Relevance

By Lee Thayer

This book, the first in a series by the internationally-known and scholar Lee Thayer, addresses the centrality of relevance in peoples health and lives. It is not about what is relevant to us, but to whom or to what we are relevant. Loss of relevance leads to the degeneration of mental and then physical health. Those who do not feel relevant to their world are the people who do violence to other people, or to themselves. How and why this feeling of relevance to others and to the world affects our lives, and thus the lives of others, is thoroughly explored and documented. The concept of relevance should be the most basic concept in theory of psychology, sociology, anthropology and the therapeutic industries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503523623

Lee Thayer

Lee Thayer is a scholar and writer known around the world for his many years of research and publications on the human condition. He has taught or lectured at many of the most prestigious universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. He has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, a Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard, and was twice awarded a Danforth Foundation Teacher Award for excellence in his teaching. His background is in music (composing and arranging), the humanities, engineering, and social and clinical psychology. He was one of the founders of the field of communication as a university discipline, and is a Past President of what was at that time the largest association of human communication scholars in the world. He was also the founding editor of the influential journal Communication, which was devoted to pragmatic insights into the human condition by the top thinkers in the world. His early work consisted of 14 books of research on the connection between communication and the human condition. More recently, he has summarized his long life of research into all matters human and social in such books as Communication: A Radically New Approach to Lifes Most Perplexing Problem, two collections of essays, On Communication and Pieces: Toward a Revisioning of Communication/Life. The present Doing Life; A Pragmatist Manifesto is a summary of his innovative perspectives on this subject for past 60 years. There is also his proposed alternative to the reach of biological evolution into the social sciences, Explaining Things: Inventing Ourselves and our Worlds. He lives in Western North Carolina with his artist/wife Kate Thayer. He is also renowned for his current work as a CEO coach of choice.

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Copyright © 2015 by Lee Thayer.

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Rev. date: 01/29/2015

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Contents

Part I The Primacy of Relevance

1 Relevance: the Human Project

2 Relevance Is Ubiquitous

3 Relevance Is Inescapably Consequential

Part II The Functions (and Dysfunctions) of Relevance

4 Gaining Relevance, Losing Relevance

5 The Relevance of Meaning

6 The Relevance of Belonging

7 The Relevance of Understanding

8 The Relevance of Feelings

9 The Relevance of Habits

10 The Relevance of Past and Future

11 The Relevance of Fashion

12 The Relevance of Time and Life

13 The Relevance of Ups and Downs

14 The Relevance of Work and Leisure

15 The Relevance of Tropes and Lore

16 The Relevance of Mirrors & Cameras

17 The Relevance of Performance

Part III The Relevance of Relevance

18 The Relevance of Relevance

About the Author

…as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been.

—Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

PART I

The Primacy of Relevance

1

Relevance: the Human Project

What is the defining characteristic of the human condition? As long as there have been people on earth who have been curious about such things, a myriad of answers has been proposed. Philosophers and story-tellers, soothsayers and poets, and sooner or later most of the rest of us have wondered: why are people like they are? Is there an over-arching answer? Do we people have a universal trait that underwrites our lives on earth? If not, why do we continue to wonder about it? If so, why is it so elusive?

If there is an underlying motive for why we humans are the way we are, it would be somewhat like water for the fish that live in it. They are not curious about it until it ceases to exist. For a fish to be out of the water, there is little to do but flip around and gasp about it. When people are bereft of this trait, they do much the same thing. They suffer from being slowly asphyxiated, slowly deprived of the life they knew or yearned for, not because their lives were good or bad, but because it is an unfulfilled need. We mostly don’t know why. We just suffer from its loss.

Because it is to us like the air we breathe, we pay it little heed until we are deprived of it, or until it becomes so unhealthy that we become ill from its absence. It is the major contributor to whatever good mental and physical health we have. Its absence is a major contributor to the mental and physical diseases we suffer in life.

Too much of it causes all sorts of problems. Too little of it causes even more problems – simply different ones. Given the way we look at the world, and particularly how we look at mental and physical health, we are always on the lookout for something that caused our problems – something that exists that didn’t exist before. Germ theory is an example. We don’t often go about looking for what is absent, for what was there in some degree but is no longer there.

