Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

The Eskimo, the Engineer, and Dr Rainwater
by Reverend John Alexie Crane

It used to be that women who were divorced were stigmatized. Anyone, even today, who has served a term in prison bears the curse, and as a result may have a great deal of difficulty finding an employer who will hire him. Anyone who is stigmatized becomes, as it were, untouchable. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter gives a classic example of stigmatization. A young woman in colonial America gives birth to an illegitimate child, and is then obliged by righteous people to wear, for the rest of her life, a large red letter “A” on her breast. “A” for adultery.

The stigmatization of an individual may be somewhat formally celebrated in what is known in social science as a degradation ceremony. In years past, a soldier who had proved cowardly in battle would be compelled to stand before the assembled members of his unit, and have the insignia of his rank ripped from his clothing by a superior officer. This is a wonderfully effective way of making an individual feel desperately inadequate, inferior, worthless.

The process of arresting, booking and locking up a suspected criminal is also a degradation ceremony. You will have no doubt seen parts of it many times on TV. Suspects are overpowered by the arresting officers, compelled to lean against a wall precariously, their bodies searched for concealed weapons; then they are handcuffed brusquely, and hustled along to the booking. Throughout the process the suspects are handled as objects rather than persons. They are stripped and searched, given a depersonalizing uniform to wear, then locked in a cage.

The result is it's hard to maintain any sense of. personal dignity, to avoid feeling a sense of guilt and inferiority when you are subjectcd to such a degradation ceremony. Whether you are actually guilty or not. The mighty force of social disapproval comes to be heavily focused upon you. A few suspects will resist the feelings of degradation by responding with hate, hostility and anger, but most are over-powered by the process.

However, it's not inevitable. In order to be degraded by such a ceremony, in order for it to make you feel inwardly evil and inferior, you have to give your consent; and a free individual may withhold consent.

Henry David Thoreau, back in nineteenth century America, gives moving testimony to this fact. In his brilliant essay on "The Duty of Civil Disobedience," Thoreau said: "I have paid no poll tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account...and as I stood considering the walls of stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and bones, to be locked up .....

“I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was ..... I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance .....

“I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it ...... The State ..... is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest."

There was a free human being. One who refused to allow himself to feel degraded. Even though the whole machinery of the State was bearing down upon him, he would not give his consent.

II.
II While I was on sabbatical, I studied (among a great many other things) a brilliant article on the social psychology of the lower class, written by a Dr. Lee Rainwater, and found that one short sentence in it especially stood out for me. It has lived on in my mind ever since.

It reflects an insight into human nature that Jesus evidently understood as he framed his ethics, an insight that is caught up also in the origins of democracy, that has come to be explicitly understood in contemporary psychology; and is incorporated in the statement of UU Principles adopted in 1985.

Rainwater managed to express it with a very simple elegance. "Everyone needs to be somebody." All of us have this need, and so central is it in human existence that it is not too much to say that the bulk of our energy and attention in the course of our lives is given over to attempts to satisfy this need to be somebody.

We all of us need to know that we are of some importance in the scheme of things, that we matter to others, that we are cared about, loved, liked, looked up to, accepted, respected, regarded as worthy.

Everyone needs to be somebody, in some way. We need to be able to feel esteem, affection, for ourselves. Almost all human behavior and all institutions are patterns in which self-esteem is gained., lost, or threatened.

When our esteem for ourselves is threatened, we experience anxiety. Anxiety is painful. We do what we can to avoid it. We tend, as a result, to govern our behavior in such a way as to avoid the threats. We typically behave and think about ourselves in ways that will help us to maintain our sense of personal worth, help us to avoid painful anxiety.

We begin doing this when we are very small children, not yet fully conscious. We very early (most of us) fall into the habit of behaving as society expects us to behave, so that we can win the approval of others, so that we can avoid the anxiety that comes with disapproval.

The result is that almost all human beings, in every society, are prisoners of this pattern. They are not deliberately aware of it as a determining factor in their behavior. They continue to respond automatically in order to avoid the anxiety that comes with threats to self-esteem, do this in almost the same way that a moth moves instinctively toward a candle flame.

When we are imprisoned in this social pattern, as most people are, then we are not free, and it can easily become destructive and self-destructive.

Success in a career is a way of becoming somebody in our society. A career is, in effect, a mode of gaining and holding a sense of being somebody; and any threats to success in a career are experienced as anxiety. Anxiety is painful. We try hard to avoid it.

The result is that people may become so driven in their careers that they may altogether neglect their own mental and physical health, their private life, may neglect the needs of love, of sexuality, of friendship, in favor of the demands of a career.

