Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion A Conversation with Author Luke Burgis

Well, it does cover a lot of ground and a lot of different different literatures.

I think it might be helpful to to to kind of look at it from a structural point of view first before we and we won't go just beginning to end.

But it has a prologue, an introduction.

There's 10 chapters in three parts.

OK, so I thought, all right, a three part structure first.

This is not that remarkable.

There's lots of books with three-part structures.

But then I started thinking, you know, a lot of people, a lot of Thomists, when they're saying, you're trying to find out where someone is coming from, and you think about what is the relationship among the three parts of the Summa, something like that, and there's different accounts.

Well, what are the three parts of the book? How is it structured? Because this is a question we can't ask Aquinas, right? Why is the structure what it is, right? It's supposed to be, in some ways, evident to the reader and to take you through, but I think if you could describe the structure of the book and the why of that structure.

Yeah.

I'm probably more of an Augustinian than a Thomist, but I have read the Summa.

I think that the structure is meant to be pedological, too.

It's meant to have kind of a natural order to it, and the very structure should say something.

It should be logical.

So I guess in the Summa, it's sort of God, man, Christ, right? Exitus retitus is the kind of the basic structure of the Summa as I understand it.

And this book starts with, it's not that different from that actually.

It starts with the tension between the one and the many.

And it's the whole first part of the book, the tension between the one and the many.

What does it mean to be myself, but also to exist in a world of social relationships where people have expectations on me? What is that fundamental tension? So just kind of describing the world and trying to help everyone identify and locate that tension within themselves.

And this, by the way, the one in the many is one of the most fundamental classical questions of metaphysics.

And then it goes into the self in a fractured world.

What does it mean to be a self? What is the selfhood of a human person? And in a very fractured world where our self or our sense of self can feel hold in many different directions, especially with technology.

And the whole chapter on technology about the way that it's sort of making us feel like we have 99 selves sometimes.

We're presenting a different self to the world in different ways.

And then the third section of the book is how to be a solid self and to build what I call a solid self, which is one of the key terms in the book, in real community.