8. Cyborg Selfhood and the Texture of Identity: Danielle's Baby meets the 16^th Canadian Regiment

     i

We live in the shadow of the First World War. While World War Two, with its accompanying Holocaust on one continent and its nuclear culmination on another, may be a more obvious candidate for the defining conflict of the age, it was the “Great War” that made the mid-century totalitarian regimes possible, and the Great War as well that redefined our notions of heroism, our notions of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, and our notions of the place of the human being in the conduct of warfare. It was this conflict that introduced the world to war as an industrial process—a process whose output, mass-produced as certainly as any car on Henry Ford's production line—was dead bodies, shattered minds, and devastated landscapes. And it was this conflict that, on the largest scale imaginable at the time, introduced the notion of the soldier as subordinate to his weapon, not in a dry academic sense but rather in a sense immediate and visceral to the men on the front lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iec7Xoos6JA. The war produced casualties previously unheard-of: about 37 million all told, including 16 million killed and 21 million wounded (http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/World_War_I_casualties.html)—to say nothing of the psychological damage for which no reliable statistics exist.

But it is not to recount the large scale history of the War that I am writing this post: other writers have done that. Nor do I intend to take a partisan stance: the war was endorsed in the classrooms, promoted in the media, and preached from the pulpits on both sides. Both sides devoted their full energies and industries to developing ever more efficient ways of killing and demoralizing the human beings opposing them: weaponized aircraft, aerial bombs, more powerful artillery, tanks, chlorine gas, mustard gas, phosgene gas, and flamethrowers to name the obvious.

Instead, I'd like to share some Wilkie family history. But even there, information is limited. Exactly why my grandfather, both of his brothers, and all of my grandmother's brothers enlisted, some in Scotland and others in Canada, is something I can only guess at. Patriotism, nationalism, romanticism, or a simple yearning for adventure and glory? None of that has come down to me. All I have are a few dozen photographs, a lifetime of reading, and a few word-of-mouth stories recollected from conversations with my now-departed dad. From that uncertain mix, though, I think I can reconstruct a fair sketch of my Uncle Arthur.

     ii

Born in Edinburgh sometime in the 1890's, Arthur Lindsay emigrated before the War and, according to my dad, volunteered shortly after his new country's declaration, enlisting in the 16^th Canadian Regiment (Canadian Scottish). From here, it's possible to trace him at least in general terms. I know that he was at Ypres in the spring of 1915 when his regiment, along with the 10^th Canadians, stood its ground against the first large-scale use of gas while the French Territorials with whom they shared that part of the line fled their trenches. I know that when the German shock troops came over expecting little more than corpses and downed men drowning on their own bubbling phlegm, they instead found unbroken ranks of Canadian infantry, their faces still wet from breathing through piss-drenched handkerchiefs, with machine guns manned and bayonets fixed. And I know the effect that the 2^nd Battle of Ypres, as that encounter is called, had on my country's identity.

What I don't know is how Uncle Arthur passed most of his life after the guns first into silence and then into obsolescence. But this big blank space between his military service and his final years has never been empty for me. It has held, and continues to hold, the potential pasts of all the other men whose names I don't know, who also got out of the War alive. Work and family. Summer vacations. Maybe slow weeks at a cottage or weekend afternoons at the beach. Backyard barbecues, family gatherings, and Christmas dinners. Weddings. Christenings. Funerals. Saving for retirement. Service clubs and civic obligations. Annual uniformed parades. Tobacco. Whiskey. And a great deal of silence about what had gone before.

Where his story resumes is in the Veterans' Home in London, Ontario: psychiatric ward. In his last years, he seems to have forgotten who he was. No longer answering to Arthur, no longer recognizing his family name Lindsay, he now responded only to Tommy. And it was as Tommy, not as Arthur, that he died. For years, I carried that transformation in my head as part of our family history and so, at least in some small way, as part of who I was. But as the years passed, I continued reading and thinking about the War, finding in its horror and filth not just an understanding of my family but, I believed and still believe, a way of seeing through the illusions we put up around ourselves. Then, while reading Lynn MacDonald's 1915, a recounting of the first full year of the War largely as told by combatants, it struck me that foot-soldiers fighting under British command were called “tommies.”

