Island selves: human disconnectedness in a world of interdependence.
  by Yi-Fu Tan

Growing awareness of the ecological crisis, together with increasing familiarity with images of the earth taken from outer space, should support the viewpoint that human beings share a small but beautiful planet with other living organisms and that there is something very special about the earth. This opinion is not merely human bias, for it is supported by the objective fact that life of any kind in the universe is extremely rare. Life teems on the earth; the more it is studied in its myriad manifestations the more evidence accumulates of their interdependence. “No species is an island, entire of itself,” one might say, with apologies to John Donne. “We are part of the main, part of the single weave of life.”

Concurrent with this acceptance of life’s oneness and interdependence, there has emerged in the late twentieth century a rather passionate need on the part of many people to see themselves as different from one another. They may push their separateness and autonomy, their cultural singularity, to the point that no one outside the group and its unique experiences can understand it, much less speak about or for it. Peoples and cultures are, in this sense, islands, their insularity both fate and a source of pride.

This split in contemporary consciousness is not in itself exceptional. In other times and places thinkers have wrestled with the dialectical tension between the whole and its parts, how the parts are related to the whole, whether the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; or, on the contrary, the whole exists to serve its parts when these are not subgroups but human individuals, each with an eternal destiny, as the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches. In this tradition, more than in others, individuals with a philosophical turn of mind have repeatedly asked, what does it mean to be a human being apart from the identity and satisfactions that derive from group membership? What are some of a reflective person’s most fulfilling and most disturbing experiences?

Note that the two scales so prominently addressed in the last quarter-century - global and local elude the question of the individual. Whether the enthusiasm is for global ecological interdependence or for communal solidarity, the individual is submerged in a larger whole. Why is this? Could it be that in contemporary society’s growing intellectual sophistication, people find it more difficult to escape confronting the true nature of being an individuated self? Because habits and customs of the past, such as harvest festivals, rites of passage, and state ceremonies, can no longer quite inter the anxiety that goes with selfhood, new or refurbished cultural covers that are plausible and congenial to the modern mind need to be put in place. Ecological interdependence and communal oneness, as quasi-religious doctrines, are among the most effective covers of recent times. Although they are undoubtedly worthy of the most serious attention and commitment, they also perform, as did religion and elaborate social ceremony not so long ago, the service of burying the uncomfortable truth of individual uniqueness and, with it, another truth - the world’s indifference that together aggravate every person’s sense of isolation and vulnerability.

UNIQUENESS

Consider first the question of uniqueness. In the United States no one wants to be treated like part of the woodwork. Americans want to be recognized for their distinctive quality, their importance to the group. In other societies, especially those called folk or traditional, people are less eager to stand above the crowd. An individual would not want to be seen as assertive and so targeted for criticism. Yet, in perhaps more covert ways, each person wants to be recognized and acknowledged as somehow special and nonexchangeable with others. This wanting to be special is one face of human nature. The other face shows that there are times when even the most ardent individualists want to fade into the background, to sink into the reassurance and protective coloring of some larger being. To be special or unique is ego boosting, but it also makes one feel disconnected, an island.

The uniqueness, in a nontrivial sense, of every human being has a variety of causes. Among them, at the most basic level, is biology. In a large cosmopolitan city, anyone can see how humans differ in body size, shape, and color, often to an arresting degree. More subtly, body scents and fingerprints vary from person to person. Outwardly so unlike one another, humans are hardly “brothers under the skin.” On the contrary, as biochemist Roger Williams (1967, 1978) noted, the size and shape of stomachs differ far more than do those of noses and mouths. If noses varied proportionately to stomachs, some would look like cucumbers, others like pumpkins. A hand with six fingers is considered abnormal, yet pipes that branch from the aorta above the heart vary in number from one to six. Individuals equipped with a narrow esophagus have a difficult time swallowing pills; at the opposite extreme, those well favored may accidently ingest a whole set of false teeth. Politicians would do well to have an esophagus large enough to allow them to finish eating and still leave plenty of time to bend their neighbors’ ears.

