Identity

Identity, it's who we are. But it isn't just who we are to ourselves, it is also who we are to other people. I shall try to keep my thoughts reasonably linear, but this is a topic that has come up in a variety of facets recently, so it may be difficult to isolate it from the surrounding context to discuss in a stand alone fashion.

One important facet of our identity is our cultural heritage. This, in some sense, grounds us to a specific place or places in history, "our ancestors were these people and came from here." It might be argued that many people in the United States lack this sense of heritage, but I think that it would be more accurate to say that they have incorporated the American ideal of settlers and intermixing as their heritage.

The question arises, what must be done to lay claim to a cultural heritage? I would assert that the act of laying honest claim to such a heritage validates itself. Of course, if I were to jokingly claim to be heir to the royal traditions of the Incas, this would not carry a lot of weight. However, if someone genuinely believes themselves to be an inheritor of a specific culture, then it is self evident that their identity is shaped by a sense of inclusion in that culture.

On the other hand, one might hold that, in order to possess a cultural heritage, one must take an active role in exploring that culture. While this is a perfectly valid way to organize people into culture groups, I think it is unnecessarily restrictive. At the risk of seeming ego maniacal, I will provide an illustrative example from my own life, simply because it is the only life with which I am familiar enough to say things with confidence.

Among my mix of European ancestors, I have some Germans and some Italians. And, while this has led me to study a little bit of German and put some effort into learning about German culture, I identify more strongly as Italian, despite having invested less effort in my Italian identity. I believe this is simply because my last name, if you unravel some Ellis Island mishaps, is Italian. So, just by identifying myself by name I am asserting my Italian identity, and it has caused people to react to me differently, thus further reinforcing my "Italian-ness."

And here we see how one's self identity and the manner in which others construct identity groups have such tricky interrelation. As I mentioned earlier, I think organizing people into identity groups based on putting effort into claiming a cultural identity is a valid way of organizing people, by which I mean that the groups that one obtains from such organization will likely share some distinguishing characteristics of interest and this organization doesn't seem to inherently promote ethnic cleansings. However, it may be quite at odds with how other people think about themselves, and indeed, how other people organize the world into cultural groups. So, it seems important to acknowledge that people can come to their identity through a variety of methods.

Further confusing the matter is the practice of assuming identities. For example, a European manga/anime enthusiast who feels their hobby confers a cultural legacy from Japan. First, let me note that this does not apply to every manga/anime enthusiast, just those who feel their hobby includes them in the penumbra of Japanese culture. Secondly, while this notion of cultural heritage may be at odds with the traditional notion of culture as inheritable from one's parents, it is entirely in keeping with both my criterion and, it seems to me, with the contrasting criterion from above, as the person in question both self identifies with Japanese culture and is investing effort into the cultivation of this cultural identity.

This highlights a further complication, in that essentializing Japanese culture down to anime and manga; or even anime, manga, and quirky gadgets; does Japanese culture a disservice, and, depending on one's views, may even be insulting. However, otaku are a part of Japanese culture, so one perhaps should not say that this view of Japanese culture is incorrect, insomuch as it is incomplete. So, toward what concept of a culture ought we direct our efforts in order to "earn" cultural inclusion?

So far we have mentioned three reasonable but incompatible methods for assigning cultural heritage; self identification, cultural participation, and parental inheritance. These are by no means exhaustive, geographical inheritance (Italians are people who have lived in Italy for some duration, which varies from person to person) and nationalism (Italians are citizens of Italy), for example, also have adherents. In light of this complexity, I am inclined to broaden my original position. While I still believe in accepting how others identify themselves, I also believe that we should accept that other people will have other ways of organizing people into cultural groups. That said, not all such organizations are "reasonable," which I would like to address at a later date.

Technology: How Much is Too Much?

I got the idea for this post while watching this short TED talk. For those of you too busy to watch it, Gary Wolf talks about how much better technology has become at measuring things, specifically things about our own lives. How we sleep, where we go, how we get there, how many calories we burn, what we buy, and even our physical health. We now have the ability to record and store so much more quantifiable data about our own life than ever before, leading Wolf to title his talk, "The Quantified Self."

While the issues related to who should have access to this information and how are quite interesting, I feel that data security is considered at enough length by tech gurus, and less frequently asked is whether we want this information. In a conversation that has evolved over at least the past six years, and through multiple conversation partners willing to talk with me, I have explored the idea that technological advances may not be synonymous with progress. Before I proceed with that, let us first take a cursory look at the difference between quantity and quality.

