Review: Selfless: The Social Creation of “You” by Brian Lowery
Selfless: The Social Creation of “You” begins with an idea that could easily become too philosophical or abstract: the self is not something sealed inside us. It is real, but it is also continually constructed and informed by things we can see and things we do not even realize are impacting us.
I had some hesitation at the start about whether Brian Lowery’s argument would remain too theoretical. Fairly quickly, though, he grounds it in universal and easily accessible examples. He makes the argument clear, useful, and connected to day-to-day life. His writing helped me further articulate something that has become part of my operating system.
Lowery’s ideas reminded me of Sam Sommers’s Situations Matter, Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind, and especially Nicholas Christakis’s Connected. All of these books, in different ways, challenge the idea that we are self-contained individuals. Selfless did not necessarily give me something those books did not, but it reinforced that network of knowledge and its value. We may experience our lives solely from inside our own heads, but those heads are deeply connected to and shaped by other people, relationships, institutions, language, and culture.
One of the book’s most valuable ideas is that identity requires social recognition. Being an author, professor, friend, partner, or member of some larger social category does not depend only on what we privately believe ourselves to be. It also depends on how other people recognize and relate to us. Most identities are relational and therefore cannot be solely contained in ourselves.
This made me think about debates around AI. An AI output is, at one level, a combination of symbols we call words, letters, numbers, or code. It becomes writing in a socially meaningful sense when a human reads it and declares it something. One person may call it garbage and another may call it writing, but the act of recognition matters. The same is true when someone is accused of using AI: the conflict is not just about the text. Their status as an author, thinker, student, or individual within a social milieu may suddenly be challenged or disrupted.
Lowery is also persuasive when he discusses the different versions of ourselves that emerge through different relationships. None of those versions must be fake. I do not understand myself in the same way with every person, because I do not have the same relationship with every person. In fact, behaving exactly the same way with everyone would seem off. How I act, converse, and conceive of myself changes according to the relationship. I do not have the same points of reference, familiarity, or closeness with my partner than I do with a colleague; as a result as I show up, talk, and behave differently. There may be strands that are connected, but there's still significant difference because my self is also relationally constructured.
The book also gives useful language to the relationship between identity and freedom. Relationships constrain us, but not necessarily in a bad way. Friendship, family, romance, work, and community all create expectations about what can happen, who can do what, and how people should show up. Complete freedom would mean having none of those relationships, because all relationships carry some form of expectation or limitation. To be human as part of a society is to recognize that our lives are pulled together.
I did find myself wanting to push Lowery’s argument further in two directions. One is language. The fact that we think in a language inherited from the world around us means that, before we develop a clear sense of ourselves, we have already been forcibly shaped by what a culture has created, what it notices, and what it fails to see. This is part of why attacks on a people’s language can also be attacks on collective and individual identity.
The other direction is digital power. Companies now possess enormous amounts of information about us and can use digital environments to shape what we see, where our windows of opportunity appear, and even what possibilities are available to us. Ideas like digital redlining show that social construction is not only about how we understand ourselves. It can also determine where we can live, what information reaches us, and what lives become possible. I do not think the absence of a deeper exploration of these subjects makes the book incomplete. It makes me want to keep thinking about how Lowery’s framework applies to them.
One of the simplest moments in the book may also be the one I keep returning to. Lowery asks the reader to perform an action. I believe it was telling the reader to touch their elbow. Whether the reader does it or refuses, the words have already influenced them. Obeying is influence, but deciding not to obey also takes attention and mental bandwidth. Our mere thinking about how another person might respond tells us that they are influencing us. We may never interact with them again, but our conception of them and of our relationship has already shaped our thinking. It made me smile to have Lowery show this so simply by words on a page, months if not years removed from when he wrote those words and the reader engaged with it.
That idea has practical value for me. It gives me another reason to hesitate and check my assumptions during an interaction. When someone behaves in a way that does not make sense to me, I can often imagine fifteen different reasons for it. None of those reasons has to be correct. The fact that I can conceive of them reminds me that there are probably things I am not seeing.
It also reminds me that there are others in that person’s head shaping them, just as our present interaction may be shaping them in ways neither of us realizes. These invisible influences are all around us. Recognizing them does not make the self less real. It makes the self more relational, more complicated, and perhaps more deserving of empathy.
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