"Making Sense of God 6c" (Tim Keller)

TITLE: Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical
AUTHOR: Tim Keller
PUBLISHER: New York, NY: Viking Books, 2016, (330 pages).

Who am I? Who are you? Often, the answer depends on our upbringing, our links to certain institutions, or our roles and titles. In non-Western cultures, people are identified through their connections with their communities. In Western cultures, this is reversed via "expressed individualism." While it may be overly simplistic, this offers us a glimpse into the differences in mindset that contrasts "self-sacrifice" from "self-assertion"; Keller even points out the hit movie Frozen's song that affirms the latter in Western culture. With secularism, the image of the modern man has become incoherent, illusory, crushing, and fracturing.

Question 6c: "The Problem with the Self: Question of Identity"
On Crushing:
The problem with the modern self is:

"Ironically, the apparent freedom of secular identity brings crushing burdens with it. In former times, when our self-regard was more rooted in social roles, there was much less value placed on competitive achievement. Rising from rags to riches was nice but rare and optional. It was quite sufficient to be a good father or mother, son or daughter, and to be conscientious and diligent in all your work and duties. Today, as Alain de Botton has written, we believe in the meritocracy, that anyone who is of humble means is so only because of a lack of ambition and savvy. It is an embarrassment now to be merely faithful and not successful. This is a new weight on the soul, put there by modernity. Success or failure is now seen as the individual's responsibility alone. Our culture tells us that we have the power to create ourselves, and that puts the emphasis on independence and self-reliance. But it also means that society adulates winners and despises losers, showing contempt for weakness.

All this produces a pressure and anxiety beyond what our ancestors knew. We have to decide our look and style, our stance and ethos. We then have to promote ourselves and be accepted in the new space - professional, social, aesthetic - in which we have chosen to create our selves. As a result, 'new modes of conformity arise' as people turn themselves into 'brands' through the consumer goods they buy.
....

The self-made identity, based on our own performance and achievement in ways that older identities were not, makes our self-worth far more fragile in the face of failure and difficulty.

....

In the New York Times, Benjamin Nugent writes about the struggles he had when he was a full-time novelist. He says:

"When good writing was my only goal in life, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth. For this reason, I wasn't able to read my own writing well. I couldn't tell whether something I had just written was good or bad, because I needed it to be good in order to feel sane. I lost the ability to cheerfully interrogate how much I liked what I had written, to see what was actually on the page rather than what I wanted to see or what I feared to see."

When his identity was based on being a good writer, it made him a worse writer. He announces at the end of the article that he doesn't base his self on writing anymore because he 'fell in love, an overpowering diversion.' But is the love of someone else a better basis for an identity?

....

If we base our identity on love we come to the same cul-de-sac that we saw with the novelist who got his identity from work. Just as he could not beat poor work, so we will not be able to handle the problems in our love relationships. The writer had to believe he is a great writer in order to be sane. We will have to believe our love relationship is okay - if it goes off the rails, we lose our sanity. Why? If our identity is wrapped up in something and we lose it, we lose our very sense of self. If you are getting your identity from the love of a person - you won't be able to give them criticism because their anger will devastate you. Nor will you be able to bear their personal sorrows and difficulties. If they have a problem and start to get self-absorbed and are not giving you the affirmation you want, you won't be able to take it. It will become a destructive relationship. The Western understanding of identity formation is a crushing burden, both for individuals and society as a whole." (128-130)


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