Monthly Archives: December 2010

Jonah,

I wanted to move your question here because I think its an important one and I don’t want it to get lost inside the other two conversations growing within the original thread about feminist Mormonism on Patheos. It may end up with just the two of us talking, but that’s fine. I’m intrigued by the question and interested in seeing where the conversation leads us.

Your question was about if it more important for us to engage in self-discovery or to engage self-transcendence? Forgive me if my paraphrase is inaccurate. It was longer and probably a little more complex than that, so please correct and clarify as needed.

I have already answered your question elsewhere, but let me expand upon that answer by providing some personal information, which I hope will serve as an anecdotal example to support my thesis.

I have had two wives and a brother tell me I am a narcissist. These are important people to me. They know me more intimately than most, and the accusation troubled me. I don’t have the personality that allows me to blithely reject their judgment, but I do nonetheless have the sense that their judgment is somehow flawed. Perhaps this is born of a natural desire to exonerate myself and stand innocent of the accusation, but I don’t think so. I don’t think so because I also have a sense that I may not be innocent and the sense that the question of my innocence depends upon what it means to be a narcissist.

So my mind naturally turned to examine what they might have meant by the accusation. The second wife wasn’t familiar with the word, but she read it in a journal the first wife had written in rehab and it stuck. They understand the term to refer to a self-love that prevents one from caring about others. The accusation was meant by both of them to hurt rather than to instruct, so I think it reasonable for me to see the accuracy of their accusation as damaged by the motivation behind it. My brother, on the other hand, understands the term differently than it is understood in popular parlance. Nevertheless, I don’t know if he is accusing me of being unconditionally selfish or if he is employing the term as metaphor, drawing an analogy between me and the Greek youth who fell in love not with himself, but with a mediated (and, therefore, inauthentic) image of himself. He gets cagey when I have tried to discuss the subject with him, so I am not certain as to the nature of his accusation. As to the intent behind it, I suspect it too was meant to hurt rather than instruct, but I cannot be sure.

Understanding human nature allows me to understand that I am genetically predisposed to be self-interested, but not just self-interested. I am, as all humans are, more complex than that in that I am also genetically predisposed to suspend my self-interest (at least temporarily) in the interest of another or to see my self-interest and conjoined with the interest of another. Am I selfish? I am. But am I selfish to an extent beyond that to which I am innately predisposed. I don’t think so. But if this denial is merely self-protection, if I am, in fact, selfish to an unnatural degree, to an unhealthy degree, then that would most likely a product of my environment. It would also be something with real moral weight and something I should struggle to transcend. But, let’s continue on to the other sense of narcissism.

After a great deal of painful introspection, I have come to the conclusion that I am a narcissist in the metaphorical sense of the word. I don’t, however, see myself as born this way, genetically predisposed to invent, adopt, and protect an inauthentic self-image. (I don’t think anyone is. I can’t see the evolutionary pay-off for such thing.) As I stated elsewhere, I grew up in the paradoxical nexus of feelings of inadequacy and delusions of grandeur, and what is the narcissist but one who doesn’t know who he is or what his place in the world might be? I suspect those questions of identity are answered for most of us by our environment, but I also believe there can exist simultaneously other environmental forces that interfere with the transmission of that hypnopaedic message of self-identification, producing sometimes the psychic dilemma: “Am I shit or am I God?”

I don’t see this as true for everyone. Sure, everyone suffers moments of self-doubt, but this doubt, I think, is more particular than universal, manifesting itself in questions like, “Am I doing the right thing?” not “Am I worthy of love and respect?” Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the people I know who seem to have a strong clear sense of themselves really don’t. But if everyone is plagued with the latter kind of self-doubt, then that would imply a nativist origin, and as I said before, I can’t see the evolutionary pay-off for a species to be born to such a predisposition. Of course, this psychic dilemma could be instead a social meme that is passed down generationally to one extent or another through social interaction and not through our DNA. Whatever the case may be, I don’t feel understanding the origin of the dilemma is all that important.

What is important is that I gained a valuable insight about myself that I don’t regret despite the fact that the acquisition and possession of it was painful in the extreme. I had thought of myself as someone with a strong, clear sense of self and I was ashamed to discover how much of that “self” was role-playing. I was also deeply embarrassed by the thought that others had seen it before I did. I didn’t want to be that guy. Not at my age.

I hope I am not misunderstood here as spouting New Age, self-help bullshit. I don’t expect to know my authentic, original kernel-self before I die. No one can do that. I also don’t care about discovering what the forces were that prevented me from organically acquiring a strong, clear sense of myself. I simply care about examining each aspect of me I have carried with me for so many years, determining if it is authentic, and casting it aside if it is not.

My leaving the church was in some sense part of this process. I am not saying that the church made me inauthentic, but I was inauthentic while I was in the church. And that fact makes irrelevant, at least for me, the discussions we have had about staying engaged with the church in order to exert change from within. That’s not me. I am not an agent for social or moral change. I liked the costume once, but I took it off. It didn’t fit. I know there are people who are sincere and effective agents for social and moral change. I’m just not one of them and I value that discovery about myself.

The comments I made about Mormon feminism specifically and feminism generally are in some sense part of this process. In years past, I would have bent over backwards to be seen as fair-minded about the repression of women by men. It wouldn’t have felt like an act to me. It would have felt like a true display of my fair-mindedness, or rather of what I perceived others to define as fair-mindedness. My opinions on the subject today may be flawed, but I am no longer going to measure my words in order to be socially acceptable. I am instead energized by the argument the expression of those opinions produced. It is a valuable argument that offers to persuade me to refine my opinions. I would be a fool to avoid it for the sake of maintaining “polite discourse.” Those who know me and love me will continue to love me despite my boorishness. Those who can’t get past it, didn’t love me to begin with, so fuck ‘em.

I have spoken of the compensatory habit I have of speaking my thoughts out loud so I could hear how they sounded and in hearing, discovering if they are rationally sufficient. This habit is in a weird way helpful to this process of self-discovery. My writing this now is also my way of hearing my own thoughts about having been accused of narcissism, and thus, in some strange and ironic sense, a part of this process.

I keep speaking of these activities as being only “in some sense” a part of this process because I don’t want to over-determine the origin, nature, and purpose of these activities.

So back to your question: “Is it more important that we seek to understand ourselves or that we seek to transcend ourselves?” It seems to me this question poses a false dichotomy. I do not see these two struggles as mutually exclusive. I see them instead as roughly sequential, while also being recursive rather than linear.

At first, I have felt angry, ashamed, and depressed by the discovery that I am not the cinematic image I had created for myself. I think it took me a few years to get past it, but now I feel liberated and something close to exultant. The opportunity to unpack the authentic “me” by divesting the inauthentic could end up being both a gift of self-discovery and of self-transcendence.

How could it ever be an either/or proposition?

Nahum