The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [12]
A person’s primitive beliefs thus lie at the very core of his total system of beliefs, and they represent the subsystem in which he has the heaviest emotional commitment.
I believe this is a table is the statement of a primitive belief about the physical world which finds complete social support. I believe this is my mother illustrates a similar belief about the social world. I believe I am of medium height, male, blond, and in my early forties is the statement of a cluster of primitive beliefs about the physical attributes of the self which finds complete social support. I believe my name is so-and-so, of such and such race, nationality, and religion, represents a cluster of primitive beliefs about the self in relation to the social world; it, too, is supported by total consensus among those in a position to know. Of course, not everyone is in a position to know. We would not expect a newborn baby to recognize a table when he sees one, or a stranger to know me or my mother. But, except for those not in a position to know, we expect everyone to recognize and acknowledge who and what we are. As Erik H. Erikson, the noted psychoanalyst, points out: “The conscious feeling of having a personal identity is based on two simultaneous observations: the immediate perception of one’s selfsameness and continuity in time; and the simultaneous perception of the fact that others recognize one’s sameness and continuity.”[2]
Another way of describing primitive beliefs about physical reality, the social world, and the self is in terms of object constancy, person constancy, and self constancy. Even though I see this object—a rectangular table, for example—from many angles, each of which changes the appearance and shape of the table, I continue to believe that it is a table and that it is rectangular. Object constancy, moreover, is not merely a sensory phenomenon, as many perception psychologists have believed. It is a social phenomenon as well, developed in childhood side by side with person constancy. The child learns that objects maintain their identity, and also that other people experience physical objects as he does. Thus, two sets of primitive beliefs develop together, one about the constancy of physical objects and the other about the constancy of people with respect to physical objects.
Object constancy and person constancy both serve important functions for the growing child. They create within him a basic trust that the physical world will stay put, and also that people can at the very least be depended on to react to physical objects as he does.[3] It is as if nature and society had co-operated to provide him with a minimum guarantee of stability on the basis of which to build his own sense of self constancy.
Actually, the child seems to need and to strive for far more person constancy than is provided by the fact that people constantly experience physical objects as he does. A child depends on his mother to remain his mother—with the pattern of behavior and all the feelings that the word implies—and on his family and social groups to remain his family and social groups no matter what variations of situation he finds them in.
It may be supposed that any inexplicable disruption of these taken-for-granted constancies—physical or social or self—would lead a person to question the validity of his