I knew then exactly what had happened to Uncle Arthur: as his brain failed, and the person he'd once been ebbed toward non-existence, another identity emerged. Not an individual identity—not a “person” in Locke's sense (see the first post on this blog)—but a collective identity: one component in a flesh-and-steel machine that had sprawled south from the English Channel to the Swiss border. It also occurred to me that, although my uncle had physically survived the War, the identity “Arthur Lindsay” had finally become one of the last casualties of the trenches.

     iii

These realizations are now long past: I've been sharing some version of them in the classroom for the last 12 years. But I'm beginning to realize that the tragedy of Arthur does not end where I've typically left it. Just as the First World War reveals a truth that humanity hides behind its many thin and comforting illusions, so the senescent re-configuring of an old soldier's self reveals a truth behind the smaller-scale illusions embedded in our birth certificates, passports, tax receipts, and hopes for immortality.

What is the relationship between who we are and who we perceive ourselves to be? Even at the most basic level to be articulated in the modern Western world—Descartes' famous realization that “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), problems emerge. Descartes arrives at this minimal piece of absolute certainty through a process of systematic doubt, moving through the unreliability of all received knowledge and all suppositions that he cannot directly confirm, and the fallibility of the senses and thus any observations made through them. Since that time—and arguably for a good deal longer—the unitary thinking subject has been the foundational unit in Western philosophy and politics. And on its surface, the logic is compelling: insofar as one must first exist in order to think, it follows that thinking is a reliable indicator of existence.

But the argument breaks down when applied to the identity of the thinking self. To put it in grammatical terms, there is a necessary disjuncture between subject and object. That is, in order to perceive myself thinking, I have to hold in mind an image of myself—not necessarily a visual one—engaging in thought. But it is impossible for a being held in mind and the being who is holding it in mind to be identical: one is an image constructed by the other while trying to represent itself to itself. There is thus a gap between the perceiving self and the self perceived:

I think, therefore I am unstable.

What this means in terms of self-knowledge is that we can never know more than an incomplete representation of ourselves: a construct written on the mind by influences both internal and external. Necessarily, that representation will evolve, but there is no guarantee that its later versions will be more accurate or “true” than their predecessors. The gap remains, an unknowably wide event horizon surrounding an ever-receding center—the intellect's own black hole. Or to paraphrase Shakespeare's Iago, “We are not what we are.”

The Cartesian self has problems not just at its heart but on its edges as well, specifically in determining where and what its edges might be. Part of the difficulty is that, as Michael Shermer observes, for sound evolutionary reasons we are all natural dualists. The image of the mind as non-material spirit stuff has a lot of traction not only in our culture but also in our species. And if this entity is non-material, the notion of fixing it in space, and perhaps in time, verges on the absurd. But if we follow the evidence and its implications (see previous posts)—the fact that the mind fails and can be fooled in predictable ways when parts of the brain are damaged or sensory perception challenged, the fact, as Andy Clark notes, that the brain does not distinguish between a body part and a thoroughly mastered tool—then we can posit tentative borders for selfhood. On the other hand, if the boundaries of the self as constructed by the brain vary with the experiences of a lifetime, then the problem arises again in a different form: if our identities can be shown at the most basic physical level not to be bound by their immediate biological frameworks, how far outward or inward, and with what degree of permanency, can they extend and endure?

