I’m listening to a lecture by Alan Watts that begins with the topic “social institutions as games”. The term “games” in this context is not speaking of the trivial, but rather something that is always played for its own sake. Recognizing social institutions, (including identity!), as games, gives us perspective on our society and our lives that is sorely missing when we insist on taking everything deadly seriously.
Social institutions go a great deal deeper than anything
we’ve mentioned. And the most important kind of social
institution is that which has to do with role-playing. Who
you are. Now, when we ask the question “Who are you?”,
people think of this question in two different ways: one
person, when asked ‘who are you’ will answer “I’m a
doctor.” Another person will fall silent because they
realize how profound the question is. They realize they’ve
been asked what their ego is. But a lot of people don’t
realize that when they’re asked ‘who are you?’.
I’ve noticed just a little bit of difficulty in my
investigations of discussing identity with people — that
they fix on their role and use that to describe their
identity. Their name. Their family. Their place in
society. What they do, what their hobbies are, and so on
— all these are roles. And then also there is the role of
character playing.
All people are, more or less, taught to
act. We are all hams from the beginning. And we were
schooled in acting in our childhood, although it wasn’t
called that. It was called education, it was called
upbringing, but a great deal of
it is schooling in acting. And you very soon learn as a
child from your peers and from your parents what acts are
appropriate and what acts are not. It is the concern of
all parents that their child learns a role in life and has
an identity by which the child can be recognized. It would
be extraordinarily disconcerting, wouldn’t it, if a child
had one personality one day and another personality the
next. But children can do that!
Don’t you remember as a child that you were many different
personalities? Depending on your environment, that you
were one person at home with your parents, that you were
quite a different person out alone with other children;
then, when you went to visit your uncle and aunt, you were
someone else altogether? And so on.
And finally, the whole trend of education is to shake all
this down and make you more or less constant, in every
sort of social environment that you enter, so that
everybody knows who you are. Otherwise it’s disconcerting.
So, we are made to believe that we have a real self. That
is to say, somebody who we really are, and whom we have to
find. To find yourself, to settle down, to grow up—means
to fit into a role. And there are a lot of people who are
troubled in our society, and who seem to be misfits and
are terrible unhappy because they just can’t find the role
that they’re supposed to fit. They don’t know who they
are. There is an inner pandemonium and conflict.
But it’s obvious, isn’t it, that the role you play is a
social institution. Because you can’t be an object to your
own consciousness, at least not in the ordinary way. You
are a subject from your own point of view. And you can
only become an object to the extent that you adopt the
attitudes that other people take towards you.
Other people, from the beginning of life, are mirrors. And
by the way they respond to you, you begin to learn what
they think of you and therefore who you are. We all tell
each other who we are. And so, the role we play, the
identity we have in that sense, is a social institution.
You can listen to the first part here. The next parts include: “How to Play the Game”, “YOU are Your Worst Enemy”, “The Joke of Death” and “Don’t be Deceived”.
As a mirror in Ess’ life, I gotta take a shot at understanding this before I try to impart it to her.
It’s 9:21 in the evening, and since it is nearly the longest day of the year, I can look out our open window and see the green grass and tree leaves in the slowly fading twilight. Dads and Grads — my favorite time of the year. The time when the days are longest and summer still feels like all possibility and nothing spent.
Yesterday, Father’s Day, while Mykala made some spectacular savory chickpea stuffing inside wontons, I asked Ess if she wanted to go on a bike ride. Watching her face change is always amazing: she’s never not said “YES!”.
So we went through the usual rigamarole of putting shoes on (make sure they’re on the right feet, Ess!) and picking out which stuffed animal would sit with Ess on the bike. We walked outside and… flat tire. Then something wonderful happened: Ess helped me fix it. Helped me turn the bike upside down, watched me use the tire levers to pull the tire and inner tube. Sat patiently in the car while I looked up the bike shops, found they were closed (5:15 on a Sunday) and listened intently when I gave her the bad news we wouldn’t be biking. But, we looked online and found an inner tube at Target!
We went together, picked it up, and then Ess helped me put it all on — and, after a delectable dinner outside with Mykala, there was still time for a bike ride through a beautiful summer evening, with my daughter.
I was out at continuing education tonight, learning about our current opioid epidemic, and I got home just before Essie’s bedtime. She and Mykala were upstairs in our bedroom, reading some stories when I got in the door. I ran up the stairs and I could hear this little voice going “dada! dada!” and when I opened the door, Ess ran up to me and gave me this GIANT hug. Then she asked me to read her this library book:
Called Triangle by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Jon Klassen.
A few pages in, Ess just quietly stared at me, and then threw her arms around my neck. And then around Mykala’s neck.
“Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to Dada…” is what I heard Ess singing in her pack and play on the morning of my birthday. She and Mykala sang it again later that day, and we drew with chalk on the sidewalk. Mykala baked a yellow cake (one of my favorites), and frosted a birthday greeting on the top of it. I visited my parents, and the sun was out for the first time in a few days. I tripled my age and got 96; I looked back and realized I started at my current job when I was only 27, and that Ess was born when I was 29. I recalled looking at my official birthday certificate when I was in college, and seeing my mom’s age at my birth: 29.
