Father's Day and Model Theories of Self-Representation

And why we need each other to lift each other up

I wrote this pretty quickly and posted it with minimal revision and editing, because it’s Father’s Day. Pardon begged for the lack of polish. I also couldn’t think of a really fitting photo, because I imagine Dad would be embarrassed if I used his.

My Dad

It’s Father’s Day, so I’m thinking about my dad. My dad is a conservative Mennonite welder who grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and has lived most of his adult life in Plain City, Ohio. He’s a white, Christian, rural, blue-collar American. For most of his adult life, he was a registered Republican who–when we could intermittently afford it–subscribed to the Weekly Standard and The Economist.

But one thing that’s been bringing Dad to mind this week is that he loves immigrants. Not, mind you, with pious heaviness or objectifying fetishism. Dad just loves people. Whether through constitution or discipline, he doesn’t seem to believe that anyone is unlike him, except that they have interesting languages, experiences and ideas he’d like to find out more about. If he’s ever seen himself and any other human as representatives of groups set against each other in a zero-sum battle for resources, he hasn’t let on around me.

He likes people, and he’s interested in people, especially if they have languages, experiences and ideas that are different from his, so it was a plus in his mind that the best place in Columbus for rock-bottom prices on usable used tires was owned by Iraqis. He got to hang around, hear their stories, and get them to teach him little bits of Arabic while they changed his tires. He would come home from work and try to teach us bits of Ukrainian he learned from his coworker Igor in the break room. And like I said–it wasn’t just a special way he treated immigrants–once or twice, after the Saturday morning art classes at CCAD my brother and I won scholarships for, he took us to visit his coworker Tom, who lived in a gnarly neighborhood east of High Street and had to have a white coworker drive with him to cash his paychecks at the bank in Plain City.

But like I said, he doesn’t go around kicking bushes in hopes of scaring up some novelty. He just has an extremely generous definition of community, and what he owes to the people in it. He kept buying tires from the Iraqis even when he didn’t need to buy $15 tires to keep the wolf at bay. He happily drove Tom to the bank so Tom wouldn’t get harassed by small-town cops. He volunteered as a conversation partner for international students at Ohio State. In the summer of 2020, during the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, he wasn’t part of the right online groups to know where to go at what time for marches and demonstrations in Columbus, so he would drive downtown after lunch on the weekends and seek out the demonstrations.

Model Theories of Self-Representation

Our best current evidence suggests that your internal representation of yourself is a model your brain constructs out of a cacophony of data your body draws from the world around you. The model isn’t separate from your perceptions—it’s what allows you to perceive the world around you as a multidimensional environment filled with things you can see and touch and push on. The basic purpose of the model is to help you navigate the world around you–both by packaging perceptual information into a rich world of objects with various causal interactions, and also by keeping track of your goals, your capacities, your vulnerabilities and so on.

But internal self-modeling extends beyond modeling yourself relative to physical environments. You also perceive and track complicated causal systems in your interactions with other humans. One of the roles of your self-representation is to track your behavior in relation to how the people around you respond to it, so that you can detect when their responses suggest that your group standing or membership is at risk, so you can modify your behavior (see Heatherton, 2011). Charles Horton Cooley referred to this (although, to be fair, he wasn’t working with exactly the contemporary conception) as “The Looking-Glass Self,” the idea being that other people’s responses are like a mirror in which we see our own social reflection. G.H. Mead added to Cooley’s theory the idea of the Generalized Other, a model of how we abstract from interactions a shared psychological profile of groups we’re a part of, and see ourselves against that backdrop without even needing further interactions with other group members. You know what your friends will think of that shirt without having to hear it from them.

Knowing how our groups think is important, because humans are hugely social. Humans understand ourselves and each other by forming collective identities and collective goals, and see ourselves and others as filling roles within a collective structure that defines who we are (lots of this evidence collected in the works of Tomasello). This process spills over into how you model yourself relative to other humans; you perceive others as playing roles and imitate their performance to fulfill those roles yourself (Mead and Tomasello both write about this, Tomasello referencing Mead).

Making Sense of Why It Matters, If It Does

Anyway–that basic structure gives some reason to think that part of why I admire, and try to imitate my dad’s instinctive interest in and solidarity with people who are different from him is that he’s my dad, and I love him, and so I think that being a good adult means playing the role the way he does. There’s something to that thought, but I think there’s a different, deeper epistemological point.

