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Subjectivity

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Clarissa

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I’m at a conference and kind of out of the news cycle because I’m on the executive board and very over-scheduled. But I always have time to watch the Matt Walsh show, and I noticed that he keeps saying “for thousands of years, people had children in conditions a lot worse than ours, so how can anybody say today that they can’t afford to have children?”

I agree that having children is the best thing in life but appealing to history is a mistake. Even just a hundred years ago our ancestors weren’t people like we are people. They were people but in a completely different way. Their subjectivity, or the way they were inside their own heads, is completely different from ours. They constituted themselves as human beings in a completely different way. The word “I” meant something different to them and so did the word “child.” In developed countries, we are undergoing yet another major change of subjectivity right at this moment, and our own children will be people very differently from how we are people. Matt Walsh’s appeals to history are ahistorical because he doesn’t take into account how our inner world transforms under the pressure of history.

This isn’t about Matt Walsh. I’m talking about this because we no longer have to be a passive object of these transformational forces. We can stop and ask, “is this change in our subjectivity that we are experiencing right now good for us? Does it make us happy? Should we allow it to happen?” My answer is no, no, and God, no. But we won’t be able to do anything about it if we keep pretending that it’s not real.

7 responses to “Subjectivity”

  1. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    OT (though sort of related): I found this fascinating article from 2019 about why western statistical models don’t really apply to russia (roughly statistics emerged when a market for statistics emerged and there’s no market for accurate statistics within russia).

    Lots of interesting observations throughout from the devolution to 19th century economic models to the eternal russian desire to mimic foreign phenomena without understanding anything about them.

    https://therussianreader.com/2019/05/15/simon-kordonsky/

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  2. Amanda Avatar
    Amanda

    could you explain more about the subjectivity in more specific terms or maybe examples from past times vs now, and how do we know this? I want to understand.

    I’ve read about the Greeks being very different from us – Something like they perceived their thoughts as external or coming from the gods. I’m probably not saying that quite right, but is that the kind of thing you mean?

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    1. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      “explain more about the subjectivity in more specific terms”

      I understand this (maybe not exactly the same as Clarissa) as values and identity.

      Different people value different things not only at the individual level but at the group level. Of course you get the entire range of human behavior and values in any group over a few hundred thousand but the frequencies change a lot between groups.

      Different societies respond to the fundamental question of human inequality differently. At the extremes Scandinavians try de-emphasize and mitigate the effects of inequality and Latin Americans like to emphasize and strengthen inequality. Most other societies are in the middle, Americans are a bit closer to Scandinavians than Latinos in that regard.

      Multiply that by questions of family loyalty, how differently men and women should behave, attitudes toward uncertainty and the future etc etc etc

      Identity is about the perception of self both as an individual and a member of various networks, family, work, education, social etc.

      Modern westerners like to imagine themselves as isolated free actors who only form associations by choice and who are free to sever any association that does not meet their immediate needs.

      In the past an individual was a node in a complex web of unbreakable relationships and individual actions were constrained by the effects on others in the web and one accepted that one would be affected by actions by others in the web.

      A person momentarily dissatisfied with a marriage now seeks to dissolve it without much thought about the secondary and tertiary results. A person dissatisfied in the past stuck it out and hoped things would change or tried to change themselves to make the marriage work.

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      1. Amanda Avatar
        Amanda

        that makes sense

        so I guess it also like late 20th century US people’s view of slavery vs early 19th century people and vs all of human history till then. And humans in other societies will have different view as well.

        I guess it’s the use of the word subjectivity that throws me because I don’t have context for that.

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      2. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        I started answering but it was getting too long, so I placed it into a separate post. But yes, it’s this. It’s how we understand what matters and what everything means. If we look at an African tribe, for example, can there be any doubt that the members of the tribe perceive the world very unlike to how we do? That the entire architecture of their mind is completely different? Different neural pathways appear in response to different outward stimuli.

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    2. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      But… most of our thoughts *are* external.

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    3. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Exactly, that’s the thing. Medieval people lived in a world where spirits and humans were in daily communion. This can still be observed in rural Latin America where spirits are part of the daily life. Your dead grandpa is just there all the time, and you feel him, hear him, talk to him. This is portrayed in Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. People think what he describes is fantasy or a metaphor but no, this is very literally how people engaged with the world and still do in regions that haven’t joined modernity.

      I have a post about this here:

      Literature Lesson: Mary Lerner’s “Little Selves”

      It references a very short story that I highly recommend to understand what I’m talking about.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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