My family celebrates the Halloween season. We decorate the house accordingly. We watch spooky shows and movies. We find thematic snacks and meals. And we dress in costumes and trick or treat.
As a quick aside, I think the popular level religious custody battles over Halloween–which make it no further than a Hegelian level of reflective history–not only completely miss the forest for the trees, but unwittingly show by their inability to reach resolution that an irreducible unity amidst our culture has emerged. The point of this holiday is precisely not the celebration of some intellectual verdict or discovery through polemical flexing or vindication: the One to whose tune we are dancing is getting participated regardless! But, I digress.
I got to thinking again this season, with all the costumes and such, about the phenomenon of anonymity. This is a really curious phenomenon, and I hope this short Halloween special can give you some measure of wonder.
Anonymity is not the suppression of an effect, but the very production of one, and one of a very peculiar sort at that. It is a highly engineered and artificial arrangement of phenomena meant to enable an agent of disclosure to paradoxically come to the fore imperceptibly.
The profundity of this capacity of ours is perhaps obscured by a common way of understanding the maxim that behavior reflects personality, so that even attempts at anonymity give away who we are. For decades now, FBI profilers have touted this common way of understanding that behavior reflects personality, and they will say silly things like that a cluttered home indicates a cluttered mind. Read Turvey’s Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis, 5th ed. for a wonderful exposition of why this is bollocks.
The problem with this common way of understanding this maxim is that it subjects agent to structure, so that a law like correspondence is thought to obtain between intentions and specific behavior. This means knowing one’s personality makes their behavior predictable. But we have been shockingly unable to make anything like this into a science, and this is because intentions are underdetermined by behavior.
It is true that behavior reflects personality, but it does not do so according to some predetermined set of correspondence laws. It may be that every grain of our actions is an expression of our interiority, but we choose what symbolizes what.
Hence, wearing dark clothes does not nomologically mean anything about one’s emotional state. Crossing one’s arms does not nomologically mean that one is defensive or insecure. Micro facial expressions do not nomologically mean that one is lying. And so on and so forth.
However, it may not be by primordial structure that anonymity reflects something of one’s personality, or character, but reflect one’s personality or character it never the less does.
This is because (i) the principle of proportionate causality, and (ii) the law of mean terms. In other words, first, nothing can be in the effect that is not in the total cause, lest things give what they do not have, and second, the more direct an effect is, the more of its cause it is given.
So, far from being an act of suppressing identity, anonymity is an act of creating one. It is the forging of a vehicle, a tool, a technology. Here, we displace ourselves, creating an ambassador, envoy, or vicarious substitute.
Indeed, we do this all the time. Whenever we compartmentalize or segregate our lives into roles, we suppress parts of our identity and emphasize others with creative license.
This is a highly advanced action that only agents of disclosure are capable of. Here in the material realm, on the edges of Being, and the rim of nothing-ness, we exercise this incredible feat in less than admirable and noble ways. But, it is a divine prerogative, as the Muses tell us in the Theogony.
I recall learning in the Catholic Church that God “is not an anonymous force.” 1 But anonymity is not the lack of an identity, it is the exercising of one.
Enjoy the masks and costumes tonight, then! Use your created identities for good, and have fun!
The Analytic Pagan 