I won't try to pin those questions down just now: for the current meditation, it's enough just to shake loose the often-unconscious assumption that who we are is necessarily knowable, non-contingent, and fixed. It's the notion of the contingent, non-Cartesian identity that I'd like to explore, particularly as it relates to Uncle Arthur. This understanding of selfhood raises questions about the value of experience, and of his particular tragedy, and the degrees to which his identities are bound up with the systems in which they became submerged.

     iv

I'll never know how Arthur Lindsay thought about himself, or the kinds of questions he asked himself huddling in a louse-infected bunker, lining up in a trench waiting for the whistle, or running across a broken landscape into rifle and machine-gun fire with a bullet in his chamber and a mounted bayonet. Nor can I know how close his image of himself came to the unknown and unknowable reality. All of the pieces, and the relationships among them, that made Arthur himself to himself are gone, the events that in the end buried one identity under another in the same aging skull now a century in the past.

But if there is nothing eternal in us, if no part of our identity is separable from physical and social determinants, and if the very notion of “I” is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves in a lifelong feedback loop with no fixed referent or location, then what does it matter that every now and then, one of these life-long improvisations suddenly changes tempo and morphs into a completely different kind of thing? To be clear, I'm not presenting this question as a straw man argument: it falls into a common category of questions, all of which draw upon the same flawed reasoning: In the absence of immortal spirit stuff, how can there be meaning in life? If we are “only” biological machines, what basis can there be for morality? In the absence of transcendental existence, how can anything mean anything at all? Or to rephrase these questions in the affirmative: Some eternal principle is required for meaning to exist. However, this line of thought sidesteps the fact that that both meaning and the capacity to make it—i.e. the capacity for symbolic thought—are demonstrably linked to the functioning of the cerebral cortex. So if our capacity to make and experience meaning is innate to our biology, meaning itself is necessarily biological, not metaphysical or transcendent. It arises from the emergent phenomenon of consciousness and thus can be understood as a property of the physical world.

Like all the men with whom he shared the line and against whose lines he alternately charged and defended, Arthur was a product of his time and place. There's nothing new in this observation, nor in the resulting observation that most people alive today would, in the same circumstances, have behaved in the same ways as the people of his generation, no matter how deep their present conviction of the war's foolishness, waste, and ultimate moral bankruptcy. This conclusion though, which follows from the premises of an organism's behavior being determined by genetics and environment, and our own genetic consistency with the people of just a few generations ago, dovetails smoothly into the cyborg notion of distributed identity or embodied consciousness.

The notion here is that identity is not centered at any one point but rather distributed across the knowing system, which at minimum consists of the lobes of the brain but in fact can include not just the biological apparatus but any social or technological scaffolding that contributes in an integral and un-self-conscious way to the experiences of knowing and selfhood. An easy example might be an enactment of the identity “musician,” an identity impossible without the requisite knowledge—for instance the ability to make a given instrument produce a given set of sounds as naturally as a fluent speaker produces utterances or a fluent writer writes them down—not forming or even being aware of the constituent motions and details but rather enacting the desired result with, at times, no more thought than one might give to breathing. In this case, both the hardware and the training that goes into mastering it are integral to the embodied identity. Biology in isolation from technology and social context cannot account for that. In other words, it is precisely those things not present in the physicality of our brains that allow us to be, or imagine ourselves to be, anything more than physically deficient apes.

So sticking with our hypothetical musician, let's make her a member of a band. While each band member has an identity outside of their musical collaborations, the medium of music, along with their shared relationships with it, each other, the named identity of the group, and its relationship with the public, defines a collective identity of which any one member is a single module. And as anyone who has followed any band over a long career will know, the collective identity often sustains itself quite well as various modules detach or burn out and are replaced by fresh components. Substitute violence for music and weapons for instruments, and congratulations: you just joined the army. This analogy provides a mechanism for understanding Uncle Arthur on the one hand, and understanding both myself and my fellow bipedal apes on the other.

