drmstream[writing]

Eru­dite and thickly-written essay in The Chron­i­cle Of Higher Edu­ca­tion by David Barash speak­ing to the need of “a gen­eral the­ory of individuality.”

It’s back to the the­ory of self for us.

In part, the resis­tance encoun­tered by human socio­bi­ol­ogy, Dar­win­ian psy­chol­ogy, evo­lu­tion­ary psychology—call it what you will—may reflect that none of the “ulti­mate” inter­pre­ta­tions thus far offered account for the enor­mous amount of (per­ceived or actual) indi­vid­ual vari­a­tion that human beings iden­tify among them­selves. Per­haps there is some­thing about the human psy­che that believes a the­ory of indi­vid­u­al­ity will do insuf­fi­cient jus­tice to our own deeply cher­ished individuality

Here’s the thing: there’s a rel­a­tively stan­dard vari­a­tion to human behav­ior because the inputs are within a fairly pre­dictable range. Some­thing does that — cul­ture, nature, nuture — and cre­ates the pre­dictabil­ity that gen­er­ates a famil­iar response among groups of people.

But every per­son is alone with the voices in their head. Their per­cep­tion is unique and new, in each instance, a cre­ative act of see­ing and inter­pret­ing. That alone­ness makes us indi­vid­ual, discrete.

One fan­ci­ful the­ory about the nean­der­tals was that they com­mu­ni­cated through a kind of group mind meld that ren­dered lan­guage unnecessary.

We don’t have the sanc­tu­ary of a group mind meld. Doesn’t that give us all we need to under­stand what is means to be an individual?