Omphaloskepsis....another word for 'navel-gazing' and implications

 It is unlikely that many of us have ever encountered the word, omphaloskepsis

From vocabularly.com we read, “As funny as it may sound, omphaloskepsis is a word for being obsessed with your own navel…The Ancient Greek root words omphalos, ‘navel,’ and ‘skepsis’, ‘reflection,’ combine to make a great way of describing a tendency to be self-absorbed.”

This piece is not about a two—year-old’s fixation with his navel. It is also not about whether a conscious and critical self-reflection is relevant and important to a health sense of personal wellness.

This piece is intended as a reflection on the degree to which each of us, and each organization, and each school and university, church, town, city, province, state and especially nation is growing obsessed with the ‘branding’ of its own ‘identity. Or course, there is ample reason for making as clear as one can which kind of culture, menu of options, manner of their delivery is available to the consumer, from a business organization. And, from a marketplace perspective, consumers need to know which model of fridge, stove, furnace, auto has which options, what kind of reviews, and what price one is expected to pay for any proposed transaction.

However, we risk losing perspective if and when we turn our gaze into a lens through which we examine and expect each of our exchanges, encounters and transactions to be rationally based on the framing of the identity of a person/organization which comes primarily from the source of that organization. Similarly, when we are reflecting on the quality of a person, a potential political candidate, for example, as to whether or not s/he is worthy of support, questions of ‘identity’ must be far more nuanced, complex and ‘rounded’ (to borrow a literary criticism term, differentiating between round and flat characters in a play or novel.) Marketing, selling, soliciting support, campaigning, and the language and protocols that attend that process, are by definition, as narrow, self-inflating and reductionistic as the market expects and demands.

Colleges and universities have increasingly been expected to ‘market’ their services to foreign students, as a source of new revenue. Naturally, the Canadian ‘ethos’ and traditional reputation of the country as cold, but friendly, and welcoming to immigrants and refugees will be included as either or both a stated or am implied ‘selling feature’. Reputations among researchers, in specific fields, will also be among the pieces of information that recruiters, message-designers and admissions officers will focus on as a language path to the sale. And for this purpose, some serious internal examination, collection and curation of data is normal and necessary.

Similarly, researchers in labs of whichever disciplines, will have focused their study on a specific null hypothesis, for the purpose of disproving that thesis, as they follow the discipline of scientific discovery. The study of previous propositions in their field will also inform their design. And this process of disciplining one’s ‘gaze’ for professionals, and for corporations seems reasonable and warranted.

It is, however, the question of a manner of considering the matters that come before what is coming to be known as the ‘public square’ that navel-gazing has its most serious and constricting impact. And the public square is a complex, multilayered, multi-interest, equation that attempts to respect the widest number of interests with the contentment of the largest number of people as its long-term ideal focus.

The question of the scale and the dimension of the public square, however, is undergoing such a dramatic transformation, that from the town square of many towns in Europe and North America where statues of prominent local personages are often built, and remain for centuries, to the public square that now embraces all of the capitals and nations of the world. We are not only living in a post-truth world, we are also living in a post-parochial world in spite of the valiant and seemingly heroic efforts to retain the ‘local’ is everything we think and do.

A few decades ago, there was a popular slogan among some institutions, “act local, think global,” that attempted to balance the local and the global. Cute and cliché though it was, it has apparently been washed away with the tidal wave of both technology and a degree of personal omphaloskepsis at the same time that philanthropy and global trade have exploded.

What has not expanded, however, is the spread of ideas, including political strategies and structures not only to embrace the new frontier of issues confronting the whole world, but to seek collaborative approaches to those issues. The current omphaloskepsis that has ensnared the Republican Party, over the question of a matter of what historically has been considered a house-keeping chore of selecting a Speaker of the House of Representatives, did not achieve front-page headlines overnight.

This epic and tragic omphaloskepsis is, in a word, a canary in a coalmine, in which we are all living. Money, consumer goods, oil, gas, and military materiel fly around the globe with both alacrity and increased transportation services, some of them actually breaking under the weight of their volume. New pipelines, new freight carriers, sleeker and more fuel-efficient planes, and a new internet that beams these digits into the farthest corners of the globe, the moment I upload them, is, however, not so much ‘balanced’ by an increase in personal autonomy, but rather an increase in abdication of the shared responsibility among all people and all nations for our shared future.

The media, and the political class, together, even if not in a deliberate and purposeful conspiracy, are increasingly encased in a mind-set, along with both protocols and previous legislation and traditions that, not only no longer work but that actually subvert the pressing needs and demands of a new era. And while tradition and history have a legitimate role in each of our histories, both personal and national/ethnic/religious/cultural, the limits of their role have not been defined, curtailed and removed as obstructions to the new reality,

All politics is local, is just one of the cliché’s that, while identifying the basic premise that all votes from neighbours and businesses on the same streets in the same towns and townships in which the elected official resides, nevertheless, has more clout that is reasonable, given the many other attributes of a political party and candidate, including policy, philosophy, vision and commitment. These larger, or more esoteric, or more abstract, or more ‘intellectual’ aspects of a political campaign, must not be permitted to atrophy or even disappear under the guise of ‘protecting’ our local traditions.

