On Grandmothers, Off-Topic

Alana gave everyone lots of food for thought yesterday with her post on grandmothers. (It's not her post I refer to as off-topic, it's this one.) This part stuck in my mind all day:

Perhaps, even, the desire is wrong, precisely because it creates conflict, as the Victorians knew it would. (emphasis mine)


Alana didn't assert that this is necessarily true, but I can see how one might. That was, more or less, the Victorian understanding of things. I'm convinced that it isn't, and that the morality of conflict is far more subtle.

Selfishness is part of the human condition - it's intrinsic to everyone's character, though of course it's tempered by socialization and maturity, at least to some degree, in everyone but psychopaths (per Kohlberg and Piaget). However, in my interactions with other people, there's more at work than my selfishness. The other person is intrinsically selfish, too. Conflict arises from the clash of my selfishness with theirs. Or of my selfishness with their reasonableness. Or of my reasonableness with their selfishness. Or of a legitimate difference of perception or understanding or opinion or genuine need. Conflict indicates difference; whatever else it may indicate is more complicated to say.

And difference - that's something else intrinsic to the human condition. We do all have different needs, desires, temptations, strengths, advantages, challenges. As a classical introvert myself, Alana's expressed desire for silence and solitude resonates clearly for me. (And as a single person who relishes living alone, I can't imagine how I would handle living full-time with the noise and energy of a house with children.) God made me in a certain way, and my design happens to include being refreshed and nourished by alone time in a particular way not experienced by extroverts. (This article on introversion is one of my favorite pieces, and describes it all.) We all function best in accordance with our design, the same way a tool or machine is most effective when it's used according to the directions and for its intended purpose.

Now, this doesn't excuse me from my commitments or callings, or from meeting needs or showing love - indeed, sometimes our circumstances and obligations don't allow needs of this sort to be perfectly fulfilled, and we survive. Some would bristle against the word needs in this context, since solitude hardly compares to air and water. But it is a need, in Maslow's sense. The fact that certain needs can't be experienced until subsistence is a foregone conclusion does lend them a different significance, but it doesn't make them less real. And if our less-fortunate (in some respect) predecessors were apparently satisfied with food, clothing and shelter - and can we really know the complexities that formed them? - then perhaps, in a sense, it couldn't have been any other way.

Certainly, we, as modern, Western, educated, middle-class people, are enabled to be excessively self-indulgent. Speaking generally, Victorian morality subjugated self-fulfillment entirely to one's duty to the social fabric; post-modern morality does precisely the opposite (see Alana's very insightful comments on leisure and me-time). Both attitudes are severely flawed. Neither is adequate for the operation of a complex society composed of complex individuals. Neither is a manifestation of love and grace.

For myself, I chose not to feel guilty for living, and accepting the blessings of, and dealing with the challenges of, my reality, rather than someone else's, which I can never fully know.