In advance my apologies for I fear will be a poorly articulated OP as the idea is ill formed in my head, which why I am hoping for some discussion.
I get a sense that there are a significant number of people almost desperate to have a label, often a diagnosis, that identifies them as somehow special or different in someway and to glom on to that as the core aspect of their identity, of who they are, including by way of social network memberships. My sense is that this behavior is increasing. Maybe the sense of club membership was once met in other ways generations past?
Again apologies the poor articulation but does this sense jibe with what you observe
I get that impression often enough. Especially with neurological things, there seems to be a whole “I’m quirky because I have X” where X isn’t necessarily diagnosed in a clinical sense and is treated as an eccentric excuse for things. It sort of reminds me of the old stereotypical “I’m 1/16th Cherokee Princess” thing where you want something different enough to be unique but not in a way that might make you other’d or otherwise cause people to view you negatively.
I wouldn’t be able to put this to a test and everyone has their own story, etc but I do get where you’re coming from. Is it harmful? I dunno, maybe. I can imagine it does a disservice to someone suffering from a condition if people’s perception of it are based on someone’s else’s “Tee-hee, that’s just my X!” persona. On the other hand, people suffer from things in different ways.
I do not believe this at all. I think it’s generally just an attempt at an explanation for how there can be so many more LGBT people or autistic people, etc. But it’s just that people are more open with this, and we’re better at telling.
I’m particularly sensitive with the autism one (I follow a few autistic creators.) , as a lot of people claim autistic people want the label to be special, and that they’re just quirky. And that HATE that. They point out that the only reason they wanted a label was because they were already having trouble and were happy to know they could now actually do something about it. None of them wanted to be autistic. Though now they would also not want it “cured” because they feel they’d be a different person.
And I’ve also seen it with gender and sexuality, where people hate this idea. They treat it the same way as “it’s just a phase.”
I know it’s a bit weird to just outright disagree with the premise, but that’s my take on it. I think people are mistaking the fact that there are so many more labels due to advancement in learning about humans and thinking it means they “want” a label.
There is in fact a movement the other way, where people are like “I don’t like the label ‘bisexual’. I’m just Ashley.”
Club membership in the past usually meant membership in actual clubs.
They seem to have started in London and no English gentleman had an identity if he weren’t a member of a club - or several - that defined members to outsiders. Remember that Sherlock Holmes’ brother was a member of the Diogenes Club, something that said everything about him.
American elites copied the club world copiously. The Who’s Who either belonged to a gentleman’s club or the Harvard or Yale clubs. The Lambs were the club for actors, the Friars the club for comics. Every major city had some.
Other classes had numerous clubs of their own, often called fraternal orders. The Elks, the Eagles, the Knights of Columbus, the Odd Fellows and more were national. Women had similar but smaller organizations to join.
These were separate from interest clubs, which brought together enthusiasts of, e.g., baseball, photography, hiking, and later movies and science fiction. Zillions of these formed in the days before the internet and smartphones joined people virtually.
All sociologists say that physical clubs have declined drastically in the past few decades. Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone started as a 1995 paper. He says things have gone downhill from there.
The Dope is a club, in every way I would define the word. You’re preaching to the chorus in that way. But the practice of hurling anonymous words to anonymous readers does not being us together in the same way a club did a hundred years ago. We - the general public - are still fumbling around for a way to do that.
I came in to mention Putnam, and I’m glad you beat me to it. It looks like there’s a revised 20th year anniversary edition, in which Putnam continues the discussion, to say that the 21st Century and the internet have made things worse, which I certainly don’t dispute.
I think maybe what the OP is seeing is louder voices coming from more crystallized extremes, which has in turn alienated the excluded middle from participating.
I wonder if in the heyday of these clubs hotels and restaurants were less common, because I believe they serve meals and have guest rooms for members. And perhaps they were a way of verifying a stranger? If someone claims to be a member of the [Whatever] Club, that can be checked.
As for old clubby clubs with leather chairs and ironed newspapers: years ago my shop printed all the material for the Rainier Club in Seattle. I see they still have rooms and dining for members as well as reciprocal membership with other clubs.
There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals.
