We need a conversation about the idea of identity itself, because if there is one lesson to be learned from the current insistence on defining identities, it is that they have a great power to be divisive
AC Grayling examines the perils of identity politics
Since the Second World War, there has been a massive rise (and still growing) in immigration to western liberal democracies, attractive to people from less developed parts of the world because of their wealth, stability and opportunities. Despite the serious problems of racism and discrimination faced by many immigrants, there has been sufficient official will to tackle such issues to make the chance of a decent life for immigrants more than a pipe dream.
Countries have taken different approaches to the question of how to accommodate immigrants, as can be seen in the contrast between France and Britain. In France, the aspiration has been for everyone to be considered first and foremost French, with the eye of officialdom studiously blind to differences of ethnicity, creed and originating culture.
In Britain, the project of multiculturalism has flourished, premised on the belief that a diverse and pluralistic society can achieve greater coherence through the recognition, acceptance and celebration of differences, allowing immigrants the space to preserve cultural and credal continuities as they saw fit in their own communities.
For a while, both models seemed to work – at least to a plausible degree. But in the first years of the twenty-first century, both have begun to prompt serious doubts, and for the same reason: fears that claims to singular ethnic and religious identities trump any other form of belonging or allegiance that could be shared with the majority population.
‘Identity politics’ – and the uses, abuses, necessities and urgencies of religious identity – have accordingly become topics of serious debate, because they have disrupted the hopes of both the multiculturalist (British) and assimilationist (French) styles of addressing the diversity introduced by immigration. If neither model has been proof against an insistence on singular identities – especially radical religious identities – as a tool or weapon in the hands of those who have come to repudiate their relationship with the broader society around them, what is to be done?
To critics of mass immigration, the appeal to identities derived from immigrants’ cultures of origin is a symptom of the fact that immigration merely imports the underlying difficulties that had made the countries left behind so leavable in the first place. This is an analysis that is meant to explain why those among ethnic and religious minorities who currently ‘play the identity card’ are in fact second or subsequent generation British-born ethnic minorities, whereas their parents or grandparents (the actual immigrants) seemed, for a variety of reasons, to adapt more readily to their new circumstances.
The argument given is that a sense of alienation from the majority culture drives some ethnic minority Britons to insist on certain features of their originating culture as a crutch, prop, source of pride or affirmation, or as a barrier against indifference or hostility from sections of the majority population, with the effect of deepening the divide between them and exacerbating the problem. And this is fertile ground for trouble.
Such an argument overlooks the fact that the liberal democracies of Europe need immigrants, and therefore need to consider ways of welcoming them which avoid the difficulties and pitfalls that both assimilationism and multiculturalism have encountered. That requires a serious and thorough conversation. But another, associated, conversation must be had about the idea of identity itself, because if there is one lesson to be learned from the current insistence on defining identities (especially of a religious nature), it is that they have a great power to be divisive and provocative. That, of course, is precisely why some insist on them; but it is also why the politics of identity needs to be combated.
No-one has done more to confront the abuse of the concept of identity than Nobel laureate and scholar Amartya Sen in his powerful book Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny [http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall06/032929.htm]. In it, he argues that describing others, or thinking of oneself, in terms of ‘a choiceless singularity of human identity’ is the mistake and the danger that both diminishes people, by taking away their rich complexity as individuals, and fans the flames of opposition and conflict between them.
Sen’s aim is to refute the error inherent in identity politics, and to compel us to remember that a person is not one thing (a Muslim or a Jew only, or an Arab or an American only) but many: a parent, a mathematician, a tennis player, a Bangladeshi, a man, a feminist, a Muslim – all these things at once, and thus a multiple and overlapping complex being, whom the politics of singular identity reduces to a mere cipher and crams into a small box with a single simple label stuck on it.
This argument is timely and right, but Sen does not rely only on the distorting effects of reductive identifications into ‘Muslim’, ‘Christian’, ‘black’, ‘white’ or ‘Asian’. He also reminds us, given that so much of the current tension over identity relates to Muslim assertiveness and the often inflamed response to it by non-Muslims (whether from Hindus in India or evangelical Christians in America), of the plural identities welcomed and celebrated in past Islamic culture. He cites Akbar, the great Mughal emperor of the sixteenth century, and Saladin, the prince of Islam in the twelfth century, as exemplary proponents of pluralism and tolerance who willingly gave room to all faiths and persuasions.
At the same time, the unhappy truth is that many of those most responsible for insisting on singular identities at present are devotees of political Islam. In contemporary Britain, some young Muslim women are increasingly wearing the niqab (veil) as a political statement, asserting their Muslim identity as by far the most significant fact about themselves – indeed, given the nature of the apparel, the only fact about them – which encourages others to treat them accordingly.
Whereas evangelical Christians in the United States might consider their faith to be the main individuating fact about them, they are also Americans, Southerners (perhaps), businessmen (often), and (in most cases) Republicans. For an Islamist, religion and politics are inextricable, and little else matters in comparison. Overriding identities are the ones people are prepared to die for; in times of war, soldiers are encouraged to make their identification with the homeland complete and their sacrifice for it glorious –precisely the use of singular identities that demonstrates their danger.
One problem for debating the dangers of singular, all-embracing identities, which sharply mark off one group from others, is that they engage only those who read and think, and do not reach the constituencies of ignorance and anger where the lessons of such discussion are really needed. It is far easier to think in terms of singular identities, both in terms of ourselves and for those we regard as enemies, than to move beyond simplistic terms to focus instead on the human individuality of others – and ourselves.
The point cuts both ways: one target audience for Sen’s book is those in western countries whose reaction to contemporary Islam is to confuse it, too often and too indiscriminately, with Islamism as such. Meanwhile, in an article for online magazine Slate, Sen takes on Islamists playing a divisive game of singular identity politics. To them, too, his indictment of reductionism and a ‘foggy perception of world history’ applies with a vengeance, whenever they use it as a casus belli or, for some, a justification for terrorism.
But while the salient aspect of the identity problem too readily associates itself in public debate with Islamism, the appeal to identity is harmfully at work in other contexts too: in nationalism in Scotland, for example, and in the rise of a deeply unappealing English nationalism, which has too often been closely identified with racism, opposition to immigration and even to closer ties with the rest of Europe, and the expression of these attitudes in aggressive and sometimes violent ways. The underlying intention is to exclude, to divide, to raise and maintain barriers, even to excuse unacceptable treatment of others pasted with a different label.
The mere thought of organisations committed to invoking ethnic, religious or national identities to explain, excuse, justify or promote attitudes and practices which divide people and promote conflict ought to be enough to make us wish to refuse to allow anyone to hide themselves or their purposes behind the disguise of an overriding singular identity.
The only identity that matters is that of being a human being – first, last and foremost. If that thought were in the forefront of consciousness every time people encountered each other, no matter what else might also be part of a description of them, the world would be a vastly better place.
AC Grayling is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggle for Liberty and Rights That Made the Modern West