Enneagram anthropology
For years I teased friends and family members—and especially colleagues: pastors love faddish personality tests—about their affinity for the Enneagram. I rolled my eyes and made astrology jokes. I made the requisite asides about pentagrams and its claim to “ancient provenance,” etc. But since you shouldn’t criticize something you don’t understand, I read the book, specifically Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile’s The Road Back to You, and lo and behold, I didn’t hate it. I wasn’t converted. I’m not a fanatic. I didn’t read any other books and I don’t listen to daily podcasts. But like all tools, this tool’s value lies in its utility. And it’s useful, not least (in my case) for understanding the motivations and desires of my children. So it’s joined some other helpful instruments in the parental toolkit.
(This also means that I now know what people are talking about when they speak in numbers around me; before it was just gibberish.)
Having said that, there’s a tic common to the Enneagram crowd, indeed common to all folks enamored of personality tests, that bugs me, and (in my view) invariably turns such tests’ relative utility on its head. That tic is explaining one’s behavior as a function of one’s number. As in, “I do [X behavior] because I am a [Y personality].” Call this reflex Enneagram anthropology, where the Enneagram stands in for any and all shorthand psychological measures and theories. The reflex is understandable: people avidly seek for causal explanations for their own behavior, and all the better when those causes are somehow naturally fixed, psychologically immutable, or spiritually bestowed from without.
Such a move is an error, however, in more than one way. It supposes that (e.g.) the nine numbers of the Enneagram are something akin to Platonic forms: eternal paradigms or divine ideas instantiated or individuated in concrete human persons. Being thus incarnate as “a [Y personality],” it follows inexorably that I—the Y-I-am, the Y-embodied-in-me, the Y-that-is-me—do X behavior. Almost as though the person were to cap off the explanation with: “Now you know. (And you better get used to it.)”
But even apart from trading on a sort of Platonizing theory of the Enneagram, the explanatory procedure, if the personality test is going to be meaningfully useful at all, has to run the other direction. Instead of saying, “Because I’m Y-personality, I do X-behavior,” one ought to say instead, “Because I do X-range-of-behaviors, I—or my pastor or my spouse or my therapist—believe the loose, incomplete, and unscientific personality-type ‘Y’ maps that range of behaviors in the most illuminating fashion.” Put more succinctly: “Because X, therefore Y-ish.” Whereupon that Y-identifier functions (usefully) to help oneself or one’s loved ones understand better, albeit in a small and quite limited respect, one’s own unique mix of temperament, motivations, desires, beliefs, and behaviors. Whereas it would function uselessly and counterproductively, because falsely, to explain what one does in terms of who one is, where “who one is” is captured by a predetermined generic description of a broadly universal “type.” For this latter function is not far from explaining away one’s behavior, at which point it is no longer an explanation but merely an excuse—and a bad one at that.