At the most fundamental, quantitative things are those capable of being encoded numerically, while qualitative things are those experienced by human beings. So, word count in an article, the average number of articles I post in a month, and the number of hits my blog gets are all quantitative descriptors of the blog. The ideas and emotions the posts, hopefully, evoke in you as you read them, that is the, more important, qualitative information of the blog. As I have mentioned before, although I use quantities like page views to try to estimate if I am evoking qualities, such as thoughts about my posts, I must admit that this is a rather ineffective method to obtain this information.

My biggest worry about the TED talk is its emphasis on quantitative data. We base so many of our decisions on quantitative information, but I worry that we often forget that the quantitative information is simply an aid to obtaining underlying qualitative trends. For example, when you are buying a new computer, or any new piece of technology, one usually looks at technical specifications and benchmark tests, all framed in terms of numerical information. But the real information we are attempting to ascertain is how the acquisition will affect your lifestyle. The new "smart-phone" may have greater bandwidth enabling more data transfer than ever, but it probably will not make people significantly more likely to want to talk to you, so you have to decide if the increased quantity will produce a more desirable quality of life.

The other worry this data-phillia inspires in me is that it may be too successful. What if we eventually obtain such detailed and comprehensive information about our habits that we can accurately ascertain the correlations between quantitative data and qualitative experience. In a sense, we will have learned how to program ourselves. While we might use this information to reliably make ourselves as happy as we could possibly be, think of the ability to control people implied in this understanding. Furthermore, I think the human experience would be the poorer for this information. Free will may well be a lie, but if so it is one of the most beautiful and fundamental lies to human existence.

Finally, Wolf ends with the following quote. "The self isn't the only thing, it's not even most things. The self is just our operations center, our consciousness, our moral compass." And here, I must flat out disagree with him, the self is everything. I don't mean this in a solipsistic manner, that I am the only thing that exists, or even in a hedonistic sense, that my personal well-being should be my number one priority, but rather in the sense that every single thing that I ever see or do, all my accomplishments and anything I will ever be known for I experience through the lens of "self." The self is all that we know, and everything else we try to understand comes to us through the self. So, I don't disagree that "know thyself" is a valuable piece of advice, but I worry that "measure thyself" may be approaching the task from the wrong angle, more on this tomorrow.

Shadow of a Thought

"Life is full of grief, to the exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people."
"The consolations of philosophy are many, but never enough." -both from "Shadow of the Giant" p161

I have come to the realization that, not only is it impossible to experience everything worth experiencing, but even if we could, there would still be more to do. The order that you do something matters, so you would need to go back and reread everything, mixing up the order to inspire new thoughts. While both main thoughts here were inspired by the books "Ender's Shadow" and "Shadow of the Giant," you may be able to see that they were affected by the book I read previously, "The Sociopath Next Door," and the thoughts which inspired my last blog post. My second thought should make sense to those who haven't read the books, but I am unsure about the first one, read it if you like, it shouldn't spoil much.

Tiny Sociopaths:

It is interesting to contrast Bean and Achilles. Achilles seems to be the stereotypical sociopath, casually charismatic, utterly void of compassion, and inclined to blame others for forcing him to commit his acts of depravity. On the other hand Bean, while standoffish, distant, and unlikable, clearly cares about other people, despite his inability to rationally understand why.

While Bean initially seems to be somewhat of a sociopath, attempting to substitute his intellect for his impaired emotional reasoning, the character Achilles continually reinforces the differences between Bean and a true sociopath. Although Bean never expresses fear that he and Achilles are similar, their shared affective impairment and intelligence seems to make drawing some comparisons inevitable. This reflects the struggle that Ender experiences with his relationship to his older brother, Peter.

Peter provides yet a third interesting example. Whereas Bean is dispassionate and Achilles is callous as only one without empathy can be, Peter is cruel. Like Achilles, Peter is skilled at manipulating people, but unlike Achilles and Bean, Peter is also able to relate to them, to understand them. Throughout the books it is interesting to see how Orson Scott Card develops each of these profoundly socially dysfunctional characters.

The Alien Other:

A staple of much science fiction, the impetus for the events in the series is a good old fashioned alien attack. Unfortunately for both species, before either side realizes how truly alien the mindset of the other is, they have each committed the kind of diplomatic faux pas that just naturally segues into xenocidal warfare.

This serves to highlight why I would love to encounter aliens someday (no, not xenocide!). Think of all that we could learn from them, not in the realm of science and engineering, but in philosophy! They are the ultimate Others, and if we could reach enough understanding to communicate I have to imagine that we could never look at our own species the same again. Interaction with a true, conscious intelligence separate from humanity seems to present so much potential for putting ourselves in a greater context. For that matter, I would be happy if we could create an artificial intelligence. Not a human simulation, but a self aware computer, as I would imagine it would have a truly unique perspective on things as well.

