Self-Abnegation

The notion that through the act of suppressing one's sense of self, one could achieve a noble result is an idea that has generally inspired our conduct up until relatively recently.

However, our notion of the self has changed over time. In fact, the very idea of the self is fairly new one, viewed over the span of history. The consciousness of self that we take for granted would be unfamiliar to our earlier ancestors. And now that we know we have a self, we must treasure it. To deny the self, or to allow it otherwise to be diminished, would be viewed as a violation.

I am convinced that at one time, people occupied less aesthetic and psychic space than is the case today. In fact, it is undeniable that many of our citizens could not care less how they are viewed, and if it is a distasteful chore to look at them, it is none of their concern.

I don't believe it was always so. Our dress, manners, and other modes of expression were much more restrained at one time. This societally-imposed restraint on our way of being in the world, it has been said, made it difficult to achieve happiness. But did happiness used to be the goal of living? I think it was not.

Instead, I gather, that if any one principle guided our existence in former times, it was a desire to find our place in the moral order of the society (whatever that may have been). We believed that there was an abstract notion of the good and the not-good that held true for all members of society. Not everyone could live up to it, but all could be measured against it. I do not wish to claim that virtue used to be more prevalent. But, for example, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that, successfully or not, an attempt used to be made to try impart "goodness" in the young, as an aspect of one's overall education. Such an emphasis would be regarded nowadays as quaint.

Formerly in society, because the notion of good and not-good held so much sway, I think we walked a humbler path. We ourselves were not so important; the moral order of society was. We accepted our lot, by and large. Whoever sought to stand out did so because he or she felt in possession of something genuinely worth exposing to the world, and not as much in order to bring attention to one's own person. And if our sense of injustice was aroused at all, it tended to be over larger concerns. I think one could prove easily that the public today is somewhat indifferent to the larger concerns of society and the world, but is acutely sensitive to anything that would impinge on what it sees as its prerogatives.

Since the self was not a sacrosanct entity, as it is now, it used to be more within the bounds of imagination to take on suffering, and use it for creative ends. The artist, for example, used to exist more or less in opposition to society. Now, partly out of guilt, I believe, for our past treatment of artists, but more so out of distaste for the violence to the self that art clearly could demand, the artist has been invited into society. We have institutions that "nurture" artists that did not exist formerly: creative writing programs, fellowships, teaching positions and the like. We have publicity, lest the artist's work should go unnoticed, as used to be very often the case in earlier eras. But however much our solicitude for artists has aided in assuring their personal well-being, it is questionable whether this solicitude has done much to make the art itself any better.

Our over-protection of the self has not just been harmful to artistic endeavors; it has affected virtually everyone's daily experience. Without denying that there are still lonely people around us, nowadays it would take a super-human effort to experience the kind of solitude that used to be an accepted part of life. To live in a rural community as so many of us did, with transportation slow or unavailable altogether, without the means to connect to the outside world that we take for granted, with books and musical instruments one's only diversion -- this is a way of living that we would find intolerable. The self-denial of such a life would be disorienting. The 'affirmation' we all expect nowadays would have been brutally absent.

We are offered wonderful variety and diverse means of fulfillment. But we have also, as a practical matter, made it impossible truly to abnegate the self, and thereby attain true solitude. Such extreme solitude would be unlikely to provide happiness or even long maintain health and sanity. But it used to be more taken for granted that this kind of solitude could either occur naturally or be attained through effort, and out of such solitude we have gotten the benefit some of our finest actions, as well as our most memorable thought.