Martin LeFevre: The Personal Has No Place

Meditations - From Martin LeFevre in California

The Personal Has No Place

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With dogs barking in front, back, and on one side of the house this morning, I couldn’t think, much less write, so I drove to the parkland.

Expressing the slightest displeasure at the dog craze in America these days invariably elicits the passive aggressive question: “Don’t you like dogs?”
What people are really asking is: Aren’t you American?

Yes, I like dogs, and they like me. What I have difficulty with is dog culture and canine consciousness.

I had hoped that once Bush was out of office, Americans wouldn’t feel that the dog was their last, best friend. But if anything, dogmania has increased. So much for Obama-induced hope.

It was a good thing I drove rather than rode the bike to the park. The adjacent road on this side of the creek was closed due to construction, and the gates of the one-way roads on both sides were still locked.

Finding a place to park, I was surprised at the number of people in the park on a weekday morning. Not unexpectedly, young children were being marched to and from swimming spots, and small companies of mothers pushing baby carriages (most with dogs attached of course) were in evidence. But so were runners, cyclists, and walkers as well.

One woman barked orders continually as she crossed the footbridge behind four dogs. Not one was on a leash. When they wouldn’t obey her commands, she herded them into a line, all the while sounding like a drill sergeant. Dogs are hierarchical animals, and they view their owners as top dog.

Inward and outward space is getting harder and harder to come by. It isn’t mainly a function of the population explosion. You can feel a lot more crowded in a developed country, with much less population density, than a developing country, with many people around.

Ever since CNN began its hyper-personal approach to the news a few years ago, I’ve wondered: What, if any, is the place of the personal?

Indulging in an unending blitzkrieg of personalization, Wolf Blitzer shamelessly panders to the viewer with continual phrases like, ‘what this story means to you.’ Other CNN anchors are all atwitter with interactive hucksterism, as if the volume of instant reaction is a measure of the quality of their reporting.

The paradox is that unquestioned conformity to the mass marketed smallest possible unit—the personal ‘me’—is shrinking the space for individual freedom as no other form of oppression in human history has ever done.

The Blitzers of the corporate-media-military world seem to have hit upon an unbeatable strategy for bending minds and shrinking hearts, for what does it mean to be if there is no ‘me?’

And yet, the elevation and successful manipulation of the implicit core premise of the Western worldview (that we are individuals, in the egocentric sense of the word), is bringing that assumption into increasing focus and question.

Despite daily non-drug-induced altered states during methodless meditation, I have assumed, until now, that the personal had its place. But since the obsession with the personal dimension in this globalizing culture is destroying all space for the individual (in the positive sense of that word), I’ve begun questioning whether the personal has any place at all.

But just what is ‘the personal?’ And how does it differ from the space and freedom every individual needs to make their own journey in growing into a human being?

To my mind, we have confused and conflated the personal with the individual to our great peril. There is a tremendous tendency to believe that having a life means having a personal life. But what if having a life means negating the personal altogether?

The personal is not a question of privacy, but of conformity; not a function of difference, but sameness; not a reflection of depth but of superficiality. In short, ‘the personal’ is synonymous with self-concern.

At its core, the personal is relentlessly and immutably egocentric. Even when the self sacrifices itself--to kill or be killed in the name of ‘my country’ for example, or to achieve some goal like becoming a surgeon--it retains its egocentric core. We accept the notion that to be human is to revolve around a self, and that to be healthy is to ‘balance’ the personal and the professional.

But in this terminal culture, such ‘balance’ is no longer possible. That means the fundamentals of the equation—the personal and professional—must radically change, or we’ll lose ourselves entirely.

The irony is that we lose ourselves by acting in terms of our Selves, but that we truly gain ourselves by losing our Selves.

A woodland hawk, its variegated browns flashing in the sunlight, shoots past me as it soars over the creek below the treetops, piercing the air with its shrill call.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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