THE PERILOUS PERSONALITY

I am incurably frivolous and shallow, so some of the more profound questions facing humanity like Who are we?, Why do we behave like we do? or How can we change? rather go over my empty head but I will turn philosophic for a brief page or two and give you my take on these weighty matters.

Mankind has complex characteristics and myths often illustrate these most lucidly. I will jump in at the deep end and tackle the claimed range of personality between the Apollonian  and the Dionysian,  This dichotomy was first illuminated by the ancient Greek tragedians and later much elaborated by philosophers and writers of the quality of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spengler and Jung.. As the classicists among my readers will recall, Apollo and his step-brother deity Dionysus were both sons of Zeus.

Apollo and Dionysus

Apollo was variously identified as the god of the sun and light, truth and prophecy, healing, plague, music and poetry. Dionysus was the god of wine, revelry, the theatre, ritual madness, rebirth and ecstasy.  Later, these attributes developed into an Apollonian personality which wants to master a skill, values order and harmony, prefers the surface to profundity, thinking over feeling, reason over intuition, personal distance over closeness. The Dionysian personality is credited with chaotic creativity, the will to power, liberation from political restraints and volatile moods. Nietzsche aspired to a fusion of the best of these personality traits, but some of them are contradictory and we can observe the dominance of some of these characteristics in many people we know. The framework of the Apollo-Dionysus dichotomy is useful yet much of the literature is densely erudite and high-falutin’ and I prefer something more accessible.

In Britain we often contrast the Roundhead with the Cavalier .personality, derived from Civil War archetypes, with echoes of the Apollo – Dionysus contrast. The Roundhead is disciplined, organised, conventional and rational while the Cavalier is free-spirited, creative, egotistical and maybe a little feckless. We all want to be Cavaliers but the reality of modern life usually makes us Roundheads. A few are unmistakably one or the other. Mrs Thatcher was a Roundhead while Winston Churchill had much Cavalier spirit.

The personality traits I am describing are inherent rather than acquired; we are born with them and cannot easily suppress them. I reject as quackery the idea that body-shape (endomorph, mesomorph or ectomorph) indicates or influences personality. This leads us to the vexed subject of heredity and our genes. The Austrian friar Gregor Mendel (1822-84) experimenting with the pea-plant, developed an understanding of dominant and recessive hereditary units (now called genes).Applying these findings to humans allows us to understand how certain qualities or faults can be transmitted down the generations. It is but a slippery slope from there to practice the discredited science of eugenics, adopted by the Nazis, whereby human bloodstock can be bred to excellence.

Staying with genes, in response to German taunts over bail-outs the Greek premier George Papandreou riposted "The Greeks do not have corruption in their genes any more than Germans have National Socialism in theirs.” Genetically and scientifically I believe this to be true but there is another concept, the meme, much used by evolutionist Richard Dawkins.The meme transmits cultural behaviour down the generations and we may believe that after 500 years of Ottoman dependency, home-grown clientism and bribery, corruption is part of the Greek make-up. Similarly anti-Semitism was an endemic Christian virus in Europe for 700 years and its meme may have been transmitted to Germans among others.

Gregor Mendel, Geneticist

       

George Papandreou in denial

Where does this leave us? We all know that egotist in the office who speaks only of himself and tramples over his colleagues. We know the pernickety character who always does routine tasks in an immutable order. Most of all we remember the greedy and uncontrolled bankers who authored so many of our current problems in the USA, England and, alas, even in Scotland. When, if ever, they face condign punishment, they may plead “We could not help it – it was in our Dionysian genes!” leaving the judge to decide if they were criminals or lunatics and whether to lock them up in a jail or an asylum.

Our innate natures are complex, evolving through the generations, mutating and diverting. We cannot easily change them but I guess we can control their wilder excesses. Maybe we can only fall back on Polonius' wise advice to Laertes:

This above all, to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

SMD

2.05.13

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013