Let's Get Objectified

While dancing a couple of nights ago an interesting interaction occurred. The follows decided that they wanted a break, while the leads still apparently had energy and were dancing around, this provoked a comment from one of the follows that they wished that had more singles. For those less culturally savvy than even me, this is a reference to the practice of inserting one dollar bills into the clothing of dancers at "exotic dance" establishments. Reasoning that if someone has enough breath to crack witticisms they have enough breath to dance, I asked one of the follows, and noted that, "I'm a guy, we aren't SUPPOSED to be objectified," in my common form of sardonic social commentary.

Unfortunately we didn't launch into an interesting discussion on objectification, but it got me thinking about the subject. Then yesterday it occurred to me that one of our greatest struggles as we try to relate to other people is our need to objectify ourself. What I mean is that, paradoxically, although we have so much more information about our own experiences than anyone else's for this very reason we often cannot understand ourself. We lack the context to understand ourself as a human being precisely because we have such a skewed perspective on ourself, and we struggle to fit ourself into the role of human as we cannot compare ourself to anyone else since we lack comparable data on any one else's experiences. Thusly we struggle to objectify ourself, or to consider our experiences from an objective, rather than subjective, point of view, because that is the only way that we can relate to other people, whom we must all view, to some extent, from an objective perspective.

I think this is related to an idea which I borrow from Hegel. Hegel posits that the individual left all alone is not a Self, that we must come into relation with some Other in order to differentiate ourself as a Self. Once we encounter the Other, another person, we may begin to realize that we are not just a bunch of immediate sensations and experiences, but we are also something that this alien Other might interact with much in the same manner that we interact with this alien Other. No longer can we simply encounter life as a series of stimuli, now we must encounter life with the notion that we are a unified entity, a Self, an objectification of the subjective.

So then, if objectification is one our social goals, what is wrong with follows wanting to stick singles into my suspenders, shouldn't I want to be objectified as a slab of hott man-flesh? Well, the answer may be yes, but there is still something wrong with it. When someone wedges Washingtons into a waistband, they are not objectifying them self, quite the opposite actually. In viewing the dancer as a source of entertainment, stimulation, they are celebrating their own subjectivity at the expense of the dancer's objectivity. If the purpose of objectification is to enable us to relate through our shared humanity with the Other, this self-gratification instead alienates us from a relation with the Other, because we attempt to deny the full subjectivity of the Other's experience of self and instead replace it with our own fantasy of the objectivity of their self.

This is not to say that I whole-heartedly disapprove of people sticking singles in my suspenders, I gain perspective, money, and it was mentioned in jest. However, I do believe the social practice that is being mocked is one deserving of criticism.

Nothing Lasts Forever

It sometimes feels like once you put something on the Internet, it will last forever. If you've ever tried to delete your embarrassing Facebook photos, I imagine you know what I'm talking about. Once I put something on the Internet, I no longer have to trust the frailties of my own memory, I can immortalize my every thought in the bedrock of our society, as though we were young lovers, simply by publishing a blog post.

However, this is a false confidence, a brittle permanence. Although the electronic memory may seem perfect in a way no human memory ever could be one minute, upon its deletion it is gone in a way no repressed or forgotten memory ever will be. With a click of a mouse a thought, a paper, a profile, even a friendship can be obliterated.

This frailty is not reflected in the real world. A computer stores its memories, each in their place, each separate from the memories stored around it. People, we live our memories, we are our memories. We don't remember things because they are "stored," we remember things because they have become a part of us, and who we are is a part of our memories. Every single thing that I remember is connected to every other, because they are all, in some sense no matter how small, a part of this thing I call myself.

On the other hand, I too am terribly impermanent, so although the memories stored within me may be more flexible and, consequentially, more durable than those in a computer, they too shall be obliterated as time wears on. I would like to thank everyone who participates in this blog for sharing something more than bits and bytes with me, for, in some way, making me who I am.

Nothing lasts forever, except loss.

Grad School

A short post, to give a reprieve after yesterday's post, about how grad school makes me question my own identity. I think the biggest problem with being a grad student is that one doesn't fit in a broad category. On one hand we are students, and I still, for the most part, consider college students to be my peer group. However, I also am an instructor to said students so, at least with regards to the specific students in my classes, I do not consider myself their peer. When you consider them, I am much more like a professor, and indeed they sometimes call me a professor. However, I too have professors teaching my classes, so they are not my peers.

