Chapter 17

CULTURE

“It is clearly rational for men to secure their self-respect. A sense of their own worth is necessary if they are to pursue their conception of the good with zest and to delight in its fulfillment. Self-respect is not so much a part of any rational plan of life as the sense that one’s plan is worth carrying out. Now our self-respect normally depends upon the respect of others. Unless we feel that our endeavors are honored by them, it is difficult if not impossible for us to maintain the conviction that our ends are worth advancing.”

- John Rawls (1921-2002), A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971:178)

            The quest for meaning is a quest to build a self that is truly worthy of esteem, respect, love, and a cluster of other life-affirming emotions. This involves more than the psychological task of cultivating a sense of self-esteem. It involves the philosophical tasks of leading a life that is truly estimable in our own eyes, and of constructing an identity that is truly worthy of our own respect. The feeling of self-esteem is not enough; we must truly deserve our self-esteem.

            We build a meaningful life on a foundation of judgment and choice. Judgment discovers where emotional truth is to be found, and where it is not. Self-construction proceeds within the limits set by the truth and falsity of emotional judgments. Where neither truth nor falsity is to be found, self-construction becomes a matter of choice.

            Both judgment and choice involve emotional commitment. Emotion fixes belief and turns judgments into convictions and ideals. Emotion binds choice and turns choices into intentions, goals, and plans of life. Emotion solidifies a history of judgments and choices into a character and an identity. Emotional commitment turns a truly worthwhile life into a life that feels meaningful. The path to meaning winds between critical reflection and emotional commitment. Emotional commitment firms ideals, deepens relationships, and strengthens character. Yet it does so by patterning attention and distorting reflection and by making self-deception easier than self-evaluation. Even when critical reflection does succeed, commitment still makes self-transformation difficult. Emotional commitment to our past decisions – exemplified in pride, vanity, and fear of regret – makes tearing down and rebuilding ourselves an arduous task.

            To discover truth, emotional judgments must be responsive to both reasons and evidence. The holism of judgment requires that judgments cohere with each another. One judgment can be a reason for another, and this network of reasons must be mutually supportive like the rows and columns of a crossword puzzle. Nevertheless, this mutual support is not enough; just as we need clues in solving a crossword puzzle, so too we need evidence in the search for emotional truth.

The Evidence of Others

            One source of evidence in the search for emotional truth is our own emotional responses to our lived experience. Our fear of something is evidence that it is dangerous, though it is hardly conclusive evidence. A second source of evidence in the search for emotional truth is the emotional responses and emotional judgments of others. When we see another person responding to a situation with fear, we have evidence that it is dangerous. When someone tells us that a situation is dangerous, again we have evidence that it is dangerous. Though the evidence of others is hardly conclusive, it is still evidence that we must either take into account or dismiss only with good reason.

            In eschewing the relativism of truth, we undertake to take seriously the responses and opinions of others. We must use the responses and opinions as evidence in making emotional judgments. We must do this even when the judgments concern what matters for us in particular. True emotional judgments are the ones we would make under the best possible circumstances of inquiry. Mistake-free circumstances would incorporate the free articulation of responses and the free exchange of views between different cultures and perspectives. In making judgements about what truly matters for us, we should ideally hear from a multicultural melange of poets, psychologists, historians, artists, writers, scientists, sociologists, and philosophers. The search for truth is a conversation, and agreement is possible. If we consulted everyone, and if everyone were open-minded, then, over time we should expect convergence of both response and judgment regarding our particular case.

            The evidence of others is all about us. It forms the cultural environment in which we judge, choose, and evaluate ourselves. Our cultural environment continually exposes us to the responses and opinions of others as they talk to us, as we hear them talk to others, as we see them respond, and as we see, read, or hear about them in the various communications media. Some of this expression is sincere, and some of it – advertising, for example – is openly manipulative. Our cultural environment contains an enormous amount of expression, all of which is potentially relevant to the evaluative judgments that we make.

            Our cultural environment is unavoidable, and we are indebted to it for much of the emotional education that makes judgment possible. Nonetheless, our cultural environment is potentially dangerous to our evaluative beliefs, for false and misleading evidence can pollute it. When the responses of others are mistaken and misguided, and when we rely on their responses in making our own judgments, then we are liable to fail in our quest for truth.

Self-respect

            We make emotional judgments at two levels. First, we make judgments about whether and how things and people matter: So-and-so is admirable, honest, fascinating, or such-and-such is shocking, revolting, disgusting. Second, we make judgments about the meaningfulness of our own lives and persons: We are worthy of our own esteem and respect, or we should be ashamed of ourselves, and must make amends to recover our self-respect. The latter judgments depend on the former; we must build our lives within the parameters set by what is meaningful.

