The social and cultural history of the self | Basic Research On the Self

Have human beings always had a self? Has there always been an “I” who reflects on a “me”? We’ll never know what it was like to be alive at the origins of self-consciousness, but that doesn’t keep us from speculating.

Charles Taylor imagines the following scenario in Paleolithic times: As a hunting group is closing in on a fierce woolly mammoth, the beast suddenly charges at Hunter A. In that moment, Hunter A thinks something like “Oh no, I’m really in for it now.” At the last moment, however, the beast changes course and kills Hunter B. Hunter A then experiences a mixture of relief for himself and grief for his companion.

Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, would have a somewhat different take on the situation. For Jaynes, Hunter A would not have thought “I’d better run for it.” He would have heard a voice from the left side of his brain saying “run for it,” and his right brain would have interpreted this as a message from the gods.

The Axial Age and The Great Leap of Being

According to Jaynes, the transition from god-inspired to self-motivated action did not occur until relatively recently (recent in the evolution of human beings, that is). Jaynes analyzed ancient historical writings. He found that, prior to (roughly) 1000 BCE, there was an absence of words indicating the intention to make a decision (decide, intend, want, initiate) and words suggesting conscious reflection (wonder, understand, anticipate, regret).

This absence disappeared during the first millennium BCE, which was also a time of major change in how people thought about themselves and their world. The cultures of Greece, India, China, Iran, and Israel were transformed in this era. We still revere great figures from this period: Homer, Socrates, Plato, Archimedes, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Gautama Buddha, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah – plus those who taught Jainism and wrote the Upanishads. Human culture had been progressing quite slowly and then, bang!, we got religion, philosophy, government, and science.

The specifics of Jaynes’ contentions are disputed, but the basic idea illustrates something that happens repeatedly: As cultural changes occur in society, there are associated changes in self-concept, identity, and our sense of such things as individuality, authenticity, and embodiment.

Social practices that relate to the self – the use of mirrors, portraits, self-portraits, increased privacy (e.g., bedrooms), social manners, diaries, biographies, autobiographies, the portrayal of characters in fiction – provide historical clues to the nature of subjectivity in the past. Some of these practices — along with changes in self-concept — are associated with specific historical periods: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantic era, Victorian times, industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, consumerism, postmodern times. Correlations between social change and subjectivity are not always straightforward, however. They can be complex and messy. This is especially true for the past few centuries, when the “psy” disciplines (psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis) became an integral and inescapable part of how we understand ourselves and how we behave.

The journey from past to future

When psychologist Roy Baumeister wanted to study an aspect of the self — the nature of identity — in an empirical manner, he figured he would not be able to do this in his usual laboratory setting. So he decided to use history as a “quasi-experiment.”

By doing this I felt that I could ascertain when identity crises actually began occurring in our history. Presumably these occurrences would be the result of certain social changes just prior to that historical period. Once I understood those changes, I would know what had made identity problematic, and I would probably also gain insight into the nature of identity.

Baumeister’s book, Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self, may be an oversimplification of correlations (there’s a summary of Baumeister’s research available online as a PDF: How the Self Became a Problem: A Psychological Review of Historical Research). Nevertheless, a historical perspective on the changing nature of the self is what gives rise to the questions that interest me: What can social and cultural history suggest about the development of consciousness and the self? How does the nature of society, in different historical eras, interact with, influence and/or determine the way people consciously make sense of the world and of their individual lives within it? Does this historical path explain – or at least illuminate – our present day concept of the self? How has the sense of self changed in my own lifetime? Has it changed in a way I would consider beneficial? Or is there a striking parallel between twentieth century theories of the self offered by the “psy” disciplines and the interests of capitalists, consumerists, and neoliberals?

My interest in these questions dates back to what I wrote 30 years ago on the flexibility of the self. At the time I had a naïve hope that understanding the socially constructed nature of reality would be helpful to teenagers – helping to ease them through a period of feeling awkward, lonely and misunderstood. Kenneth Gergen suggests applying social construction to psychotherapy, education, organizations, and scholarship. Why not explain the social construction of identity to teenagers? I’m not sure how possible that is, either intellectually or politically, but I still believe it would be a worthy project.

And what about the other temporal direction? What will the self – or for that matter, our sense of reality – be like thousands of years from now? Though I can only barely imagine this, when I read about neuroscience (see this blog post, for example) I sometimes get a chilling glimpse of how different our regard for human subjectivity might be in the future.

In this blog, I hope to gain a better sense of what we can learn about the self by considering the past – what Nikolas Rose calls the genealogy of subjectivity. I believe understanding the contingency of the present can provide grounds for optimism about the future. As Rose writes: “If the history of our present is more accidental than we may like to believe, the future of our present is also more open than it sometimes appears.”

Image source: Tyranny of the Prefrontal Cortex

References:

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Mark Leary, The Curse of the Self: Self-Awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life (I’m indebted to Leary for his discusses of Taylor, Jaynes, and the Axial Age)

Roy Baumeister, Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self

Roy Baumeister, How the Self Became a Problem: A Psychological Review
of Historical Research (PDF), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1987, Vol 52, No 1, pp 163-176

Kenneth Gergen, An Invitation to Social Construction

Daniel Lende, Advances in Cultural Neuroscience, Neuroanthropology: Understanding the encultured brain and body, March 29, 2013

Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self