Another thing is that I am, sort of, not very competently, running my own life. I have a job, which gives me a paycheck, with which I rent an apartment, buy food, make my computer work, and all the other serious adult-y things that one might imagine adult-like people doing. But, as mentioned above, I still think of myself as a student, someone preparing for life, rather than living it (this might be worth an elaborating post in itself some time, but not now).

Sometimes I worry that one of the functions of grad school, similar to boot camp, is to break down the participants sense of self in order that I can be re-molded in the form desired by her or his superiors. Whether or not this is the case, I certainly have, in previous semesters, lost myself over the course of the semester. Granted, over the past few years, even before I came to grad school, I haven't had the strongest grasp on who I thought I was. However, I feel like it has been worse since coming to Michigan. Upon returning to Oregon over winter break this year I remarked to a friend that as I was leaving to walk over to his house I had the strangest feeling, as though when I had done the same thing last summer was much more immediate than anything that had happened to me in the intervening semester.

This is one of the reasons I try to keep up with the blog, it keeps me thinking important thoughts, and not sleepwalking through life. And I appreciate all those who are willing to share that journey with me. One last piece of advice, always go for the red pill!

Society Gives You Hell

If you find repeated, unnecessary usage of the word "hell" offensive, I highly recommend that you don't follow the link to this video. In fact, the thought inspired by this song concerns the premise of the music video much more than the lyrics of the song, let's discard them for the most part. Sorry I just indirectly cussed at you a whole bunch for so little reason.

This is a song of which I had never heard before my Top 25 Mashup epiphany, from a group of which I have never heard. While the lyrics, which we henceforth mostly ignore, detail someone dealing rather poorly with a breakup wishing all sorts of ill will upon their ex, the video depicts two neighbors, one set very straight-laced and the other group quite alternative, embroiled in an escalating series of attempts to disrupt each other's lives. It seems that both find the lifestyle epitomized by the other distasteful and disturbing. Interestingly enough, the main character from both households is played by the same member of the band.

One might simply write this off as a gimmick designed to showcase how clever we can be with green screens, I think further thought is rewarding. Suppose, rather than simply being played by the same person, the two main characters actually are the same person. Then what initially appeared to be the conflict between two feuding neighbors actually becomes an inner conflict between the forces of acculturation and individuality.

Put simply. the straight-laced household, to me, represents our inner desire to "fit in." Although our culture has fetishized the "individual," or the "rugged individual," a desire to acculturate is by no means a bad thing. For one thing, forging your own way can be hard going, and perhaps not worth it for unimportant preferences. As Hegel notes, "in dress fashions and hours of meals, there are certain conventions which we have to accept because in these things it is not worth the trouble to I insist on displaying one’s own discernment. The wisest thing here is to do as others do."

Furthermore, participating in a shared cultural background facilitates the various modes a sociability that humans seem to require to live happy, fulfilled lives. Through our interactions with others we obtain both valuable practice in interpersonal skills and shared experiences and vocabulary, both of which, in turn, assist us in further social communication. Indeed, acculturation plays a critical role in our social, and consequentially, emotional well being. Those of you who know how well I fit into a crowd are probably waiting for the other shoe to drop.

That other shoe is the call of individualism. For now I would like to set aside that representing individualism with counter-culture is a flawed metaphor, as counter-culture consists of a group rejecting the dominant culture, and is therefore a culture of its own subject to all the benefits and woes of acculturation. Furthermore, the fact that our concept of ourself as an individual is heavily influenced by external stimuli, such as how we think others see us or what we think is the acceptable thing to do, shall be tabled for now. Both of these concepts are quite interesting, and provide fertile ground for thought, but to address either of them would make this post much longer than I intend it to be.

Although conformity has decided benefits, individualism makes valuable contributions to our personality. While, "being true to oneself," is vague enough as to lack all meaning, I think we all have been in situations where we did not feel our actions corresponded with our self image. Sometimes these feelings ought to be overcome, as we try new things, get out of our comfort zone, and expand our horizon, to borrow a few clichés. However, at other times these feelings indicate that we believe that authority is directing us in an immoral or otherwise deleterious direction.

So, in conformity and individualism, we have two powerful, important, and opposing drives shaping our persona. Guess what, I'm not going to even give advice on how to reconcile them, sorry! For one thing, I wouldn't venture to claim that I have done a great job balancing them against each other. I also think that our search for a way to harmonize them within ourselves is one of the most important, difficult, and rewarding struggles that we may face in our lives. So, keeping in mind the importance of the oft uncomfortable interplay between conformity and individualism, I hope they give you much to think about!