What Are We?

"What are we?" I wonder if the question of “we” doesn’t arise after the question of “me.” In other words, I think “What am I?” comes up as a question before “What are we?” It did for me, anyway, and that might be the result of the culture that raised me. I don’t know, though. A question that has often arisen for me is “Am I even part of ‘we’ except in a biological or cultural context?”

My answers to these questions changed throughout life—to the extent that I even had answers. I can mark my identity, in a way, through the answers I gave to the questions “what am I?” and “what are we?” at various times of life. Who I thought I and we were in high school differed radically from the answers I had in college, during my marriage, after reading Foucault, during and after my visits to Amsterdam, and, most markedly, after my “bipolar” experiences in 2011 and 2013. I had more concrete answers (even if “wrong”) before my so-called bipolar experiences. I have no way of explaining the experiences I’ve had any longer. The experiences happened, but they don’t fit into any explanatory categories that are even remotely satisfying or seemingly accurate on any level. I have utter disdain for those who attempt to define or explain bipolar disorder whereas I have the utmost respect for the nurse who once told me bluntly, “We have no idea what ‘bipolar’ is or what causes it.” At least she was honest and not trying to fit me or my experiences into a categorical box. Hell, I can’t even explain me let alone us.

I guess an easy, if unsatisfying, answer is that we are beings who want to know what we are. It seems like there should be some purpose for this need to know and perhaps it is to orient ourselves in the world, with (or against!) one another. My inclination is that the searching for an answer to this question serves a security-related purpose, not just for survival but for the release of anxiety and stress, so that we can feel safe and not have to worry about being killed, harmed, abandoned, or humiliated.

But maybe that’s just the starting point—if it is at all. The epistemology of "what we are" may be the beginning but perhaps not at all the end. My thinking, though, is that if the question remains mired in safety-related issues then we’re doomed to a particular type of societal morality, something akin to Bentham’s Panopticon. With surveillance cameras and data collection and analysis, Bentham’s architecture is obsolete. If it’s made clear enough through the dispersal of overarching rules of conduct then the threat of being watched persuades most to conform to certain modes of behavior, modes that, if repeated often enough over time, transform the internal thought processes and even emotional processes into a particular “shape” that no longer requires surveillance or control. The control mechanism has been internalized.

One interesting point about Bentham’s Panopticon is that it essentially replaced the internalized religious morality that was well on its way to breaking down as an internal locus of control. Bentham was essentially proposing an architectural (spatial) replacement for the omniscience and omnipotence of God. Today surveillance cameras, law enforcement, data collection, and the like combine to replace the all-seeing eye of God, imposing much the same confines of monotheistic morality on the public.

Foucault tackles Bentham’s Panopticon in Discipline and Punish and that’s where I first came across many of these ideas. Coming to grips with Foucault and accepting that he was more right about the world than I had been was a crushing blow. It disoriented me and threw me off my moors. A couple years ago I had a series of conversations about preferences and, I’d thought then, that there is no morality, just preferences. My thinking is that what I or you or anyone seems to do is semi-consciously identify preferences and proceed, over a lifetime, to mostly nonconsciously build up rules (often contradictory) that justify preferences. However, some of those rules are at odds with laws and cultural norms and other aspects of cultural/societal moralities. This creates not only conditions in which individuals are encouraged to hide who they are but also leads to subculture groupings of individuals (tribalism) based on certain behaviors, thoughts, practices.

Sociologists seem to believe humanity is like a statistically predictable solar system but I think there are asteroid belts everywhere ripping through planets and obliterating them and the sun constantly changes intensity making life unbearable on previously livable planets while opening up the possibility of new life on planets previously uninhabitable. I think that’s so because what makes one safe and secure in one culture makes one exposed and vulnerable in another. In a culture like ours, one with no real secure center, life is increasingly unbearable and so more desperate acts of diffusion occur; it’s like my paintings: there is no focal point. Anywhere you look you simply see something beginning to form and connect to something else that seems to be in the beginning stages of forming and connecting to something else that still hasn’t formed. Explanation is impossible because there are no coherent referents. We’re adrift in space without any moorings. Our individual moralities are facing the abyss and there is no comfort in doing what one thinks is right because often enough the response is cold, resounding silence.

But then … what are we?