Our Cultural Liminal Phase

Navigating these In-between Times

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I’ve previously written about the psychological condition known as a liminal phase. When a person faces an intense, abrupt change like the death of a spouse or child, the loss of a job or position of status, or a debilitating injury or illness, they enter into a liminal phase, in which their old, familiar role and identity are gone but they don’t yet know what the new role and identity will be. It’s an in-between time. I can tell you from personal experience that prolonged liminal phases are intensely challenging for a human psyche.

I believe U.S. society is in a cultural liminal phase. In liminality a person’s identity is unclear; perhaps they were a wife or husband before but no longer are or were very physically strong and active but now are physically limited.

I can remember as a young person having a sense of what America meant, what it stood for – things like democracy and opportunities for people to advance no matter where they started from. I identified with having American freedom, independence and strong entrepreneurial drive. I had passionate political views but it felt like people could disagree and still basically get along.

Today, I have a hard time describing what the U.S. is all about. Large chunks of our population hold nearly diametrically-opposed visions of what America should be. The uncertainty, not only about the presidential election, but how things play out afterwards is intense and uncomfortable.

And yet, when I take a step back, I find some hope in all of this. In many ways my early sense of what it meant to be American was clothed in myth. After all the “melting pot” sure didn’t work out so well for Native Americans or enslaved Africans. Our wars certainly haven’t always been for a good cause. Poverty for some segments of society was baked into the system. We romanticized “Founding Fathers” who were slave-owners and believed women and poor people shouldn’t have the right to vote.

Evolution in nature doesn’t happen without pressure. A species, or sub-population of a species, finds its habitat or food supply has radically changed and it has to adopt different behaviors or even physical appearance to find new ways of surviving. Over time, those new characteristics shape the overall population.

Nature continuously evolves and so do cultures. It is at least possible that all the foment, discord, conflict -- the pressure -- in our U.S. culture is an opening to an evolutionary step. Myths are being exposed and broken systems can no longer be ignored. This will present new opportunities to tackle the essential redirection and system-redesign before us.