We diagnose this or that problem by looking for some anomaly. If a person is depressed, surely something happened that caused that person to be depressed. If a person is in poor physical health, there must be something that is causing it. We look for what is unusual rather than looking for what was usual but is now missing. It seems counter-intuitive to a physician or a therapist to look for something that is missing. And yet we know full well that the absence of a true lover does not make the heart grow fonder. It makes the heart grow anxious. The death of a loved one does not bring peace and serenity to the survivor. It brings regret. It disturbs one’s mental and bodily functions. So does losing one’s job. So do dashed hopes and dreams. When everyday life becomes a chore rather than a joy, what is missing? Not what has occurred in the past, but what has ceased occurring in the present?

–—

To be someone in any human tribe or society requires other humans. You become who you are because those around you are who they are. It is an intricate and ever-changing spider-web of relationships. You can’t be someone unless and until others relate to you as that someone. You come to define yourself within the parameters of how others define you.

You can be aware of yourself only in a group or community that is cognizant of you, as George Herbert Mead insisted. We all belong to something larger than ourselves. It may be as small as a relationship with certain others. Or it may be as large as a culture. To be someone you have to be that someone in a human, social context.

Your self has to be created and nurtured in some human context. In general, that context provides for you the parameters of the self that is permitted. If you abide by the roles permitted, and the rules imposed, you can be someone. If you don’t you become a pariah – an outcast. Then you have to find a different context – a different human group that will have you. Failing that, your self will dissolve. You will cease to exist. People who do not belong to some human group will die. That is what happened to all of the babies who were given no sense of belonging to the social groups around them. They all died.

In much the same way, you have to be somewhere to be someone. The first GPS system was not a technological marvel. It was preceded by a very sophisticated GPS system that permitted you to locate yourself in a place that had a name (like home). It permitted you to locate yourself in a social group or community. Your self permitted you to locate yourself in those two contexts.

There is a third context within which you locate yourself. Who you are begins with your personal history – as you remember it, or as you were told to remember it. To be someone requires you to be that someone (as you understand it) in a specific biography at a specific time in a specific place as a member of a specific social group. That is who you are.

That spider-web into which you have been woven is what makes who you are both possible, and necessary. As long as you perform yourself in a manner expected by the others who endorse you, who you are is insured. Fail to perform up to their expectations, and who you are (in that particular context) will be in jeopardy. You are a prisoner of those you belong to, including yourself.

So what are the ubiquitous phenomena that undergird this live as we do or cease to have a place in this society condition of human existence?

–—

In his Journals (of 1843), Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.

How is this possible? If we have a self, is it not this self that we present to others? Or is the implication here that we have as many selves as we have friends? That we present ourselves differently with different people because that is a different relationship? Is it that we have as many selves as we have relationships with others? And thus, what we take to be our self is some congeries of all of those faces we present to others?

There are at least three useful insights we might take from Holmes’s observation:

• One is that we start our social life with a relationship with one person (most often, our mother), and then we parlay this into relationships with others in ever-expanding circles as we go about in the world we inhabit.

• The second is that we are not conscious of doing this, always imagining that we have but a single identity – a single self that goes with us wherever we go.

• The third is really one more question: are we not putting on a special face for that person we are talking to when we talk to ourselves? And, if so, which special additional face do we use for that relationship?

Marcel Proust provided us with a kind of answer to that conundrum when he wrote (in The Guermantes Way, in 1923):

The opinions we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinfolk are in no sense permanent…but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

If they are so fluid, so plastic, why does something like a self or a relationship seem so permanent? Is what Proust says applicable to the opinions we hold of ourselves? Certainly in most cases we want a sense of personal continuity. And, in most cases, we want the feeling of permanence in our relationships with others. Once others accept us for what we are, we don’t want that acceptance to be as eternally fluid as the sea.

We know that every relationship is tenuous. Each one hinges on the pertinence or the subjective value of the relationship to one or the other. So the tacit agreement is: I won’t change my mind (or my heart) if you won’t. If you do, the whole deal may be off.

