I think ~most people crave reasonably stable, socially legible categories. Let’s call these thick categories. These are roles you can opt into (for a price) but cannot freely shape. We can contrast them to thin social categories which are customisable, fluid, and temporary. The latter includes most subcultures, modern professions, and moral beliefs. Thick categories are distinguished from thin ones by their apparent rigidity. They require a degree of non-voluntariness, making them intimidating for the modern used to infinite optionality. A few examples are: farmers, police officers, soldiers, funeral directors, academics in old institutions, and priests.
There is always a danger for a social identity to thin out. Social roles resemble, ever more closely, a form of “LARPing.” Sure, I am a Christian, or a communist, or a totalitarian, but the way I live is materially identical to everyone else. It is a world where people – their clothing, accents, lifestyles, habits – are diverse and shallow. A world of the aesthetic wiki and the starter pack, where the variety of human forms is immense but transient, impermanent. Compare our modern caricatures to those of an earlier age, say the 19th century:
The humour of both of these caricatures works in the same way: we recognise a “social type” and the previously-unseen pattern comprising it. Yet how different their grammars are! The Georgian plate illustration depicts men with timeless, distinct ‘uniforms’, fundamental alterations to their bodies, and particular long-term habits. They are sailors and remain recognisably so. It is inconceivable that these two men, telling their tales of Battle, will become unrecognisable in 20 years. Or to put it another way, as they are now tells the story of a lifestyle which will always be a permanent part of their identity. The digital meme, on the other hand, depicts modular, disembodied signifiers: a tendency to sweat, an off-the-shelf shirt, a brand of shoes, unobtrusive tattoos, a preference for a kind of bitter. The “Middle-aged UK Pub Male” could theoretically reinvent himself completely, just as the image-editor could alter it. In doing so there would be no trace of his old identity. It would merely be a sweaty, Carling-soaked dream. Unlike the sailors, it is an ultra-specific, already dated image. But that does not matter. Both the subject and the audience are presumed to be impermanent.
The process of a social ‘thinning out’ first became truly noticeable in the early 1960s (although critiques of interchangeable city dwellers can be found in the 1930s and 1950s). From left-quarters it was criticised as a disempowering, socially enervating effect of capitalism:
The reign of such a one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the contrary, there is a great deal of “Worship together this week,” “Why not try God,” Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.
(Marcuse, “The One-Dimensional Man.”)
Conversely, on the right – or right-adjacent – it was criticised (aside from the obvious demolition of social hierarchy) on the grounds it represented the destruction of self-respect and character. Joan Didion in her earlier, more individualistic phase, recounted the following anecdote:
In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: “Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it.” Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, “fortunately for us,” hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnée.
(Didion, “On Self Respect”, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem)
Although Didion speaks also of making one’s own moral code, or choosing one’s own life, it is clear she wants to live in a world populated by characters. That is, people who have committed to a social position, or role, or way of life, and through self-discipline thereby reproduce it. Do we want these kinds of characters in life? They represent a mixture of trauma, irreparable change, and social rigidity. In short, “social types” only exist in the shadow of non-optionality.
On the one hand I want to hang on to these types with all my might, presumably with the force of the state. In fact, I want to become a social type: a teacher, local pillar of the community, father, son, and grandfather. On the other I feel like letting go, allowing the centrifugal effects of modern technology, progressive capitalism, and liberal individualism spin me out into a fully independent agent. Things like community, villages, flags, uniforms, accents, national cuisine, local stereotypes, regional dialects, and old traditions can all vanish in the haze. Humanity produced its collective forms of culture between 12,000BC and 2025AD. After that it gave up and simply recycled from the existing library from now until eternity. And that’s okay because we live complete and perfect from moment to moment, making art, music, traditions, and life, even if it vanishes like the ripples in the sea.