Questioning Self-Definition
By George “Chip” Hammond
In 2015 the national news media drew our attention to a controversy surrounding Rachel Dolezal, professor of African studies at Eastern Washington University and president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. The controversy arose because Dolezal, who had graduated from Howard University, defined herself and was living as someone who was black. She had in fact come from white parents.
Much of the condemnation of Dolezal stemmed from her dishonestly. She had claimed that her biological father was black. The deception had been the basis for the jobs she held which were not based (at least solely) on the quality of her work but also on her racial ancestry. There was outrage that someone who was white had self-identified as a black woman.
Dolezal’s case raises important questions about self-identification. Is there any “givenness” to one’s identity, or is the identity of a human being completely malleable irrespective of physical, genetic, and biological realities? Can a white woman identify as black woman, or as a native American woman? Can a woman identify as a man, or a man as a woman? May someone define for him or herself with whom one is sexually compatible without reference to the biological realities? And at what age? Must one reach sexual maturity, or can a biological male decide to be a girl at eight years of age? Is it acceptable for a malnourished person to identify as an obese person, and should others affirm that identify?
Who determines the answers to these questions? It is not the individual person, as we have been told when a pre-pubescent child identifies as other than his or her biological gender. If it was indeed the individual person who makes the choice, then there would have been no condemnation for Dolezal.
In 1944 C.S. Lewis wrote a short book entitled The Abolition of Man. In the book, Lewis speaks about humanity’s conquest of nature and the benefits that have arisen from it. He notes that in many areas of our lives we have not made ourselves beholden to the “givenness” of things. Take, for example, the “givenness” of disease in the world. We have made remarkably successful efforts at overcoming it. Nor have we made ourselves beholden to the “givenness” that our bodily structure will not allow us to fly. We have figured out ways to do so. These conquests of the “givenness” of nature have been beneficial, but for all of the benefits of overcoming natural realities and limitations, Lewis raises concern about the idea of overcoming ourselves and the “givenness” of our own humanity.
As an example, Lewis points to contraception. At the time of his writing, contraception was not legal, but its relative benefits and merits were being discussed. Lewis’ uneasiness with it was “a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those who are already alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer.”
He continues, “if any one age really attains, by eugenics … the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all … who live after it are the patients of that power … There is therefore no question of a power vested in the [human] race as a whole, steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last [people], far from being the heirs of power, will of all [people] be subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners, and will themselves exercise least power in the future.”
Today the realities are more acute than they were in Lewis’ time. Contraception is now a socially accepted reality. But it is not the only reality. Abortion helps to ensure a eugenic purity. In 2017 the news media reported that Iceland had almost completely eradicated Down syndrome. They did this by prenatal screening and aborting any child they suspected of having an extra chromosome. Down syndrome was eliminated by eliminating people with Down syndrome. Is it possible that it has occurred to some doctors in Iceland that perhaps cancer can be eradicated in the same way?
Taken together, contraception, abortion, in-vitro fertilization, gender re-assignment surgery, hormone replacement therapy, and cosmetic surgery mean that we are no longer beholden to “givenness” in the area of human sexuality. Whatever arguments one may offer for the benefit of any of these technologies individually, the final effect has been to remove the necessary connection between human sexual behavior, conception, and the propagation of the human race. We are thus free to express ourselves sexually however we wish and to define ourselves however we wish.
Or are we? Dealing only with the realities of his own day, Lewis noted that what we might call “humanity’s power” is in reality a power possessed only by some people. “Within this generation (in itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still … [Humanity’s] conquest of Nature [i.e. human “givenness”] … means the rule of a few hundred men over billions upon billions.” The conclusion is inescapable: “The power of [people] to make [themselves] what they please [really] means the power of some [people] to make other [people] what they please.”
Are people able to define themselves? Timothy Keller maintains no one really defines him or herself. We are always defined by someone else. Keller asks us to image an eighth century Anglo-Saxon warrior. This man has two strong impulses. He has intense aggression. He has a compulsion to and draws great satisfaction from killing people who show him disrespect. Living in a shame-and-honor culture with a warrior ethic, he will identify with this feeling and think this aggression, pride, and strength are foundational to “who I am.” The other strong feeling he has is same-sex attraction. He will feel ashamed of this and suppress and control this impulse. He will feel like it is a foreign invader of his psyche.
Now take a man who has the identical impulses living in twenty-first century Manhattan. He is fiercely proud and has the impulse to physically attack and even kill anyone who disrespects him. He also has same-sex attraction. This man will look at his aggression as an unwanted invader of his psyche and seek counseling and anger-management strategies to suppress and control that impulse. But of his same-sex attraction, he will say, “This is who I am.”
Keller’s thought exercise leads to the conclusion that we do not get our identities simply from within ourselves. We receive some “interpretive moral grid” from outside of ourselves, which we lay over our various and sometimes conflicting feelings and impulses in order to sift through them and determine which is “really me” and so should be expressed, and which is a foreign invader and must be controlled. It is the grid that we use – not a raw, innate, unadulterated expression of our feelings – that determines for us who we should or should not be, and that gives us our identity.
Keller asks us to consider from where the Anglo-Saxion warrior and the modern Manhattanite get their grids. He states the obvious answer: from their respective cultures and communities. Neither of them simply “chooses for himself.” They both filter their feelings though what someone else tells them is acceptable, embracing some of those feelings and rejecting others in conformity to the external moral grid in order to decide who they really are.
This explains why an eight-year-old boy with conflicting feelings today is encouraged to express himself as a girl, but why Rachel Dolezal is condemned for expressing herself as a black woman. It has less to do with how either of them feels, and more to do with what their current culture tells them they can, should, or must do with their feelings.
Self-definition is a self-deception. No one defines him or herself. We are always defined by someone else. We will either allow ourselves to be defined by the zeitgeist, the changing spirit of the current age as interpreted by an elite contemporary group of “our betters;” or we will allow ourselves to be defined by the unchanging God who created us and loved us enough to send his Son to redeem us and restore us to our true identify.