Every person’s continuity depends upon every other person’s resistance to change. And that resistance to change comes from the need we have to be much the same person tomorrow as we were today. To achieve that continuity requires that the others who corroborate us and our lives have the same need for continuity we have. What kind of relationship could you have with a person who wanted to decide afresh every day whether or not to be your friend for that one day? But that may beg the question: From whence comes this need for continuity, for the permanence of things that are in reality ever changing?

–—

Emerson had much to say about habits. And his is one kind of explanation. He wrote (in Human nature and Conduct, in 1922):

A bad habit…makes us do things we are ashamed of, things which we tell ourselves we prefer not to do. It overrides our formal resolutions, our conscious decisions. When we are honest with ourselves we acknowledge that a habit has this power because it is so intimately a part of ourselves. It has a hold on us because we are the habit.

Indeed that explains much. But it does not really tell us why we permitted this hold on us in the first place. Habits can serve a good purpose. And then this hold on us works for our higher ideals. But where do we learn which habits are which before the consequences appear? It’s easy enough to understand that learning to play the piano or to put ourselves in the path of danger requires some habits that we are not born with. But a friend or a lover chooses us because we choose them. Each becomes habituated to the other. Given the outcomes, was this a choice to which we have become inadvertently habituated, or not? Wives who have been subject to physical abuse by their husbands more often than not go back home when they have recovered. Why is that?

If we’re bad, we persist, because we’re more likely to hang out with others who are bad. If we’re good – but seemingly few are started off on that path – we may or may not persist, depending on who we hang out with.

There is something about paths and people that propel us in one direction rather than another. Even habits have an origin. What is it that causes us to become who we are in the first place? Why do we choose the wrong relationships? Why do we not make better choices for our own benefit?

–—

Human nature is simply what people have believed to be true, and thus have performed in ways consistent with their beliefs. It is, in a sense, the result of thinking one way rather than another. It is what most of the people around you would do in those circumstances. It is knowing the acceptable protocols for that group and acting upon them.

It is in part about conformity. We conform to the norms of those people we belong to, that we gain our identity from. There is a certain comfort in walking to the beat of the same drummer. We must be right. Everyone (we know) says so. Being a lone nonconformist requires a lot of courage, conviction, and sheer grit. Conforming to the norms of a nonconformist group is easy by comparison. Here is an observation by Eric Hoffer that bears consideration:

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

In other words, when you’re not in the group in which you feel like conforming, go pick a nonconformist group where you will feel at home. The Mafia had a code of conduct which was far more stringent than that of the local church league. The Impressionists provided a place away from the mainstream thought of the day about what constituted great art. They hovered together both for sustenance and aesthetic confirmation. Their nonconformist work had certain similarities. They had their own ideas, which became normative for them.

The Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, who was himself a voluntary outcast, wrote:

Normality is a tightrope walker above the abyss of the abnormal.

It helps if most of the other people you know are there with you. Better to be anonymous in a crowd than the one who gains notoriety by falling into the abyss. What is normal and what is abnormal depends on your point of view. Historically, what was normal and what was abnormal was often determined on the battlefield. Whoever won got to say what was normal. More recently, this is decided by public opinion, or by whoever has the most votes. It’s not as bloody. But it is just as effective.

Whether you are crazy or not can be determined by how persuasive your trial lawyer is, and by how the jury was selected. Note, too, the semantic trap: If there is normal, there must be abnormal, and vice versa. You can’t be both. You have to be one or the other.

To belong, you have to exemplify the values and the superficial trappings of the group to which you belong. The more fragmented our society becomes, the more opportunities there are for being normal in one group or another, and thus abnormal from the perspective of others. What was normal for a previous generation easily becomes abnormal for a present generation – but from which perspective? What was considered abnormal a generation ago may now be the new normal – protected by law what was previously against the law. Or protected by public opinion, which in an earlier generation may have been immoral.

So what is it that people are so desperately seeking in these changing times? Is it always the case that the previous generation – or those people over there whose worldview is different from ours – is it always the case that one is right and the other is wrong? Or is this not at all the real issue?

If our opinions depend almost solely on which clique we belong to, and if it is the belongingness itself which is at stake, are we missing something vital and exhausting ourselves on the crucible of who’s right, who’s wrong? When a married couple (of any sexual orientation) get into a fight, what are they fighting about? They don’t instigate a fight over who fell in love first. Is their argument about something vital? Or is it a ploy to obscure what is vital? Obviously, something that was there is now missing – it is not there. We say that they are falling out of love. But how could they rescue something that they didn’t create in the first place, but just fell into? Why are those who exasperate us because they vehemently disagree with us always seem so wrong, so stupid? Might there be something far more basic about life-making going on?

