CONSCIOUSNESS AND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
by Forrest Church
March 6, 2005
Though I should have been warned off by Larry Summers unfortunate foray into gender speculation, let me begin this morning with an irresponsible generalization. On average, when men look into the mirror they like what they see; when women look into the mirror, they don't. In part, this is because society seems to place as high a premium on how women look as on what they do, whereas this rarely is the case for men. Call it the Hillary Clinton hairdo syndrome. People tend to notice what Condaleza Rice is wearing, something that has never once happened in all his adult life to, say, Karl Rove.
One result of this syndrome„again to generalize wildly„is the male penchant towards unwarranted smugness. Which is why what happened this week in my own family has been so morally instructive. My wife and I have both recently returned from speaking engagements outside the city. Carolyn went to London and spoke at the House of Commons and House of Lords. I went to Pocatello, Idaho and spoke at the House of Pancakes.
I've been reflecting lately on the relationship between consciousness and self-consciousness. Even as righteousness and self-righteousness are opposites, the same is true, I am coming to believe, of consciousness and self-consciousness. The more wrapped up we are in ourselves„and this holds, of course, for both men and women„the less attentive we are to others. For instance, people who are highly sensitive (who are easily hurt) are often„not always, but often„highly insensitive to the feelings of others. They are so keenly attuned to their own fragile feelings that little room remains on their radar screens to register how others may feel.
The same thing holds for self-consciousness in its more familiar, crippling form. We walk into a room and feel as if everyone is staring at us, picking us apart. As long as we remain conscious only of how we may appear and seem to others, we have little opportunity objectively to read the room. To whatever extent we are caught up in ourselves, we fail to take in new information. We re-cycle our own poluted air. In this sense, the more self-conscious we are, the less conscious we will be.
This observation has religious ramifications as well. Anyone who is completely wrapped up in his or her own salvation, may, in the grip of spiritual self-consciousness, either dismiss, diminish or ignore the spiritual quests of others, especially those whose paths lead to a different altar. The more conscious we are, the more aware we tend to be of fundamental similarities that unite us in a single human family. Self-consciousness holds up distinctions that set us apart.
With that as a backdrop, let's take a look at one aspect of the modern liberal spiritual quest that may be compromised by self-consciousness. Call it, for want of a better term, the self-discovery or self-actualization movement. In short, the search for our elusive selves. jJesus memorably taught his disciples that they must lose themselves in order to be found. Conversely, by seeking to find ourselves, we may actually get lost.
Self-discovery has its place in the religious search, but as a rite of passage not a destination point. Each of us passes through a phase during which self-differentiation and discovery are vital. That phase is adolescence. Spiritually speaking, if we don't move through this phase in a time appropriate manner, we may never grow up.
One celebrant of spiritual adolescence known to all of us who came to age in the 60s is the German novelist, Hermann Hesse. To a rebellious generation who greeted his writings with quasi-worshipful enthusiasm, Hesse was appealing precisely because he dedicated his novels to the angst of self-discovery. With Nietzschean flourish, he pitched to his audience, I among them, wonderful images of climbing to the mountaintop and standing alone, naked in the storm, defiant against the fates.
To illustrate the barriers such self-consciousness erects against the development of a more conscious, less self-absorbed religious world-view, let me offer my own adolescence as a cautionary tale. Shortly after Hesse became my all-time favorite author, I concluded that I would die before the age of twenty-five. My father had cancer when he was twenty-five. Given three months to live, he staged a remarkable recovery and then went on to serve for twenty-four years in the U. S. Senate. By cultivating this death fantasy, I may have been substituting myself as a sacrifice due to the Gods in exchange for his life. More likely, I subconsciously determined that the best way to avoid competing with my very successful father was to check out before I had a chance to fail.
Knowing that I would die before the age of twenty-five had its advantages. Untrammeled by the responsibilities of growing up, I could skip class whenever I wished and devote my brief life to the pleasures of marijuana and the writing of incomprehensible poetry. I had only one goal: to seize and exaggerate every opportunity for pain and joy. By the way, they were wonderful years. I wouldn't turn them back for anything.
But then I joined the work force. Adolescence and work, it turns out, aren't the best of dance partners. Thirty-five years ago, I took my first job as ministerial assistant at Stanford University's Memorial Church. Since finding the Holy Grail was my highest priority, here is what I did. To begin with, I followed a strict ascetic regimen. I went to bed at one, awoke at five and spent each morning drinking Lapsang souchong tea and reading Greek philosophy. Every afternoon I served as guru and guide to a few ragtag disciples. Evenings I listened to Mahler and read Milton, which, together with the Vietnam War, were the primary sources for my budding eschatological vision.
Should you doubt that I was taking my life too seriously, for a week or two in the late spring of that year, I took off my glasses when walking around campus, so as not to lust after all those gorgeous half-dressed women.
