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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
This study employed the Duquesne method of phenomenology to explore eight participants' experiences of not belonging. These experiences began with a discomforting sense of difference that then developed into self-conscious, wary behavior. This experience was followed by attempts at interpersonal transformation whose success led to an episodic view of not belonging and whose failure led to a more dramatic, personalized, isolating, and permanent view of not belonging. Such a view was also accompanied by a profound transformation in how the participants experienced themselves, others, and their social environments. Among the most interesting findings in this research were the descriptions of isolated belonging--a pattern of relating involving many interpersonally distant relationships--and consistent, generalized not belonging--an experience where not belonging is the primary mode of interpersonal relation.
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Though it is always difficult to define historical epochs (especially those we inhabit), modernity is often characterized as a time of both tremendous technological progress and, paradoxically, a time of increased alienation and isolation. Richard Tarnas writes of the dawning of the modern age: "Extraordinary intellectual and psychological sophistication was accompanied by a debilitating sense of anomie and malaise. An unprecedented broadening of horizons and exposure to the experience of others coincided with a private alienation of no less extreme proportions" (1991, p. 388). This development seems paradoxical because technology has placed the world and its inhabitants at our very doors, and yet our unfettered access to one-another does not seem to have contributed much to our sense of genuine community or belongingness. Though it is difficult to say whether this is a uniquely modern development, it has been argued that modern life, in particular, has come to be marked by broad interpersonal and cultural alienation because, in this age, the rootedness of community and tradition is giving way to the broad but foundationless homogeneity of the global culture (Gunton, 1993).
Most of the received accounts of modern life are flavored with this sense of alienation but the lineaments of the discussion are usually
impossibly broad and well beyond the distinguishable personal events of our lives (some notable exceptions will be discussed later). It is not always clear what we mean when we talk about alienation or other similar terms (e.g., ostracism, loneliness, not belonging) and we are left to wonder exactly what it is that constitutes such experiences. Indeed, it seems prudent to wonder whether there is a discernible unity to the myriad experiences gathered under the rubric of modern alienation such that they can be thought of as the same kind of experience.
Though that question is, perhaps, beyond the scope of the present investigation, the impetus for this project is a similar one. The current investigation seeks to elucidate the lived features of the experience of not belonging without assuming that this experience is identical in kind with experiences marked by similar terms. Though it is assumed that there are broad experiential and conceptual connections between experiences like alienation, loneliness, and not belonging--connections that will become clearer in the literature review--it is also assumed that these experiences are not identical and that their investigation cannot thus be conflated. Experiences like loneliness or ostracism can certainly be associated with not belonging but that association is not a necessary one--one can feel lonely or be ostracized without feeling like he does not belong--and so not belonging will be treated as a unique experience not reducible to these associations.
Literature Review
Philosophical Background
Though it is difficult to clearly indicate the origin of the idea that modern man has become alienated, the generally acknowledged harbingers of this cultural theory are Hegel and Marx. For Hegel, alienation was the profound estrangement that he observed between self and world. This estrangement manifested itself in numerous ways, among them the estrangement of spirit and nature, human desire and social institution (2001/1821, p. 149), the wealthy and the impoverished, and the human subject and the world of objects (p. 72). Marx, true to his Hegelian roots, also emphasized the notion of alienation but he distanced himself from Hegel's idealism. Like Hegel, Marx saw modern man as alienated but he claimed that it was the depersonalizing forces of capitalism and consumerism that were the origin of that alienation and not the more abstract and metaphysical constructs that Hegel employed. It was what Marx called "alienated labour", or the "fact that the worker relates to the product of his labour as to an alien object," that ultimately alienated human beings from their world and from each-other (1998/1844, p. 998).
Existentialist philosophy has also embraced these themes of angst, loneliness, and despair and they write, more explicitly than Hegel or Marx, about the modern experience of alienation. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, characterized modern life as forlorn: "everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to" (1998/1946, p. 1210). Another existential thinker, Martin Heidegger, shared this concern with what he calls "homelessness," or "the symptom of oblivion of being" (1993/1947, p. 242). Heidegger saw this homelessness as "the destiny of the world" and he compared it directly to the Hegelian and Marxist notions of alienation or estrangement: "What Marx recognized in an essential and significant sense, though derived from Hegel, as the estrangement of man has its roots in the homelessness of modern man" (p. 243).