The perceptual senses vary widely in their scope and degree of sensitivity, even among individuals considered normal. Ears that can barely register sound at certain frequencies may be supersensitive at others. When pitch sensitivity is combined with other capabilities of hearing, people’s daily lives are affected in matters such as tolerance of the level and kind of noise, ability to grasp certain words in speech, and appreciation of music. Standard eye tests reveal unique strengths and weaknesses in visual acuity. Peripheral vision is not ordinarily tested, yet it can show remarkable differences that affect competence in sports, driving cars, or flying airplanes and perhaps also in the ease and speed of reading. Whereas color vision is a species trait, sensitivity to shades of color and to the appreciation of a color’s richness can differ widely. “Is the redness of the rose the same to you and me?” lovers may wonder as, hand in hand, they stroll through a garden. But the question is not merely philosophical; it is also neurological - a matter of knowing the number of pigment genes on the eye’s X chromosomes (Neitz and Neitz 1995).

Most remarkable of all are differences in the human brain. Every feature that has been measured shows surprising diversity. The brain makes every individual truly unique, a fact that is a source of pride but also of isolation and discomfort. A wizard at chess may not be much good at algebra. Excellence in one branch of mathematics does not guarantee high performance in another. The talented French mathematician Jacques Hadamard (1949, 115) admitted that he had difficulty mastering Lie group: it was as though his mental energy for that specialty had been exhausted in the process of attaining mere competence. Some people are very verbal, but there too the talent may show itself in one area rather than another - for example, in poetry rather than in expository prose. Double negatives in a sentence can be a stumbling block for some listeners, who otherwise do not lack aural-verbal competence. Exactly how specialized is the human ability to form grammatical sentences? An extreme example is a family whose members, as a result of a defective gene, have difficulty forming plurals, although in other respects they speak or write normally (Gazzaniga 1992).

THE WORLD’S INDIFFERENCE

One consequence of human biological uniqueness is that a person often feels slightly out of step with other persons, including ones who are closest by virtue of blood or affection - still eating when others have finished, feeling cold when others complain of heat, unable to catch the meaning of a sentence when others nod, and so on in the course of an ordinary day. Reminders of disconnectedness are easily repressed. Beginning with lessons in the family, people are schooled to attend to what holds them together. The family is par excellence mutual support and community, despite differences in sex, age, and temperament. Each family member lives in a world uniquely its own, for both biological and sociocultural reasons. Yet all family members are one, not in spite of but because of these differences. Still, it is also within the family that a child first learns the fact of human disconnectedness. The child learns that just as it has a project, so does its mother, and that the two by no means always coincide. The look of annoyance that clouds the mother’s face as the child disrupts her reverie to show her a picture it has proudly drawn creates in the child, however fleetingly, a sense of disorientation, even of betrayal. Through incidents of this kind, trivial in themselves, a person first encounters a hint of the world’s indifference (Updike 1989, 100).

The world is composed of people, other living things, and inanimate matter. If people at times find their own species uncomprehending and incomprehensible, what expectation can they reasonably have of their ability to connect at a personal level with plants and animals, rock and wind? Fortunately for their peace of mind, the question seldom arises. The world’s comprehensibility and responsiveness are almost taken for granted. As an illustration, consider a man and his dog. The man reads a newspaper; at his feet the dog wags its tail. What can the dog really know of the man’s world of thought, or the man of the dog’s world of odor? What real mutual understanding and communication can there be? Very little. An abyss separates the two beings, yet they are often seen as a perfect picture of companionship and compatibility. If this abyss can exist between a man and a dog, which is humankind’s oldest domesticated animal, what is one to think of wild animals - cockroaches, for example, that scuttle across the kitchen table in the dark? Or, still further from humans - plants and inanimate nature?

From time to time, people are aware of their isolation and the world’s indifference. Such awareness is rarely the result of failing to penetrate imaginatively another’s existence and world. Rather, it comes through simply noting the disjunction between one’s mood or condition and that of the surrounding world (Kolakowski 1989, 69-77).

