Who am I and where did I come from?

I know who I am.  I know where I was born, and typically I will know my parents, I know what I like and what I do not. But how do I really define me?  And if I do define me, where did I in fact come from?

Somewhere during gestation a spirit emerges in the foetus.  At birth, breathing, we can agree that the essence of our humanness, our spirit, is fully with us.  From birth the manner of the expression of spirit progressively diverges reflecting the person that is emerging. 

There is a spirit within us expressed differently making each of us unique.  As spirits we are all the same, our spirit does not define us, it just is; it is just us being. It is something else then that defines us, something else that defines identify, defines who we are. How did this person arise and where did they come from?

Imagine two people, a pygmy in the Congo rain forest, and a New Yorker. Now imagine at birth, for wherever reason, they are both born with the exact same genetic potential physically, emotionally, intellectually and as expressed in personality. We are not necessarily clear on exactly how genetics impacts and shapes this potential, but let us assume that whatever the process, at birth it is exactly the same in each infant; two human spirits with the exact same genetic structure and potential. 

Both infants grew fully within their location, so the Pygmy never left the rain forest and the New Yorker never left greater New York. 

At forty, will these two people be similar or different? It is hard to imagine any overlap at all; the physical and social environments are so different.  They will be very different people. 

Now imagine we can swap the infants at birth so that no one knew. What do we think will happen? It is hypothetical of course; a thought experiment, but then Einstein reshaped global physics with a thought experiment or two.

Let’s call the Pygmy in New York the Pygmy New Yorker and the New Yorker in New York, the New York New Yorker, and vice versa.  I suggest the social and physical environment will work exactly the same on our infants, that given the exact same potential and the exact same circumstances and experience of life, the Pygmy New Yorker at forty will be the same as the New York New Yorker at forty and vice versa, that is the Pygmy Pygmy at forty will be the same as the New York Pygmy at forty. 

We get a little closer to defining who we are, at least we begin to see that who we are is most related to our living experience and is not defined by our spirit or by our genetics. Both our spirit and our genetics are important, but as a platform from which ‘we’ emerge and express our existence in the choices we make in response to our life experiences.

We have two factors shaping our expression of our spirit in the world; first our physical environment; second our social environment. In an attempt to clarify the impact of each, imagine we could educate the Pygmy from the Congo in how to survive in the physical environment of New York, but they were not trained in how to survive in the social/cultural environment of New York (let’s imagine that is possible).

How would they get on if they were then moved from the Congo to New York? They would be able to cross the street, understand about taxis and underground, violence and street thugs, getting to work, where to live and how to buy food, etc.  But they would not know how to behave in response to friends, family, co-workers, social events, celebrations of culture such as Christmas and thanksgiving, schooling, and libraries, etc.  We begin to get a sense that our Pygmy Pygmy trained in the environment of New York and then placed in New York would survive, but it would be very difficult, and without development of the social skills and insight they would have a very difficult life. 

Now imagine we could do the reverse, namely educate a Pygmy Pygmy in the necessary social/cultural skills and then transfer them to New York. I suggest they would come to terms with the physical environment and quickly be able to cross the street, understand about taxis and underground, violence and street thugs, getting to work, where to live and how to buy food, etc. Then their social/cultural skills and insights will enable them to move easily in New York society, in fact their size and accent may well make them a center of attraction so depending on the genetic inheritance they may relish the attention and find New York a most satisfying place. Conversely, a New York New Yorker with social skills of Pygmy may well be the center of attention in Pygmy culture and again depending on genetics they may well enjoy that. 

We come to what is perhaps already understood, namely that we are most defined by the ideas we absorb from our social and cultural environment. We are born into a framework of ideas and views, some subset of those we adopt and allow to guide how we think and shape our minds, then our mind guides our brain and so we act and feel.

The idea of a world spirit has been part of Western philosophy for millennia, a Jesuit priest and anthropologist called Tielhard de Chardin called the world of thought the nousphere.  We are all born into this nousphere, or at least that part of it alive and functioning in our society and culture. From the nousphere we draw the ideas and attitudes that forge our active existence; the energy of our spirit flows through the ideas we adopt from the nousphere to be the expression of us in the world. I regard the nousphere as humanity’s rudder. 

We can begin to see the relationship between ‘who I am’ and the social world in which we grow and from which we draw that which most defines us, the ideas we accept into our mind. 

But, what if we live in a complex world, with lots of choices of how to live, and lots of people living very different from how we would choose and some living so different we become offended at how they want to live. 

Let’s call the ideas closest to me and the ideas I seek to live by ‘values’. So in a society with many ways to live there are then many sets of values. We are painting a picture very different from the notion of a tribal society; there is no uniformity, no obvious and shared set of values which defines the group. So how can we have a shared society, when there seems to be no sharing of values?  

