Whatever Will Be, Will Be: Trust, Fate and the Reflexive Self

Abstract

This article is a critical discussion of Giddens’s claim that an extended self-reflexivity has emerged as a result of recent social upheavals, providing the individual with the opportunity to construct self-identity without the shackles of tradition and culture, which once limited the options for self-understanding and self-development. Giddens’s emphasis on the declining role of fate concepts and the ascendancy of ‘active trust’ is argued to be inconsistent and incomplete, and it is claimed that the culturally situated nature of modern identity is still essential to an understanding of selfhood. Concepts of fate are used to illustrate the persistence of a partially unreflexive relationship between self-identity and culture. Popular spiritual self-help texts and a range of contemporary examples are used as illustrations in providing an alternative portrayal of reflexivity and self-identity. It is concluded that concepts of fate are just one example of the ways in which self-identity is still meaningfully culturally embedded.