Among life’s most common experiences is the world’s indifference. Though awareness of this distressing fact is deeply buried so that life may go on, once in a long while people, ordinary people, speak out. Consider the eloquent exchange between Aua, an Iglulik Eskimo, and Knud Rasmussen, the Danish explorer. Rasmussen tries to get Aua to articulate a coherent philosophy. Aua replies that it cannot be done and that it is indeed presumptuous to try to do so. Look at it this way, he says: “In order to hunt well and live happily, man must have calm weather. Why this constant succession of blizzards?...Why must people be ill and suffer pain? We are all afraid of illness. Here is this old sister of mine: as far as anyone can see, she has done no evil; she has lived through a long life and given birth to healthy children, and now she must suffer before her days end. Why? Why?” “You see,” says Aua to Rasmussen, “you are equally unable to give any reason when we ask you why life is as it is. And so it must be.” In the midst of an enigmatic and chaotic world, the Iglulik seek comfort and security in the rules that they have inherited from their ancestors. To quote Aua again, “We do not know how, we cannot say why, but we keep those rules in order that we may live untroubled” (Rasmussen 1930, 69).

Human beings create order and meaning, suspecting even as they do so that their works may well be a measure of their desperation. The anthropologist Monica Wilson asked the women of an African village why they set such store by their ceremonies. Their answer was always the same. The purpose of such ceremonies, they responded, is “to stop people going mad” (Drury 1974, 52). Nature is indifferent and often unpredictable; people, for their part, can be not only indifferent but malevolent - the malevolence descending on the victim unexpectedly like a sudden shift of wind. What to do? The advice of the poet W. H. Auden (1991, 153) is like that of the African women. Not to be born may well be the best, but there is, he says, a second best, which is formal order, the “dance’s pattern.” We should dance while we still can.

To a character in a novel by Iris Murdoch (1975, 45), “unironed handkerchiefs could lead to madness.” People must opt for order somewhere down the line. A touching confession of helplessness before the world’s bewildering complexity, verging on chaos, comes from Claude Levi-Strauss. He has been accused of reductionism, of suggesting that mathematical models have the power to illuminate human experience and social reality. Levi-Strauss denies this. “This idea that structural analysis can account for everything in social life seems outrageous - it has never occurred to me. On the contrary, it seems to me that social life and the empirical reality surrounding it...unfold mostly at random.” “Disorder reigns” in social life’s “vast empirical stew,” as the famous anthropologist picturesquely put it. He, for his part, has chosen to study only its “scattered small islands of organization.” Moreover, these “islands” refer not to “what people do, but [to] what they believe or say must be done” (Levi-Strauss and Eribon 1991, 102-103).

OVERCOMING ISOLATION

Human beings have found numerous ways to overcome isolation and the self’s problematic uniqueness. These ways constitute a large part of culture. Culture is the human answer to the world’s disjunctions, unconnectedness, and indifference. Some of these ways may well be considered as much biological-instinctive as cultural: for instance, bodily contact. In a hunting-gathering band, huddling, fondling, and caressing occur frequently not only between adults and children but also among adults. Young men, in particular, sleep together in clusters, with arms and legs slung over one another’s bodies as though they are a band of lovers. Bodily contact establishes a feeling of oneness so strong that it can transcend even close kinship ties (Henry 1941, 18, 33; Turnbull 1982, 137).

Communal singing has a similar effect, asserts musicologist Victor Zuckerkandl (1973). In preliterate and folk communities, people gather to sing and so make a reassuring bubble of sound around themselves. There are singers, but no listeners - no outsiders to evaluate the performance and so make the singers feel self-conscious. Because looking tends to create distance, eyes may be closed in communal singing to enhance the sensation of total immersion in sound. This way, individuals are blissfully able to lose their burdensome identities in the larger whole (Turnbull 1990, 56).

