The darling of the right has just published an op-ed in the NYTime on the nature of human identity where he references the experience of Douglas Hofstadter, a happily married man, who when Carol, his wife, was 42 and their children were 5 and 2, dies of a brain tumor he has an epiphany of sorts. David writes:
"A few months later, Hofstadter was looking at a picture of Carol. He describes what he felt in his recent book, "I Am A Strange Loop": I looked at her face and looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes and all at once I found myself saying, as tears flowed, ‘That’s me. That’s me!’
This is undoubtedly an experience not foreign to any of us who have loved deeply and lost but is David able to transfer this insight into a generalized statement of who we are in a social context? I will let the reader make that judgment.
Here are the points where David is, in my opinion, still struggling to get it right.
I bring all this up in an Op-Ed column because most political and social disputes grow out of differing theories about the self, and I find Hofstadter’s social, dynamic, overlapping theory of self very congenial
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No, that's only half the picture. The dispute over theories about the self are an indelible part of the dispute over theories of society. The debate is focused on the perennial mystery of the one and the many, captured most profoundly in the Buddhist symbol of the two fish in the circle, which suggests that our language betrays us if it suggests that one can be comprehended without apprehending both...that there is at the nature of all things a fundamental binary: a yes implicite with every no, an on with every off, a one with every many.
It emphasizes how profoundly we are shaped by relationships with others, but it’s not one of those stifling, collectivist theories that puts the community above the individual.
No, it goes far beyond that to suggest that the personal cannot be understood apart from the communal and the communal apart from the personal. The personal and the social are two sides of one coin. There is no community to put above the individual nor individual to put above the communal because they are parts of a single whole.
It exposes the errors of those Ayn Rand individualists who think that success is something they achieve through their own genius and willpower.
Not only that but it explodes the myth of the necessity of a privileged class upon which David's brand of conservatism (the Wall Street establishment) is so profoundly and deeply based...that without an investor class society would come apart and all progress terminated because "the people" cannot get their act together...that democracy is really a failed concept without a self-absorbed privileged upper class to shepherd "the masses" through history.
It exposes the fallacy of the New Age narcissists who believe they can find their true, authentic self by burrowing down into their inner being. There is no self that exists before society.
David is so close with this last sentence but fails to make the connection of this concept of the self with public policy. If individualism AND collectivism are not the right answer, what is? Can it be a public policy predicated on protecting the wealth of the few to the impoverishment of the many? Can it be a public policy that arbitrarily assigns a value to labor not on the basis of its essentiality to a sustainable social matrix but by an auction on one hand but established socal norms on the other?
How is it that the sanitary worker and the proctologist have such diverse income levels? They are dealing fundamentally with the same process yet the one performing the service for the many is valued far less than the one performing the same service for the few. Without the services of one, urban life would be unthinkable and unliveable, while only the few would be discomforted with the lack of the service on the other. Under what reasonable sense of either individual or social values does this make sense?
In conclusion, David still does't get it. He is still shilling for the house that pays his rent...or more indelicately, still pleasing his johns.