Footballs, Baseballs, and People

 Imagine a magical ball being used as a football at a large, outdoor athletic center. It is a normal football—oblong and brown. Now imagine it being thrown out of bounds and onto the baseball field. Immediately upon landing, it transforms into a white baseball with red stitching. The players there pick it up and pitch it and hit it and do what you normally do with a baseball.

That is, until someone hits a homerun and knocks it onto the soccer field, where it transforms immediately upon landing into a soccer ball. The players kick it and head it as they do with any soccer ball, because it has become a soccer ball. Utterly. That is what it is now.

And then someone kicks it out of bounds to the golf driving range. There, the ball becomes small and white and dimpled. A gold ball. And it acts just as you would expect a golf ball to act, because it is a golf ball. Utterly.

Do balls behave like this? No, of course not. But we do. I find myself and others utterly transforming ourselves, on the instant, as we pass from one context to the next. For instance, imagine I had some friends over, and we were in an animated discussion about music. I am interrupted by my young daughter who wants the lid for the peanut butter jar to be loosened. I respond to her with some annoyance in my voice. My friends do not take offense; they know the context has changed from friendliness to family-time, and we express more annoyance with family members than friends because, frankly, we can take them more for granted.

Who is the real me? The friendly guy talking to his friends, or the annoyed guy talking to his daughter? Well, I am both. And neither. What is true of me, I have found is true of other people, too. We don't carry a centered self around to various contexts. Rather, our self molds to the context. This may seem disconcerting, but it is good. If we were as stable and fixed as we often like to believe our selves are, we would not be nearly flexible enough to deal with life's exigencies. An adaptive, flexible, and fluid "self"—if we can call it that—is necessary to live.

I recall a few years ago an intelligent physicist said that she likes to think she lives her life according to certain principles. She believes, or likes to believes, she has certain values and moral strictures that guide how she behaves. I can see why she would say this: believing this can bring us confidence and security. However, it seems delusory to me. (I am using the word "delusion" not in the psychiatric sense, which means a person believes in things his or her immediate social group does not consider reality, but in the sense of not being in accord with how things work, regardless of the social context.) It brings comfort, not accuracy.

When I look at myself, I do occasionally conform to certain stated principles and values come what may. I have suffered the consequences of going against the tide. However, this is rare. I usually go along and get along, even when that means what I do in one context is inconsistent with something I do in another. For instance, I sometimes am heroic in the manner described above. But, when insecure and unsure of myself, I can be a manipulative weasel. I hate to admit it, but it's true.

That said, I am sure I carry around notions of myself as delusory as my physicist friend. This is because concepts, ideas, and words developed not to describe reality, but to get things done. Even nouns, which would seem to describe static things, actually describe functions. "Doorstop," for instance, refers to anything that can be used to keep a door open, from a brick to a book to a formally designed doorstop. Similarly, "cup" does not refer to a thing out there, but a function: I can make my two hands into a cup and drink from them. And so on.

My physicist friend, I think, developed what she wanted to believe was an accurate description of how she lives her life when she said she lives according to principles. My guess is that this description, as noted above, served a strategic purpose rather than a descriptive one. It helps her to get on in the world and get things done, even if it is woefully inaccurate. 

And, of course, I have my delusions. Certainly, my knowledge of physical reality must be a little delusional relative to hers. Beyond that, I assume the metaphor of the magical ball that I am using to describe the selves we all have is, itself, strategic. What do I gain from it? For one thing, I let myself off the hook for inconsistencies. For another, it allows me to more fully engage in the contexts at hand because I don't feel the need to carry values that serve in other contexts to the new one.

All of this does raise the question of ethics: aren't there some things that are wrong regardless of context? Yes, of course. But it helps to see that the people engaging in this wrong are not necessarily evil, but are caught up in a context well beyond their will and control that they are conforming to. We already know that, given the right context, otherwise "good" people are capable of horrible atrocities. This human ability becomes less of a mystery if we assume people accommodate to their various contexts rather than taking a centered self of definite value wherever they go.

Furthermore, in moving between contexts groups, oftentimes small ones, can rectify social cruelties. Martin Luther King, for instance, moved between the context of the U.S. that promised equal treatment before the law and the context that tolerated racism. He brought these two into dialogue, exposed the inconsistencies, and, with others, helped to end legalized segregation in the country. I realize King used notions of transcendental moral good in his understanding of his work, but from the perspective I am presenting he used dialogue between existent social contexts.

Is there any such thing as a centered, rational self? I doubt it. I suspect that we are through and through conditioned by and formed by the various social and natural contexts we find ourselves in. And, as I said earlier, this is not a reason for despair: it is a celebration of the diversity of human social life. And it shows how intimate we are with each other. We live with and through each other, supporting each other, making each others' lives possible and livable. Rather than being isolated atoms coming together, we make and are made by our thoroughgoing intimacies.