The “Personality Fallacy” describes a kind of user illusion that’s at the root of a lot of Western thought. Simply put, the assumption that people and things are primarily personal drives a whole lot of western discourse in particular directions that are neither necessary nor foreordained. Let’s examine this notion more closely from a couple of different – though related – perspectives.
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1- Sensory Input and a Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow
We’re all familiar with rainbows. I saw one over at the reservoir during my walk on the dam this morning. And of course, none but the most recalcitrant Luddite can fail to recognize that ROYGBIV-in-the-sky is an optical illusion fostered by droplets of water vapor acting as tiny prisms to separate visible light into its component colors. Cool, eh?
We’re also familiar with the popular notion of a leprechaun guarding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. And those with a more biblical bent may remember G*d’s rainbow-based post-flood promise to Noah to never again destroy the world with water. What does all this storytelling signify other than our native human hopefulness about a future that’s better than the present? First and foremost it’s an admission that our world is a mixed bag which makes predicting the future highly uncertain. That leprechaun is a trickster who’s not handing out free gold bars without a fight. And as for passengers on the Ark, there’s this stark admonition: “No more flood. It’s the fire next time.” Yikes!
The common thread to these fables – aside from their being cautionary tales – is that they rest on a shared assumption that the agency beyond the illusion is primarily personal. A leprechaun is not just a disembodied idea, he’s a mean bearded Irishman with a pipe and a jaunty green hat. And Noah’s patron-of-the-Ark is a promise-keeper who not only crafts covenants, but also guides us throughout the course of our tricky trek through the troubled waters of history. There’s more to say on this score in later sections, so stay tuned.
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2 – Man’s Best Friend vs Exploitation of a Co-Evolutionary Niche
Who’s a good boy? Take one look at the smiling canine mug above and know for sure that dogs have got us well and truly conned. How their lupine forebearers went from vicious-packs-in-the-forest to furry-friends-at-our-fireside is an improbable tale of co-evolution that you’d be hard-pressed to believe if you didn’t already know it was true. Like wild mustangs and, to a lesser extent, Siamese kittens, these once untamed species have traded their independence for the good life as our protectors, our modes of transportation, and our bosom buddies. They know on which side their bread is buttered and also that their continued proliferation depends on their relationship with us.
In return, we project our notions of human personhood onto them. We give them names. We allow them inside our homes and barns. In some cases (like the ancient Egyptians with their beloved cats) we revere and even worship them. And, of course, we bury them beside our nearest and dearest with full family honors. It’s a win-win evolutionary bargain made possible by our desire to join ourselves with other species in the great struggle to adapt and survive.
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3 – Santa Claus, C.S. Lewis, and The London Blitz
When I was very young, I believed in Santa with all my heart. Later on, I loved reading C.S. Lewis as much for the science fantasy as for the evangelical theology. What became apparent to me only much later in life was that he wrote “Mere Christianity,” actually a series of radio broadcasts, as a WW2 public service to the British government during the height of the blitz. It was intended to bolster sagging spirits of Londoners under nightly air attack.
Near the end of a career spent teaching at Oxford and Cambridge – and after a late-in-life marriage, coupled with losing his Beloved to cancer shortly thereafter – Lewis wrote “A Grief Observed.” In it, he said his earlier sure-fire Christian pronouncements on the nature of spirituality and theology were all still valid, but that his views had become tempered with the wisdom of age. Yes, maybe G*d was still a Personal Being, and the process of finding Him analogous to a schoolboy “doing sums.” But all that mathematical jazz mattered less to him once Nazi bombs stopped falling on Londoners’ heads, and once his beloved Joy was dead and buried in an Oxfordshire churchyard.
Maybe when we “grow up” we start seeing “Santa” as less of a literal red-clad North Pole dweller named “St. Nick,” and more akin to the human spirit of gift-giving. Reindeer don’t actually have to fly in order for packages to arrive under trees on Christmas morning. Given humanity’s fickle nature, it’s an open question as to which of the ways they get there is ultimately the more miraculous. After all, I still love Lewis as much as ever, even after his own grief observed – and maybe even more so than before.
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4 – Legal Responsibility, Personal Agency, and Moral Blame
Western jurisprudence is founded on notions of personal agency and moral responsibility. Our modern system of trial before a jury of one’s peers pre-supposes the notion of a “Reasonable Man” as juror. And if a defendant is found “Not Guilty by Reason of insanity,” (s)he is presumed to be outside the normal bounds of personhood which would otherwise subject them to the strictures of legal liability. Thus, the criminally insane are deemed, in a sense, no-longer-persons. While this preserves our categorical understanding of people within the Personality Fallacy, it casts those so-defined into an outer darkness far beyond civil rule-keeping. Is it worth it? Maybe so. Or maybe not.