One sort of club that people once exclusively belonged to that is now more difficult to so exclusively is one’s family and one’s ancestry. It used to be much harder for someone to marry into a socio-economic group that one didn’t already belong to. People’s ancestries are more mixed than ever before. What club (i.e., ancestry) you have no longer determines what you can do from then on. It’s not surprising anymore that a current princess of Norway is married to a Black American or that the current Queen of Sweden married into the royal family despite being a German-Brazilian commoner or that an American of mixed Black and White ancestry is married to a British prince. All sorts of intermarriage are now more common around the world.
Again, I am having a hard time articulating it, but yes, sort of. There is clearly a human need to belong to groups of “us” and while I have not read Bowling Alone I suspect that thesis overlaps with what I am thinking about, that there is a decline of participation in these social institutions and that lack drives looking for other sorts of membership that sets us apart as somehow special, with the ability to find others with similar labels on line facilitating it, and those labels then becoming the prime driver of identity.
Yes, some self diagnosing various conditions in order to be part of a group, but more often some having that one part of who they are become their main face to themselves and the world, not just something they happen to have (and deal with) or one aspect of who they are.
I was not specifically thinking of those self-diagnosing (and making sure every knows) as autistic spectrum disorder @BigT but, as someone who cares for some kids who have the label through comprehensive evaluation, yes it applies, precisely because it is such a spectrum from severe disorder to so-called “normal” and no definite line between. I personally do not see lumping and splitting every normal variation into different boxes and having those become our granfalloons is “advancement in learning” per se. And having had granfalloon pop into my mind, that may be really what I am talking about, that today’s granfalloons are different than being a Hoosier was …
There’s also the decline of organised religion, which fulfilled a social function similar to what @DSeid is describing, and could foster a very strong sense of belonging.
It is also more common to convert religions than it used to be. What religion one is now depends less about what one was raised as and more about one actually thinks religiously. So religion becomes about the “club” one grew up in and more about what one actually thinks.
Yes, religion certainly created some of the groups, outside of congregations. The Knights of Columbus was a Catholic organization, the Knights of Pythias was technically non-sectarian but Jews would form a lodge to take advantage of that, and the Knights of the Maccabees were a much smaller Jewish fraternal group. (The Maccabees are now an international Paul McCartney fan group. /kidding)
On the Honeymooners, Ralph and Ed were members of the Loyal Order of Raccoons. It was taken for granted that men like them would be members of some similar lodge, partially for the comradeship, partially for ease of use of the various facilities like pool, and partially to get away from their wives. Getting away from the stay-at-home wife was also taken for granted in the early 1950s. I think the trend toward doing things as couples has contributed to the demise of men’s clubs. But also facilitated the rise of women’s clubs such as the Red Hat Society.
I’ve often been described as “desperately seeking a label”, so I’ll fire off an answer based on my own understanding of my motivations.
• Contrary to what’s often stated or implied, I don’t need a label in order to feel okay about myself, nor has any of the labels I tend to use for myself conferred a group membership and acceptance within such group to any meaningful extent. But the latter was admittedly a part of what I was seeking, I’ll have to admit that. As I once expressed it, I really would have loved to have finally found my part of town, where I would be surrounded by people “like me”.
• A bigger part of my motivation has been “being understood”, though. I’ve expressed this part pretty often, too: if i can’t be accepted and loved for who I am, let me at least be hated and reviled for who I am, not perceived and treated and referrred to as something I am not.
• Another thing I’d like to emphasize is that my self-labeling was always a reaction, as in "I didn’t start it, other people were calling me this and that and perpetually calling my attention to how I was different from “normal”; they made it an issue. I get to reply, dammit!
The two most ubiquitous self-applied labels that you folks see me use on myself are the ones about gender and the ones about sanity or lack thereof. Most of you have seen countless examples of those from my years of posting.
My father, God rest his soul, was a Mason and a member of the Shrine. He played in the Shrine band. He was also a member of the American Legion, and an Eagle Scout.
I became none of the above, although I’m starting to re-think that in my older age.
It is easier in today’s world to move around between groups, as mentioned above, as racial barriers no longer exist…at least not to the extent they used to exist.