Thinking about human beings as alienated has also been a consistent theme in psychological theory, most often in the form of the assumption that the need to belong is a fundamental human need. This idea, like most ideas of a very general nature, is probably as old as humanity but its roots in modern psychology can be traced most clearly to Alfred Adler, Abraham Maslow, and Eric Fromm. Adler made a concern for community--what he called "social interest"--central to both the human psyche and to humanity as a whole. For Adler, the highest destiny, or perfection, of human life was the realization of a kind of everlasting community (Rychlak 1981, p. 137). Abraham Maslow (1968), like Adler, also saw community, or what he called "the belongingness need," as essential to human functioning, though he analyzed belonging in terms of its individual rather than social import.
Eric Fromm also incorporated the need to belong in his theorizing about psychology and he did so largely within the framework developed by Marx. In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm provided an essentially Marxist account of the psychological ills associated with capitalism: "Man is not only alienated from the work he does, and the things and pleasures he consumes, but also from the social forces which determine our society and the life of everybody living in it" (p. 137). Fromm thus understood the psychology of modern, and especially American, humanity as alienated. Though this alienation was seen as fundamental, its remediation was also seen as a fundamental human drive: "Human existence is characterized by the fact that man is alone and separated from the world; not being able to stand the separation, he is impelled to seek for relatedness and oneness" (Fromm 1947, p. 96). Fromm, like Marx, saw human existence as alienated and, like Adler and Maslow, he saw the desire to overcome that alienation as a fundamental human need.
The historiography of American culture also bears the marks of this preoccupation with alienation and loneliness. Alexis de Tocqueville, in the classic work Democracy in America (1958/1835), characterized American life as fundamentally individualistic and thus isolated. He spoke of this individualism as a "novel expression" that owes its origins to democracy. For de Tocqueville, individualism is not the same as egoism because individualism is not so much self-love as it is a "mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows" (1958/1835, p. 104). He saw this individualism taking root and growing in the modern, and especially American, world and isolating individuals from their community. His final dire prediction was that it would throw modern man "back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart" (p. 106).
The descriptive account offered by de Tocqueville illuminates some of the generalities of the experience of alienation and later accounts of American life manifest some interesting parallels to de Tocqueville's work. Two classic works that address this topic directly and insightfully are Riesman, Glazer, and Denney's The Lonely Crowd (1953) and Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton's Habits of the Heart (1996). Riesman et al.'s (1953) analysis of modern American life is a striking contrast to de Tocqueville's because, though both saw modern man as isolated, they offered very different explanations for that isolation. Whereas de Tocqueville saw individualism as the source of this isolation, Riesman et al blamed conformism, or what they called the "other-directed" personality. According to Riesman et al, this other-direction--as opposed to either inner-direction or tradition-direction--creates a strong pressure towards conformity and allows the mass media to instantiate itself as an arbiter of communal values. Thus "children begin their training as consumers at an increasingly young age" and they grow into consumerist drones whose values and tastes are determined for them by the mass media (p. 120). Ultimately, then, other-directed people seek a kind of conformist homogeneity but "they no more assuage their loneliness in a crowd of peers than one can assuage one's thirst by drinking sea water" (p. 349).
In Habits of the Heart Bellah et al, like Riesman et al, attempted to describe the broad features of American life and they found that individualism, and the loneliness it provokes, pervade the American sensibility. Like de Tocqueville, Bellah et al asserted that "individualism lies at the very core of American culture" (1996, p. 142). Also like de Tocqueville, they asserted that this "modern individualism seems to be producing a way of life that is neither individually nor socially viable" (p. 144). There is also some similarity between this analysis and Riesman et al's analysis in that Bellah et al also observed the paradoxical connection between individualism and conformism such that "refusal to accept established opinion and anxious conformity to the opinions of one's peers turn out to be two sides of the same coin" (p. 148). In their final analysis of American life, Bellah et al...
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