Update: Yeah I stumbled onto the right answer at the end. Ignore what I say and listen to what the 12-steppers say instead. They know more than I do.
I continue to be fascinated by the difference among people in how much internality, how much self-observation they have. Because I am well on one side of the continuum and have had puzzled discussions with important people from my life who are nearer the other extreme, I have had a tendency to regard this as an either-or. As recently as my discussion of why most Bible studies in print leave me cold I have dichotomised this.
Perhaps over-fascinated. Even James, who seems to be equally comfortable with self-examination has mentioned that perhaps a full lifetime examen is not necessary before deciding whether to have the chicken or the fish at the banquet. So yes, I can tie myself in knots needlessly, and there is always my friend Christine's "The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the examined life ain't not picnic either."
Yet some of those on the other extreme I have now concluded are pretty thoroughly autistic. Autism does not guarantee an avoidance of self-observation, for in fact some go to my extreme seeing it as a topic of fascination. Yet there is a larger tendency among the autists who do not acknowledge that their behaviors outside the norm are actual symptoms who get quickly, furiously, snarlingly angry at any mention of the possibility that this could be pathological in any way. And of course, lack of insight is an indication of severity, creating a Catch-22 in approaching the subject.
I know one young woman who stays with her father more than her mother as an adult because of lifestyle choices, and there are fewer emotional mirrors at Dad's, as he also is evading self-observation. And they all lived together in a little crooked house.
This expands out into not only understanding oneself, but understanding others. Would this sound different if it were a woman saying it to a man? How would I feel if someone said this to me? Is there some ambiguity in expression I overlooked when I first wrote this? What if this was my group he was talking about? Automatic to me. I don't take any credit for it, I can't stop. I'm just forever puzzled when I see that others haven't done this. Conservatives explain liberal behavior or motives and v/v without the least pause of "Wait. What does this say about me?"
It was interesting that the Path Before Us essay on fasting and asceticism came to me as I was writing this. The description that people sometimes do not do any self-examination until they are in a crisis rang true, as did his reminder that there are degrees of crisis and we don't necessarily have to be in a prison cell to rethink things. By that measure, a lot of the "crises" would just be recognising that a problem exists. Huh. My professors aren't as charmed by my writing style as I expected. Best to go back to the old way until I figure this out. But the point holds. Some of us need to be cued, however mildly, and do not self-observe as a matter of course.
The Twelve Steps of AA and the other groups address this in some detail and see it as an ongoing project.The operative steps for this
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature
of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make
amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so
would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly
admitted it.
I probably should go over some of their material on this, as they have been at it a long time and likely have learned a few things. I had a question I used to ask my friends in recovery, just because they had different answers and enjoyed thinking about it. "Do you regard the Twelve Steps as addiction medicine, or as food for healthy living for all of us?"
This is a follow on to the theme on Shallowness? You describe people who getting blazingly angry when ?confronted with their lack of observed self examination, and wonder at the difference between deep divers and the blinkered. Taken to excess, which anything can be, self examination is Zeno’s Paradox, and the ‘blinkered’, like some thoroughbred racehorses, can better achieve. They need it, the opposite of what you describe? as an unalloyed good.
ReplyDeleteA later article on National Geographic limns well the mild annoyance of common and increasing editorial and cultural practice now of throwing a conceptual wet blanket over what used to be better and more beautiful. Would that such could MYOB as you seem to call for with self examination, but when thrown over others, “observed”, is hateful.
I agree with you, MYOB and mind it well. It’s the Your Own aspect, speaking generally but on point in all similar examples, that needs triple emphasis.
Not even President Lincoln will escape ( or has had at the Celestial Bar) sharp questions to answer on this. Lesser? More so? President Carter as well. Amusing topic to argue over which more egregious. But note well the attractions for evil clowns against this principle, whatever ‘good’ comes from its earliest and best abeyance.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Kev, but I stumbled on it at the end and you probably should just stick with what the 12-steppers say rather than what I say. They know more than I do.
ReplyDeleteI think you are right that the disposition to self-examination is innate, and likewise its opposite. I'd add that self-examination has morbid and healthy forms. We see something of the morbid form in Robert Frost's quip that a liberal is a person who will not take his own side in an argument. Morbid self-examination deflates the pretension of the self to the point where the self cannot stand up for itself. Healthy self-examination on the other hand looks for remediable faults. Morbid self-examination is one form of what traditional psychology called melancholy. I'm innately melancholic and this has always been weakeneing.
ReplyDelete