Donald Clegg: Power of self-concepts reaches near and far

I‘d like to talk about a couple of barriers of idea and belief that serve to make sense of the world, yet severely stunt our view.

They’re rather simple yet powerful tools of organization by which we categorize and understand the world around us. The concepts we have, placed in certain contexts, help to anchor us and make sense of the real world out there, whatever that is.

Concepts, our mental pictures, stand for that “buzzing, blooming confusion” of the real world, as William James put it.

If I say the word “chair,” several images no doubt come to your mind, perhaps ranging from the dining room to your favorite Lazy Boy. So, too, for “dog,” “tree,” etc.

These images give us comfort, as we “know” what a chair is, and dogs and trees are also a given, part of the understandable tapestry of our existence.

Concepts help us to order the world, or so we think.

Context is equally important, as the concept I have of something is dependent upon place and time: Context helps me to know which concept to use.

Concept is “what.” Context is “where.”

My image of a certain chair, sitting in an early apartment I had here in Spokane, is quite different from my current picture, even though it’s the same chair. But its current context, here in my studio a few feet away, is quite different than the red shag rug it sat on more than a quarter century ago.

We arrange both people and things contextually. Think of a person you “know” as a bank teller, a grocery store checker, and number of places that various people “belong.”

Then, you’re at a movie theater and see the same person, knowing that you know that guy, yet you don’t know why. Once, “Ah, the Rosauers on 14th and Monroe,” comes to mind; order is restored.

These tools, of course, are also powerful barriers to further thought, examination, inquiry, understanding, heightened awareness – really everything.

Once my concept is fixed, it is closed. Once I lock something into context, thinking that I know it, that placement limits my view.

So, how we arrange our furniture of concept and context powerfully delimits the space between our ears, where much of our living happens. Is it an expansive room, or narrow, rigid, stingy in its sparseness? Marked more by what it excludes than includes?

Two recent columns in this space have addressed quite different arrangements of furniture, one conceptualizing humans as innately good, the other, fallen. Given each concept, the appropriate context shifts accordingly.

One has it that we’re blind, unable to even walk around our living quarters without assistance, and further, that if we don’t ask for that assistance – specific assistance, from a particular source – we’re done for.

That’s no world in which I want to live. Conceptually speaking, it’s too narrow a vision of whom and what we can be, and my mental pictures are of an immense expanse of possible ways to live on this earth.

I believe those at the helm of our current administration are impoverished by a mean-spirited concept of whom and what we are: we, being the good citizens of this country who disagree, vehemently, with the path of unnecessary war and death, of the gutting of the treasury, of the stealing of our fundamental freedoms.

We, being the people of Iraq, victimized by a national policy bent on creating a Pax Americana, a stronghold from which to launch attacks on still other countries, unfortunate enough to have land and people on top of our oil.

Alan Greenspan himself has just told us:

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.”

And because these people, these “others,” are seen as fallen, walking blind in their lack of “right” belief, it’s of small import whether we kill them, in order to build higher the walls constricting our own view of reality.

How we see ourselves makes a huge difference in how we treat not only those poor souls of “wrong” belief in the Middle East, but in our own homes, both conceptual and real.

If the image of home that gives one the most comfort and safety is of locked doors, closed to all who lack the Jesus key, then that’s a small, small abode and a smaller still imagining.

The house of humanity holds all of us.