I got to hear the Ukrainian and Spanish and Arabic phrases he learned. I heard their stories second-hand, and sometimes first-hand in our living room. When I bought my first car, a sway-hipped, rusted out, $300 89’ Camry, he gave me directions to the Iraqi shop, and I got to hear their stories. When a Sudanese friend needed a ride to Pennsylvania, he asked me because I was my father’s son. When I found myself living in a neighborhood like Ben’s, it wasn’t a shock–I’d been to places like that before. The point is that Dad placed my siblings and I into a situation where we couldn’t help identifying with people who were different from us because he identified with them. Where the way they played their roles and the way they responded to us became part of how we understood ourselves.

Did I benefit from that? Absolutely. Without question. I got cheap tires. But also: I’ve had conversations about courtship practice with Kenyans and Ethiopians that changed how I think about marriage, family and love. I’ve had conversations with Nepalis that changed how I think about culture, church and God in ways that had practical impact. I learned how to talk to drug dealers (and how to file an insurance claim when your car takes a few strays from a turf-war firefight) from my neighbors in Kensington. I’ve been fed so much delicious food, and welcomed into so many homes–just in the United States–to say nothing of the benefits of encountering other people in their home cultures and contexts (Nepali kukris are the ultimate practical blade, and all public toilets should be squat toilets). I have a richer knowledge of myself and of my world than I would otherwise have.

Bad People

There’s a different, less comfortable aspect of my dad’s approach to life: he’s not scared of bad people. And I don’t just mean ‘demonized’ people. I mean that he’ll break bread with people who’ve done bad things, even if they aren’t altogether reformed. Not that he doesn’t believe in justice or restitution or protecting innocent people–but that his concern for another person isn’t obviously diminished in light of their moral degeneracy. As near as I can guess, some of his motivation is a baseline concern for the humanity of others. But that’s not all of it–he also cares about bad people because he’s aware of his own flaws and the inescapability of moral compromise. He sees that darkness and delusion simmer in us all, but most of us get lucky so that it doesn’t boil up out of us at the wrong time, in the wrong way and swamp our lives. We can rationalize and justify and ignore our darkness and our stupidity until it recedes from sight and thus from mind. Whatever the reason for it, it sticks with me. Sometimes, when I think about the powerful people who kick the rest of us around in search of elusive self-actualization, I dream of one day refusing to shake their hands. Snubbing them in a way that stings.

I generally remember pretty quickly that none of those people will ever plausibly care about shaking my hand, much less be stung by not getting to. But I also think, uncomfortably, that Dad would probably shake their hands. Because they’re people.

And that’s a less comfortable thing for me to accept. Obviously, diversity and immigration are good. Different people see the world differently, and have different skills and knowledge, and the more of it we have, the better off we all are. We lift each other up to better things. But what good is moral compromise? What good can come from shaking hands instead of punching faces? When we lift each other up to better things, do we lift up the stupid and evil people, too?

Is it complicated? I’m not sure. It’s clear that accountability, safety, restitution and recompense are all important. But have I benefited from the way my models of myself and of the world have been changed by people I think are morally compromised, or who think I’m morally compromised? Yeah, I have. Based on some of our conversations with them, Dad and I concluded that at least one or two of those Iraqi tire guys drove tanks for Saddam. Dad’s friend Tom once beat up a gaggle of teens with a baseball bat and claimed self-defense, but it wasn’t clear what the whole story was. I’ve learned from addicts and felons and idiots with bad politics

I’m not trying to both-sides anything or come out swinging for that deadest of all American horses, knee-jerk centrism. Dad quit the Republican party. He marched in 2020. Caring for people, even hearing them out, doesn’t mean we give all ideas equal weight. Some ideas are better than others, and some people–no matter how much we care about their welfare–are wrong, and shouldn’t be allowed to carry out their agenda. All I’m saying is that when I think of my dad, one way I suspect he’s influenced my model of the world is by convincing me that people are mostly just people. Limited and misguided, with mixed motives and questionable instincts. We need the skills and tools and perspectives and knowledge of others. We need each other to lift each other up. And when I think of my dad, one way I suspect he’s influenced my model of myself is by convincing me that I’m not different from other people; I’m limited and misguided, with mixed motives and questionable instincts. The world goes far beyond what I’ve seen, and I can’t understand or change it on my own. We need each other to lift each other up.