If human togetherness were the sole aim, tones without words should suffice. People, however, feel a strong need to be emotionally engaged not only with other human beings but also with the nonhuman world of plants, animals, rock, and wind. For this to occur, says Zuckerkandl (1973, 27-29), words must be used. Words alone, as in ordinary speech, can already capture things for people, making them a part of their world. But the capture is insecure - the things still seem separate, “islands” out there. When words are sung rather than merely spoken, people and things are finally able to resonate emotionally: the separateness is then fully bridged.

All sorts of communal activities have the power to repress the self, especially when these require coordinated movements, as, for example, farmers working in a field, soldiers marching to the music of a military band, or people enacting their designated roles in a ceremony. An awareness of the Other - an indifferent or hostile reality out there further intensifies group solidarity and weakens the feeling of individual separateness. To farmers laboring together, the fields to be plowed and the weeds to be uprooted constitute the Other. To soldiers, the Other is the sharply defined human enemy. But it is always present, hazily or vividly, for any group that is engaged in common activity and shares a way of life. A possible exception is cosmic ritual, which in principle is all-inclusive. But there too, something lies outside: chaos, which the cosmic ritual is designed to forestall or tame.

Human beings are able to build an artifactual world from the material of nature. This world, especially at the microscale of rooms and houses and perhaps of neighborhoods and small towns, can promote a sense of group solidarity. In the living room, family members do different things and think separate thoughts: the baby crawls on the floor, the teenager studies algebra, the mother balances the budget, the father dozes before the television set. Yet they feel very much a close-knit family, and any observer of the scene would conclude the sam.e. The enclosed space of the room, a cheerfully illuminated interior set against the darkness outside, encourages a sense of oneness. Likewise, the pictures on the wall, the coordinated pieces of furniture, all attest to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The classroom provides another example. All the chairs in it are identical, which helps to create the illusion that the students who sit in them are alike - that they all have much the same body shape and weight, much the same sensory equipment, much the same kind of mind and intellectual preparedness, absorbing professorial wisdom in much the same way. What a shock when the professor reads the blue books!

SPEECH AND BONDING

Speech binds. Human beings feel that they live in the same world in large part because they apply the same words to the same things - because they speak alike. If I am not a botanist, why do I still want to know the name of a flower? What additional information do I gain when I am told that I am looking at an African violet - a specimen of the Saintpaulia ionantha? None. Knowing its name reassures me not because I know more about a plant, a feature of nonhuman reality, but because I now share one more term with other people, which gives me the impression that I share one more bit of the world with them. For a people to sustain the belief that they live in a common world, their conversational vocabulary has to be severely limited, as it almost invariably is (Whiting and Whiting 1975, 170-171). In modern society, even when men and women chatter away, they use perhaps no more than a hundred different words in the course of a day. Bonding among members of a group is further strengthened if they develop a distinctive pronunciation, a jargon; and linguists assert that every close-knit human group has its own manner of speech that sets itself off, however subtly, from others.

Speech both binds individuals and tempers their peculiarities so that they can fit into a larger and blander whole; it also binds, as I have noted previously, people with the nonhuman environment. It does so most effortlessly and effectively by means of metaphors, which are a universal feature of language. Apparently, human beings can only know who they are through the use of animal and plant metaphors and similes. “I am a fox; you are a pig; he or she is a prickly cactus.” In the process of learning who they are, people also become aware of their intimate ties to other living things: the two processes are inseparable, melded into one by the character of language (Fernandez 1974, 122-123). As for things in the mineral realm, anatomical metaphors such as foothills and headlands, the spine of a ridge, the mouth of a river, the face of a cliff make them all seem familiar and personal, features of a world impregnated with human values. Indeed, language tricks its users into believing that the features are all in some sense alive. And remember: there was never a time when natural human language did not perform this comforting trick. Language in itself makes the inanimate appear animate. Historically, as Hans Jonas (1966, 11-12) has observed, the problem that confronts human beings is not how life has emerged in a lifeless universe, but rather how a warm body can turn into a corpse. Ordinary speech lacks neutral ways of referring to that which is not alive. The inanimate depends on the prior conception of animate. Words such as lifeless or dead, when applied to rocks and stars, imply a prior state of aliveness.

