Universal? Maybe Not
My thoughts on various claims about universal human needs and feelings.
Everyone craves human connection and suffers when it’s missing in their lives.
What kid doesn’t love being the center of attention?
Whether we admit it or not, we all fear making mistakes.
His story illustrates the universal ambition to leave one’s mark on the world.
When I come across statements like those above, I stop and hold them at arm’s length. Is the assertion about universal human tendencies true? Is it true absolutely rather than as a matter of degree? Is there evidence for it, or is it just a common assumption?
All too often, when we hold up such claims against the vast range of individual variation and human cultures, we see that we have to dial them back if we care about truth. And all too often, hidden in those supposedly universal statements are rationales for stigmatization or exclusion, with harm done to those whose preferences, life trajectories and individuality lie outside of the norm.
Introverts are among those whose experiences may not match what’s presumed to be universal.
Let’s take what might appear to be a trivial example: insistence that every child deserves and needs to have the spotlight on them once a year in a birthday party. After all, what kid doesn’t love being the center of attention on their special day? Well, some introverts would rather jump into a freezing lake than sit through a birthday party in their honor.
If we imagine the reaction of parents to a kid who bravely says he’d rather not have a birthday party, there are several possibilities. Denial: “Don’t be silly, of course you do.” Pathologizing: “What do you mean? What’s wrong with you?” Overruling: “Well, I want to give you a birthday party, and that’s that.” Accommodating: “Oh! Then what would you like to do instead?” I doubt very much anyone was hauled into a psychiatric institution or experienced lifelong trauma due to the first three kinds of responses, but still, some harm to the child would have occurred.
At the opposite end of the lifecycle, let’s take an elderly person whose doctor has taken to heart the idea that being alone causes unhappiness and is necessarily bad for one’s health. If the patient protests, denial and pathologizing can very well come next from the doctor. Hopefully a doctor wouldn’t have the power to overrule an introvert who said they enjoyed spending most of their time alone, but the doctor’s arrogant and invalidating attitude would be wrong in and of itself.
I got started on this line of thinking when a writing workshop instructor said that we all read fiction and memoir to connect with universal themes like love, loss, fear, jealousy and redemption. I reflected and remembered many instances where people who were reading the same things I was commented on how “relatable” the emotions, characters or events in a story were. As the instructor maintained, it seemed they were indeed responding to what they and the narrative had in common.
On the other hand, I also recalled quite a few instances in which a story enthralled me because the setting was new and fascinating to me, the emotional dynamics differed from my own, and the characters and their predicaments were things I had never experienced or perhaps even imagined. Through reading, I learn quite a lot about the world and people. For example, when I finished the 530-page novel The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki, set in pre-World War II Japan, I understood more about a society where nearly every waking hour was spent in deference to – or in the case of one character – in rebellion against norms of propriety. The book’s level of detail charmed me by being so un-universal.
I also enjoy crime novels and spy thrillers because the author has set up interesting, complicated story lines that resolve at the end like a satisfying piece of music – not because I identify with the characters or what motivates them. If I also learn more about Cold War history, forensic psychology, computer hacking or counter-intelligence from such reading, that’s a bonus.
After I expressed skepticism, I dropped the discussion with the writing instructor because I sensed that his next move was to argue that underneath my fascination with the unfamiliar, I was responding to universal human currents without realizing it. Or perhaps he’d just insist again that people read literature for universal human themes and always would do so. Being a stubborn person who likes to think for herself, I do not accept someone else’s generalized truth as valid even if experts and everyone else in the world agree. To me, this type of discussion resembles the parent or doctor telling the child or patient what to believe about their own experience. The introvert in me holds that line.