It’s telling that we draw our legal lines in such a fashion. Maybe it’s necessary to keep our courtrooms functional, but that has relatively little to do with what really defines us each as human, either genetically or biologically. A verdict of “Insane” does get one off the hook legally, but at what cost? Those so labelled are presumably irredeemable, and are sentenced to a fate of being Not-A-Person. In some ways, that may end up being far worse than incarceration.
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5 – Determinism, Free Will, and the Great Man Theory
Two schools of thought rule the recording of history. One is the “Great Man Theory” which posits that exceptional individuals drive decisive historical moments in one direction or another. Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napolean Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln: Each of these shaped their historical moment by force of will and personality. An alternative to this view is one that says historical moments become “ripe” in some ephemeral way, and if one particular “Great Man” doesn’t happen along to pluck it at the proper time, then another will.
At bottom, these competing views about history reflect differing underlying notions about Free Will vs. Determinism. On the one hand, the Proletariat inevitably rises. On the other hand, thank goodness for Vladimir Lenin and Chairman Mao – right, Comrade? Dig a little deeper and it’s not surprising we find the Personality Fallacy leaving its indelible imprint on various competing historical documents. Which way to see it is correct? Aye, there’s the rub.
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6 – Psychoanalysis, Mythology, and the Collective Unconscious
Sigmund Freud developed his theory of psychoanalysis based on categories contained within classical mythology. Thus, bedrock Freudian terms like “Oedipal,” “Erotic,” and “Narcissism” have passed into popular parlance from the original Greek. Later, Jung added his own idea of the “Collective Unconscious” into the psychoanalytic stew.
What all these terms share in common, from ancient mythic stories to the emergence of modern social science in the 19th-century, is a reliance on our old friend, Personhood, which supports our psychological categories. Those Greek characters – real or imagined persons all – help us to see ourselves, in sum or in part, in a particularly personal way. And the Jungian collective extends the boundaries of psychological discourse without fundamentally altering the main underlying assumption: It’s all personal – first, last, and always – from Oedipus on down.
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7 – Universe, Multiverse, or a Cosmic Shrug?
With the recent advent of space telescopes and the collection of data about the expanding edges of our 18.3-billion-year-old universe, we now see the outer limits of time and matter. Surely if there were anything that might get us beyond our fixation on personality as explanatory metaphor, it would be this.
And yet there’s this nagging feeling, this insistence even, that humanity isn’t just a “one-off” or even a “one-among-many,” but is somehow uniquely special. Which translates individually into the notion that each of us is, likewise, not an anomalous end point of one particular dead-end path of bio-evolution, but is rather an integral part of something bigger, something more lasting, than simply congealed star dust. We are Persons, goddammit, not mere anomalous blips in a cosmic continuum that, whether it ends in cataclysmic firestorm or goes on expanding forever to fade in a whimper of oblivion, doesn’t really give a hoot one way or the other about little old you or little old me.
Where’s the personal in all THAT, huh? Nowhere, that’s where. Can I get an “Amen,” brothers and sisters? How about just a shrug, so I know you’re still with me? C’mon folks, we’re almost all the way home here.
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8 – Alternative Traditions: Taoism, Buddhism, Other Non-Theisms
The world’s a rich tapestry, and Western mindsets aren’t all we have to choose from. Other traditions, many of them originating in the Far East, present non-Theistic alternatives to the parochial “G*d-is-a-Person-and-I-Matter-Only-Because-I’m-One-of-His-Chosen.” For instance, just to name a few, Taoism and Buddhism both come from a central core that celebrates the negation rather than the coronation of Self.
Can all those billions of non-Western souls down the millennia be utterly mistaken, all completely off base? I think not. Or at a minimum, they each deserve our serious consideration. I’m certainly no expert, at least not beyond the narrow bounds of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. So, I guess we’ll have to file this one under “to be continued” and move on. But stay tuned, there’s more to come.
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The Personality Fallacy – Where do we go from here?
Far be it from me to propose any new “The Way, The Truth, The Life” as a cheap way out of this Personhood conundrum. The notion of “person” is certainly both compelling and enduring as a concept. Having stood the test of time, it’s at least as vital to our species’ survival so far as DNA replication and mutation has proven to be for diversity and adaptation of biological life on this planet.
I guess if I you held a gun to my head and made me utter a pronouncement, it would go something like this: No one explanatory metaphor, however useful, is ever the single solitary be-all and end-all. It’s never the only game in town. And if you have any doubts about that last bit, just ask the pre-KT-event dinosaurs about their rosy prospects going forward – you know, post asteroid impact. Oh, no, wait… my bad. We’re not gonna hear much outta them on that score, are we? Yeah, it always pays to stay humble. And that’s every bit as true for Triceratops as it is for you and me. Can I get an “Amen,” brothers and sisters?
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Which of 1-8 above would you like to see explored in greater depth?
This will help me to choose where to focus my attention in future.
Anything I’ve said you particularly agree or disagree with?
Anything that merits further clarification?
Go on, you can let it out, I won’t bite.
Not like I’m a T-rex, after all.
Personally yours,
Triceratops.d