My attention has lately been drawn to humans’ fragility. It began some time ago in a counseling class. We were thinking about how hard it can be for clients to be open to change, and the wise professor noted that people are not free to simply pull out some piece of their worldview and subject it to scrutiny. Our ways of living and understanding are often, in his words, a “tenuously constructed scaffolding.†It would be foolish for a person to gamble with something he relies upon to hold his world together. It would be insanity!
So it began by thinking about people who are in therapy, and how they might be wise not to open themselves to all sorts of “fixing.†The professor hadn’t limited his observation, however, to some class of troubled people. Over time I have come to think of us all as relying on tenuously constructed scaffoldings to make sense of our lives. We are all held together with duct tape. The events of our lives are here with us, as one struggle led to a patch here, another to a support there. Our hopes and dreams can be found in this structure too, and may be no more sound than the fixes. A need to be strong forces us to have a blind spot here. A love of nature is behind a defense mechanism there.
But perhaps all this is obvious, at least since Freud. Of course our selves are made of our histories. What is new in this for me is that I believe I have held an image of humans as basically hardy. Everyone has struggles which pull them to the sidelines from time to time. Many of us suffer from neuroses and obsessions. But these acknowledgments all rely on a view of people as basically functional and whole, with problems understood as exceptions. It feels very different to begin with the assumption that there is no integrated, hardy whole—that each of us is an awkward attempt to make life work.
Of course there are those who have solved this problem in elegant ways. Many lives may indeed be perfectly full, balanced, and aligned. My suggestion is that this is better understood as a rare achievment than as our natural state.
I have been teaching at the same school for three years now, and it’s amazing to me how my impressions of the other teachers have changed. When I met them so many seemed very close to perfect. They were confident and professional. They were masters of their work and liked by all who met them. I can’t say I lost respect for these people, but I found they were a lot more like me than those initial impressions suggested. Among them many are worried about whether they fulfill their duties to their students. Many feel the need to be liked, or to be found attractive. Several have been through ugly divorces and other tragedies. Some may be alcoholics. All, it begins to appear, have things about themselves they are ashamed of. So how did they carry themselves so confidently? Even stranger: have some of them seen me with the same naive eyes?
I fear I am only echoing a sentimental (and very Christian) reflection: We’re all the same. We’re all weak. We all need. I sure hope I’m saying more than that. My new way of thinking about people has been more than to be humble or to feel solidarity with them. It feels like more of an intellectual change. Still, I can’t deny the connection to that more emotional insight.
This new view has done for me something like what might be expected of a determinist position. I find myself less anxious to blame people for their various offenses. I am more likely to hear a rude remark or the story of some aggressive act and think, “He has some reason for doing that. It serves some purpose—protects some wound.†I am not prepared to forgive all wrongs, but I am less inclined to assign simple blame.
As suggested above, I also think this view provides an admiring and appropriate way to regard well-adapted persons. To think of such persons as having managed to pull their lives together and create whole and fruitful selves seems better than the alternative—to imagine that they have merely failed to suffer from any mental disorder. I think this reflects where “an orderly life†comes from. One has to build that order, rather than merely avoid the onset of chaos.
Where I think this insight my be most practically useful is in the message: You’re not the only one held together with duct tape. I think most teenagers and many adults (as my experience with my co-workers suggests) might benefit from a bit of reflection on this. We hide the tenuousness of our scaffoldings behind polished, happy exteriors, and this system leads each of us to believe that we alone are in danger of collapse.
Two other questions have arisen in my recent efforts here. One is the problem of defining collapse. If my image is of a worldview (and I have also tried to escape reliance on this single word by using “ways of living†and “ways of making senseâ€) which is in danger of collapse, it would seem important to say what we mean by it. Do we all live in danger of going so mad we can no longer function? This seems too much to believe. But the idea that we are on the edge of some kind of disaster seems fitting. My hope is that I can identify specific “patches†and “crutches†in myself and consider what losing them would mean. I have a clear feeling about people desperately needing this or that defense mechanism, but it doesn’t seem to clarify what “need†means here.
The last issue I want to raise at this time is that investigations along these lines should provide some tentative answers about how people can go about: 1) replacing dysfunctional pieces of their scaffoldings; and 2) overhauling the whole self-system to work toward the sort of integrated, hardy self we have imagined to be natural.