Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Family v. Community: Two overlapping yet concentric circles of intersubjective relation

Family is for giving you faith in yourself, while community is for giving you faith in everyone else.  Obviously this is a simplification, but it gets at a fundamental difference in identification between family and external community. Just as an individual can feel distinct and excluded from generalizations about the rest of the world (everyone else is irrational or selfish in some sense, but I am different) so too can family be easily separated conceptually from the rest of the greater community of which it is a part.

People are stupid and obedient, but I know what's going on, and my family--they're smart too. This is also why praise means different things coming from family and outsiders. The immediate family, in the western societal context, is usually perceived in this way as some sort of extension of the self. The family members have established roles and spaces they occupy in and around your life that you have become accustomed to. Outsiders don't usually have these clearly defined parts to play, especially when first beginning interaction. This can make it both more volatile and meaningful in a way. You are accustomed to praise from the individuals fulfilling parental roles in your life and sometimes from the other familial satellites orbiting your personal existence, but this praise never means as much as praise coming from people outside of this familial space. 

Your personal conception of these others  from outside your family is thus much more flexible. This certain amount of distance that makes interaction with them different than interaction with your family -- and even with your close friends -- makes them represent something much different. They can come to fill a border space between the close and familiar place of your family and the distant and immaterial place of the numerous other people of the world.

Your family helps to give you your conception of yourself, but is limited in giving you real confidence and self-faith beyond a certain point. It is even more limited in giving you other-faith -- faith in those people you don't know.

Trust or lack thereof appears very differently with varying degrees of familiarity. From trusting your kin to keep your best interests in mind to trusting your neighbor or friendly acquaintance to respect your wishes to trusting the "unwashed masses" to make rational decisions.

Trust comes out of identification--empathy--with these groups or subsections thereof. Just as you may come to see your immediate family as an extension of yourself, (which is a dynamic that was much more prevalent before the rabid individualism of the modern era) you trust others beyond that when you identify with them.

If you don't have any people around you that you can really respect, how likely are you to respect anything else in the world?  Your family and the community that surrounds you as a child serve as the only representation of the entire world that you have as a child.  However they behave, however they act and react with you, is the only way you can imagine the rest of the world acting and reacting. Without any other means of experiencing the rest of the individuals in the world, you have no reason to expect any different of them. 

If the best people you know aren't really worthy of respect, or if they never show respect toward you,
 you'll expect the same from the rest of the world.

Another way to look at this extension of identification and other-faith (I've presented a couple of randomly different ones already) is the way you perceive people to be like or unlike you. Your family is close to you, not just in that your relative social roles are procedures for interaction are clearly defined yet flexible, but in that they often look and talk a lot like you. If your family and your surrounding community are too uniform, they won't be seen as reliably representative of many other unfamiliar communities.

If you never see anyone substantially different than you who you can also say is a "good person," you might not have much hope for others. (In fact, it might even alter your demographic conceptions so far as to give you a fair share of bigotry.)

 I've contradicted myself a fair amount and drifted between a few different contextual vocabularies and perspectives, but hopefully thoughts are clear.

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