SPEECH AND SOLITUDE

Through most of human history, speech has helped to maintain a sense of group cohesion. In numerous myths and lores, the kinship of all things - some kind of mutual understanding at the level of feeling and verbal communication - is assumed. Speech nevertheless is not solely a social glue. It is also an instrument of critical reflection and inventiveness. Used in a certain way, speech enables people to penetrate its social character, its power to elevate the fetishes of the group into nature’s norm, and to mask the disjunctions and separateness in the world, as well as its fundamental indifference. Self-critical speech eschews metaphors and other rhetorical devices that so effortlessly rope the nonhuman into the human world. It seeks to become a more austere scientific language that, in the interest of hard truths, sets aside human-bonding needs. Ironically, such a language creates its own bonding among scientists, who by speaking in a way understandable only to themselves are able to forget their status as complex human beings and to assume the simpler role of experts, distinguishable from one another by their scientific viewpoints, which they offer to their colleagues in a warm bubble of mutual appreciation. Life in this specialized community can be fully satisfying unless or until some other dimension of reality rudely intrudes.

In a well-coordinated and well-designed room it can seem as though the armchair and its ottoman, a standing lamp and the adjoining side cabinet are “conversing” with one another, such that a polite person would hesitate to disrupt the exchange by passing between them. When human beings stand side by side talking, is there a similar sense of coordination - of souls in deep and sympathetic exchange that should not be lightly disrupted? I would say yes, but even more often no, at least on social occasions, which means on most occasions. The fact is, people seldom truly speak with or listen to another. It is tempting to say, “Well in the old days, friends and family had genuine conversation. In our time, with so much television watching, we have lost the art.” Tolstoy would have disagreed. In an early literary effort, which was published posthumously, he wrote, “I don’t know how people were in the old days, but conversation there can never be....It is not from any deficiency of intelligence but from egotism that conversation fails. Everyone wants to talk about himself or about what interests him” (Bayley 1978, 37-38). I am reminded of Andre Gide, who reportedly believed that people were not really interested in what he had to say and that hence he had a tendency, even in his prose, to rush the ending. He based this conclusion on the fact that when he was interrupted in the middle of a story, no one ever asked, “And what comes next?” (Green 1985, 63).

Egotism may indeed be the heart of the problem. Egotism, however, is not just the moral defect of some people; it is an inescapable fact by virtue of a person’s uniqueness of body, mind, experiences, and projects. Having an ego makes listening truly to another a superhuman achievement, because it calls for an emptying of sell and how many people can do that? In Simone Martini’s altarpiece, The Annunciation, the Angel of the Lord speaks; Mary listens but discreetly keeps her place in the book she was reading when the Angel arrived. The Angel’s mission is no doubt momentous, but it is not hers: she listens with a hint of reluctance, because she was otherwise engaged. In Anton Chekhov’s play “The Three Sisters,” anguished cries from the heart are deflected by a rebuke to the servant or an asinine comment on the weather. Misunderstanding in a familiar setting - in the family and among friends - is a common theme in modern literature: things are said but are not understood; distress signals are sent out but are lost in indifference. Human beings have not become more egotistical, only more aware of their egotism - of their disinclination to listen, thanks in part to modern works like those of Chekhov and numerous other writers. Such awareness may encourage a person to become a better listener, and so a better person.

