A reader e-mailed yesterday with some fascinating and important information:

Reading your work about the BenOp, I’ve wanted to contribute a piece of the puzzle, a notion that would help to solidify one of the axes in locating this complicated mess we are all in.  I hope not to write a treatise, but to share an insight.

Gordon Neufeld, a Canadian psychologist, has written about the idea of peer orientation, that is to say, the tendency to model oneself after the people whom one considers like individuals.  (www.neufeldinstitute.org)

This is not to be confused with peer pressure.  It’s not just about children, though that is Neufeld’s focus.  Peer orientation has been evolving along with mankind, but exploded with the Industrial Revolution and again in the Post WWII era, and yet again with the Digital Revolution.  I’m sure you can think of more accelerators.

In a functioning society, culture is transmitted mostly vertically, and somewhat horizontally; that is, children model their parents’ behavior, who in turn model the extended family culture, who in turn model their institutions, sacred and otherwise.  Loving adults are meant to be nurturing Alphas to dependent children.  Adults are to take turns in the Alpha and dependent roles as only one can lead at any given moment.  (You can see where there has been ample abuse of the Alpha throughout history, ruining relationships, institutions, etc.)  A healthy human goes through stages of attachment: through the senses–sameness–belonging and loyalty–love–psychological intimacy–emotional intimacy.  We learn to be diplomatic as well as true to ourselves.  People are more or less designed neurologically and psychologically to relate to a tribe.  We can learn to live in a pluralistic society, but it takes a hell of a lot of maturity, which ironically can only come with a strong attachment to the family or close surrogates.  Atomization happens when families/communities/personal maturity falls apart.

Our cultures flatline and we become susceptible to whatever is the fashion of the moment.  It’s not something we think about; it just happens.  All the things that dilute our relationships, that pull us away from the people we are personally attached to, contribute to peer orientation.  Needing to work too many hours and not getting enough face time with family;  inability to bridge separation due to differences with our loved ones; loss or perceived loss of unconditional love; the shame a father feels when he can’t provide and subsequently loses the confidence to nurture and lead; children who spend all day with other children, who are not designed to care for them and whom they are more likely to attach unless their teacher presents as a strong and trustworthy caregiver and parents also nurture the bond.  A lot of our assumptions about how society and people are and should be, are perverted by peer orientation.  We assume adolescents should not only individuate, but must also rebel and reject their parents.  We assume we must know so much more about any subject than our backward ancestors, and we don’t integrate new findings with old wisdom.  (On the other hand, sometimes we refuse to reinterpret old wisdom in light of new knowledge and we render our relationships brittle.)  We constantly throw the baby out with the bathwater and then wonder why it is so hard to live life when we start from zero at each generation and at each human being.  We create cultures at a disconnect from their roots, cultures that are sterile and cannot reproduce across generations.  Yet there is hope because we are hardwired for relationship and maturity, if only we could respect nature’s rules, if only we would not educate ourselves out of our instincts.

I have been studying this paradigm for about five years now and could go on and on, but won’t.  I particularly like to zoom out to macro and societal implications.  Hope you find this engaging.

I do! Boy, do I. Thank you. This is really helping me break through a conceptual fog I’ve been struggling with.

Might the Benedict Option be described as a form of localist retribalization for orthodox Christians seeking to deepen their roots in tradition and ties to each other?

We will be talking about this real soon at the Idea Of A Village conference near Clear Creek Abbey in eastern Oklahoma, on May 20-21. I don’t know if they’ve sold out on tickets yet. Check the website on the link. I’m really looking forward to being there with my friend Ralph Wood, from Baylor. If you haven’t heard Ralph before, you are in for a treat.

And by the way, he’s going to be at Walker Percy Weekend too, talking Dostoevsky and Percy with Jessica Hooten Wilson. If you haven’t bought your tickets, we still have some available for the June 3-5 event, but they tend go fast in the final two weeks. Go to the website and reserve yours.

UPDATE: The reader who wrote the e-mail writes back:

A couple of notes: peer orientation is about arrested development.  I should add that peer orientation is characteristic of when a person is stuck in that second stage of relating–attaching via sameness.  Think of it as when a baby begins to do things to be like mommy or like daddy or brother or auntie.  It is a reflexive, uncritical adoption of others’ qualities because we feel attached to them.  It’s teenagers dressing alike and being more at home with each other rather than their families and extended community.  It’s fascinating to think about the manifestations in adults; perhaps when we seek statistical normality rather than reaching for potentials.  The thing is, we are supposed to become all we can be, not just a clone of our family and not just a facsimile of our culture of origin, but if the culture is working, you should be able to see congruency as well as evolution through time.

Neufeld has a short explanation here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKRp3dsPelE

I also was a slightly inaccurate with the stages: senses–sameness–belonging and loyalty–significance–love (emotional intimacy)–being known (psychological intimacy).  We’re not meant to relate to everyone, totally; that’s why you’ll not be that close to all 700 of your Facebook friends.  We are meant to leave home base carrying the relationships that ground us, to go out in the world and be ourselves and let others be themselves.