     v

Picture Arthur as a young man. He has grown up in a large comfortable family, gone through the usual late Victorian and Edwardian public education, made the long and supposedly permanent crossing of the Atlantic, and embarked on a settled, productive life as a citizen of the Empire. He still lives under the Union Jack, still considers himself British, and enjoys the company of people like himself. A Presbyterian from a long line of Presbyterians, he goes to church regularly and understands the centrality of work to who and what he is. He doesn't talk about these convictions as there is no need to do so—they are familiar, self-evident, and thus quietly assumed. Also assumed is his place within the Empire, not just politically but ideologically: the knowledge—and for a young middle-class white man from Britain it was taken to be knowledge—that the flag that flew over 40% of the world's land mass and, effectively, over most of its oceans, did so by the legitimate use of power guided by both human and divine justice. He has his being, both biological and non-biological, through the Empire—quite literally, he lives through and by the Empire—and inversely, the Empire lives through him and people like him: a holographic polity played out both externally and internally.

Then: the War.

And with the War: a rapid re-configuring of not just who but also what he is. His horizons contract both geographically and spiritually while his bonds with the men who now share and largely define his world intensify. The high ideals for which he has been taught to value the Empire are stripped from him in the first bombardment as he comes to know the un-euphemized conclusion of his own society's industry. He learns that his life is worth less than the continued operation of any given piece of artillery as he is easier and cheaper to replace. At the same time, both his training and his experience teach him that his function overlaps those of the men and machines with whom he shares the front, his life now in the hands of people who had recently been strangers on the one hand, and on the other, of the masses, velocities, and trajectories of grenades, bullets, and shells. Math—his life is in the hands of math. He is part of a machine stretching from the North Sea to the Swiss Alps, facing another version of itself across a narrow and shifting gap—or maybe simply another part of itself: a single apparatus set to work devouring a generation as it feeds itself with itself.

But no machine processes input without producing a corresponding output, and all machines are constrained by both their designs and, prior to these, their underlying assumptions. The most important assumption for our purposes is the I/NOT-I distinction as this is foundational to any human conflict. Also important to remember is that, though the machine's output may be more homogeneous, less nuanced, than its input, it is nonetheless just as real.

These are the terms in which I've had to reconsider Uncle Arthur's tragedy. Where until recently, I've seen this in terms of a true identity being overwritten by a false one, the bleaker but more tenable conclusion is that Arthur and Tommy were equally real. And in being equally real, they were also equally non-existent. As Robert Pepperell notes, the mind, contrary to the predominant religious and philosophic assumptions that have misguided the West for millennia, is best understood not as a thing but rather as an activity: just as walking is an activity of the legs and other parts, so the mind is an activity of the extended knowing system centered on, but not necessarily confined to, the brain. And just as any given instance of walking cannot be said to exist once the legs have stopped moving, so any given mind cannot be said to exist once the system from which it emerges stops functioning.

It follows that our identities can also be understood as actions rather than actors, with the actor recognized not as the self-conscious being but instead as the extended physical system that performs the gestures of selfhood. In a fully developed, well rounded identity, those gestures may resemble a dance, as they did for instance in Arthur's case. But as the enacting system is damaged, or as it wears down, that dance can degenerate into a lockstep, or a limp. But a limp is no less real than a dance: both are articulations of the systems from which they arise, and neither has any continuity beyond its system's operation.

On the bright side, the limits of the system are unclear—our boundaries uncertain, the I/NOT-I distinction, if it exists at all, more of a fluctuating field than a hard and fixed line. We are not—or at least need not remain—imprisoned in the psychological and social mechanisms that define and seek to contain us. Nor need we remain, or see ourselves as being, constrained by our superficially obvious edges. Our brains do not differentiate between body parts and fully mastered tools (Clark 2008), without which many of our identities would be impossible. Nor need we assume that the indeterminate field of identity negotiation does not overlap, and even contain, other selves with whom we have relationships, or that the fields centered on other people do not overlap and contain us. We extend into groups—army units, musical bands, families, intimate friends—and those groups themselves, as well as the people who make them up, also extend into us. We extend as well into our physical environments, especially those parts with which we are deeply familiar. With all of these extensions branching from our brains through our bodies, tools, social circles, and locales, the notion of the isolated, self-contained conscious being, so central to both our apparent common sense and guiding ideologies, becomes at best questionable and at worst untenable and destructive. Or perhaps this insular identity really is possible, but only through an act of self-amputation that has become so commonplace that its innate psychological violence is invisible to us. The wound is so ubiquitous that we may never even notice we are in pain.

