Cultural/Evolutionary Basis of Cutting: In Defense of Self-Mutilation, part three
Cultural/Evolutionary Basis of Cutting
Human beings have been cutting themselves for thousands of years. Way back when, however, it wasn’t a solitary activity in response to overwhelming psychological stress. It was integrated into the community as a rite of passage, a ceremonial scarring to mark one’s acceptance into the adult community. Highly ritualized events like this not only provided a sense of direction and belonging, but they acknowledged the human need for intense physical experiences (pain in this case, but other ancient rituals emphasized sex, drugs, starvation, etc.) and gave those experiences boundaries of time, place, and community.
Of course, we have disposed of those barbaric traditions, because we are now too civilized and too rational to do such things to ourselves or our children. Of course, drugs (including but not limited to booze) and addictive behavior; illicit and compulsive sex, prostitution, infidelity; violence and S&M dynamics of all sorts still flourish somewhere in the shadows (and often in the broad daylight) of the adult world. But at least the children are safe. (OK, I’m being obviously sarcastic here. I won’t insult your intelligence by drawing that out.)
My own opinion is that there is nothing inherently bad about sex, drugs, or violence. (There is, of course, something inherently dangerous about them, but it’s not a moral issue.) Nor are they demons from our distant past that we can stamp out through some sort of political, psychological, or social progressivism or reactionism. In fact, we run into virtually identical problems whether we liberate these forces from the prison of moral interpretation (replacing it by either excusing excess with novel designations of victimhood or celebrating excess with a blind eye toward its dangers) or beat them repeatedly with moral baseball bats. They have always been an integral part of the human experience and they always will be. The only choice we have to make is how to work with them, direct them into channels less likely to kill us and our loved ones. As long as we refuse to make that decision, old human patterns will persist in their more destructive forms.
As long as kids have little or no sense of purpose or meaning, no sense of personal identity (you can’t tell just by the hair or the music or whether they get along with their parents), no sense that their actions can affect the world around them, sex, drugs, and violence will flourish in their world, too. Pain will be a solution to pain. Cutting will not stop. But in some distant memory, in the chemicals that flow from our glands and swim through the primordial waters of our bloodstream, all of this connects us to an age when everything made a hell of a lot more sense.
Related Posts on Other Blogs
The RecoverYourLife.com Forums discuss whether seeking help is just “being selfish?”
ModBlog shows us a journey from “Self-Harm to Self-Love” using conscious and deliberate self-branding over cutting scars, and and another “Self-Injury Scar Cover-Up Procedure” using artistic scarification.
ModBlog also has some incredibly interesting posts on ritual and/or performance cutting (Caution: Graphic, bloody pictures).
