Thursday, August 12, 2010

We are who we are by whom we choose to imitate, or imitation leads to identity

The recent news in science is the dethronement of the gene. Whoever wanted to have his genome decoded can spare his money. Apparently our genes aren't graved in marble, they are more like Lego- proteins can log on and modify activation. Wonder what Darwin would make of this.
The bad news is that this makes us much more responsible of who we are- the food we eat, the environment we live in, the challenges of life- all will take its toll. (For holistic medicine, this isn't news)
So far for the physical part.
Intelligence too, it seems, can be shaped by education ( so far for liberalist ideas of leaving markets and societies to themselves and that the best will win..) Or, let's say, the way you deal with your intelligence. Whoever took an intelligence test must have realized that most of them are pretty mathematic, and that anybody trained in similar exercises will have better results (and I'm not even talking about the problem of language and instruction, different logics etc.)
So we can train to think. But what do we want to train at? For most of us our world today isn't shaped by the question of accessibility to information, but by the value we attach to that information and by the time and money we are willing to invest to digest this information. This is a large quantum leap from last generations who still had to take information in the moment they were confronted with it.
Actually, this choice has always been valid. Intellectual information might have been scarce in former centuries, but environment information was always too abundant to be completely decoded. Humans are the species that has the most choice as to what information shapes its thinking.
Contrary to most animals, babies are born unable to cope alone and they stay this way for a long time. Their capacity and desire to learn is proportionate to their dependency. ( interesting question: does dependency condition learning targets?). And their primary focus for learning is the person who is vital, the feeder and carer. With growing independence they look around and take in their environment- but here too they are influenced by the caretaker: The people who have physical power over a baby have also the power over the environment it is exposed to.
And the baby learns by imitation, it chooses to imitate the caretaker and thus its world is defined by the caretaker.
Later in life other people become important- family, friends, schoolmates, teachers, all people that our youngster chooses to attach attention to. And in school the kid learns to imitate the teacher- even if he/she is asked to develop her own reasoning- the independent reasoning is allowed in a framework constituted by culture and customs.
The more the growing child discovers society, the more he/she decodes the important inherent messages that are vitally important for him/her to be part of or at least to interact with society. Questions of rank are dealt with: Who is considered important, by whom and why? What are the contradictions concerning society in what is said to be as compared to reality? (Whoever talked to a child above 10 will notice that these subtle hidden distortions are a frequent subjet of observation and critique).
In Occidental societies it is also vital for the adolescent to answer the question: who am I? detached from answers that social, race or family belonging could give.
The mind deals with these questions through observation, evaluation (often conditioned by the values acquired through imitation in younger ears) and choice. Choices, especially in teenage years, tend to be black and white. I am this and I aint that.
How many careers have been shaped by an admired teacher or by a convincing role-model!
That leads to a specific behavior: Imitation of those who represent what I am (or what I aspire to be) and differentiation from those who represent what I am not. Groups are chosen, give clear, visible or hidden signs of clanship and thus shape the identity of their members. With the choice of group comes the attitude towards society. Even groups that 'refuse' mainstream trends have strong clanic identification codes.
Interestingly, the values and attitudes that come with these groups aren't static. They are usually influenced by group-leaders and who becomes a leader represents an ideal archetypal representative of what the group stands for and its values. But this only works as long as the individuals in the group are projecting their individual need for self-esteem on a leader. If the individual is given a proposal that seems more attractive to his need of self esteem change can be quite sudden. Societies that have lost a war adapted to the winner's culture quite fast, underdeveloped countries tend to adopt external signs of value of developed countries.

But human species has an inbuilt capacity to integrate learning and change. When an individual becomes aware of conditioning, of his own unwanted limitations or of the hidden unwanted limitations of society, he/she tends to rebel against this frame. If he/she can attract a sufficient amount of imitators that agree with these ideas the group will form a clan with its own values, rituals and external signs. Gradually,if this group is sufficiently important, its specificities will influence mainstream with the help of leaders of mainstream opinion( people, publicity etc.) who are always on the look out for new element to profile themselves (the human attention is only given to new as opposed to usual- hence the need for constant renewal). Of course this taking over can also happen in a negative way, in refusing the specificities in order to limit mainstream from the influence, especially if the group is judged to be too dangerous (understand: threatening values and customs of mainstream too fast, or challenging the social order of mainstream society)
Which way influence will take depends largely on the capacity of the group to be aware of their own conditioning. That takes information and a lot of courage, since peer pressure will always go in direction of the established opinions of the group.

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