If, however, we recognize the relational nature of our beings and identities, then we no longer accept the necessity of this amputation. Further, we embrace, or at least have the option of embracing, the possibility that our selves overlap and interweave with other selves as well as the environment and technological frameworks through which those selves arise. Such a move, if taken to its conclusion, can re-configure the basis for both moral relationship and self-interest. If there is no absolute boundary between I and NOT-I, between me and you, then I can't say with certainty that your well-being is not my well-being, that my community's well-being is not my well-being, or that the well-being of the socio-technological scaffolding through which our identities are embodied and enacted is not my well-being as well. That is, the insular personality of Hobbesian and Lockean, or even Rousseauvian philosophy, to say nothing of the rational and self-interested lone actor beloved of contemporary neo-conservatives, is little more than a mutilated stump of a person.

     vi

As I began with a story about death, I'd like to conclude with a story about life. Recently, while attending the FREDtalks conference at which I presented a preliminary version of this meditation, I learned that a friend of mine is pregnant. My immediate reaction was joy for Danielle as she was obviously happy, but then it occurred to me that I was already in a moral relationship with her child, and further, that insofar are there is no hard boundary between me and her, there is also no hard boundary boundary between her extended identity, obviously including her baby-to-be, and my own. Her child is thus a facet of my own being just as I am a facet of its being, and its ultimate happiness is not entirely separable from mine. That connection is not a mere abstraction. Rather, the Enlightenment notion of the self as an isolated and self-contained being is the abstraction—a particularly cold abstraction—that denies the richness of both subjective experience and objective fact.

It's in this organic, technological, and perpetually extending web of selves or self that Uncle Arthur, Tommy, an unnamed unborn baby, and “I” meet up. Maybe it's possible to peak out from under the shadow of the First World War, and maybe it's not. We'll probably never know whether we've managed it. One thing is clear, however: the logic behind both the ideologies and the mechanisms that made that war and its many consequences possible is a logic of perpetual reduction, perpetual separation, at once drawing lethal lines between US and THEM, and building up collective identities in which only the least nuanced facets of our subjective uniqueness can have any place, in which our Arthurs are melded into Tommies, the textures of our minds and experiences flattened to a level better suited to the collective impulse toward dominance. In this sense, the difference between flesh-and-blood Tommies and the collective hive-mind of an entity such as Star Trek TNG's Borg is merely one of metaphor, and perhaps not even that.

Danielle's baby presents another option, no less collective on the one hand but on the other, expansive rather than reductive in terms of the texture of experience and identity. Here, boundaries are transcended rather than enforced at the edges, and interwoven rather than detonated in the interior, self-interest fusing with empathy to the point that the mindsets, at least in potential, merge into a single impulse toward well-being. Our identities are always already embedded in others, and theirs in us. The more fully we embrace this in-born mutuality, the richer and more nuanced our identities will have the chance to become. And while I have not yet explored these ideas to their furthest conclusions, I'm beginning to wonder whether just this kind of shift in perceived identity is what we need to start addressing the social ills currently besetting North-American democracy, with its increasing tendency toward economic inequity in the name of some truncated neo-conservative individuality—the pursuit of perpetually increasing wealth at the cost of perpetually contracting moral horizons. We can do, and be, better. And recognizing the non-existence of the boundaries that separate us may may offer a way of moving past our mutual alienation—toward learning how to address one another with a greater emphasis on the music we can make than on the range and power of our guns.