Identity too Often Trumps Decency
How Group Labels Separate us From Our Humanity
America's most powerful social product may very well be that of the politicized identity. Pick a label, shove the entirety of a person into it, then use this narrow caricature to condemn, belittle, dismiss, celebrate and worship, depending on whether you like or don't like said label. Any attempt to start a conversation, suggesting that a person is more than any singular act or name, is met with varying degrees of disgust and declarations of not being a true 'x.' What that 'x' is inevitably centers upon the easiest and quickest way to differentiate that person as other, as different.
Ideologies, rather than being ways to facilitate an ease of conversational shorthand, are instead used for demands of purity of purpose. Don't agree with me? Well, it must mean you're not a true Christian, Atheist, Liberal, Conservative, Democrat, Republican, Jew, Muslim, etc. The result of this slicing up of our humanity is a bloody floor littered with the ruins of potential conversations, personal growth, and a liberal democracy of the people.
Disagreement is inevitable, vilification is not. For every person who has an opinion that is inaccurate, that very same person likely has one that is/was true. Every person who has lied, cheated, or said something foul, that very same person has likely loved, cherished another, and said something supportive. We are amazingly capable of dismissing our own moral failures as blips on the channel of our right-ness. Yet we call out the other person's moral failings as intrinsic and unchanging qualities of their programming.
Our humanity, the shared reality of what it is to be a human being, a much larger identity, provides us the space to be both liar and saint, villain and hero, often within the same episode of our lives. The focus on one over another is not a sign of progress, it is a promotion of a myth of group-possessed righteousness. This sanctification of a group, where belonging is all that matters to be right and true, inevitably leads to a failure of a broader humanistic ethic, and promotes policies based on that moralistic authoritarianism.
Fukuyama, in his book “Identity,” explores how there’s been an inversion over the last few decades concerning the role of subjective perception. Previously one’s opinions were considered interpretations on reality, with reality being the thing could always be found out to show that one’s opinions were false. However, that has often been flipped, where one’s opinions aren’t just interpretations of reality, they supervene upon it.
There are variations of the thinking on both liberal and conservative sides, where “lived experience” is on the left, and more conspiratorial thinking on the right (not that the left doesn’t also have such thinking, it’s just not as easily known for it). In both situations, the subjective felt “knowing” is supreme, where one’s thinking is synonymous with confirmation bias.
Big problem, among many, is that when subjectivity is the guiding structure for determining right/wrong and accuracy of interpretation, there’s no shared epistemic system that crosses identity groups. Every proclamation of “truth” is subject to an identity silo.
For all the talk of fascism and socialism from one side or another, at the heart of both is an emphasis on group (of some kind) over the individual citizen, of subjugating the self to the moral authority of a supreme leader (individual or group). As I’ve mentioned in conversation, likely ad nauseam, and written about and discussed previously, the great danger facing humanity is that of the authoritarian tendency in all of us. Our individual felt sense of rightness often screams to be heard over the crowded marketplace of ideas, and what better way to ensure people are listening than to use force?
An Issue of Labeling
Despite the tendency towards group siloing, what each of us cares about is not so different than anyone else. Our Values are universal, the behavior we use to manifest them is most certainly not. How a person gets from a Value to a Behavior is through their perspective/worldview, a structure for determining what is and isn’t appropriate given a specific context and desired outcome. Simplistic and singular labeling moves us right past what we have in common as human beings and places the entirety of our emphasis on a single sliver of behavior among the vast panoply of human life.
Labeling and calling names is empowering, it's why we do it. If we can define a person as a single biological fact, behavior, or idea then they no longer have the power to step outside, in our eyes, of what we have proscribed for them. By this limitation we need never consider what role any of our actions may have had in their life or humbly submit ourselves to the realization that had our own lives been different we may be acting or voicing the opinions which we are currently condemning.
Stereotypes, in this view, are then attempts to control a person’s outcome, the direction of their life. We apply such bias as a means of telling the person, “the future of your life is what I have allowed myself to perceive.”
Beginning with what we have in common is not about dismissing the very real harm done through bigotry, hate and fear. What it does is remove the automatic association between what we care about and our behavior. Doing so recognizes that all of us act on our interests and for the promotion of what we care about, while also allowing for disagreement on the means. This keeps open the potential for change in even the subtlest of shifts in worldview, because if two or more people care about the same thing and show it differently, then there is undoubtedly more ways of doing so, ways that may be less destructive and more communal. A focus on what we do not have in common leads only to continued separation and various forms of strife and othering.
Our shared humanity does not call us to agree about everything or to ignore pain and suffering. What it does is remind us that we are still connected to one another despite our disagreements and that one person's pain can exist even as another's suffering does as well. Our growth as individuals and as a species will be based not on who is 'true' to a label, but upon whether we're able to break free of the constraints such names make upon our behavior.
Further Reading:
Identity by Francis Fukuyama
Once and Future Liberal - by Mark Lilla