–—

People are forever making choices and decisions. How do we decide what needs to be considered in doing so? Physicians diagnose your complaint based on the symptoms you report or display, and on the basis of what is currently being done about such diagnoses. What is going on when they are making a diagnosis and then prescribing a course of treatment? As commonplace as this is, why do we know so little about how it is done? The automotive technician goes through much the same process. He or she tells you what their diagnostic tells them the problem is, and they prescribe what needs to be done from a prepared list of suggestions. When you consider this, what is the process you are going through in order to arrive at a decision?

The self-styled conceptual prankster Andrew Boyd once challenged us with this:

I choose how to live a life I didn’t choose.

Most people didn’t actually choose the life they have. But they nonetheless have to choose how to live the one they’ve got. It isn’t the lives we live that are the problem. The problem is: where does that locate us in the social world? We can make an identity out of almost any social/environmental conditions. But just because most people are handed an identity doesn’t mean they are going to be happy with what their lives give them.

Our choices over time do indeed contribute mightily to who and what we become. But those choices are not totally free choices, like the penalty shot in soccer. Choices are made. They are made by a person. Any person will be more or less capable of making the choices that need to be made. The consequences for you – and ultimately for the society – will come from your choices carried out, not from your intentions. Being offered a choice doesn’t make you competent to make the kind of choice that is efficacious – for you or for your society.

Not all choices are free choices. Some are endorsed in advance by the social groupings one belongs to, and others might never be endorsed. It seems easy when you read about making the right choices in a book. But no book is the real world you have to live in.

Choice and decision are often interchangeable. What we can know about choice applies equally to what we can know about decision. Of all that has been written and said about the two, this much we can know:

• Whether it is a choice or a decision, we can know that they both have consequences.

• We can never know for certain what those consequences are going to be. We can make informed guesses. But that’s the best even the wisest can do. Those who make uninformed decisions (the best they can do, being unaware of all of the pertinent circumstances and of the wisdom of the world) seem to deserve the untoward consequences that then befall them.

Even so, most of the advice available about making decisions comes down to the way Theodore Roosevelt explained it:

In a moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing.

But what is that right thing? And why does the right thing sometimes turn out to have the wrong consequences, and doing the wrong thing can have unexpected but salubrious consequences? What is it that one has to know in order to do the right thing? Will we somehow be fully informed by our explainers? Maybe not, as Aldous Huxley said:

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

Our experts, whatever their fields of expertise may be, seem to be no better at making vital decisions for their own lives than the rest of us are.

Some food experts seem to become obese in spite of their advice to the rest of us. Some psychoanalysts have terrible personal lives. Some doctors smoke. Philosophers don’t always take their own advice. Physicians don’t always take the advice they hand out to their patients.

We are often told that the answers are given by this religious denomination or another. Yet we have this observation from Vine DeLoria, Jr., in his book God Is Red:

The phenomenon of a substantial number of clergy suffering psychological problems indicates that religious and mental problems have not been solved by Christianity in any of its denominational expressions.

If we want to make decisions about spiritual or lifestyle issues in our own lives, where do we turn to determine the right thing to do, if not to the experts or the insiders? It raises a more challenging truism: Why is it that, even though we may personally believe we know the right thing to do, we don’t necessarily do it? Why is the salvation some clergy might offer us not pertinent to their own?

The teacher/aphorist Peter Robinson once observed that …all life’s important decisions are bets against the odds. So much of what has been said and written about making decisions is therefore like betting with the odds: in other words, too rational to be very pertinent in a largely irrational world. It is often an unspoken assumption that one makes decisions to get rid of a problem. That may turn out to be too short a perspective. What a person should be living for is something that outlives that person. That would be an example of one of life’s important decisions. The consequences of a decision will always outlive the making of it.

