Relational beings with relations

It's always interesting when someone really intelligent makes a basic mistake. Here's an example:

Like Buber he was keen to emphasize the importance of relationality—that dimension of the person which makes him unique and unrepeatable. (Benedict XVI: A guide for the Perplexed by Tracey Rowland.

That's not completely off the point. There is something about relationality, when applied to human beings, that makes you you. But it misses the essential point by a wide mark. To be a relational being is to have being in relationship with others. Are you tall or short? If you are one of those things, you are that in relation to others. Relationality is not something that exists inside you. It is a set of qualities that exist in relation to others. By putting it the way she does, Rowland takes away everything that is special about relationality.

Why she does that I don't know but I think it has something to do with a belief in the metaphysical self. That is the belief that the real me is something apart from all my relations, a special being that exists inside me and is the standpoint from which I can make the really important moral decisions.

This inner being, which is believed to be the real and authentic me, is usually understood as difficult to access. I have to peel away all the outer layers and that calls for self-denial and prayer. But getting to it is taken as the most important moral task.

Bu what if this picture is completely wrong? What if you are your body, as the Catholic Church teaches us and not some inner soul dressed in a body? What if being authentic isn't a matter of looking inside but looking outside at the relationships that make you who you are? I'd put it to you that the key point to take from relationality is not that you are something unique and unrepeatable but that you cannot be anything at all unless you are connected to others.

The Japanese have a saying: "A man is whatever room he is in."

Imagine you are a young person away from home. It's not the first time. You have enough experience at this to have a  grasp of what it's like. You've had failures and successes. This time you are with a group of people and you are doing well. You are establishing a new and exciting identity. This identity is not the person you are so much as it is the person you want to be. You didn't sit down and work out who this better version of yourself is. It's just there because that's the way human beings are, especially adult human beings and you're pulling it off successfully ... so far anyway.

And these people you are with have, without realizing it, given you a tremendous freedom. By accepting you, they are allowing you to work at being this new person. This is exciting and scary. It's a high wire act. Everything these people know about you is what you've told them and what you've shown them. That last element is the most important of the two for that is what makes it authentic. You can tell outrageous lies about who you are but you can't fake performance. And it's scary because you could fail at any moment.

You're at a table in a public space. Perhaps it's a pub or a student lounge. And you look up and, some distance away is a sibling. They are coming towards you because they've recognized you. And you get a sinking feeling that this might ruin everything. You don't dislike this sibling and he or she doesn't dislike you. But you really don't want to see them because, just by showing up, they have taken away your freedom to become the person you want to be.

The problem is not that they know "the person you really are". You could think of it that way and you'd feel a little guilty when you saw them because you'd feel like a fraud. They're going to come over and meet your new friends and start treating you as a different person from the one you've been acting as until now. Maybe you'll be the only one to notice this but it won't matter because you will feel an intense shame at the gap between who you want to be and the person your family takes you to be.

Maybe you've never experienced anything like that. I suspect you have though. It's one of the things that makes up modernity. There have always been people who were able to leave the place they came from and go somewhere else and become someone else but it is only relatively recently that just about everyone could do this. You don't even have to leave town to do this if you already live in a  city. You can hop on a bus and head across town to school or work. You could make the move almost seamlessly. Or you might not. One of the points of tension will be your family.

Let's dramatize this

Let's imagine a dramatic setting that will help us isolate and identify this tension. Most stories are designed to get us over this hump by way of some dramatic intervention. David Balfour's parents have died and then he is kidnapped. Now he is free to become someone. It might not work like that in real life. He might just crumple up and die. Or he might succeed. But it's a terribly helpful scenario in a novel. A different set of relations is the opportunity to become a new person.

But suppose we wanted to dramatize the personal narrative I've been describing above? Then we might have a dramatic break that is in constant danger of failing. You're sitting at a boardroom table. You ran away from home and you've assumed a new identity, complete with a false name. Most of the time you get away with it but you worry about running into one of the people who can connect you with your old identity and thereby drag you back to it. A coworker knocks on the door, excuses herself and hands you a note. It's your nightmare come true. The note is from your little brother Adam Whitman. You haven't seen him for years, not since you first adopted your new identity, but now he's tracked you down and he's at the reception desk waiting to talk to you.

You see what we've done here? We've taken an ordinary human situation—wanting to escape the identity that comes from being in one set of relationships and get into a new environment so you can be someone new—and made it a high stakes game where external consequences, arrest for deserting the army, act as a marker for your internal shame.

Most stories put the risk and high stakes on the side you go to after being kidnapped, have been sprinkled by pixie dust, escaped through the back of the wardrobe or been orphaned. This story reverses that. The new world has its risks but the danger is all about being dragged back to your family.

"You want to be Don Draper? You already are."

For those of you who aren't part of the less than two percent of the population that watched the show, I didn't make up that dramatization. It's from Mad Men. Don Draper is terrified of reverting to the Dick he used to be. That's something fairly new in story telling. I doubt it's completely new, although I don't know of any other story quite like it. As a consequence, most people missed the point.

The quote that is the subheading above is from The Last Psychiatrist. He misses the point too but he comes very, very close to getting it. For you might already be Don Draper. Don Draper, as his creator Matt Weiner insists, is not an anti-hero like Walter White. He's much closer to home than that.

TLP argues that Draper is a narcissist and believes that is the premise of the show. Again, that is very close but he is actually a man raised by a narcissist mother and who keeps making the mistake of marrying women more or less like his mother.

Even in a world that pretends to embrace transgression in art, a character who hates his or her mother is pushing the limits. Weiner moves that very dangerous notion one step away by using the time-honoured trick of making her a stepmother but even that isn't quite enough to defuse the tension. But it's also the appeal—watching this show allows a man to work out tensions they have with their mother.

Resentment: indignant or bitter feelings you cannot act on.

You can't easily express anger at your mother. Even if you could, what would it accomplish? But you do feel it. Not everyone feels it intensely but even a little tends to get bottled up for, "How dare you be angry!"

This meditation was inspired by the fifth episode of the first season of Mad Men. The title of the episode was "5G". There will be more such meditations coming.