You are not your own (part 1)
Book Review (O. Alan Noble)
I've now read more than a few books that attempt to truck in theological anthropology or to identify the zeitgeist of our age. Alan Noble does a better job than most, and I think this book is well worth a read on several levels. So I’ve got a lot to say about it, both summarising and digesting, and I've broken my review into two parts. I'll post these today and tomorrow.
Alan Noble, You are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World (IVP 2021).
Part 1
The title draws upon the first question and answer from the Heidelberg Catechism, "That I am not my own..." and this forms a central motif for the book as a whole. It thus falls into two parts: diagnosis and treatment. The first four chapters are really diagnosis: he begins with the way in which society, modern contemporary society, is essentially engaged in a project of inhumanity. We are created to be humans but live in a society that frustrates, even opposes this. At the heart of this :
We’ve created a society based on the assumption that we are our own and belong to ourselves. But if this anthropology is fundamentally wrong, then we should expect people to suffer from their malformed habitat. (p18)
The result of this is that our society shapes us under this fundamental expectation - the burden of belonging to ourselves becomes the burden of Responsibility of Self-Belonging (Noble's term). It is an existentialist project, for each of us must make our own meaning, form our own identity, and then live out a self-justification of that identity. And because we self-create, we likewise desire external affirmation of the validity of our identity. Our identity building project must have expression, and that expression must in turn be affirmed by others.
Noble also skilfully explores "the quantification of values". We attempt to find measurable elements of universal welfare, and then quantify them, and base our morality upon this because it feels objective.
Chapter 2
goes on to explore the various ways in which society enables, helps, and in fact demands, that we pursue a program of Self-Belonging. Here Noble explores the stories we tell each other and ourselves, the shape of ethical consumerism and compassion, identity construction in the age of social media, identity and community commodification as expressions of meaning. He also gives a deep dive in understanding how Ellul's concept of technique helps make sense of the framework and driving forces of our society towards abstracted 'efficiency'.
“Technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency . . . in every field of human activity.” (p51 quoting Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (1964), xxv.)
Further, he talks through the ways our society make 'belonging' possible, but contingent. Our relationships, friendships, families, communities, are re-ordered to make them optional, contingent, extensions of our identity and self-making.
Chapter 3
turns to the ways in which, having created these conditions, society also miserably fails us in fulfilling them (because they cannot, in fact, be fulfilled). Noble opens the chapter with what I consider to be a very acute insight into pornography. It holds out the promise of humanisation, intimacy, meaning, and offers infinite disposable choice, in which you are the center of meaning and the universe, but this is all a mode of consumption and technique, it's always hollow, never real, and so it is an endless emptying, resulting in unending inadequacy and addiction.
What's so powerful about this treatment is that it doesn't merely offer a surface discussion of lust and illicit fulfilment, but an analysis that treats pornography as an exemplar for the way in which our society continually and infinitely offers up "technique", "efficiency", and product to satisfy our desires for meaning-making and personal expression, and these always fail.
The dynamic of choice, consumption, power, and identity in pornography mirrors our broader cultural practices. (p68)
This chapter also explores the constant pressure of self-Responsibility, and the way this manifests in competition.
Because we have taught our children that we live in a meritocracy where the winners are responsible for their success and the losers are responsible for their failure, all of life becomes part of the game. (p74)
I found this section cut very deep into my own experience. I was a very successful student, in many ways, certainly in terms of grades, quality work, fulfilling and creating expectations among my professors. I never won any prizes or anything though, I never had an elite education in contemporary circles. And coming to the end of the academic pipeline and realising that it wasn't a meritocracy at all, that there were no academic jobs, that I didn't have a place to be welcomed into as a scholar, was crushing. I still struggle with the sense that ultimately I wasn't and am not good enough, and my current precarious employment is a personal failure.
Another insightful part of this chapter is where Noble discusses the "posture of Affirmation" and "Resignation". Affirmation is when we embrace the project of Self-Belonging, and embark on an endless project of self-improvement, success via technique, and total work. It is a way doomed to failure, especially via burnout. Resignation is the flipside. It is still an embrace of Self-Belonging, but a rejection of the normative ways of doing so - if I can't succeed in the putative world of societal victory, I can still carve out a meaningful life by rejecting all such things and making my own meaning: if you can't win the game, you change the game to one you can win.
Chapter 4
looks at the ways we self-medicate.
As society fails to fulfill its promise, as it fails to provide techniques adequate enough for us to meet our Responsibility of Self-Belonging, we require new techniques to cope with the stress, anxiety, exhaustion, and inadequacy. (p94)
Whether we are Affirming or Resigned, the Self-Belonging is "experienced as perpetual inadequacy", and just as society provides infinite futile ways to express our individualism, it also (necessarily) provides infinite inadequate ways to help us cope with our failure to do so. That may indeed involve medications, self-administered or not; it may involve the endless distractions that fuel our modern society, and indeed the very way in which our economy functions on distraction;
A few things again particularly struck home for me.
When you live in close community and have obligations to others that transcend your personal preferences or emotions, eventually you have to be vulnerable and make them aware of hardships you’re facing. p102
In the modern world, public vulnerability is always a choice, and therefore it takes on an overwhelmingly performative quality. p102
The result is that our moments of vulnerability are often carefully cultivated and prepared for public consumption to maximize attention and develop our image. p102
I regularly feel like this. I long for closer community, and feel inadequate precisely because I don't have it. I have watched important friendships fade and/or fail. And I know that being vulnerable on any social media, including this substack, cannot be other than performative.
Given how easy it is to avoid vulnerability in the contemporary world, we can’t assume that just because people around us haven’t shared their trauma and suffering, they are okay. You are better off assuming that everyone you meet is bearing some unspoken burden. (p103)
My own experience, and the meagre insights I have into the lives of others, tells me this rings true far more than any of us like to admit. I now assume that most people I meet are struggling with unspoken burdens. Maybe, like me, they are barely holding it together. Noble shares his own experience of finding out only years after the fact that a close friend and co-worker had gone through a serious breakdown, at the same time that he himself was suffering considerably. How many of us are in acute or chronic stress, and simply cannot deal. We instead learn to cope. We cope for as long as we can, perpetually crushed by the weight of our own existence (it is fitting that the chapter image is repeatedly Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill). We medicate because Self-Belonging is a rock that will never stay at the top of the hill.
Temporary Conclusion:
Noble provides a penetrating diagnosis of our modern condition, drawing both upon the named sources (Ellul, for example) and less obvious ones (Charles Taylor, who is cited, but who also stands behind a large number of these kinds of analyses of our zeitgeist). What Noble does exceedingly well is provide a framework in which we can hear our own pathologies, and hang them on that frame – our effort to belong to ourselves. This is not a reductionistic assessment of our contemporary anthropology, but a lens through which we can make sense of our own desperate attempts to come to terms with life in our present moment. Not only did I find myself nodding and highlighting along in agreement, but feeling the ache of seeing my own predicaments laid bare and exposed. I have regularly, daily, felt the strain of trying to make my own meaning in life.
Tomorrow: part 2, a Christian anthropology.