Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

by Will Storr

The disconcerting fact is that what we do in the world is, depending on which academic you believe, either largely or wholly controlled by our unconscious.

‘If you devote your time to thinking about what the brain, hormones, genes, evolution, childhood, foetal environment and so on have to do with behaviour, as I do,’ writes the

neurosurgery Robert Sapolsky, ‘it seems simply impossible to think there is free will.’ Most of those who argue that we do have free will believe its power to be limited, marginal or conditional. The illusion that we have it in the way we think we do is perhaps the most important and most devious job of the self. Confabulation, as it emerged on the night of the Devil, brings with it two ideas that are important for our journey. First, the extent to which the self is a ‘story’. It turns the chaos of the outside and our inner worlds into a highly simplified narrative which, if we’re mentally healthy, serves to reassure us that we have control and all is well. For the person struggling with perfectionist thinking, of course, that voice can sometimes be...

are universal. All humans’ brains are structured in this way, because that’s how they’ve evolved. But there’s another clue, in John’s experience, that leads us to the next stage in our journey. During the night of the Devil, John’s mind grabbed the ‘story’ that would form the structure of his new life from his culture. He was raised in a Christian country, by a Catholic mother. His plan for the future and his replacement identity would be built from ideas from these sources. Tales from his culture were selected by his self, which rebuilt itself according to their design. This hints at the incredible power culture, and the particular...

‘In life, if you’re in control, you feel you can’t be hurt,’ John ...

was out of control in a situation, the fear would make me very angry. In that anger I’d have control. People couldn’t hurt me.’ If John’s found happiness now it is, at least in part, because he’s subcontracted his need for control to God. ‘One of the biggest changes in my life is that I don’t feel fear much now,’ he told me. ‘The more you fill yourself with God, the less fear there i...

the outline of my body, can make me feel as if I’m guilty of a moral transgression. This bizarre notion – that physical appearance and moral worth are directly linked – is so deeply sunk into my brain that I feel it to be true on an emotional level. I feel it so powerfully that it easily overwhelms the part of me that reasons that it’s nonsense. But it’s a cultural invention. It was made up by humans. As classical scholar Dr Michael Squire of King’s College, London told me, ‘The Ancient Greeks had this idea that being physically beautiful was the same

as being ethically good and, likewise, being physically ugly was the same as being ethically bad.’ They had a word for this: kalokagathia, which came from kalos, meaning beautiful, kai, meaning ‘and’, and agathos, meaning ‘good’. ‘This idea, that the bodily form is inherently important for understanding who someone is, is very much still with us,’ he said. The scholar Professor Werner Jaeger has written of kalokagathia’s roots in early Greek aristocracy, describing it as their ‘ideal of human perfection, an ideal towards which the elite of the race was constantly trained’. Just as John Pridmore’s self snatched core ideas of who he was and who he ought to be from his culture, so does mine.

To what extent, then, are we the culture we’re born into? ‘In one sense, I’d say culture is about 90 per cent of what we are.’

The self’s ingestion of culture can be tracked, in a startling form, in the brain of the growing baby. Despite the fact we’re born with almost as many neurons as we’ll ever need, the weight of a child’s brain increases by more than 30 per cent during its first fifteen months. If this rapid gain isn’t due to the generation of brain cells, then what is it? Most of it is the weight of new connections, or synapses, that are forming between those cells.

By the ...

two, a human will have generated over a hundred trillion synapses, double that of an adult. So great is this extra brain functionality that youngsters even develop cognitive powers the rest of us lack. Six-month-olds can recognize the faces of individuals from other races with an ease that would have the rest of us worrying quietly whether we were racist. They can even readily identify monkey faces. Babies can hear tones in foreign languages that their parents are deaf to. They’...

But then begins the cull. These connections start dying off at a rate of up to 100,000 per second. It’s believed that this is one of the ways the brain shapes itself to its environment. Huge connectivity means it’s prepared to deal with a wide range of potential possibil...

killed. They call this ‘neural pruning’, and it works a little like a sculptor carving a face into a block of marble: it’s what’s taken away, not what...

When we’re born, then, our brain is ready for the world – or at least a world. It rushes out to greet it, gets to know it, then prunes itself down, specializing itself for the particular culture in which it finds itself. Much of the environment’s influence over who we turn out to be takes place in childhood and adolescence, periods in which our brain is in its phase of heightened, developmental plasticity. Influencing the way our brains initially wire up are our genes. ‘But a genome doesn’t specify the final form of the brain,’ Professor Jonathan Haidt told me. ‘It really just specifies the starting conditions. That’s sort of the initial direction, the first draft of mind. But then as we grow up our brains expect to get all kinds of information from the environment. They continue growing, while incorporating that information.’ People have long argued about what is more important in determining who we are, genes or environment. In a major study, researchers in Queensland collated the results of 2,748 papers and concluded the averag...

