This week, we celebrate our nation’s birth in a national and individual display of our patriotic attachment to this country. — which includes our self-definition as Americans.
For each of us, personhood is an almost miraculous product of our brain’s plasticity — the brain’s ability to change chemically, structurally, and functionally, based on our life experiences — arising from near countless moments of change in the wiring of our brain.
The incredibly complex remodeling that created “you” is a product, of course, of your very complicated, unique passage in life. You have a repertoire of skills and ability; you have stories and understanding and a history of sensing and acting and thinking in the world that is, in detail, unique only to you and your experiences.
As your brain created its model of your world by recording “what goes with what” at each brief moment of time, your brain — that most complicated and wonderful of “machines” on planet Earth — also associated billions of moments of feeling and action and thought with their source, your Self.
Because we primarily construct our model of the world through our eyes and ears, it’s not surprising that the emergent Self that is located somewhere in the center of your head behind your eyes and between your ears. Through billions of contacts with the surfaces of your hide and sensory organs, you have embodied yourself.
Your sense of ‘us’
These same neurologic processes extend beyond our physical beings to incorporate other contributors to our well-being into our personhoods. Loving parents, siblings, friends — and others in your clans and tribes and nations — literally grow into your personhood by these same self-associating processes. These relationships are supported in mutual identity by all of the tokens and icons and charms and customs that collectively define you and enable a sense of “us.”
Put another way, Mother Nature (or, in another cultural perspective, our Creator) has designed our brains to incorporate all of those who are close to us — and more broadly, other individuals in our clan or tribe or nation — to be a part of each of us.
Humans are highly social creatures. When we rise up and risk our lives to defend our friends, family, or cultural “in-groups,” we are literally fighting to defend ourselves — because those other individuals have grown into our very being. In defending them, we are literally defending a part of ourselves.
From one human perspective, this attachment to family and clan and tribe and nation is obviously key for our survival. We are an individually vulnerable but collectively powerful species, and attachment and mutual support are a key to our personal and collective successes in life.
From another perspective, there is also a dark side to this “gift of nature.”
We draw lines in substantially arbitrary locations across the surface of planet Earth, or we may define our self as belonging to a group in a political or social or religious context, or sect. Our tribalism can support a generally strong level of support and succor for fellow humans on our side of that line, while we regard those just across the line as undeserving of our support. If they offend us, they may become targets of our capacity for cruelty.
Our allegiances can be both wonderful and harmful.