Identity Theft (3)

I am a stranger on the earth; do not hide Your commandments from me. Psalm 119:19 NASB

I am – Jacob said to his father, “I am Esau your firstborn; I have done as you told me.  Genesis 27:19a  NASB

Some time ago (September 28, 2018) I wrote about the shift in the idea of “individual.”  I noted that ancient, non-industrial cultures exhibit group consciousness rather than discrete, individual consciousness.  I cited works by Gabor Mate and Anthony Storr, noting that even today there are cultures where the idea of an individual identity apart from the social group of culture just doesn’t occur.  I suggested that reading the Bible in this ancient way requires a radical revision of what it means to be a person.  A verse like Acts 16:30, famous for its evangelical interpretation, might need to be read differently if the jailer thinks like an ancient Roman rather than a modern pagan.  We are the victims (perhaps willingly) of this shift from communal to individual identity.  Perhaps we didn’t even know we were affected, much like other forms of global “disease” in recent times, but nevertheless, a major change in meaning occurred for all of us.  Lionel Trilling notes that some words seemed to have been invented only recently:

Words which first came into importance in their present meaning “in the last decades of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century: ‘industry’, ‘democracy’, ‘class’, ‘art’, and ‘culture.’  These words make our way of thinking about society.  And  . . . ‘society’ itself is another such word.”[1]

Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement that, in the last sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, something like a mutation in human nature took place.  Frances Yates speaks of ‘the inner deep-seated changes in the psyche during the early seventeenth century’, which she calls ‘the vital period for the emergence of modern European and American man.’”[2]

These changes were partially the result of “the dissolution of the feudal order and the diminished authority of the Church.”[3]

“ . . . a new kind of personality . . . emerges . . . what we call an ‘individual’: at a certain point in history men became individuals.”[4]

“Taken in isolation, the statement is absurd.  How was a man different from an individual?  A person born before a certain date, a man—had he not eyes? Had he not hands? Organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?  If you pricked him, he bled and if you tickled him, he laughed.  But certain things he did not have or do until he became an individual.  He did not have an awareness of what one historian, George Gusdorf, calls internal space.  He did not, as Delany puts it, imagine himself in more than one role, standing outside or above his own personality; he did not suppose that he might be an object of interest to his fellow man not for the reason that he had achieved something notable or been witness to great events but simply because as an individual he was of consequence.  It is when he becomes an individual that a man lives more and more in private rooms; whether the privacy makes the individuality or the individuality requires the privacy the historians do not say.  The individual looks into mirrors, larger and much brighter than those that were formerly held up to magistrates.  The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lucan believes that the development of the ‘Je’ was advanced by the manufacturer of mirrors: again it cannot be decided whether man’s belief that he is a ‘Je’ is the result of the Venetian craftsmen’s having learned how to make plate-glass or whether the demand for looking-glasses stimulated this technological success.  If he is an artist the individual is likely to paint self-portraits; if he is Rembrandt, he paints some threescore of them.  And he begins to use the word ‘self’ not as a mere reflexive or intensive, but as an autonomous noun referring, the O.E.D. tells us, to ‘that  . . . in a person [which] is really and intrinsically he (in contradistinction of what is adventitious)’, as that which he must cherish for its own sake and show to the world for the sake of good faith.  The subject of an autobiography is just such a self, bent of revealing himself in all his truth, bent, that is to say, on demonstrating his sincerity.  His conception of his private and uniquely interesting individuality, together with his impulse to reveal his self, to demonstrate that in it which is to be admired and trusted, are, we may believe, his responses to the newly available sense of an audience, of that public which society created.”[5]

And then there is this from Christopher Hill:

“All roads in our period have led to individualism.  More rooms in better-off houses, use of glass in windows (common for copyholders and ordinary poor only since the Civil War, Aubrey says); use of coal in grates, replacement of benches by chairs—all this made possible greater comfort and privacy for at least the upper half of the population.  Privacy contributed to the introspection and soul-searching of radical Puritanism, to the keeping of diaries and spiritual journals.”[6]

Autobiography began when man became an individual.  The ability to stand outside oneself and reflect on being a discrete self is a thoroughly modern invention of the psyche, not possible before men created a different kind of public, a society.

Now we need to re-read the psalmist’s statement.  gēr ʾānōkî is a claim about identity theft at the social level.  In the ancient world, I am who I am because I am connected to you, to my family, to my tribe, to my nation, to my God.  Any disruption in any of these will leave me less than human, and that, of course, is exactly what has happened to us.  God didn’t make us individually.  He made us relationally (“male and female” I think it goes).  Disrupt that ontological connectedness and you end up without human beings.  To be a stranger is to be aware of my own depth of deceit, my internal and external disconnection, and my lack of human integration.  It is to be something other than what God created.  And that is very sad—and very scary.

Topical Index:  ʾānōkî, individual, Genesis 27:19a, Psalm 119:19

[1] Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 19.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., p. 20.

[4] Ibid., p. 24.

[5] Ibid., pp. 24-25.

[6] Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution: 1603-1741 (Norton: New York, 1961), p. 253.