One of the most engaging parts of Michael Sheen's lecture is the description of his developing sense of identity.
"I'll begin with the only thing I feel I have any kind of authority to be able to stand here and speak to you about tonight. Which is myself - my own personal experience. And even that can get a little bit slippery, to be honest. I've spent most of my life outside of Wales. I left my home in Port Talbot to go to drama school in London when I was 18 years old. And I've lived in one place or another on the other and at various distances from the Severn Bridge ever since. It was only when I left that I even began to be aware that there might be such a thing as Welshness, like a fish only knowing what wetness is once it's landed on the shore, mouth gaping and eyes bulging. I'd been so in it, but I hadn't known anything different to compare it with.
Thinking back, I turned up in London with no real sense of being different, no sense of coming from a particular culture or class or anything like that. Really I'd been aware of events going on around me growing up, particularly in the mid '80s of course, but I was so myopically focused on being a teenager with all the self obsession that can involve that I haven't really understood the full significance of what was going on in Wales at that time. And I suppose I just assumed that it was pretty much no different everywhere else, that the world was probably just the same as Port Talbot but just more of it. I barely went to Neath, let alone any further afield. And then one day, not long after I'd arrived in London, I walked into a McDonald's and no one could understand me when I asked for milk. Milk? Milk! I mean, it's not that hard is it, milk! Oh, Milk! Come on, really, is it that different?
His anecdotes are not just vivid and entertaining, but also lift a corner on what identity is. For an idea that does a lot of heavy lifting in the modern world, identity is a challenging concept to get a grip on. It's easier for everyone if we all pretend it's simple - but... By definition, it is the most basic and definitive aspects of you; it's stable and obvious, but then it changes - and you're still you! How is that? Is identity a rock you can stand on, or is it solid like mist and fog? It certainly needs a lot of external reminders to keep it in line. It's a label you put on yourself - but then sometimes other people say what label goes on you. Is it how you feel, or how other people see you?
It becomes less mysterious from a personality development perspective. Growing up has two processes, individuation and socialisation - that is, finding out who you are in yourself, and who you are in relation to other people. Identity, roughly, is the name given to the fact that these are different aspects of a single complex experience, with no real way of separating out the internal and external parts. That's where a lot of the shifting and sliding comes from.
And, obviously, things change over time. For example, it's hard to say that you have a separate identity when you are tiny - that is, you might have a legal and moral identity, but hardly a psychological one. None of us really remembers what it was like to be an infant or a toddler, but it seems reasonable they don't really separate themselves out from their surroundings until they are older. Maybe "knowing who you are" doesn't even mean anything until you have a certain level of brain development. And this is only the hardware needed for cognitive and emotional development. It requires social experience to fill out the sense of identity. As a child, you have little other than what you are born into. You accept it as given and have no frame of reference for comparing it to anything else. The sense of identity develops spontaneously as circumstances change, without you having to make any special effort about it.
The most intense challenges for the development of identity are between sexual maturity in the mid teens and physical maturity in the mid twenties. The pre-frontal cortex of the brain, for instance, important for impulse control and decision making - basically agency - this continues to develop right up to the early 20s. Young adults might look grown up, but they have a life to make, and they have it all to do. They are hungry for significance and belonging; they are drawn to excitement and opportunity. They are passionate and impressionable, keen to find out who they are, and to find a place for themselves. That's what makes Michael Sheen's anecdotes instantly relatable to anyone who has left home. It a vivid, sympathetic telling of a young person's journey to being an individual.
All of that is nice, and nostalgic, but does it matter? Well, it matters because "Identity" is doing a lot of political heavy lifting at the moment: such as, which of the adjectives that apply to you define your real interests? Humans are groupish, and politics is tribal: who should you stand with politically? Is identity what you say you are, or what other people tell you?
A key idea in liberal civilisation is that a person can develop ideas of their own; they can criticise what's around them, and can choose the interests they want to promote. This is more of a challenge than in traditional societies, where what you think and where you belong are just what your parents did. Ready-made ideologies promise meaning and belonging, and many young people choose that. But your ideas don't stop developing, not when you reach 25, or ever. It is really very hard to appreciate what your future interests will be, or what your future self will think about them. For all of the recorded experience of others, we are just not built that way. Experience alone clarifies what you really value, and what you might choose to invest in and promote. Perhaps that's what maturity is.
In the twentieth century West, independence was often held up as the ideal, especially economic independence. Self-sufficiency was the goal to aspire to, and once someone had enough money they could aspire to 'self-actualisation' - whatever that is. This downplays human groupishness, and the importance of others for well-being. Everyone is dependent on others in some stages of life - individual self-sufficiency only really works well for those who can get by without others - the working age healthy and comfortably off. Everyone else - children; parents; young adults; the poor; the ill and old - everyone else's need for others is much clearer. Tensions like these allowed coercive regimes to criticise liberal societies with a communitarian rhetoric. However, what's important is the balance between freedom and coercion, not the balance between the individual and the group. Right now, the shift is away from freedom, and towards conformity and coercion: identity means group membership, and belonging means obedience. It is presented as more freedom from oppressive norms, but the intention is to constrain freedom and complexity of experience; and the aim is to make people easier to control.
