Got an ID?

Sociology claims that we identify ourselves in large part based upon the world outside of the self.

Identity?-the sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances?-the condition of fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else; individuality, personality

I have never personally experienced an earthquake but have read that it is a very destabilizing experience. It is disorienting and it will cause a great deal of anxiety over and beyond what any ?'normal' catastrophe would cause. It apparently is caused by completely destroying our sense of certainty and solidity and permanence that we associate with the world outside of the self.

I am sure there are many reasons why religion is so pervasive within the population. I suspect one important reason is the comfortable sense derived when one is certain that there exists an anchor of stability outside of the self. I suspect this metaphysical certainty is somewhat like a night light in a child's bedroom. The human need for stability seems to demand some assurance that stability exists outside the individual.

In the 1950s sociologists and psychiatrists began to refer identity to a fluid reality "socially bestowed and socially sustained". Common understanding began to accept a person's actions and the public record of those actions no longer define identity. A person came to be identified by the social roles she performs and/or the reference group to which she belongs.

This began a change; there was deterioration between a conception of "association between identity and continuity of the personality". Both persons and objects lost their solidity, their definiteness and continuity. Persons began to lose a sense of fixedness; they no longer inhabit a world that exists independently of them. "Identity has become uncertain and problematic not because people no longer occupy fixed social stations?-a commonplace explanation that unthinkingly incorporates the modern equation of identity and social role?-but because they no longer inhabit a world that exists independently of themselves."

Those who study such things claim that with the receding of the common world?-the world shared by all, for example the notion that it takes a village to raise a child has had a detrimental effect on all of us. Our life now liberated from the "prying eyes of neighbors, from village prejudices, from the inquisitorial presence of elders, from everything narrow, stifling, petty, and conventional" has had a serious effect on private life as well. "It has freed the imagination from external constraints but exposed it more directly than before to the tyranny of inner compulsion and anxieties."

The fantasy of imagination nor longer becomes a force for freedom, it gives rise to hallucinations. We lose our sense of the practical and science gives us an ever rising sense of power to achieve our wildest flights of fancy. "By holding out a vision of limitless technological possibility?-space travel, biological engineering, mass destruction?-it removes the last obstacle to wishful thinking. It brings reality into conformity with our dreams, or rather with our nightmares."

There is an article in last Sunday's Washington Post that I think bears witness to this problem. The Post requires that the reader become a member but the membership is free if you wish to read the article at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/18/AR2005111801778.html

The quotes are from "The Minimal Self" by Christopher Lasch.