I’ve been slowly piecing together logic and math in a kind of rudimentary numerical summary, arranged in a spreadsheet I nicknamed ‘Prognosicator alpha’ — it tells us how our student loan payment decisions affect Essie’s college fund and how that affects our retirement — and looking at a grid of all those years and their numbers gives me the sense that this can’t possibly be my life, so easily moved in time from age 29 to 65 that the rows don’t even take up the height of my laptop screen.
As I’ve told Mykala before and as I reiterate now: I have no idea what I’m doing. Not in a small way, like how do I teach Ess about inequality and the way people can behave in frightful ways. Not in a small way, like what’s wrong with our water softener or how to repair it. Not in a small way, like why can’t I just call the insurance company so we get the Jetta’s windshield fixed. No. I don’t know what I’m doing in a BIG way.
A big way, like what will I teach Ess about trading time for money. Trading autonomy for security. Trading future comfort for present pain. Are those even the real choices… or are they straw men, false dichotomies?
A big way: is there an escape from the strictures of consumerism and society? Do we wish to escape? Should we?
A big way, like what even is our full menu of choices?
A big way, like why is it that philosophical understanding puts the events of our lives on such a grand cosmic stage that it feels like nothing matters?
Andrew Sullivan’s short and potent The Madness of King Donald levels-up when it ends with a subject rather more profound than our current administration:
I’ve managed to see Scorsese’s Silence twice in the last
couple of weeks. It literally silenced me. It’s a
surpassingly beautiful movie — but its genius lies in the
complexity of its understanding of what faith really is.
For some secular liberals, faith is some kind of easy,
simple abdication of reason — a liberation from reality.
For Scorsese, it’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery, and
often inseparable from crippling, perpetual doubt. You
see this in the main protagonist’s evolution: from a
certain, absolutist arrogance to a long sacrifice of
pride toward a deeper spiritual truth. Faith is a result,
in the end, of living, of seeing your previous
certainties crumble and be rebuilt, shakily, on new
grounds. God is almost always silent, hidden, and
sometimes most painfully so in the face of hideous
injustice or suffering. A life of faith is therefore not
real unless it is riddled with despair.
How efficiently he gets from his summary of secular liberals’ imperfect understanding to the realities of a life of faith. As a secular liberal guilty of precisely that imperfect understanding, reading this helped me understand that faith doesn’t resolve all existential angst or salve all philosophical bramble.
The originators and adherents of #GiveYourMoneyToWomen
didn’t just suggest that women should get paid for
existing, although yeah that too if you’re buying.
Rather, women should get paid for all the work they
typically do for free – all the affirmation, forbearance,
consultation, pacifying, guidance, tutorial, and
weathering abuse that we spend energy on every single
day. Imagine a menu of emotional labor: Acknowledge your
thirsty posturing, $50. Pretend to find you fascinating,
$100. Soothe your ego so you don’t get angry, $150. Smile
hollowly while you make a worse version of their joke,
$200. Explain 101-level feminism to you like you’re five
years old, $300. Listen to your rant about “bitches,”
$infinity.
It was beautiful to watch #GiveYourMoneyToWomen
unfold. Men got angry, and then
women explained to them that to have their anger
acknowledged, they would have to pay. This made them
angrier, of course, but without a donation, who was
listening?
Following EverydaySexism has helped me begin to see the grinding, humiliating, oppressive, equality-crushing mill of our society; one that produces suffering women endure knowingly and unknowingly. Reading pieces like Zimmerman’s are my next step in jumping from seeing to understanding. That way lies empathy.
Here’s a nice excerpt from Walking, by Henry David Thoreau:
My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to
bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is
perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to
is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do
not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything
more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden
revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called
Knowledge before—a discovery that there are more things
in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our
philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun.
Man cannot KNOW in any higher sense than this, any more
than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face
of the sun: “You will not perceive that, as perceiving a
particular thing,” say the Chaldean Oracles.
At first reading, it may seem to be an argument against Knowing anything but Thoreau declares “insufficiency” of knowledge in the philosophical, not the scientific sense. So, I feel that I can staunchly defend the merits of Science and Knowledge with a video like Science in America from Neil deGrasse Tyson, while nodding along with Thoreau about the importance of imaginatively underestimating how little we understand. That is to say: science is splendidly suited to uncovering truths (statistical significance), completing tasks (move this to there), advancing understanding (how are life and matter shaped), and setting the course of humanity (how should we behave to make sure our descendants don’t die). But if our hubris makes us believe the narrowness of our experimentation accounts for the broadness of the unknown, then we’re just punching buttons on a treadmill. For it is always the imaginative leap of the hypothetical that takes theory, instrumentation, experimentation from one plateau to the next.
Then I would say: science not governed by imagination, but alloyed with it.
