Relationships: A Societal PerspectiveMembership Status
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By yahya
08/13/05 (Edited 02/27/12)
Driven by the emotional viscosity, a social structure relies much upon the hierarchy of human relationships. Talking in socio-psychological terms, relationships are categorized as follows:
1) Consanguineous Relationships.
2) Those recognized by cultural convention; like marriage and adoption, further subcategorized into sexual and asexual relationships.
One must keep in mind that a third kind of relationships is usually described as Legal Relationships. But legal recognition is normally attributed to a relationship that already falls in an above described category; like marriage which is a cultural ritual or a social contract. So we won't be considering it as a permanently differentiated category.
Reflecting as a lay-man, one could easily fall a prey to the temptation of asking an apparently irrelevant but an extremely vital question: â??What are relationships?â? A relationship, in sociology, is defined as a social connection between two human variables. Talking in terms of psychology, however, a relationship is the dependence of a variable on another. Apart from their professional usefulness, these definitions, instead of clearing one's conceptual approach towards his society, push him into the realm of abstractly interwoven ideas that, quite normally, do him no good. Personally, however, I'll prefer to use rather simpler words, and say that a relationship is marked by the intensity of an Emotional Cross Fade between two individuals. When a human being, emotionally, feels attached and, in some of the cases, attracted, to another human being, we dub it as feelings. But if the same is felt by both, cross- fading the emotions, it is called a relationship.
Being careful towards the choice of words, one must consider, quite seriously, the fact that people do not respond to other people directly; instead, they respond to whatever they imagine other people to be. They respond to other people's behavior and the meanings they impute to it. For a normal human being, other human beings do not existâ?¦ what really exists is their behavior. For normal human beings even reality is not something that is â??just out there'; reality is constructed in their minds as they size one another up and guess at the feelings and impulses of one another. A fact has no meaning of itselfâ?¦ meanings are given to facts and to human actions by human beings.
In order to make this whole theory clearer, we need to meditate on the nature of human existence. Humans are not inanimate objects like stars or other cosmic surroundings, which could be pointed out directly in terms of concrete definitions. Humans are defined by their symbolic interactions. Say, for example, the person â??A' is son of the person â??B' whereas he is the husband of the person â??C'. If we ask the person â??B' and â??C' to define the person â??A', their definitions would differ exorbitantly. The father will define the existence of his son in terms of his own interpretations of his behavioral and interactive approach. The wife will define his existence in another perspective, heavily influenced by the sexual nature of their relationship.
Considering the subjectivity of human existence, one comes to realize the importance of â??role playing' in a social surrounding. In the above mentioned example, the person â??A' plays two different roles: in case of his interaction with the person â??B' he plays the role of a son, while interacting with the person â??C', he plays the role of a husband. This â??role playing' is further complicated by social â??norms', or what is often called â??expected behavior'. In both the roles, the person â??A' is expected to do certain things and is expected to behave in a certain way. The â??unexpected' behavior would not be acceptable by society, and thus the term â??taboo', defining abnormal behaviors and unexpected correlative patterns.
â??Role playing' is an essential task one has to take to himself in order to justify his social existence. The important question here is: is this role playing decisive? Do humans, in order to interact socially, wear masks and try beguiling others? The answer, quite disappointingly, is yes. The study of â??persona' in psychology also reveals the same facts.
Coined by Carl Jung, â??persona' refers to the personality that an individual projects to others, as differentiated from the authentic self. The term is derived from the Latin persona, referring to the masks worn by Etruscan mimes. According to Jung, the persona enables an individual to interrelate with the world around him by reflecting the role in life that the individual is playing. In this way one can arrive at a compromise between one's innate psychological constitution and society. Thus, the persona enables the individual to adapt to society's demands. This, comments Jung, is a normal approach of an individual. Like sociology's â??role playing theory', psychology also believes that humans, in order to serve the dominating characteristics of a society, mask themselves and, thus, appear decisively different in front of other human variables.