If a small vocabulary and the frequent use of cliches promote understanding and communal solidarity, the achievement of verbal-intellectual sophistication can have the opposite effect. The more people know and the more subtle they are at expressing their knowledge, the fewer listeners there will be and the more isolated individuals will feel, not only at large but also among colleagues and coworkers. Let me use an architectural metaphor to show how this can come about in academic life. Graduate students live in sparsely furnished rooms but share a house - the intellectual house of Marx, Gramschi, Foucault, or whoever the favored thinker happens to be. A wonderful sense of community prevails as the students encounter one another in the hallways and speak a common language, with passwords such as capital formation, hegemony, and the theater of power to establish firmly their corporate membership. Time passes. As the students mature intellectually, they move from the shared life of a house to rented apartments scattered in the same neighborhood. The apartments are close enough that friends still feel free to drop in for visits, and when they do the entire living space is filled with talk and laughter, recapturing as in younger days not only the bonhomie but also the tendency to embrace wholeheartedly the currently favored doctrine. Eventually the students become professors themselves. They begin modestly to build their own house of intellect and add to the structure as they prosper. Because each house bears witness to a scholar’s achievement, it can be a source of great personal satisfaction. But the downside is, who will want to visit? And if a colleague or friend does, why should the person spend time in more than one room?

Social scientists assert that a tenement, at which people hang out the washing or sit on the stoop to socialize, can be a warm and communal place. By contrast, a suburb with freestanding houses is cool and unfriendly. I am saying that the same may be true of intellectual life as one moves to larger houses of one’s own design. Both types of move - socioeconomic and intellectual - signify success, and with both the cost to the mover can be an exacerbated feeling of isolation.

FEAR OF LIGHT

Culture may be variously defined. One that promises new insights is culture as a form of escapism unique to human beings. When it rains, what do people do? They escape by going indoors. Shelters are built so that people need not confront nature’s pummeling and unpredictability, which not only can be dangerous but are unwelcome reminders of nature’s indifference. People also erect conceptual shelters - that is, tell stories, conduct ceremonies and rituals - for much the same reason, as well as to soften dissonances in social life and to reduce, for the individual, a sense of aloneness and anxiety. Material shelters can be taken down, but so can conceptual shelters - those reassuring covers composed of words and gestures - by an unusually reflective individual. Understandably, all societies strongly discourage the practice. One possible exception is the modern West. In modern Western society, blowing the cover is not simply an odd happening initiated by an exceptionally bold and gifted individual, but it is fairly common, emerging from a intellectual climate that has, at least ostensibly, the approval of society itself.

A strongly analytical and critical inclination of mind, sustained over time, can lead to cynicism and despair. In the West this has not yet happened to a pronounced degree, and one reason is ironic: the same hard questioning that has corroded traditional cultural covers has enabled Westerners to build a new one the dazzling technological world that has its own great powers to shield, entertain, and distract. Still, in the course of the last two centuries, critical thinking has undoubtedly dented the modern person’s sense of what it means to lead a moral and rewarding life, the true nature of relationships among human beings and between them and nature. May this not be another reason, perhaps even the deepest reason, for the vehemence with which the West is sometimes attacked? Besides its egregious faults of imperialism, racism, and specieism that are generic to civilization, the West is uniquely destructive of cultural covers and escape routes, not only other people’s but its own. I wonder, however, whether the critics, who are themselves nearly all Westerners or Western trained, know that they derive a personal benefit from their indignation? The benefit lies in the forging of a camaraderie, a warm feeling of being in the right in the company of others also in the right, the creation of a strong sense of Us through the postulation of an implacable and powerful Other, which is among humankind’s most time-honored and effective means of repressing the tormenting awareness of personal guilt and anomie, aloneness and vulnerability. In short, the attack hides a deep human fear - one that has always been a part of conscious life - the fear of light in places that best remain in the dark.

CITATIONS

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-----. 1990. Liminality: a synthesis of subjective and objective experience. By means of performance, eds. R. Schechner and W. Appel, 50-81. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

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Zuckerkandl, V. 1973. Man the musician. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

DR. TUAN is the John K. Wright professor of geography and a Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706.

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Publication Information: Article Title: Island Selves: Human Disconnectedness in a World of Interdependence. Contributors: Yi-Fu Tuan - author. Journal Title: The Geographical Review. Volume: 85. Issue: 2. Publication Year: 1995. Page Number: 229+. COPYRIGHT 1995 American Geographical Society; COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group