The Elusive Self

I was in for a surprise when I sat down during my college days to listen to a conversation that I had recorded with my parents.  Who was this young man talking in the voice of a Kentucky tobacco farmer?  Could it be me?  Without my knowing it, something dormant had broken through, like a flower in a spring rain, in my parents’ home.

During the first six years of my life I had lived in a rented farmhouse in central Illinois, and heard little but my parent’s rural Kentucky accent and grammar.  Other aspects of their culture and traditions also took hold, intertwining and forming tendrils and roots.  But as I grew older I unconsciously adopted a Midwestern accent and took on new values and attitudes.

Nevertheless, when I became a school psychologist, I at times found myself to be uncomfortably aware of a divided identity.  I should have been non-judgmental when parents and non-teaching staff used those familiar old grammatical forms, including double negatives and the word “ain’t”.  But to my chagrin, my immediate, albeit unvoiced, reaction was sometimes disapproval, even though those same expressions might bring me to a sentimental smile in other settings.

Now, in my retirement years, I sing and play guitar at open mikes and other events, and include in my sets old time country songs, vocalized in a southern accent.  One day I saw a couple, friends from my past life as a school psychologist, in the audience.  As I opened with “Muddy Waters” they broke into broad smiles.  They were still smiling, but puzzled, after the performance as they tried to reconcile my singing persona, which seemed perfectly natural, with the one they had known.

It seems to me that these differences are like a picture often seen in textbooks about perception.  It can, with the flipping of a mental switch, be interpreted as the face of a hag or that of a beautiful woman.  I hear the old time country music that I grew up with and understand how some people, who have not absorbed the sensibilities that it represents, find it irritating.  And yet, by flipping that switch, I find beauty.

Likewise, double negatives are acceptable in many languages, including Spanish.  According to oxforddictionaries.com, they were also a standard part of the English language through the 16th century and are still used in many English dialects “where they don’t seem to cause any confusion in intended meaning.”  And, according to my Webster’s New World Dictionary, “Ain't once was standard for am not, and a small number of educated speakers still prefer it to amn't or aren't in questions.”  Thus it seems that adopting one form or the other is not only or even primarily about effective communication, but also a way of choosing sides, of announcing to others and to ourselves that we belong to one or another group.

So who am I really, at my core?  According to one school of thought, there is no core.  We are instead more or less collections of “memes,” units of thought that interact within the brain in the same way that organisms compete and sometimes support each other through evolution in the natural environment. The idea originated with the zoologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene.  According to Dawkins, memes are like viruses, acquired through contact with others, and mutating in order to ensure that they can survive and be passed on from one person to the next. 

Daniel C. Dennet took this concept one step further in Consciousness Explained, proposing that, “Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes, (or more exactly, meme-effects in brains)…,” operating as a “virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for any such activities.”  The result of all this is a “self,” a fictional entity created by this process rather than being in control of it.

Of course, a part of me believes that I am real, not fictional, and that I choose my identity, just as another part, deep down and in spite of all evidence to the contrary, believes that the earth stands still and the sun and moon rise and fall over me.  Nevertheless, there is a certain appeal in the idea of the meme.  It’s as if the mind is a rowdy legislature, with competing factions and shifting alliances, rather than a staid absolute monarchy of the undivided self.  It’s the kind of place where a Kentucky tobacco farmer can hold his own with a college-educated professional, a vibrant society rich in possibilities for the future and appreciation for the past.