There is a further perspective that is often ignored. While you are busy deliberating your decision (or your choices), the rest of the world is not holding its breath. Others are making choices and decisions every moment of every day. Some of those may affect you directly. Others change the world in large or small ways, thus changing the social/economic environment you have to live in. Then it is no longer what it was. If you base your decision on the past, it will already be out of date. You have to base your choices and decisions on what you intend your future to be. Make the world catch up with you. At least then you will not forever be playing catch-up with it.

How do we determine when something needs changing? Or better left as it is? Choices and decisions are intended to change things. But do they necessarily change things in the right direction? There’s something vital missing in the way we explain and carry out our choices and decisions. What is that something vital that is missing?

–—

Habits, like luck, always play a role. Habits operate out of awareness, and therefore out of any conscious control. In that critical way, we need to understand that we don’t have habits. Our habits have us. They don’t live for us. We live for them. If you don’t believe that, try changing a long-standing personal habit.

Habits add up to the status quo in any relationship of any size. Try changing that in the short term. We think like we do because it is habitual to think in that way. We react to things that occur because it is automatic and habitual to react to them in that general way. Our emotional lives have us by the skin and the hair. We have the feelings we have because it is habitual to have them. If you think you can change people with words, try to do so. If you imagine you can change yourself with words, test it.

Habits lead us into paradoxical situations in two ways:

1. They may make life’s journeys (such as driving to and from work or the practiced routines of tying our shoes) more efficient. But at the same time they disengage us from the world around us. The more we live by habit, the less we live by engagement in the world outside ourselves. For example, we spend more time explaining our world to others than we do actually experiencing life in that world. As the remarkable Spanish philosopher, playwright, and poet Unamuno wrote:

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.

Unless, of course, it is a habit you need?

2. If the world as we see it doesn’t fit our well-worn mental models of it, our first reaction is to try to change the world, not our own mental and emotional habits. If your spouse doesn’t act the way you expect him or her to act, your first reaction is anger – and the need to change him or her. If it rains on the day of your lawn party, you are most likely to be put-off about the weather.

Most of our daily problems and piques are a result of this discrepancy between the way things are in reality and the way we would like them to be. That’s how our habits trap us. The world – people, things, and events – are often out of whack with our expectations. More often than not, our expectations come from our habits of thought and not from our careful surveillance of what is actually going on in the world. But our immediate reaction is that the world is out of whack, not that we are. Santayana wrote (in his Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, in 1900):

Habit is stronger than reason.

That may be why we have so much difficulty trying to reason with it.

We most often lead with our habits. When we do so, what sets things amiss is the condition of life that we fail to bring to bear. We fail because no one told us how important it was. When we pursue the truth of things, for example, we miss seeing a far more important condition of life at work.

–—

In his fascinating book, Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton wrote about how critically important personally our status in society may be:

"If our position on the ladder [the ladder of relative status] is a matter of such concern, it is because our self-conception is so dependent on what others make of us…we rely on signs of respect from the world to feel tolerable to ourselves."

It could be status anxiety he writes about. But there may be something that is far more basic and ubiquitous. There can be little doubt that what others make of us can affect our self-conception. There are always limits to what we make of ourselves. If we wander in our imaginations too far away from the general consensus, we might be considered loopy and locked away. On the other hand, if someone fits the social mold made for him or her too perfectly, that person may have no sense of self-identity, feeling much like just a well-greased cog in the social machinery.

There has to be, as Botton suggests, the kind of public behavior that others expect of us, while at the same time a mild portion of our own making. It may have less to do with status as such than with this other condition we have been alluding to, but are not seeing clearly.

Of special interest here is an observation made by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in 1759, not long before we found ourselves on that slippery slope of modernity:

"To what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power, of pre-eminence?…What…are the advantages of that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition?"

If those who have wealth and power seem to have the same need for bettering their condition that those lower on the totem pole are said to have, what are we to make of that? There is nothing wrong with being poor, if you and others have respect for who you are and how you conduct yourself. There is nothing wrong with being wealthy as long as you and others have respect for who you are and how you conduct yourself. As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. It is the person who interprets the world, who formulates the interpretation. Celebrities may be haughty. But so may their fans be haughty.

In our modern Western world, our status may depend upon what we can buy, if we want to go downstream with the culture. But what is it that makes that process seem necessary? The process itself carries no mortal obligation. Your status (with some) may depend upon how rich your