In my last column, I equated having a sense of place with homeownership. A good friend, Careyleah, disagreed in an email: “As a product of the late 40s/early 50s, and having moved 69 times in 78 years … every place that I have lived feels the same — it’s that I bring my home with me and find it easy to feel rooted wherever I am.”
This counterargument is worth discussing. It was presented 40 years ago by Joshua Meyrowitz in his influential book “No Sense of Place.”1 He argues that electronic media — TV in his day — have created new social situations that are no longer shaped by where we are or who is “with” us. He is piggybacking on Marshall McLuhan’s theory that “The medium is the message.”
One of the people I most admire, James Jay Lifton, advanced a similar idea. He was a big thinker who also did groundbreaking work studying the survivors of Hiroshima and the nature of authoritarianism in Nazi Germany.
He also had the courage to stand up for Vietnam veterans who were suffering from a condition many experts claimed was either malingering or imaginary. He came to their defense and was instrumental in establishing that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was a legitimate, often devastating, psychiatric condition.
He, along with McLuhan and Meyrowitz, understood that the accelerating pace of scientific and technological change was reshaping our perception of reality, “buffeted about by unmanageable historical forces and social uncertainties.”
Indeed, in the short term, this shift has caused severe dislocations, leaving many behind. What could be tougher than being threatened with the loss of identity? That, in my opinion, is what caused the populist revolt among working folks, leading to Trump’s rise to power.
Nevertheless, in the long term, Lifton saw a silver lining: we “are becoming fluid and many-sided. Without quite realizing it, we have been evolving a sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time.” He suggested that as a whole, we were transitioning into a new way of being, which he called the “protean self,” after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms.
His book on the subject, “The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation,” has proudly sat above my desk since it came out in 1993. In a later book, “Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry,” Lifton returned to the subject, noting the rise of a global epidemic of fundamentalism, including Donald Trump’s extreme nationalism. Contrasting the two, Lifton writes, “While proteanism is able to function in a world of uncertainty and ambiguity, fundamentalism wants to wipe out that world in favor of a claim to definitive truth and unalterable moral certainty.”
Certainly, as a country, we have moved closer to becoming protean selves since I grew up in the hidebound 1950s, as confirmed by the steady increase in diversity and inclusion across most categories, including race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability and age.
As opposed to the fundamental self, the protean self is “always in process; as being many-sided rather than monolithic, and resilient rather than fixed.” While I consider myself a protean self in most respects, I have limits: I remain deeply rooted to my physical home, like my mentors, Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry.
While I have many protean attributes, my friend Careyleah has me beat by a mile. She is 100% protean, intimately connected with people around the world, both in person and on social media. Truly, wherever she lays her head, that is her home. That is a good thing.
This ongoing psychological recombination allows individuals to embrace diverse perspectives and interact with others without resorting to a single “my way or the highway” mentality. I applaud this quality of diversity and openness to new experiences. Through collective innovation, it empowers communities not just to survive crises but to prosper.
But as for the importance of having a grounded sense of place, the debate continues.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.