Be Not a Channel
Selfless devotion to a just cause is at once the ultimate nobility and the ultimate humility. Or so I thought. Until recently, it seemed to me that the most admirable people would rather have been causes than people at all. In other words I often assumed that, with no choice but to be human, the saints among us are those who use their bodies as cause-conduits, as Franciscan “channels of peace” rather than as true “selves” with personally-motivated interests and prerogatives.
Perhaps post-Catholicism and ultra-Liberalism in collusion (and exacerbated by a Harvard-induced obsession with efficiency) desensitized me to the distinction between living a good, entire life and devoting an entire life to doing good. In fact, I doubt that I am alone in having long fused life and life’s work almost completely in considering the ideal purpose of everything from getting an education to raising a family. Until recently, I have suffered from a case of world-change tunnel-vision, but I now realize that people can no more live as causes than they can live as birds or fish. In a sense, it is an act of pure hubris even to try to live selflessly.
Having shaken off this tunnel vision, I have claimed selfhood in a way I was never previously able to and have consequently become very interested in the concept of self-cultivation. By self-cultivation, I mean the exploration of personal interests seemingly unrelated to the essentially life-consuming career path in service and activism I considered to constitute “doing good.” For me, self-cultivation is about the development of the interests in the arts that I once saw as distractions from the more important mission of learning to effect concrete, positive change in the world.
I am now convinced that I have misunderstood my secular saints as basically selfless beings, or at the very least that an example of a life constantly endeavoring toward selflessness is not necessarily one that should be followed. The project of self-cultivation is that underlying yet vital narrative of the most purposeful lives, and world-change should be the attempt to enable all people to live comfortably enough to self-cultivate. Service and activism should not be, as I suspect I was not alone in making them, the unitary priorities in the lives of those fundamentally uncomfortable with the state of things as they are. The attempt to be ever “doing good” should not deal a death blow to the activities that make our lives good ones.
I do not mean to advocate dramatically increased selfishness among prospective public servants, in fact quite the contrary. What I do mean is that, in newly taking a bit more time to self-examine and to self-satisfy through writing, painting, etc. for the sake of writing, painting etc. rather than for the sake of building a diversified resume that will enable me to say, come to Harvard in order to get the best possible education in public service, I feel closer to being genuinely useful to society.
When I subscribed to a more focused interpretation of meaningful action, which demanded a socially-oriented eventual good from most self-cultivating pursuits and dismissed the others as permissible aberrations from the all-important concept of working to help others, I was no more useful to others than I am now. I was, on the other hand, much more tired and much less interesting to those others in frequent contact with me. My only evidence in support of the ultimate efficiency of honoring rather than curtailing self-cultivation is that I feel happier and more productive now than when trying and failing miserably to be a cause unto myself. For now that is the only real evidence I need.
Note: Darius, I have edited in order to clarify, and invite your harshest criticisms.
7 responses so far
The struggle towards living a life of genuine decency, is, in fact, the most difficult one of all, and many erstwhile crusaders have failed pretty miserably at it. See old Sartre, the senile drug addict who abandoned Beauvoir, or Al Franken, notorious asshole, for examples.
Genuine decency I categorically expect from a public servant, though they may all occasionally stray from its course. I would define decency maybe more loosely than you would: it is only the principle of doing as little harm and as much good as possible without entirely abandoning the call of self-interest. Selflessness, the ultimate goal of which I sought to debunk here, is on the other hand a more mystifying concept involving perfect willingness to die, or at least not to live very full for the sake of promoting a cause. For example, I would consider any non-corrupt, earnest, hard-working member of Congress who makes time for his family and often indulges a love of baseball to be genuinely decent and admirable. I would consider a campaign staffer so hell-bent on electing good people that she hasn’t had a vacation in four years and hasn’t seen a film (assuming film is her underlying passion) in even longer to be attempting to act selflessly. She, I feel, is probably headed for a crash and burn or a serious disillusionment that will make her entirely useless to society for possibly a period of years. In short, she should take in some baseball with the Congressman.
On the definition of self-cultivation.
Mel’s post: “By self-cultivation, I mean the exploration of personal interests seemingly unrelated to the essentially life-consuming career path in service and activism I considered to constitute “doing good.” For me, self-cultivation is about the development of the interests in the arts that I once saw as distractions from the more important mission of learning to effect concrete, positive change in the world.”
Exile 1.2: “…self-cultivation, which is the subterranean biographical narrative of artists and all those with the leisure or the prerogative for introspection.”