This is not an unusual outcome in our society because, though we do not say this explicitly, it appears to me an empirical fact that we value achievement, success, and productivity more than we value personal well-being.

We need to be somebody, need to be able to esteem ourselves. The anxiety that is generated by threats to self-esteem presses us insistently, often below the level of consciousness, giving form to our actions, shaping our feelings about ourselves and about life.

It is important that we become deliberately conscious of the impact of this pattern upon us if we are to be free. We must be able to make creative choices in harmony with our own nature.

We can do this, for the fact is we do not have to give our consent to the patterns of judgment that others hold over us. No one can make us feel inferior unless we allow them to do so.

III.
Each society has a set of standards of its own for measuring who is somebody and who is not. Among the Eskimos a man is measured by his prowess at hunting, women by their ability to support a hunter effectively. In some other primitive societies a man's worth is measured by the number of his peoples' enemies he has killed in battle. In still others, people are measured by the number of head of cattle they own.

Among us, people are regarded as somebody if they are "successful," by which we mean if they have gained status, gained recognition, come to possess wealth or fame or both, if they do work that is regarded as significant by our people.

We, in turn, having absorbed this standard as we grew up, have internalized it, made it part of ourselves, come to see it as an inevitable way of viewing the world and of measuring ourselves. Our feelingd being somebody tend to rise and fall in relation to how well we perform in relation to this prevailing standard.

However, there are alternatives. We do not actually have to measure ourselves by the standard that has been thrust upon us. It isn't easy to set it aside, but it can be done. It requires a good deal of understanding, of awareness, of strength and courage; but, we can, if we choose, determine our own standards.

It may be that our unique nature is such that we do not fit well into the patterns laid down by our society. It may be that we do not best fulfill ourselves by striving (and striving) to meet those standards. In any society most individuals accept the prevailing standards without question, but in the present time, more and more of our .people are turning away from the long established standard.

Many more, it seems clear, are being driven into anguish and a nxiety by' a continual striving to be somebody, as our society defines it. We can choose alternatives if we are aware, if we are in touch with our own inner being, our own nature and needs'. We can measure ourselves by our own standards, apart from those instilled in us by society.

For example, one very real and fundamental need that each human being experiences is to be involved with other people. We need to be close to others who may come to see us as somebody, someone who matters, is important.

It turns out that we are so structured that being somebody in this way is far more important to our well-being, is far more lasting in its rewards, than being somebody in terms of society's standards of success.

To look into the face of someone close to you each day and see in the lines of that face warmth, affection, approval, love, caring, generates far more real, lasting self-esteem than gaining a promotion to vice-president or having an article published in a learned journal or having an audience applaud you.

IV.
Sometimes people misunderstand us. It's inevitable. Even though our intentions may be constructive, though we may have no evil intent at all, we will from time to time find other people misinterpreting our words or acts, taking offense. Then we find ourselves an object of hostility and abuse.

All of us encounter this kind of thing now and again, no matter how well-intentioned we are: bus drivers get it, receptionists, sales people, politicians, waitresses, repairmen, mothers, children, husbands, wives, teachers, ministers, policemen. In their roles, such people are more than once met with misunderstanding and hostility.

When we do encounter this kind of thing we are very likely to panic. It's a threat to our self-esteem, you see, which we experience with anxiety. We then often tend to behave in ways that only make the matter worse. We may, for example, blaze into anger and hostility in return.

The individual who can stay calm and quiet, unruffled, in the presence of this sort of thing, has an enormous asset. She remains open, attentive and aware, her consciousness of what is going on uncluttered by wild surges of emotion. She is in command of herself.

Think what a force for good such a person may become,. Think what a friend she can be to herself as well as others. She need not give her consent when someone tries to impress her with her inferiority. She has the ability to love not only her enemies but even herself, can respond to both in life enhancing ways.

To look at it another way, in this existence with which we wrestle each day, the most lasting kind of happiness does not depend on what we achieve, does not depend on things external to us, so much as it does on our own inwardness, the state of our own mind and emotions, what we contain within us, our character, our contents.

If we cannot order ourselves inwardly, cannot choose values and responses and judgments that are creative, cannot feel at home with our own image of ourselves, then no matter how great our achievements are, no matter how high our status nor how wide the recognition we gain, we will not be at peace.

V.
To conclude: I have been searching out here the implications of a passage from the philosopher Schopenhauer: “What people are in themselves, what accompanies them when they are alone, what no one can give them or take away, is clearly more essential to them than anything they have in the way of possessions, or even what they may be in the eyes of the world.”

Dr Alexie Crane
2880 Exeter Place
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
(805) 682-3476

Lex1304@aol.com

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