#buffered self

A Secular Age, Charles Taylor. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (ISBN: 9780674026766), 2007. Summary: How Western society moved from a shared belief in God to a secular age in which belief was one option of many. Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age, has become a primary source of sorts for anyone trying to understand our present time. On a regular basis, I come across writers…

This is a really smart take on how our digital living has rendered us in some ways pre-modern, where the boundaries of our self-conceptions are once again porous:

To better understand the consequences of digital media, then, we need to look more closely at how it shapes human experiences that have especially salient political dimensions — how, for example, it shapes the experience of the self, of place and time, and how it predisposes us to think about the socio-political order. Let us look at each of these in turn.

The Reenchanted Self

In his account of the nature of secular society, Charles Taylor argues that an important part of the emergence of the modern age was the disenchantment of the world and the rise of what he describes as the “buffered self.” Unlike the old “porous self,” the new buffered self no longer perceives and believes in sources of meaning outside the human mind. This new self feels unperturbed by powers beyond its control. We might say that in the Digital City the self becomes in some ways “porous” once again. It is subject to powers that we perceive as impinging on us, powers now algorithmic rather than spiritual.

Taylor’s discussion of disenchantment begins with the question of meaning. In our disenchanted modern world, meaning arises only from minds, and the human mind is the only kind of mind there is. Nothing external to the human mind bears any meaning in itself. Moreover, there are no non-human agents, either made of matter or spirit. By contrast, in the enchanted world things and spirits have the “power of exogenously inducing or imposing meaning,” a meaning that is independent of the perceiver and that we may be forced to reckon with whether we would like to or not. Objects in the enchanted world can also have a causal power. These “charged” objects, Taylor explains, “have what we usually call ‘magic’ powers,” and they can be either benevolent or malevolent. They may bring blessing or trouble, cure or disease, rescue or danger. “Thus in the enchanted world,” Taylor writes, “charged things can impose meanings, and bring about physical outcomes proportionate to their meanings.” The vulnerable self sought refuge in a well-ordered society whose ritual life was designed to protect its members from malign forces. As Taylor explains, this is in part why heresy was so dangerous. The heretic was not only a source of intellectual error, he also compromised the security of the community by compromising its purity.

According to Taylor, the enchanted world “shows a perplexing absence of certain boundaries which seem to us essential.” In particular, “the boundary between mind and world is porous.” The “porous self” in an enchanted world is thus “vulnerable, to spirits, demons, cosmic forces. And along with this go certain fears which can grip it in certain circumstances.” By contrast, the “buffered self,” characteristic of the disenchanted world, is “invulnerable” and “master of the meanings of things for it.” It is also immune to the fears that may grip the porous self. The buffered self is sealed off from the world; its boundaries are less fuzzy; meaning resides neatly within its own mind; and it occupies a world of inert matter. It is autonomous and self-possessed, the ideal type of the modern individual.

Certain features of the self in an enchanted world are now reemerging in the Digital City. Digital technologies influence us and exert causal power over our affairs. In the Digital City, we are newly aware of operating within a field of inscrutable forces over which we have little to no control. Though these forces may be benevolent, they are just as often malevolent, undermining our efforts and derailing our projects. We often experience digital technologies as determining our weal and woe, acting upon us independently of our control and without our understanding. We are vulnerable, and our autonomy is compromised.

We are troubled not by spirits but by bots and opaque algorithmic processes, which alternately and capriciously curse or bless us. In the Digital City, individuals may be refused credit, passed over for job interviews, or denied welfare on the basis of systems built on digital data against which they have little to no recourse. The self that emerges out of this digitally mediated milieu more resembles the porous self of the old enchanted world than the buffered self of disenchanted modernity. Consequently, the self that emerges in the Digital City is more likely to seek refuge in a social body and to strive for the purity of that body.

Disruptive Witness, Alan Noble. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2018.

Summary: Drawing on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, Noble explores our longing for fullness in a distracted, secular age of “buffered selves,” and the personal, communal and cultural practices Christians might pursue to disrupt our society’s secular mindset.

When I first came across this title, I was expecting something…

“The rise of the buffered identity has been accompanied by an interiorization; that is, not only the Inner/Outer distinction, that between Mind and World as separate loci, which is central to the buffer itself; and not only the development of this Inner/Outer distinction in a whole range of epistemological theories of a mediational type from Descartes to Rorty;’ but also the growth of a rich vocabulary of interiority, an inner realm of thought and feeling to be explored. This frontier of self-exploration has grown, through various spiritual disciplines of self-examination, through Montaigne, the development of the modern novel, the rise of Romanticism, the ethic of authenticity, to the point where we now conceive of ourselves as having inner depths.” — Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

I unfortunately read an awful article recently in Psychology Today (I hesitate to link to it, but it is here). It was written by someone named Izzy Kalman, a fan of Jordan Peterson, who’s ideas I also dislike a great deal.

To quickly summate, the author, Kalman, wants to help Peterson better attack the left so he offers two “fatal flaws” of the left that Peterson should exploit: 1) the left wants to erase the line between objective and subjective harm, and 2) the left wants to replace “might makes right” with “might makes wrong.”

