A far greater writer than I once identified the signs of a sick culture by naming a complex of symptoms that included, among others, high taxation, a high ratio of those on the public dole vs. those who were gainfully employed, lack of faith in the courts, police, and criminal justice system, constant, small incidents of violence (muggings, arson, terrorism of any sort), and a legislature that attempts to cure social ills by passing myriad laws that are basically ridiculous or unenforceable or both.1 He identified personal rudeness as the sign of a dying culture writing “This symptom is especially serious in that an individual displaying it never thinks of it as a sign of ill health but as proof of his/her strength.”2
While Heinlein has a valid point about dying cultures, I am more interested in one of the symptoms he named as part of a sick culture: particularism, the cessation of a people in identifying with a country and the onset of identification with a group (racial, linguistic, religious) that sets them apart from the population as a whole. This interests me not because I am concerned so much with the breakdown of society – it is happening all around us and while it is true that the only thing that ever changed the world is a small group of thoughtful people3 I am more concerned with how these disparate identities get formed in the first place.
A baby is born, so we are told, a blank slate knowing only that where it was once quiet and dark, and she was warm and never wanted for nourishment the world is now a loud, bright, cold place, and hey, what’s this weird feeling in my belly. We take these little blank canvases and we imbue them with destinies that are determined by factors that not only do they not control but in which they have absolutely no say. Hell, we do this even before the child is born with the aid of modern technology.
The template of our identity includes expectations based on our sexual biology; little boys get blue rooms with tigers and elephants on the walls while little girls get the pink or yellow room with the ducks and the bunnies. Psychological studies have shown that adults when given an infant of undetermined sex will handle and talk it differently based on what they are told about its sex (don’t make me dig out the study). Where do these expectations come from, these gender roles we’re all forced into? They come from outside, from society at large which is a combination of religion and social biology (be attractive, get a mate, reproduce).
We’re given the template of an identity based on our family’s economic circumstance (born into a middle class family…you can be a doctor; born to a poor teenage mother, welcome to the gas-and-go, kid, how do you feel about third shift to start?) Often our families want better for us than they had. Sometimes, though, they resent us for the opportunities they did not have access to that a changed and changing society presents to us. They resent the constriction of their lives by the accident of the time of their births and comings of age.
How much of our lives is a struggle against these imprinted destinies? How much time do we spend bullying our way out of these expectations and coincidences of our births to find our true selves? Why do continuing generations perpetuate the theft of a child’s potential for self-determination by imposing these expectations?
And how much of what each of us has been told is essential to our core being is myth? How many of these expectations
– the ones that tell us because our genitals are formed a certain way we must act a certain way, that because we were born or raised in this particular part of town in this particular city in this particular country these are our options in life, that our religious and spiritual paths have been laid out for us by the choices made not by our parents necessarily but by generations of people before them – have been forced upon us against our will even before we knew there might be other choices?
I think about these things a lot as I wait for the subway or the bus, watching the people in their office drag trudge home with their bags and their briefcases. There is this one guy, though, who draws my attention every time. He’s a cross dresser. He’s not trying to pass as a woman by any means; he is, simply, a man dressed like we would expect a woman to dress. Yet he commutes like everyone else, getting on the subway in the evening with his bag and his purse. He makes me wonder what fortitude, what alignment of circumstance has allowed him to choose an identity that is so far out of the mainstream. How did he come to the realization that this is who he wants to be/really is? And more to the point, how did he ignore all the noise that we call society to stand up and say: no, this is my reality and it is not negotiable?
Once again…not many answers and a whole lot of questions.
1. Robert A. Heinlein, Friday (New York: Del Ray Books, 1982), 240-242.
2. Ibid.
3. Margaret Mead, “A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
A small quibble – you speak of a baby being “born, so we are told, a blank slate.” I don’t think so.
In my own very small experience – one sister, two brothers – they were each different from the others, markedly different. One was sweet and funny, one was willful in the extreme, one was strong and very social. These characteristics showed almost as soon as anything could show – for example, in the way each cried, from earliest infancy. The first basically didn’t cry, the second yelled in near-fury, and the third would whimper a bit, and then smile when she (yes) got what she wanted. These differences persisted in two of them and were markedly changed by other factors in one.
Ok – this is just annecdotal – but the differences were so strong, and, for me, so unexpected, that I have never forgotten. I never was able to think of babies as “blank canvases” again.
I’d argue that what you’re talking about is personality and what I’m talking about is knowledge.
No baby is born knowing that because it is a boy it can or can’t do certain things or it ‘should’ be acting in a certain way vs. another way. No baby is born knowing that because its skin is a certain shade of brown it will be allowed to go to certain restaurants or this high school instead of that one. These are all things that are imposed upon the child by the people who raise it.
What you’re talking about is, to me, an innate sense of self and way of approaching the world [winks]
Delurking as a fellow NaBloPoMo participant. I clicked, I read. I think I’ll bookmark your site. Obvioulsy there is mature food for thought here. Something to digest, savor, and maybe sometimes respond to. Thanks for letting me drop by.