s number on each, but I self-identify
as a high-functioning addictive personality with control issues and mild
episodic mania and depression – maybe I just drink a lot of coffee and get sad
sometimes?)
Severe, genetic neurochemical imbalances and disorders
exist, acute environmental trauma can mess you up, but frequently,
psychological pathology is a reaction to cultural pathology.
If a mind is unwell, it’s likely a socio-cultural sickness is
also present. When there are conflicts between the group and group members, if
an internal or external locus of control is weakened, idiosyncrasies can develop
into disorders.
This is one way social normalizing can be dangerous. If we’re
operating with socially inherited internalized biases – what Foster Wallace
calls “the default setting” and Dan Ariely calls “intuition” – especially if we’re
unaware of them, individuals within parent groups can be adversely affected. We
see the predominance of certain psychosocial conditions in similar
socio-cultural settings and others manifested at specific times; i.e.
alcoholism and drug abuse more frequently in lower income communities and
eating disorders in young females in the developed world.
The encouraging thing about psychology8
is that it’s a practice based on the premise that these conditions can be cured,
with traditional talking therapy and/or behavioral reconditioning. “Normal”
self-limiting and probably even extremely self-destructive behavior is
treatable. You can heal, but you have to know what you want to heal to. You
have to choose. There are no atheists.
There are many, many literary parables structured around an
individual bracing himself against the weight of society out of youthful
petulance, Manichean goodness or the fight for personal liberty. In A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
Joyce’s fictional reputed alter ego Stephen Dedalus says:
When the soul of a man is born in
this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk
to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
In some cases the struggles of these heroes are rewarded, painted nobly,
even in tragedy, and in others are revealed to be solipsistic folly. Often though,
as is Stephen’s experience, the protagonist learns that his relationship the
society he clashes against is more complicated than he originally assumed.
Society is not an unmovable burden that we need to throw down, we’re part of
it, it is us and we’re mutable. In most places, on most graphs, human beings
seem to be moving toward more open societies, accepting of a broader range of
typicality and friendlier toward the narrow periphery. Slow motion is better
than no motion. There are no atheists and anarchy remains an ideal. We all
choose, and sometimes amazing things can come from constraints. Limits can be
facilitators. Dedication and practice yield virtuosity. Proficiency bears
neuro-physical and social fruit. We don’t get a Gretzky or a Beethoven without
cultural norms and individual proclivities.
Individual and group specialization is fine, sometimes good,
possibly inevitable – righteousness is dangerous. If righteousness is removed,
acceptance and change are feasible, potentially pain-free and a future riven by
conflicts fought in defense of societal or personal truths can be avoided. Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and ecclesiastical scholar who fought against, was
imprisoned and finally executed by the Nazis, has some beautiful work on this
subject.
In his Letters andPapers from Prison, Bonhoeffer talks about religionless belief,
suggesting that humans have no essential need for (divine, ineffable,
infallible, righteous) authority to coexist on this earth – in spirit, support for
bias sensitivity, maybe an argument for liberal arts degrees (maybe the only
one) and for equal and un-propagandized education, definitely for freedom of
access to information, for vagabond traveling through foreign places, scholarly
cross-cultural study, for self-doubt and self-love.
We’re constrained by the laws of physics, our bodies, brains
and cultures but most pertinently by our own choices. Discussing free will for
John Horgan’s Scientific American blog, Cross Check, neuroscientist,
Francis Crick collaborator and consciousness hunter Cristof Koch
proposes: “What remains, though, is that I am the principal actor in my life,
so I better take responsibility for my actions.”
Regardless of the neurological parameters of free will, a
nexus of personal control can prevent individuals from doing harm to themselves
or others. But, the self isn’t god. Culture isn’t god. God isn’t god. Nothing
(that we can cross-culturally prove yet) is god.9
We can both love our choices and question them rigorously. We can recall the
techniques we used as children to test and understand the limits around us,
picking and choosing our truths freely. Baring righteousness, being mindful
that societal ills can throw us off-balance and remembering that we can change,
individuals and groups can move toward tolerance.
At the end of the Kenyon College speech David Forster
Wallace warns his young audience to be justly questioning of biases and reminds
them to wear the colors of their beliefs proudly, because, in paraphrase, this
is it, folks, this is the stage.
Killing the infinite, accepting limitations, may be part of
the contemporary human condition, but if we go just one step further than DFW, offer
an open, evaluative method for determining truths, we give our people, young
and old, truths that feel just a little bit truer and limits that feel a lot
less limiting.
* Read the entire article again, here.
8 Encouraging, as contrasted with the nagging odor emanating from the social sciences that comes from the fact that many conclusions appear both intuitive and circumstantial – an underwhelming combination, festering into a distinct aroma of rationalizing bullshit.
9
Also included in this list is science: Science isn’t god. The idea of
discussing and reviewing information like physicists do is so seductive.
Certain real things in human experience (and the physical world) may not be
measurable. We need to embrace fallibility. Uncertainty. I think we can trust
empiricism if we can learn to walk away in frustration. Still, it seems unfair
that a tool so wonderful should be insufficient for understanding us.
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