            At both these levels, we employ the responses of others as evidence for our own judgments. At both these levels, therefore, our cultural environment can mislead us. We most easily see this at the second level, judgments about our selves and our own worth. John Rawls, in the chapter motto, stresses the importance of self-respect to leading a life. He also stresses the dependence of self-respect on the responses of others. If others fail to recognize us as worthy of respect, then we will take this as evidence that we are unworthy. At the very least, we must deal with this evidence and dismiss it if it is false. If it is false and we fail to dismiss it, then we may make false judgments on our own lives. Charles Taylor makes this point in a discussion of recognition by society.

. . . our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being. Thus some feminists have argued that women in patriarchal societies have been induced to adopt a depreciatory image of themselves. They have internalized a picture of their own inferiority, so that even when some of the objective obstacles to their advancement fall away, they may be incapable of taking advantage of the new opportunities. And beyond this, they are condemned to suffer the pain of low self-esteem. (Taylor 1992:25-26)

The failure to respect the dignity of others is widespread in racist, sexist, and homophobic cultural environments. The harm done by a failure to recognize the dignity of others is cumulative. Such harms to self-respect are not caused by the actions of a determinate individual. If only one man failed to respect women, then that would not harm any woman’s self-respect. When such attitudes are widespread, however, then society-as-a-whole confronts women with a great deal of evidence that they are not worthy of respect.

            Beliefs respond to evidence, and evidence is cumulative. The more confirming instances we have for a hypothesis, the more we are likely to believe it. Advertisers know this; it is why they spend huge amounts of money setting up connections between their brand and an emotionally favored image. We respond emotionally to the image that contains the branded product, and these emotional responses become evidence that the branded product is worthy of that response. Repeated over and over again, such evidence starts to confirm this judgment.

            Of course, no amount of bad evidence adds up to good evidence. We can protect ourselves from bad evidence by looking to see if our responses cohere with our other judgments. For example, if someone’s past gives her plenty of confirmation for her self-respect, then she can probably dismiss the disrespect displayed in her present cultural environment. Yet the cumulative effect of false cultural evidence is hazardous to the truth of our judgments. The emotional responses of others continually confront us with evidence that we are wrong, and so wear us down psychologically.

            The responses of others can convince a person she is less worthy of respect than she really is. In the same way, the responses of others can convince a person that he is more worthy of respect than he really is. The cultural environment can give false confirmation of certain ways of living, and it can lead to a false sense of self-respect. Earlier, for example, we investigated finding meaning through satisfying wants and desires. We found general, philosophical reasons why the satisfied-desire theory is false. Yet favorable emotional responses to people getting what they want permeate our cultural environment. Our cultural environment glorifies costly consumption and turns the wealthy into heroes. This glorification accords many people more respect than they truly deserve. It leads them to judge themselves and the lives they live to be more worthy of respect than is truly the case.

            False self-respect feels just as good as does true self-respect. Yet, no matter how good false self-esteem may feel, it is still a dangerous trap. Imagine a well-paid professional person, well-thought of by his peers and by society generally, and satisfied with himself and his life. His good view of himself will seem natural to him. All the evidence that he receives from his cultural environment confirms his positive view of himself. His emotional commitment to his view of himself will make it difficult for him to see any alternative. Because his view is uncontested, he will have no reason to begin the critical reflection and self-examination that will advance him on his quest.

Self-transformation and Cultural Reform

            Escape from the traps set by our cultural environment is very difficult. The cultural evidence is just too pervasive, and our human reasoning skills just too finite. We can, it is true, carefully and critically examine any particular judgment that we have made, and discount or dismiss the responses of others. Still, it does not follow that we can do this for every judgment that we make. (Kernohan 1998:22-23) Consider this analogy. Imagine a skilled and well-equipped geologist. It is true that, presented with any rock on the surface of this planet, she could identify and label it. Yet it is not true that she could identify and label all the rocks on the surface of this planet. Her life is simply not long enough to examine all the rocks on the Earth.

            Consequently the quest for meaning is a collective project. In this, the search for emotional truth is just like the search for scientific truth. No scientist can form a true perspective on the universe without using the work of scientists who came before her. Nor can she gain this perspective without the aid of her contemporaries. The volume of information to be learned about the universe is just too large, and the powers of the human intellect are too small.

            As individuals we can only go so far. Our judgments will always depend on the responses and opinions of others in our cultural environment. This surrounding background of evidence will always influence our judgments. Individually, we can transcend our cultural milieu only partially. To fully gain the wisdom we require, we would need to collectively reform that cultural milieu, ridding it of false judgments and inappropriate responses. Full self-transformation can only come after cultural reform.