Maturity is about what you choose to value, and to promote - possibly, even to fight for. For all their faults, liberal societies accept the messiness of human development and human social relations. Perfect freedom, perfect self-determination are often held up as ideals, inspiring but never reached. In the real world, freedom is partial and contingent. However, it is the best that is available. Anyone who has experienced it, as fallible as it is, knows what coercion and conformity put at risk.
Michael Sheen: 2017 Raymond Williams Lecture
"I'll begin with the only thing I feel I have any kind of authority to be able to stand here and speak to you about tonight, which is myself - my own personal experience. And even that can get a little bit slippery to be honest. I've spent most of my life outside of Wales. I left my home in Port Talbot to go to drama school in London when I was 18 years old. And I've lived in one place or another on the other and at various distances from the Severn Bridge ever since. It was only when I left that I even began to be aware that there might be such a thing as Welshness, like a fish only knowing what wetness is once it's landed on the shore, mouth gaping and eyes bulging. I'd been so in it, but I hadn't known anything different to compare it with. Thinking back, I turned up in London with no real sense of being different, no sense of coming from a particular culture or class or anything like that. Really I'd been aware of events going on around me growing up, particularly in the mid '80s of course, but I was so myopically focused on being a teenager with all the self obsession that can involve that I haven't really understood the full significance of what was going on in Wales at that time. And I suppose I just assumed that it was pretty much no different everywhere else, that the world was probably just the same as Port Talbot but just more of it. I barely went to Neath, let alone any further afield. And then one day, not long after I'd arrived in London, I walked into a McDonald's and no one could understand me when I asked for milk. Milk? Milk! I mean, it's not that hard is it, milk! Oh, milk! Come on, really, is it that different?
Anyway I suppose that's where it started the having it reflected back to me that I was different thing but I didn't like that. I mean I want it to be different, I just wanted it to be in a way that I chose. I didn't like how exposing it felt. I didn't want my difference to be something that was defined by other people. I wanted to be in control of it. And so I started adapting shifting my shape to hide that difference so I could control when it was seen or not. In the first couple of weeks of being a drama school, I remember one of the voice teachers asking if she could record me speaking. She said she did that with a lot of students who had quite strong regional accents when they arrived: she used them as teaching aids for when someone might need to learn a particular accent for a play. She said she had to do it in the first few weeks, though, as people tended to lose their accent so quickly and then it would be no use. I'd be so interested to hear that tape now. I have no idea how I must have sounded then.
...I wasn't embarrassed about being Welsh or anything like that. I think I just realized without it ever having to be said that I was faced with an utterly overwhelming and totally implacable field of otherness all around me, towering above me like a huge wave, rising up, pushed forward by unseen but dimly visible forces that I knew would roll over me without a second's hesitation and I found I had very little to hold on to to resist its ineluctable currents on some level without being aware of it. I decided I would turn and swim with the current. I would leave negotiating my difference until later once I'd learned how to swim within the racing tide. It took me a very long time to even begin to understand the consequences of how you respond to having your sense of difference be defined by others. The difficulties it can create around developing a genuine sense of identity; the ways it can disconnect you from your past. My difference, my Welshness, was first presented to me in the form of a shock from outside - a crisis of recognition; and I responded with a form of assimilation and accommodation that I thought I was in control of. But, actually, it just confused my sense of identity in such a way that it would take me many years to even begin to come to grips with.
...it is truly remarkable that a small country like Wales. with no real political identity, or clear legal status to our nationhood has managed - in the face of being enveloped by a huge imperial power like Britain - somehow to hold on to our sense of being different with our own cultural identity in all its complexity and our own language in spite of everything. Remarkable. Seen in this way, it is a story of extraordinary resilience. But, if we are to have any kind of a future, then we must face the reality of our present. And that means a reckoning with the legacy of our past...
Like I said at the beginning of this, I have spent most of my life outside of Wales. So what right have I to stand here and speak about these things? No right. No right at all. I'm just one of those many Welsh voices. But I do have a voice. And unlike many my voice can be heard. Many of us in this room today can have our voices heard. And I have come to feel the responsibility of that and the opportunity of it. When I walked into that McDonald's all those years ago, newly arrived in a strange familiar land, little did I know - or care - that vast currents of history were swirling around me - unseen but pushing and pulling like the ocean against a small ragged piece of coastline. An incident without importance or meaning to anyone but me. And yet at the same time a moment repeating back over and over through the past and on and on into the future; experienced by multiple generations, and continually shaping, with each response and reaction to it the possibilities for our self definition and shared identity. I felt my difference and, shifted drew back, as William said, skillfully accommodated found my few ways to be different and cultivated them. When the door was opened to that larger society as it was in the age of Henry and his acts of Union I ran through it. When the promise of British respectability and the fruits of individual opportunity were offered up to me - as they were to those in the 19th century - I took them gladly and without a second thought. But slowly, over time, through becoming more engaged, sometimes by design but more by accident - and always because of the example of others - I have come to feel differently. I begin to understand now what Bevan said - what Bevan meant - when he said the purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away. And when Raymond Williams wrote "as so often in Welsh history there is a special strength in the situation of having been driven down so far that there is at once everything and nothing to lose and in which all that can be found and affirmed is each other."