‘When I was an undergraduate, over twenty-five years ago, you heard about genetics and environment being spoken about as two different things that were impacting on your development,’ the neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott told me. ‘Now we’ve

come to realize that it’s much more complex than just being a dollop of genetics and a squirt of environment.’ The relationship is symbiotic. Nature and nurture are not in competition, but in conspiracy.

Culture’s influence on the self is more insidious. It comes at us from many directions: from our family, who’ll share their values and beliefs with us as we grow up; from our friends and associates, not least during adolescence; and also from our ‘social category’ – our gender, class, race, and so on – whose cultural norms we’ll be susceptible to absorbing.

It’s both remarkable, and rather depressing, that the body ideals of Ancient Greece look so similar to ours today. Indeed, 2,500 year old depictions of Hercules and Adonis could feature quite happily on the cover of next month’s Men’s Health magazine, even down to the pelvic V-line. Yet peer outside the bubble of the West and things can become disorientatingly different. Professor Sophie Scott told me about a friend who used to spend time in Tanzania, collecting data. ‘Being fat there is a sign of status,’ she said. ‘People would comment in a negative way if she lost weight.

Our obsession with youth, too, turns out to have a cultural root. Sophie described a body of scientific work that shows that, when you ask people to talk about their lives, they don’t tend to bring things up randomly from across their life. Instead they tell you mostly about events from their twenties. ‘It’s thought that your brain might work differently in your twenties and you’re laying down more memories,’ she said. ‘That’s part of the explanation. But more recently somebody did an experiment

where, instead of asking older people, they spoke to people aged ten to eighteen. And it turns out, they do the same thing. They talk about what’s going to happen in their twenties! Basically, in our culture, we think being in your twenties is brilliant.’

It’s thought that we started to become recognizably cultural animals around 45,000 years ago. But if you, like John, were born in the West, many of your finer and most important cogs, springs and wheels were forged around 2,500 years ago, amid the spectacular drama and muscular beauty of Mediterranean mountains and sea.

This realm of proto-entrepreneurialism, travel, novelty and debate was to form the beginning of what, according historian Professor Werner Jaeger, ‘appears to be the beginning of a new conception of the value of the individual, that each soul is in itself an end of infinite value’. This idea – of the individual as a node of value that had the potential to improve itself – birthed the modern Western civilization of freedom, celebrity, democracy and self-improvement we live in today. In its form, Ancient Greece was not a nation as we’d recognize it

One definition of happiness for the Greeks was that it consisted of being able to exercise their powers in pursuit of excellence in a life free from constraints.’

What had been created in Ancient Greece was individualism. As you’d expect in such an intellectually dynamic place, this was a concept that had many critics. But it’s one that still dominates

our lives today. In fact, it’s so easy to spot the foundations of our twenty-first-century age of perfectionism in this Greek notion

This will be the journey of an idea – of how we in the West, since the days of Aristotle, have tended to see ourselves as individuals rather than part of a connected whole.

an important question must be addressed. How can it be that the beliefs and values of a distant people, 2,500 years ago, can play a part in forming who we are in the twenty-first century?

So the brain is a storyteller and it’s also a hero-maker – and the hero that it makes is you. But the hero it makes and the plot it shapes your life around are not created in a void. The brain is a plagiarist, stealing ideas from the stories that surround it, then incorporating them into its self.

we absorb the stories that flow around our culture and use them to make sense of our past, our future, and to help us figure out who we are and who we want to be. We use them to construct our ‘narrative identity’. It’s thought that the stories our parents tell us, and their characteristic shape, begin to play a part in building

our understanding of self and life no earlier than the age of two. Between five and seven, the content of those stories – including ideas about cultural roles, institutions and values – starts to merge with our sense of who we are and who we should be in society. We now have a model of our ‘cultural self.’ It’s during adolescence, according to the psychologist Professor Dan McAdams, that we start to understand our lives as a ‘grand narrative’. In order to help build this narrative, our memories of the past are shuffled and warped – edited as if by a canny screenwriter who’s turning us into a sympathetic, heroic character. We also start imaging the future in such a way that it fits the story we’re creating. The storyteller inside us, then, is heavily influenced by the culture ...

books, stories work as both entertainment and a kind of shopping mall of the self. ‘Culture provides each person with an extensive menu of stories about how to live,’ writes McAdams, ‘and each of us chooses from the menu.’ We build our sense of who we are by ‘appropriating stories from culture’. Turning our lives into myth, he writes, ‘is what adulthood is all about’. Our story gives ...

