Island Selves: Human Disconnectedness in a World of Interdependence

Abstract

Growing awareness of the ecological crisis, together with increasing familiarity with images of the earth taken from outer space, should support the viewpoint that human beings share a small but beautiful planet with other living organisms and that there is something very special about the earth. This opinion is not merely human bias, for it is supported by the objective fact that life of any kind in the universe is extremely rare. Life teems on the earth; the more it is studied in its myriad manifestations the more evidence accumulates of their interdependence. No species is an island, entire of itself, one might say, with apologies to John Donne. We are part of the main, part of the single weave of life. Concurrent with this acceptance of life's oneness and interdependence, there has emerged in the late twentieth century a rather passionate need on the part of many people to see themselves as different from one another. They may push their separateness and autonomy, their cultural singularity, to the point that no one outside the group and its unique experiences can understand it, much less speak about or for it. Peoples and cultures are, in this sense, islands, their insularity both fate and a source of pride. This split in contemporary consciousness is not in itself exceptional. In other times and places thinkers have wrestled with the dialectical tension between the whole and its parts, how the parts are related to the whole, whether the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; or, on the contrary, the whole exists to serve its parts when these are not subgroups but human individuals, each with an eternal destiny, as the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches. In this tradition, more than in others, individuals with a philosophical turn of mind have repeatedly asked, what does it mean to be a human being apart from the identity and satisfactions that derive from group membership? What are some of a reflective person's most fulfilling and most disturbing experiences? Note that the two scales so prominently addressed in the last quarter-century - global and local elude the question of the individual. Whether the enthusiasm is for global ecological interdependence or for communal solidarity, the individual is submerged in a larger whole. Why is this? Could it be that in contemporary society's growing intellectual sophistication, people find it more difficult to escape confronting the true nature of being an individuated self? Because habits and customs of the past, such as harvest festivals, rites of passage, and state ceremonies, can no longer quite inter the anxiety that goes with selfhood, new or refurbished cultural covers that are plausible and congenial to the modern mind need to be put in place. Ecological interdependence and communal oneness, as quasi-religious doctrines, are among the most effective covers of recent times. Although they are undoubtedly worthy of the most serious attention and commitment, they also perform, as did religion and elaborate social ceremony not so long ago, the service of burying the uncomfortable truth of individual uniqueness and, with it, another truth - the world's indifference that together aggravate every person's sense of isolation and vulnerability. UNIQUENESS Consider first the question of uniqueness. In the United States no one wants to be treated like part of the woodwork. Americans want to be recognized for their distinctive quality, their importance to the group. In other societies, especially those called folk or traditional, people are less eager to stand above the crowd. An individual would not want to be seen as assertive and so targeted for criticism. Yet, in perhaps more covert ways, each person wants to be recognized and acknowledged as somehow special and nonexchangeable with others. This wanting to be special is one face of human nature. The other face shows that there are times when even the most ardent individualists want to fade into the background, to sink into the reassurance and protective coloring of some larger being. …