Self-cultivation is neither “subterranean” nor solely the province of “artists.” Self-cultivation is a continuous (and vital!) process of identity-formation which takes place in nearly every waking moment of an individual’s life. The word “self” in self-cultivation is misleading because the concept of personal identity–one’s self–is bound up with a sense of dependence upon as well as freedom from other people, a social community. We cannot properly understand our personal identities–the “I”s that are linked to various character traits, intellectual or artistic interests, and more pernicously to race, gender, social roles, class–without simultaenously understanding ourselves as inseparable from the communities we inhabit.
This link between the individual and community–a link which always threatens the terror of rejection to the individual–is what makes the process of self-cultivation ESSENTIAL and UNIVERSAL. The very purpose of all “social justice” projects is to remove fear of physical and psychological deprivation and in doing so maximize opportunities for transforming the self. Self-cultivation thus encompasses the process of re-imagining one’s abilities so as to find new and more creative methods of economic subsistence. It encompasses the re-evaluation of one’s loyalties and allegiances to both individuals and larger communities bound by a particular cause or interest. It encompasses the experience of art (yes!) because art–as countless instances in history reveal to us–has perhaps a unique power to provoke a lifting-up out of an individual’s routine contexts and empower him or her to imagine a broader horizon of possibilities.
It was with great dismay that I read the sentence that self-cultivation is a “privilege” for those with leisure, implying that self-cultviation is a luxury and not a necessity. All people find at least a few moments in their daily lives for self-cultivation, whether these moments involve South Park, sexual union, Beethoven, manual labor, or tree-gazing. Without these moments, the terror of vulnerability in the face of the Other–the Other who by means of his/her alterity holds out the fulfillment or rejection of one’s own personal identity–would be too great to overcome.
Self-cultivation is the end of all economic and social policies. The link between self-cultivation and an individual’s “concrete” economic/political contexts is an expression of what personal identity IS.
More? Read RMU. http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/unger/english/passion.php
“In the event of a sudden change in cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the overhead panels above you. Place the mask over your nose and mouth, and breathe normally. If a small child or other passenger needs assistance, always secure your own mask first before assisting them.”
Message: If parents and adults don’t take care of themselves, everyone dies.
Darius–
Very well put, but you misunderstand me, which is entirely my fault. I should not have used the term self-cultivation at all. What I more nearly mean is the conscious, focused development of non-malicious self-centrism. That being an entirely awkward description, I suppose I settled for a term that clearly connotes more than I intended.
I would not dare deny that every person, regardless of any possible distinction of status, is a complete and constantly developing self. I would hope that you could also acknowledge that every person is not equally equipped with the free time and the resources to make a serious and defined study of their innermost selves and most esoteric (and non-paying) interests, as those of us privileged to be at Harvard are able and in fact encouraged to do.
There are infinite modes of education, experimentation, and expression available to even the most destitute individuals (and communities), but the reality is that no matter how impassioned an impoverished single mother of three may be about poetry, it is highly unlikely that she will be able to devote a significant portion of her time to the study of it while she is preoccupied with a constant battle for survival, and the needs of her children must constantly override her own.
What I was trying to get at here (obviously not too adeptly) is that a person with the capability to set aside a portion of each day or week to prolonged introspection and serious study of a passion, for the sake of itself alone and not as an occupation, is incredibly lucky and should cherish that capability in tandem with the equally important capability that person has to better the circumstances of the impoverished mother through service and activism. In the long run, I feel people who have and take the time to nurture themselves can be more effective nurturers of others, which is a sentiment wholly unoriginal to me, wholly obvious, and wholly ignored by many.
With regards to the line from The Exile, I am predictably responsible for it and did not mean, by calling “self-cultivation” (a term now established as falsely used in this case) subterranean to mean that it is unimportant. What I meant is that, especially in the case of the artist (I used that word because we were specifically discussing fashion design, which I consider an art form) we are often more preoccupied with product (the actual works of art) than personality, though it obviously manifests itself in the artist’s work. I also included those with the “leisure” to self-cultivate because it seems to me not ridiculous to note that those with a healthy amount of time to shop and dress themselves and enough money to buy the latest styles tend to be style-makers. I did, though, consciously include those with the “prerogative” to give due credit to those others who, though not extraordinarily equipped to do so, take an interest in defining personal, subcultural, and generational style.
One bit of contention:
I agree with this in-an-of-itself, but contextualized within the concept of ‘identity communities’ I think it becomes dangerous. Social justice must work to liberate quantities of individuals, but it can’t liberate identity-groups. That is, it can ease the way for any one individual to choose an individual cultivation of, say, transsexuality, but it can’t, and shouldn’t, liberate “Transsexual America.” In other words, the social apparatus should decimate the pre-defined categories of cultivatable identity, whether they happen to be hegemonic or repressed at any given time, and encourage each person to assemble their own constellations of cultivated self.
that’s ‘in-and-of-itself’ … fuh fuh fuh fuh