Very briefly, it’s unbelievable to me that Psy Today would publish this guy in the first place; the sharp dualistic distinction he’s making between “objective harm” and “subjective harm” is seriously scary and seems very outdated to me, philosophically for sure, and psychologically too I would imagine…. The author makes a big deal about emphasizing how hurting someone’s feelings with words is not the same as some type of objective, physical bodily injury that may be inflicted upon someone. I didn’t look this guy up and don’t know what his training is, but he is definitely implying that psychological harm is not physical and therefore not as harmful; according to Kalman, if we’re “subjectively harmed” we’ve ultimately harmed ourselves, the insult (or whatever) from the other person had nothing to do with it. This seems terribly specious and actually very disingenuous, dangerous and just plain dumb.

Reading Kalman go on about “subjective harm” and “objective harm” I couldn’t think of a better example of what Charles Taylor (quoted above) terms a “buffered self.” Kalman obviously views physical bodies as containers for consciousness which does allow one to distinguish what is “me” from the “world out there”; what is “inner” is mine and what is “outer” is just unmediated stuff we encounter. Simple! Lol! If only it were true. When we talk about the human nervous system in the context of symbiotic relationships with our ecosystem, it doesn’t make sense to imagine the human nervous system and mind as enclosed within the skull; the human nervous system is more ecological than we would like to admit. We’re co-continuous with our environments and there is no clear distinction between mind and body. Thoughts, feelings, emotions are real things (not secondary illusions) that have causal efficacy. No one would argue that physically murdering someone is the same as insulting someone and hurting their feelings, but the difference here is a difference of degree not kind. Insulting someone, being verbally, emotionally and psychologically abusive, is harmful and traumatic and is emphatically wrong. It is my guess that Mr. Kalman behaves differently around different people, e.g. I bet he would bite his tongue around young children and not use the foul expletives he might use around his buddies at the golf club. Is he being politically correct when he censors himself like this? Of course not, he’s recognizing difference, recognizing power hierarchies and being lovingly sensitive to others.

Additionally, the whole “might makes wrong” thing, omg… Kalman is a biblical scholar too! At one point Kalman cites the Jewish Bible, claiming it forbids judges to engage in favoritism which supports his claim that “Sometimes the rich/strong person is the wrong one, and sometimes the weak/poor person is the wrong one.” He interestingly leaves out the little bit about how in the Judeo-Christian Bible preference is definitely given to the well-being of the poor and powerless of society in the teachings and commands of God as well as the prophets and other righteous people. A rich and powerful person may be legally right about something but the question of weather or not a legal system itself is right or wrong does not enter Kalman’s thought process. How unfortunately parochial and short-sighted of him.

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Illustration above by Rosita Uricchio

“Given this dynamic, we observed how love involves the dissipation of the emotions of otherness. This entails the dismantling of cognitive and emotional boundaries between the self and the other. We call this emotional identification “love” or “intimacy.”

It is at this point that certain psychotherapeutic objections are raised. All this talk about dismantling or dissolving the boundaries between self and other tends to fly in the face of certain psychotherapeutic recommendations that suggest that proper “boundaries” between the self and others are vital for emotional and relational well-being. There may be fears that the analysis I’m offering, that love dismantles boundaries of selfhood, could create enmeshment and dependency. That is, it is often argued that psychological and relational health requires clear and appropriate boundaries between self and other. These boundaries create a space for self-care and emotional restoration: we disengage from others to care for the self. The worry is that if boundaries between the self and other don’t exist then the self would be worn down, expended, or victimized by the relational demands of others. Clear “boundaries” prevent this from happening. So the objection is, given all this talk about dismantling psychological boundaries between self and other, am I not recommending a variety of unhealthy and pathological processes?

I’d like to respond to this criticism in a couple of different ways. To begin, I’d like to simply assert that my descriptions of love are demonstrably true, uncontroversial, and widely recognized. Recall, I’ve claimed that in love the self and the other become so identified, emotionally and symbolically, that the two form a union, an identification, a fusion. This might seem like the very definition of enmeshment but, upon consideration, this description of love describes how most of us do, in fact, experience love. Consider the love between a parent and a child. What parent, if faced with the choice, wouldn’t sacrifice the use of his or her right arm to save their child? Or even give their very life? The point is that the safety and well-being of the child is more important than the parent’s own physical body. This, after all, is what we mean by sacrificial love: the loss of the self (e.g. one’s own life or situation in the world) for the sake of the other. And this loss of self doesn’t have to be a dramatic life or death choice. Parents frequently forgo life opportunities and their own ambitions to make sure that their children have the chance for a better life. In all of this we see how our notions of selfhood become intertwined and fused with the other to the point where the well-being of the other is how I define my selfhood! Anyone who loves understands this. What is radical about the call of Jesus is that he extends this love not just to children and family but to the entire world, friends and enemies alike.”

This passage comes from Richard Beck’s book Unclean. (If you can’t you tell, I absolutely love this guy.)

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Illustration above by Gracia Lam

It is amazing to me how often Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations speak directly to the sermon that I am preparing for the upcoming weekend. We come to our final week in the Advent Conspiracy series. We’ve been exploring how to conspire against the rampant consumerism that overshadows this season. So far we’ve looked at the themes: Worship Fully, Spend Less, and Give More. This week we end with Love…