The following are two fictional recountings of the same twenty seconds:
Brad’s version:
“Jack was not paying attention. He was fiddling with the dashboard when I yelled, “Jack!” He slammed on the brakes, barely stopping short of the string of five ducks crossing in front of us. Fortunately, I’d kept my coffee lid on, but a good deal of it still spilled all over me. Of course the only thing Jack was worried about were his precious car seats.”
Jack’s version:
“It was early morning, but I happened to spot them just in time, right as I was turning. There were a couple teeny little ducklings right in the middle of the road. I managed to not hit any of them, but had to pay for it with my truck. Because I stopped so fast, Brad spilled his coffee all over my passenger seat. Then he had the nerve to get angry at me!”
Notice in Jack’s story the different details, angles, and emphases. By Jack’s account, he’s a real park ranger—spotting ducklings in the dark and risking his truck to save them. This is how we all sound in our own stories… but is it true? Sort of, but it’s perhaps not the most trustworthy version. If you can’t be trusted to recount a simple story from your day, how much less should you trust your version of what your identity is?
If there was a jury called to pass a verdict on your identity, you would have to recuse yourself. You’re way too biased. This bias presents a challenge when it comes to understanding your identity because, frankly, no one is nearly as invested in that topic as you are. Unfortunately, we tend to fully trust our own judgment at precisely the place where it is least trustworthy.
Trouble Under the Scientific Method
Think in terms of the scientific method. The study of your self is more error-prone than any other research you could possibly undertake. Subject and object are one and the same. There are no double-blind tests. There is not even a single controlled variable in the experiment. Most suspiciously, your very instrument of study (your mind) is itself part of the subject and object of the study (and therefore heavily invested in the outcome). This means that if you do not depend on outside sources, your conclusions will get more and more off track.
Introspection, without outside voices, is a cyclical trap. You think about your actions, thoughts, and motives. You come to certain conclusions about yourself, and then present those conclusions to…your self! You then attempt to move your self forward on the basis of those conclusions. This is how people can end up being thoroughly self-deceived and rigid in their terribleness!
To illustrate the difficulty, imagine another subject of study that would be necessarily subjective: let’s say you’ve been tasked with reviewing a new pizza place in your neighborhood. You will still be conducting your evaluation using plenty of subjective opinions. For example: you prefer thin crust, like spacious countertops, and expect red and white subway tile. You won’t escape your own biases, but at least the pizza place itself will not be changing. It will not present a different store front each day, in response to your thoughts, based on its own hidden agenda, and all the while, be inserting advertisements into your head. But that’s exactly what’s happening when it comes to your identity.
Any time you describe your self, it’s almost as if you should allow another part of you to listen in as if listening to a used car salesman—maybe some of it’s true, but don’t get too sucked in.
Trust God’s Word When It Comes to You
This is why we need God’s Word to understand our identity. It’s absolutely fixed, certain, and outside of you. “Forever, oh Lord, your Word is firmly fixed in the Heavens” (Psalm 119:89). The Bible also comes with an edge—a sharpness that enables it to cut deeper into you than you are willing to go (Hebrew 4:12). In other words, as you read God’s Word, God’s Word reads you. It tells you things about yourself that you’re not likely to admit. It gets deep under your skin and into your heart. It will reveal dark motives and deep fears if you allow it.
God’s Word does this to help you get to know yourself, and then to build you into who God wants you to be. As you learn to trust that God knows you better than you know yourself, you will also trust he knows what your best self looks like, and you will more readily follow his guidance to get there.
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2 comments
William McIlvanie
Love this latest dialogue with yourself if for no other reason than it’s a bit self-refuting. In my experience , mistakes are often more enlightening. What is human intelligence other than silent talking with oneself? That is to reflect on what we know, so that we may know that we know it. Likewise reflecting on our own past behavior by first suspending judgment on it and then searching for any sensory, perceptual and/or intellectual errors that have crept in thence to become bad habits of thought and perception–these latter also subject to the same reflection. As a Christian, I find the process more illuminating when I do it in the company of our Lord, and more painful when the Holy Spirit convicts. Without this process summary confession would be crippled at best.
With regards to a fixed identity, Aquinas famously justified Neo-Platonism’s influence on Christianity by allowing that forms/essences could exist without matter eternally in the “mind” of God. This he warned was a purely analogical statement, if it had any meaning at all. It made some sense in a world of fixed forms. Since Aquinas’ time, discoveries in biology, astronomy, physics and geology have falsified the notion of any physically fixed forms. Still, I find the idea that ‘God knows who we ought to become’ attractive even though its justification becomes highly abstract and could be used to support deism or Gnosticism if taken to extremes.
Imagine if you will, a world without a digitalized identity or an engineered self. (By way of confession, I try to imagine myself living in a snapchat world but can’t bring myself even to use Facebook so abhorrent is the posturing that goes on there.) In a world without social media would you have any concern for your identity other than to display some social solidarity with your in-group? Adolescents who aren’t nerds tend to be overly concerned about themselves this way, especially girls. But they soon outgrow this. They find their identity changes naturally with time and hopefully for the better, though there is backsliding. This was once the normal course of maturation into adulthood. Unless you are a “public figure” you don’t contrive an identity, your identity develops with time and experience. Moreover, you don’t have one identity. You become a lover, a parent, a carpenter, an astronaut. You become a grandparent. You become geriatric. Identity can develop in a myriad of ways only some of which can be realized in a lifetime. We don’t concern ourselves with all the things we could have been unless we want to drive ourselves insane. Mankind possesses near infinite possibility, but any one man possesses only limited potential, confined as he is by circumstance. Moreover it is more important that others be able to identify who we are than it is for ourselves to do so. If we were the only person in our world, the question of identity would likely never enter our heads. Who we are is always relative to something or somebody else. A hungry lion identifies us differently than do politicians seeking our vote. We identify our own selves differently depending on social circumstances. A doctor identifies differently with a patient than he does in a foursome on the golf course.
Having established both the fluidity and developmental quality of every actual identity, viz a viz a digital identity, as the term “identity” is commonly used in a social context, I would like to entertain your idea of a fixed identity as an antidote for the psychoses attendant on having to create a public identity in the digital space. Very few people are the same in public as they are in private. There are good reasons and bad ones for cultivating two identities which I won’t touch on here. However I will say this: the one attribute of a public identity that the public expects is that it is consistent at minimum and preferable fixed over time. Actors hate this phenomenon which type casts them, thus to ruin their career when the type loses its novelty. The fact is, nobody wants to be type cast. We want to grow and develop. We don’t want to be the same person at sixty we were at twenty. Attend any thirty year high school reunion and note how at least a few of your school mates still act like adolescents. Everybody pities them. As Christians, of course, we all want to grow in Christian virtue. A fixed self, therefore, can only be who we ought to become, an essence known only to God, a unique soul whose perfection is not of this world. Jesus is the ultimate exemplar of our final selves, but none of us could ever be Him. However true it may be that we have a fixed identity somewhere in eternity, it’s but a nicety to think about, like the lovely proofs for the existence of God. To be honest, very few people care about proofs for the existence of God any more than they care about their eternal essences. It’s who we were, are and are about to become that properly concerns us mortals. Like the Apostle Paul said, we must run the race and work out our salvation in the here and now. The development of our souls by the grace of God and thus our reward in heaven depends upon it.
Justin N. Poythress
These are some really good thoughts, Bill. I particularly appreciate your take on how the whole notion of a “public persona’ is a new phenomenon in a digital world which has probably driven a lot of the identity obsession of today.