If the modern person considers himself to be something he can create for himself, so he tends to extend that same notion to his relationship to the world in general. We no longer think of ourselves as subject to the world’s fixed nature, or of it as having an objective authority or meaning. We are the ones with power, and we are the ones who give the world significance.

From a Fixed World to a Plastic World

One important part of the context of the changing understanding of the self is that of the correlative understanding of the world (which includes how we understand the self) that has also emerged over time. Indeed, the notion of the self with which we now intuitively operate in the West—that of something plastic that we believe we can shape in any way we wish—is arguably simply one example of a much broader view of the whole of reality.

To clarify this, it is useful to engage in a thought experiment. If I had been born in England in the fourteenth century, I would have lived in a world that I would have considered stable and fixed. Wherever I was born in the social hierarchy—peasant, noble, or king—that is where I would have remained. In all likelihood, I would have been born to a family that worked the soil as peasant farmers. My career path would thus have been determined at birth: I would grow up to be a peasant farmer. My geographical placement would have been fixed as well, as travel, let alone emigration, would have been difficult and pointless. Everything I needed would have been in the village or town where I was born. I would have had a wide extended family with whose members I was familiar. I would probably have met the girl I was to marry fairly early in life. I would have been baptized, married, and buried in the same church. And my children—as well as my children’s children—would have experienced much the same. My religion would not be a choice since the Catholic church was the only religion available in my town. And my life on an annual basis would have been shaped decisively by the rhythm of the seasons: I needed to sow my crops in the spring, not the winter, and harvest them in the autumn, not the summer, praying for appropriate rain and sunshine in the interim. In short, my world would have been very fixed and very stable.

Our world is very different. Mass transportation, migration, education, social mobility, technology, science, medicine: all of these things and more have served to make the world a much more plastic place than it was in 1400. I will look at a few specifics below, but notice here the general picture: where once the world was fixed and therefore I needed to find my place within it (a place that was itself rather fixed), now its lack of fixity inclines me to think that the world can actually be shaped to my will. I was born the son of a small-town accountant and lived in Gloucestershire as a child, attending a state grammar school; but, unlike my parents, I went to college, gained an undergraduate and a postgraduate degree, and, having worked at four previous institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, I am now a professor of humanities at a college in western Pennsylvania.

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