And the mind-set and the attitude that clings to the ‘local’ candidate over the one who has appropriate and needed policies and ideas to make both the constituency and the state and nation better, is not merely provincial, it is essentially, political omphaloskepsis…navel gazing, just as the hostage-taking of the Republican Party by two dozen anarchists, models.

A similar kind of omphaloskepsis, although much more critical with international implications, whether the men and women who sustain its grip on the American political class, is the U.S. refusal to become a signatory to the International Criminal Court. Rationalized under the flimsy excuse that, to sign on would expose American military and diplomatic personnel to the same scrutiny under law as other nations, just does not fly, in a world in which thousands of men, women and children are dying under the specific orders of the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin. And this war, itself, is another example of omphaloskepsis, on the part of Putin and his Russian sycophants. It is not so much that America and Russia are not enemies, but that they are both deeply enmeshed in a kind of polity and perspective that not merely shapes national perspective, buy corrodes and precludes national potential.

What are the underlying motivations, conscious and unconscious, for the dynamic of omphaliskepsis?

The most obvious, is that the world as far as we can see, is amenable to control to the degree to which we require it to be. Not only on its face, but in its full perspective, that is utterly inconceivable. Drawing a line around the world in terms of our ability and willingness and capacity to control it, is fanciful, fantasy and self-sabotage in the extreme. The two-year-old fixated on his belly-button is merely exploring his body and his new world. Similarly, the atomic microscope in the research lab is detecting the components and the movements and the relationships between and among the item under study with other items. There is a legitimacy to those respective pursuits. Applied to the national interest, whether as imitation of or as defence from another nation’s omphaloskepsis, however, it evaporates under clear-eyed scrutiny.

Another potential motivation for this dynamic might be national pride, nationalism, and the building up of the hopes and the dreams and the aspirations of the people of any nation. And while national and personal pride are both welcome and necessary, to a limited degree, hubris, in the service of both personal mental health and national status and respect, fails both the person and the nation. And, there is no denying that omphaloskepsis directly and indirectly contributes to the risk of hubris, at home and abroad. And the implications of the simple phrase, “Number One” emblazoned on the hearts and minds of any people, or religion, or ideology or culture, or even an auto manufacturer or pharmaceutical company, or certainly a candidate for the presidency, (think “I alone can fix this!”).

There is a qualitative difference between omphaloskepsis and narcissism. The former brings about some potential self-reflection on the narrowness of one’s perspective, and perhaps even the option of extending the range of vision to include a more complex, nuanced, and interesting and imaginative perspective, on the way to a global perspective. National navel gazing, also, is not a psychiatric or psychological diagnosis. Narcissism carries the connotative freight of a mental defect. It is not incidental to note the prominence of the word narcissist, as one of the more insidious fixations of the social media, rendering everyone access to the false and dangerous perspective of a psychological professional, a qualification none of us holds or is authorized to hold. And the very dependence on the vocabulary of mental defective, from those of us who have no legitimacy to deploy such radioactive words, screams both omphaloskepsis and a degree of dismissal of those we do not like or know.

In Canada, the dynamic of omphaloskepsis can readily be seen in the national government’s public stance on reconciliation with the indigenous population. Public, persistent and proud proclamations of ‘making things right’ with indigenous people, in an attempt to right centuries of colonization, contempt and downright racism, while generating a media blitz of headlines, conferences, and the like, all of it coming from a place of acknowledged national shame, without actually making real the necessary changes both in law and in practice to move in the direction of reconciliation, smacks of timid and tepid commitment at best, and deceit and delay at worst.

Hypocrisy of political parties and actors, is also different from omphaloskepsis. The former is so deeply embedded in the cultural memory and imagination, and readily separated from the daily lives of the ordinary people. Omphaloskepsis, on the other hand, applies to everyone everywhere, and is not and cannot be restricted to the attitudes and behaviours of only the political class. Hypocrisy is also universal, but navel-gazing seems so much more pedestrian, almost incidental and less loaded with negative freight.

If we are all engaged in a process, omphaloskepsis, and we can all open our minds and our hearts to the implications of gazing at our collective navel, is it possible  in that we might shift our gaze from our narrow, personal, familial, neighbourhood, parochial, and national fixation and begin to embrace a new perspective?

    Can we begin to envision a world in which nations realize that self-interest is no longer the solitary or even the primary interest of each national government?

    Can we begin to envision an international series of bodies, institutions, designed, created and empowered that can and do represent the interests not only of rich and militarily powerful countries, but of the single mother scratching out an existence in a hovel in Africa, as equally important, and equally subject to the ravages of global warming and climate change as a universal existential threat?

    Can we envision an international media, representing the writers and the perspectives of at least the major ethnicities and cultures, in the spirit and design of addressing the multiple complex yet universally shared threats to respectable, dignified, and sustainable human existence, for the benefit of everyone?

    Can we envision both the philanthropic and the corporate and the academic and governmental ‘establishments’ in each nation coming to accept the respective responsibility and surrender of some of what is commonly referred to as autonomy or sovereignty, depending on the locus, in order to manifest and to design and then to build a shared , sustainable and stable future for our grandchildren?

    Can we begin to realize how dry, uininteresting and unimaginative our own ‘navel’ is in light of the variety, and stimulation and creativity that a wider, more receptive and more courageous ‘personal, national “lens” offers?