The Social Organization | Discover Lloyd Bower's Thrilling Stories: Divide the Country, Freedom as Public Utility, The Results of Polar Bear Research & Keep These In the Family.
I can give parents a very good reason for sending their kids to college. You meet a lot of different people there, and they can change your life. The relationships that develop in college, and the influence they have, often linger longer in the memory than the schoolwork does. You will likely never again experience such a variety of people.
I met my first serious girlfriend in college. Looking back at our relationship, it had the character of a futile high-school crush, not a serious relationship. She did not cruelly reject me; she just let me know that she barely knew me. We never kissed or anything like that. It remains in my memory as a nine-month-long study in sexual frustration.
But a friend of mine in college defined it in more adult terms. His name was Gil, and he wanted to go to med-school to become a psychiatrist. I guess he was testing diagnostic procedures on me when he spoke in his head-in-the-clouds voice: "Does your girl suffer from recurring depression?"
Odd to think that, in an ashy sort of college beer-joint, that stank of stale cigarette smoke and spilt beer, people would talk about such things. I had no way of knowing if my would-be girlfriend suffered from "depression" or not, and curiously never even asked Gil to define it; but the question got my attention right away. She just looked real good and radiated enchantment, with a willowy thinness and a charmingly thoughtful way of drawing her hair back from her face.
Gil continued that (I am paraphrasing.) "There is a reciprocal relationship between memory and selfhood. Selfhood needs memory because it serves as a digest of things that we experience, that give us a sense of what works and what doesn't. Memory helps us measure our psychic distance to other people and remains our spiritual link to them. In that sense, memory structures our sense of a social organization." Meeting outlier intellectuals in college is sort of standard. I hadn't realized.
Gil wasn't finished: "Conversely, memory needs selfhood to give it a foundation, organization, and make it intelligible. He mentioned two other terms, "personal continuity" and "ego-strength". I do not remember if he said anything about them, but I have gleaned a little from on-line sources.
The term "ego-strength" gives a scientific gloss to more pedestrian terms like "courage", "strength of character", and "self-reliance". One expects a person with ego-strength to have personal conviction, a sense of direction, and a persuasiveness that does not suffer fools for very long. These qualities also strengthen the social organization that grows up around them. Otherwise we remain atomized, lacking the personal strength that resists the compulsive process.
Wikipedia defines "personal continuity" in a section of its "Personal Identity" article. I found it hard reading: "Personal continuity is the union affecting the facets arising from personality in order to avoid discontinuities. . . . Personal continuity is the property of a continuous and connected period of time." These high-falutin' definitions obfuscate the real intention of personal continuity, namely that a person reacts to his changing environments with an unchanging core of forward-moving selfhood.