One could, very rightly, argue against this, quite frenziedly nominal, theory. Most of these roles are normally pre-assigned to a person and not chosen by free will. For example, one is born a son to a father in a family. If he takes on the role of a son, how is he deceiving his father or the society he lives in? The answer to this question requires a clearly distinguishing knowledge of a person's â??natural behavior' and what is called an â??action-driven social behavior'. A son behaves naturally towards his father, and, in doing so, he simply fulfills the demands of a biological reality. But he can behave naturally towards his father only if society does not exist around them and they are, say, deserted onto an island, left there alone to interact with just each other. When society comes in, the behaviors are no more natural, they are action-driven, always conscious of a social observer. The action-driven behavior ought to be distinguished from the natural behavior, because the action-driven behavior is deliberate whereas the natural behavior is not.
By the term â??role playing', sociologists mean the deliberately chosen sets of behaviors, normally chosen to please the â??social observer' and, like I mentioned earlier, to justify the social existence. If, for a moment, we assume that the role-playing in the consanguineous relationships is pretty normal and indecisive even in the presence of the social observer, we cannot, whatsoever, prove it in the non-consanguineous relationships. If a person is destined to be born in a particular family, he still chooses to be a husband. The fact, on the contrary, is crueler. A child is â??trained' in ways of his social interaction even with the blood-relatives. A girl is â??told' to behave differently to her father than the way her brother does. A boy is â??told' to think of his mother as a special woman and not just another feminine figure he can have sex with. According to Freud, this training, juxtaposed with one's inner thoughts dubbed as id, causes psychological diseases like Oedipus and Electra complexes.
Children are not only trained in terms of their interactive behavior, but are also initiated into the joys of decisive outlook from a very early age. Girls are strictly advised to make themselves up before going out to attend a family dinner. Boys are trained in terms of power, chivalry and nicety, calling for a set of behavioral actions dubbed, collectively, as mannerism. This training is partly done subconsciously through â??the looking glass self'. We create an image of ourselves deep in the dark chasms of our mind, and that image is influenced completely by how we see other people react towards us. A pretty girl is reacted towards in precisely that wayâ?¦ treated like a precious little jewel, and, thus, develops an image of herself telling her that she is beautiful. A brilliant boy's mind works in the same way. But the looking glass self does not end here. Children are driven by the expectations their beloved ones nurture in their reactive approach. And things get complicated. Where a brilliant and intelligent boy gains self-respect and self-confidence by the reactions he encounters, he also tries hard to mask himself as one all the time, simply, to maintain those reactive interactions, which satisfy his emotional and intellectual needs. This is yet another aspect of the role-playing and is highly decisive and unnatural.
Do I mean to say that society corrupts? If that is exactly what you are asking right now then the answer is in negative. I am not suggesting that society essentially corruptsâ?¦ but I would rather mention someone who actually did suggest that. Jean Jacques Rousseau is a well-known figure to all those who indulge in studying western literature and/or western philosophy. In his â?? Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Mankindâ? (1755; trans. 1761), he distinguished between â??natural manâ? (man as formed by nature) and â??social manâ? (man as shaped by society). He argued that science, art, and social institutions have corrupted humankind and that the natural, or primitive, state is morally superior to the civilized state. This is dubbed as a â??Naturalisticâ? view in philosophy and stands juxtaposed with the views of Pietists, who emphasized Christian devotion and diligence as paths to the good life; and the Enlightment thinkers, who focused on reason and clear thinking as the sensible way to happiness.
Rousseau's arguments are powerful and very convincing, but lets just say that I, like many others, am not convinced fully. I would rather prefer to say that society has a twofold behavior towards the ones who live in it. On one hand, it plays the role of a text book teacher, with all its morals, mores, values and taboos. While on the other, it works quite contradictorily. We all know, as the society does teach us, that smuggling or other unfair means of earning money are not â??good'. But, contradictorily, society assigns higher status to the ones with grater amounts of it, irrespective of the means the very money was earned by. Now this is just one of the many examples. Truth is a social value, accepted to be necessary by all developed civilizations regardless of religions and cultural traditions. Yet, quite regrettably, we don't come across many societies really enforcing its implementation. â??Watch your own back'. That's the name of the game our present global village is playing, whereas conventional mores teach us brotherhood and watching out for our humane brothers.
Concluding this essay, let me just say that relationships, as understood by a normal social human being, do not exist. Decisive as they are, humans wear masks to interact socially.