In the same era in which the Western self was being shaped by Aristotle and the individuals, a grumpy, sarcastic and pernickety thinker was roaming the other side of the planet, gathering

disciples and trying to save the world. His was a land of war. For hundreds of years the rulers of the Zhou Dynasty had overseen their vast empire in relative peace. In contrast to the crags and islands of Greece, most of his country’s population lived on great plains and amongst gentle mountains. These deep and wide horizons were a blessing for agriculture but were easy to conquer and rule centrally. They were also isolated: the inland people that farmed them rarely encountered foreigners or foreign beliefs. During the peaceful era of the Zhou, massive river-irrigation and water-conservation projects had been created. They were grand schemes that supported large farming projects and they all required the efforts of the many to succeed. Ancient China was no place for the ambitious individualist. Group harmony, rather than individual agency, was survival’s favoured mode. But by 2500 BC, the glorious powers of Zhou had disintegrated. The region had

descended into a chaos of massacre and conquest. It was into this mess that an astonishing and eccentric man, Master Kong, or Confucius, arrived. He became obsessed by the idea of bringing China back to its more harmonious days. He was an odd man – kind to some but foul to others, and rigid and pedantic. He made a point, in his dress, of avoiding silk lapels and cuffs of maroon. He didn’t like to eat too much, and unless his dishes were prep...

We can have a good idea what the Confucian self looked like because it

‘The superior man has nothing to compete for,’ he’s recorded as saying. ‘But if he must compete, he does it in an archery match, wherein he ascends to his position bowing in deference.’ He ‘does not boast of himself’, preferring instead ‘the concealment of his virtue’; he ‘cultivates a friendly harmony’ and ‘lets the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection’. What Confucius calls the ‘inferior man’, meanwhile, could be a description of his showy Western counterpart. This is a person who understands not ‘righteousness’ but ‘profit’. He is ‘aware of advantage’ and ‘seeks notoriety’ which causes him ‘daily to go more and more to ruin’. Confucius believed that harmony could only exist among the people if they knew their

place and stayed in it. ‘The superior man does what is proper to the station in which he is. He does not desire to go beyond this.’ And certainly not for personal gain.

Writes historian Michael Schuman, ‘Confucius expected people to do the right thing because it was the right thing to do, not because they’d get paid off at some point in the future.’ In his lifetime, Confucius failed. He wouldn’t become truly influential for another two hundred and fifty years, when the warring period ended. The new rulers of the Han dynasty found his philosophy of deference and duty, which had been kept alive by generations of adherents, agreeable to their project of...

The Han’s ultimate embrace of Confucianism would end up changing the world for ever. Scholars such as Richard Nisbett argue that the flat and fertile landscape of China gave his ideas a kind of pre-destiny. In contrast to the Greeks, with their islands and city states, and their concomitant view of reality as a collection of individual objects, China’s rolling, isolated, conquerable plains and hills produced a species of self that worked best as part of a group. It also resulted in them viewing reality not as a mass of objects, but as a realm of interconnected forces. For the Confucian everything in the universe was not separate, but one. It followed from this that they should seek, not individual success, but harmony. This perspective has a number of profound implications

for the way the East Asian self experiences reality. Ninety-five per cent of modern China belongs to the Han ethnic group and Confucius’s influence still roars in places such as Japan, Vietnam and the Koreas. Incredibly, these differences, which are rooted in the physical landscape thousands of years ago, are still readily detectable in hundreds of millions of people alive today.

For the descendants of Confucius, reality is not a collection of individual objects but a field of interconnected forces. This means that East Asians tend to be more aware of what’s happening in their environment: they’ll see the whole picture, not merely its subject.

Asian art that goes back centuries. ‘It isn’t just that Easterners versus Westerners think about the world differently,’ Nisbett told me. ‘They’re literally seeing a different world. We’ve found that if you show people pictures for three seconds, the Westerners will look all over its main object and only occasionally make eye movements that drift out to the context. For the Chinese, they’re looking constantly back and forth between the objects and the context.

context. The complexity of environments that Easterners can tolerate is much greater than it is for Westerners. I mean, the street scene in East Asia is

just chaotic to

us.

the researchers who study the ‘geography of thought’ have revealed the extent to which where we are shapes who we are. The sort of person we become depends, to a great extent, on who we need to be in our particular environment.

Being tribal animals, we’re also constantly scanning our environment for people who seem to have, in some way, mastered the secrets of a successful life. The ideal self we’re looking for doesn’t only exist in fiction

and gossip, it’s also right there in front of us. And these people can be a powerful source of influence. The psychologist Professor Joseph Henrich writes that the ‘cultural learning’ that comes from those around us ‘reaches directly into our brains and changes the neurological values we place on things and people, and in doing so, it also sets the standards by which we judge ourselves.’ Our brains identify these leaders by being alert to various ‘cues’ that they, and the people around them, display. A basic cue we look for is ‘self-similarity’, for the straightforward reason that we’re more likely to learn salient things by deciding to follow people who are like us in some fundamental way.

Another cue is age, which is especially important for children. Physical dominance is a cue that can be traced back to our primal ancestors and was,