This is the modern trap in to which we are inclined to fall… Consider our ideas on freedom, an idea that is the core of the western way of thinking. The ‘barbarian’ tribes of Europe only offered compliance to Rome and were never subjugated. Their spirit of defiance has driven the West for over 2500 years crystallized around 400AD when Rome was overthrown.  How we think today is a product of the European defiance to Roman dictatorship and authority. History interprets the following thousand years as the ‘dark ages’, but in fact is was an intense formative period where was initiated much of the thinking we today take for granted, nation states, limitations of power, rights of people, and freedom of worship. Rome, the dominating power for centuries was no more, people had to work out for themselves how to live side by side and especially so since the tribes of Europe had such limited cultural overlap. Hence rule of law was the only factor able to bind diverse groups into some form of common effort, and this learning process remains alive and well, fully with us today. 

We gain glimpses into the foundation, the very soul of our Western cultural history. We here in New Zealand are not new, we think in a manner the result of over two thousand years of intense cultural development. The thread of core social values and individual freedom found in the defiance of the barbarian tribes of Europe, implicit in the social struggle of dark ages after Rome, then consolidated in the Magna Carta, British Civil War, emergence of sovereignty of parliament, democracy, French Revolution and United States Declaration of Independence. Social values that include separation of powers, so economic activity, judiciaries, legislation, and police, are all separated. Religion is a personal choice and not part of the state; and we have democracy, significant political transparency, social education and health, freedom of movement, right of speech, right to privacy, right to protest, and freedom of association etc.  Those outside the West still struggle to build and apply that which we are able to (almost) take for granted.  

When these values of the European Barbarians were a fight against tyranny and the unfettered power of Kings, dictatorships or authoritarian regimes, of which Rome was one of histories greatest and most vicious, then defining ‘who I am’ was easy; on one side was might and authority, on the other, rights and freedoms of people, freedom of ‘my’ people, my tribe. Today we have no such boundary to make sense of defining our identity. No tribe with which to identify, no struggle to which we commit. Today, we in the West are in an unprecedented stage of human and social development with no exact struggle no obvious opposition with which to define the boundaries and so define our soul and what we stand for. 

The struggle about economic development, of free markets and socialism, is not a struggle remotely comparable to the struggle for freedom itself for no other reason than protagonists in the economic struggle were both within Western philosophy, just different ways of doing it.  From an economic management point of view the cold war gave no clear winner only a clear loser, in that central planning of socialism failed. Now, after the recent global financial crisis it is clear that free and unfettered markets are not the winner in relation to wealth creation and general community prosperity. We need new ways of thinking about issues of regulation of markets and the role of commercial freedom to ensure entrepreneurial motivation and innovation. But this story must wait another time. 

Our problem of defining who we are is now clear and we can now put the accurate question. In a liberal Western democracy like we have here in New Zealand, how do I need think so that I know who I am, and what I really stand for?  Each person must answer this question for themselves; I merely offer some starters and a direction. 

We have lots of different sets of values: Maoris, Caucasians, Polynesians, and Asians, for example, we can call each set of values a ‘culture’, so culture defines how some group chooses to live. Society exists of multiple cultures living side by side. 

The emergence of this social state is inevitable given the focus in establishing freedom of living via the law; this is our cultural history. The law does not define how any of us must live; it defines that we can all live as we choose within the law. At that point, commitment to law as a framework of how people may live in freedom, the law and culture parted company, and our thinking has not quite caught up with that fact. 

The law does not define culture, it enables multiple cultures. In fact there have been many powerful social battles that removed culture from the law, so that today we have what is called ‘secular states’, which initially meant no religion was defined in statute, but today it is moving to not define any form of essential belief or living circumstance, it is law intended to apply to everyone in the society and so must embrace divergent value systems, enabling all culture, all sets of values, but defining none in particular. 

First question: Do I value my right to live as I choose? 

Second question: Do I demand everyone in society live by the same values as I do? 

If you answered ‘yes’ to the first question and ‘no’ to the second, then we are certainly on the same side, and like me, at core a libertarian committed to individual freedom. This means we need embrace as core values the right of others to be different. That they can live as they choose as long as they live within the law and do not seek to impose their point of view, their values, their culture on anyone else. 

This value, that of ‘defending the right of others to live different from how I choose to live’ is our core social value defining our very essence, our nature, rooted back into European barbarian defiance to the authority of Rome, a fierce independence that certainly predated Rome and was central to the psyche of the tribes from likely thousands of years before Rome. I now trace Western cultural history back to before ancient Greece and before any form of cohesive social structure across Europe.   

Today, the value of defending the right of others to live by their values is likely the only value that binds us. We can live as we choose and many will choose to live in ways so different as to require me to ignore their existence as they ignore mine, yet I can but hope they would defend my right to be as I defend their right to be. 

Then we live, in our own culture, as our parents, perhaps, but different, knowing and understanding in a way they did not need to that we must value the culture of others. 

Others coming here must value their right to be different and in so doing embrace our right to be different from them, to come here from another culture they must accept the very core, the essence of our society, embrace the right of others to be very, very different from them and they have no right to seek or impose their culture, and to be here they live by the social, legal, moral and ethical core of what makes us who we are.  … for us to ever let go of the demand that people coming to live among us accept our core social value of diversity and pluralism is to risk losing the very foundation that enables us to live as we choose.