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In most traditional societies there isn’t much interest in self-concept, because society defines who you are right from birth, and the culture offers no alternatives to that definition. Every traditional culture has its beliefs about humanity, and its place in relation to their gods and the rest of the universe, so almost no one questions it. As Tevye says in Fiddler on the Roof, “Because of our traditions, every one of us knows who he is, and what God expects him to do.” In a traditional culture, individual identity is simply a small and unquestioned part of the shared identity of the larger society.
It has often been said that “A culture is the accumulated wisdom of a group of people.” But culture also contains the accumulated stupidity of a group of people, and our own culture is no exception. It is a little easier for us to examine our own mistakes, because of the immense variety of cultural models that we are exposed to.
About thirty years ago, I lived in Moab, a small town in southeastern Utah with 13 different churches serving a population of about 5,000. About 55 miles south, another small town had only one church for nearly as many people. Moab, with its religious diversity, had many more people interested in self-exploration and questioning, trying to figure out what it meant to be a man or a woman, and what a healthy human being really is.
If you have only one world-view, it’s very difficult to even think about asking those kinds of question. And if you do manage to think about asking them, it’s even harder to find someone else willing to think about them and discuss them with you!
Modern society tolerates a great many different religions, world views, and lifestyles, so either we have to pick and choose between them, or invent our own. Many of us are in the process of trying to discover what a human life is, while in most traditional cultures that decision has already been made. You might disagree with a culture in which men own and control everything, and women are the property of their fathers or husbands (just as it was in the US a scant hundred years ago), but people within the culture simply accept it, and the unhappiness that it creates, because they don’t even consider alternatives to it.
The scientific world view also plays a part in the recent upsurge of interest in the self, since science is a way to question and discover how things work through experimentation, rather than just accepting a description provided by a prophet or ancient scripture. Although science started by questioning nature, the same process can also be directed toward asking questions about the questioner, and about the society or culture in which s/he lives.
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