Originally posted on July 19th, 2008 as “Is Ignorance Bliss?”I’ll be re-posting a few posts from a few years back as I adapt to life with three kids! Been thinking about cross-cultural development a lot the last few weeks so I though it was a good time to bring this one out again.
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I heard an interesting result from some research this past week that I thought I’d share. Research from a Professor at Bethel that’s been researching formation issues in grad students over the past decade has shown a correlation between greater cultural (and not just ethnic) self-awareness and flexibility with higher anxiety. Similarly, those who reflect greater rigidity and lack of awareness reflect lower levels of anxiety.This really has been on my mind lately.
From a systems standpoint, high differentiation (more or less having a distinct sense of self while also staying connected in relationship) is often connected to lower anxiety because the emotional undercurrents are less confusing and people are free enough to live with greater clarity than when they are bound up anxiously with others. I think this is still true. Yet, research is also showing that a more complex consciousness or capacity to see things from other perspectives and cultures is linked with increased anxiety.
On some level I’m not surprised. I once heard a professor say “Ignorance isn’t bliss. Ignorance is ignorance!” Yet the research shows on some level ignorance is indeed bliss, or at least comes with less anxiety. People who have more rigid personal systems or worldviews and who have not yet encountered levels of pain and difficulty that provide the necessary catalyst for a “crisis of faith” (or worldview) in ways are able to live with greater contentment about their own lives. The downside is that this means that many of us are content in our own worlds, but almost precisely because we’re more clueless about or unaware of the legitimacy of very different or competing points of view or perspectives.
The research shows that the more we truly “know” those who are different from us, the greater our anxiety will be. Maybe this is because we care more and have to keep in tension competing or challenging values outside of what we hold most naturally. We all know that “loving our neighbor” is hard, but this shows that those who have the capacity to see things from a different perspective (in the way they see it, and not in the way you would see it if you were in their shoes), will find that seeking to love others well will carry with it at times a fair measure of anxiety and internal tension. Loving others incarnationally (on their terms) is a much more anxious process than loving others myopically (on our terms).
This is interesting to me because I’ve often struggled with why I seem to see the “relatively more clueless” experience more happiness and euphoria in life at times than those who are “relatively more discerning” or who have a more complex capacity for vision.
The question I have to ask myself is this: Would I rather be in bliss, but intellectually and emotionally cut off from other people’s worlds or would I rather be able to be more intimately connected with other people’s cares and concerns from their perspective and experience for myself more angst, tension, and emotional turmoil?
Seems like one of those options falls in line with discipleship to Christ and one doesn’t. This reality has some real developmental implications which maybe I can write about as I think through them.
Updated thoughts 11/12/10: As I reread this one thing is jumping out at me right now. A lot of people encourage cross-cultural action and behavior. But this research would suggest that unless you have a plan to help people deal with what is generated internally and emotionally through that process there likely will be limited long-term change.
What do you think?