Being basically blind, this plan proved impractical. I lapsed, put on my glasses, and returned to the pleasures of hell. But I maintained my other disciplines. My goal was to learn Latin and Greek and to read all of Western philosophy in two years. What better way to discover the truth! I cut off all my hair, grew a foot-long beard, lost thirty pounds, made it to the Stoics and collapsed. Positive that I'd contracted consumption or some equally romantic nineteenth-century disease, I went to the university health service. My doctor was not impressed. She said that I had been behaving like an idiot. There was absolutely nothing wrong with me that a little more sleep and a little less tea wouldn't cure. She told me that she never wanted to see me again. I never wanted to see her again either, so I abandoned my quest for perfection.
Later, my Stanford boss, Wayne Rood, told me, "When you were on your ascent of the mystical mountain, I considered firing you because you weren't doing your job, forcing the rest of us to cover your work in addition to doing ours." Had he spoken of his concerns back then, my then overweening sense of self-importance might have led me to take offense. I understand them now. When we follow our own bliss at the expense if interpersonal responsibilities, we must measure personal gains in one project against shared losses in others. This is not a zero sum game. When duty is sacrificed on the alter of self-absorption, even the worshipper loses.
It is useful to remember that, in harder times, adolescence barely existed. People often began working during childhood, tended to marry early (assuming the mantle of adulthood without enjoying the pleasures and experiencing the pain of untrammeled youth), and then died in what passes today as early middle age. Those who profess nostalgia for a simpler age might contemplate this. Things may have gone to hell lately„each succeeding generation has thought so since the beginning of time„but today's hell is far preferable to yesterday's imagined heaven. We forget how short the life span was before this century. Some two millennia ago, meeting death at the age of thirty-three, both Alexander the Great and Jesus beat the odds. In the United States, at the turn of the twentieth century, life expectancy was forty-seven.
Think of how different things were back then. If from late childhood, we had to get up at five in the morning and work without ceasing until dark simply to survive, we'd consider supper and a beer to be a bargain. In this light, questions like "Who am I?" and "What does life mean?" are a luxury. People may have asked them since the beginning of time, but today we have more time to ponder them. If seducing from our lives an extended measure of adolescent angst, the luxury to ponder ultimate questions is not a bad thing. On the other hand, since, by its very nature, adolescence is marked by self-absorption, our answers to these questions may be further from the mark than were those of our less privileged ancestors.
The luxury adolescence is by no means a bad thing. It consists in breaking free. Such freedom has its limitations, however. Adolescents jump from goal to goal, responding to this stimulus or that, embracing one idea and then another. Adolescents are "indiscriminate evaluators." Over time, we winnow our experiments into more sustained endeavors„often from many sexual relationships to one dedicated relationship, from many vocational possibilities to a single job, from quicksilver intellectual passions to a more sustained set of values about the world and our place in it. At the end of this process, and for very good reason, ideally we will ask "How am I doing?" and "How can I do it better?" rather than waste time pondering who we are. Slowly consciousness supplants self-consciousness. We begin to grow up.
At lease my own adolescent behavior had„with a few lamentable exceptions„the charm of being age-appropriate. Such antics are less appealing when the search for "self" in adulthood leads the seeker into the thicket of self-absorption. Even as adolescents need to become "themselves" to gain autonomy, adults discover meaning by connecting. As long as we confuse the search for meaning with the search for selfhood, we are wanderers in the woods.
Inexorably, such a search leads to narcissism. You surely know the story of Narcissus, who refused to love others and was therefore condemned to love no one but himself. In one version of this ancient myth, Narcissus wasted away longing after his own reflection, mirrored in a still, deep pool, in another, he leaned over to embrace it, fell in, and drowned. In both tellings, this picturesque Greek legend warns against the dangers of self-love.
Narcissism„the pathology of self-consciousness„encompasses more than self-love, of course. Since, by definition, narcissism reflects unhealthy self-absorption, the narcissistic danger many of us face springs not from self-love but from self-doubt, even from self-hatred, the most debilitating form of self-consciousness. Suicide, for instance, is often a narcissistic act. People become so completely absorbed in their troubles that the only way they can imagine solving them is to paint themselves out of their own self-portrait. We are far more likely to be absorbed by negative self-images than positive ones.
Which leads us to the most common form of self-consciousness. All of us indulge, in little ways, almost every day.
"What will she think of me?"
"How do I look?"
"If I speak, will I say something stupid?"
And then, an hour later:
"She must have thought I was an idiot."
"God, I looked terrible."
"How could I have said such a stupid thing."
This is garden-variety narcissism, self-consciousness in its most familiar form.
Half hidden here is the point I wish to leave you with. The key to spiritual grown lies not in achieving selfhood but in achieving integration. The question "How am I doing (or connecting)?" speaks volumes more than does the question "Who am I?" even with respect to who we actually may be. When we integrate our values, projects, and relationships, our lives begin to cohere. Consciousness supplants self-consciousness. We become spiritually mature.
There are even practical advantages to this. Should our spouse, say, be speaking at the House of Commons while we are speaking at the House of Pancakes, we don't say, –Bad for me,” but –Good for her.” We take as much, if not more, delight in the world we share as we do in the world we direct and control. We move from the crippling limitations of self-consciousness to the wider field of consciousness. We take ourselves more lightly and the world more seriously. We begin to grow up.
Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all.