It’s often taken as axiomatic, in any discussion about the human condition nowadays, that people need high self-esteem for optimum well-being. This would be very hard to measure, but it seems a reasonable assumption. Self-esteem breeds self respect and self confidence. These are, arguably, essential characteristics of well-rounded personalities who are comfortable in themselves and likely to be valuable members of their communities. Underlying all this is the need for a sense of identity: we’re unlikely to have high self-esteem if no-one knows or cares about us; we all need to be recognised by our peers and acknowledged as of value to our communities. We all need to be able to answer the question: ’who am I, and where do I fit into society?’
That we feel these needs is not surprising when we look at our evolutionary background. Throughout most of the period of human evolution and development, available archeological evidence indicates that we lived in small, self-sufficient groups in which the way of life, based on hunting and gathering food, did not change much for thousands of years. Humans with body form much like that we have now have been around at least since the Cro-Magnons emerged about 50,000 years ago. They were essentially fully modern humans in terms of skeletons, and the ability to produce tools. There is some evidence of advanced cultural traits, but these only developed slowly. ‘Technology’ changed very gradually. The Stone ages gave way to the Bronze and Iron ages, although not at the same time in all communities. Somewhere around 5 - 8,000 years ago the archeological records indicate the beginnings of agriculture in various places: plants were deliberately established for the food they could provide and some animals became domesticated. About 5000 years ago settlements and communities, characterized by higher population densities than those of the hunter-gatherer bands, became established in southern Mesopotamia – now Iraq. These mark the beginnings of civilization and recorded history and from this time cultural evolution proceeded much more rapidly. But all this cultural development has only been going on for – at most – about one-tenth of the time that humans have been around.
Human behaviour patterns, as they evolved over thousands of years, were geared to life within small groups where there was no problem about recognition or personal identity. Observation of hunter-gatherer groups that survived into modern times shows that the place and role of each individual in these was recognised and individual contributions to group survival and welfare were highly valued. The psychological well-being and the welfare of the individual were strongly associated with the welfare and well-being of the group, which may have been part of a larger grouping – a tribe. These recognition and behaviour patterns are embedded in our genes, in the sense that there would have been positive selection pressures acting in favour of those who conformed to them. This is why the punishment of exile was historically so serious: those who were banished from their community or tribe lost the protection of those communities and the support of their families; they did not belong anywhere and not only lacked the protection of their community, but were also likely to be psychologically devastated. With the establishment of larger communities in towns and cities, where population numbers gradually increased from hundreds to thousands (and are now in the millions), community bonds became weaker and it became harder and harder for individuals to retain their personal importance and identity. Nevertheless, tribal bonds and associations remain strong and important.
There’s plenty of empirical - or at least anecdotal - evidence for this need to belong: we just have to look at the way people behave. Most of our social activities are in quite small groups or organizations within which there are sub-groups that provide their members with their recognised personal niche and to which members frequently show (sometimes strong) loyalty. The ‘units’ that we relate to obviously overlap: people feel strong rapport with ‘their’ team, their town or state – with any group that reinforces their sense of identity: this is who I am; this is why I matter. Examples include sports clubs, church groups, professional societies and groups within workplaces. But we also identify with our country: patriotism in many countries may not be the force it once was (and still is in the United States), but jingoistic enthusiasm for our national identity surges up when it comes to support for sports teams or individuals – the feeling of ‘togetherness’, of almost fanatical tribalism generated by enthusiastic and excited groups, can be extremely strong.
Individuals have different status and importance relative to the other members of each of the groups, communities, or sub-cultures to which they belong. Their status at work or in a professional society may be entirely different from their status in the local sports club. The net result defines their view of themselves in relation to their society. Young people, without focus in society, especially young people who come from broken or dysfunctional families, are likely to join gangs, or indulge in behaviour which will be labelled antisocial by society as a whole, but which is driven by their need to be recognised, to have status within some group, to have an identity. Some of these groups might have bizarre initiation ceremonies and rites of passage. But, once in, you belong, and have the key to self esteem.
Another factor that might influence our confidence and well-being is a sense of place. Those who grow up in the area where they were born are not only likely to be strongly embedded in their local community – assuming it’s reasonably stable – but also, usually, feel strongly connected to the land, to familiar countryside, to the characteristics of scenery and season. The strength of this propensity is very clear from the completely subjective way people tend to extol the beauty and advantages of their country or, quite frequently, the part of the country they live in. There is a visceral bond, weaker in most peripatetic westerners, but astonishingly strong in Aboriginal peoples; for Australian aborigines ‘my country’ is of central importance – they feel the spirit of the country, of their ancestors. It defines their sense of identity; if they are taken from it the pull to return is clearly sometimes overwhelming, and when the tribal and community system in which they have their being breaks down, their lives become dysfunctional, directionless. We of Caucasian descent, immigrants long since displaced from our places of origin, nevertheless feel their atavistic attraction and tend to associate ourselves with those places, although we may know that we will never go back to them. The pull is weaker for us and, in most cases, not a dominant factor in our psyche and our view of ourselves; we have transferred our weaker sense of place to our adopted countries but the strength of the attraction and commitment is likely to vary depending on how long we have lived there, and whether we have stayed in one locality.
This quest for identity shows itself strongly among the young (many of whom are not dysfunctional), who use social networking packages such as Twitter and Facebook to ensure that they are ‘connected’ virtually all the time. Whether that electronic connectedness is an adequate substitute for genuine, face-to-face human contact and interaction is arguable, but it’s clear that many are driven by the feeling that it’s essential to be ‘on the air’ all the time. Some feel compelled to respond almost continuously to the flood of ‘tweets’ that clog their mobile (cell) phones, and if they haven’t updated their Facebook page for a few hours they become concerned that they are out of touch, that they might lose their (largely mythical) place in the virtual community in which they feel they have an identity. Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationships that connection permits—none of this is important. Social networking software clearly encourages people to make weak, superficial connections with each other, hardly likely to contribute positively to constructive social discourse. Most of those virtual friends are unlikely to care about the well-being of the individual, represented by a name and a photograph and some standardized, mostly trivial, social data. So we have to ask whether this kind of connectedness provides an adequate substitute for recognition and acknowledgement by real people in the real world. It seems unlikely.
The whole question of ambition and the urge of so many people to be seen, to be recognised, to have publicly acknowledged status, could usefully be analysed in terms of this human need for identity. Ambition, when you get right down to it, can generally be explained as the drive to be considered important, or interesting, to be identifiable by as many people as possible. Most of those who ‘bask in the public eye’ are concerned with their image and with this ‘recognition factor’. Of course there are people of high ability or achievement who don’t seek the limelight because they are quite comfortable with themselves and don’t require overt recognition and acknowledgement of who they are to maintain their self-esteem and sense of worth.
I think it’s reasonable to speculate that the gradual breakdown of families and family bonds in Western societies must be a major factor contributing to social problems in those societies. There have been social problems of various sorts ever since people began to congregate in large numbers in cities and towns, where individuals tend to disappear in the heaving anonymity of the mass, but the current narcissistic cult of individual satisfaction (‘Me first; what I want is the most important thing!’) and lack of any universally accepted system of morality and responsibility for communities – arising from the lack of recognition within communities – are almost certainly major contributors to current problems. Strong, loving and supportive families, embedded in stable communities, minimise them, as does any supportive group, but it’s hard not to be pessimistic about the outlook.
