Society
The New Statesman Essay - Nothing left to belong to
Published 25 February 2002
"Know thyself," said Socrates. In today's world, how can we?
We are in the middle of an identity crisis, not just in Britain but throughout the world. Most of us do not know who or what we really are. Some have impossibly romanticised notions of what they should be: they cling to an imagined "heritage", subscribe to the preservation of an unchanging "tradition", and are ready to kill and be killed to save some "essence" of idealised identity. Others have abandoned the very idea of a fixed identity: they change their identity with as much ease as they change their jacket.
Identity is being contested everywhere. Britain puzzles over whether to become more American or more European. For much of the 20th century, American identity was shaped in opposition to a "communist bloc". Since the end of the cold war, the United States has cast eagerly around for new enemies, such as bankrupt and starving North Korea, or "the Chinese menace". This explains why, after 11 September, Americans so readily accepted President Bush's declaration of a new and unending "war" on terrorism. The collapse of the Soviet Union has produced a plethora of artificial, feuding identities, pitting Azerbaijanis against Armenians, Chechens against Russians, Kazakhs of one kind against Kazakhs of another. The Balkans has just gone through one of the most brutal balkanisations of identities in all its history. In the Muslim world, traditionalists and modernists have been engaged in battles over what constitutes true Islamic identity for decades. And the very idea of being "white" has now become so problematic that "whiteness" is studied as an academic discipline in its own right.
To "know thyself", as Socrates put it, is both a fundamental human urge and a basic question in philosophy. Having some idea of who or what we are helps us to determine how we ought to live and conduct our daily affairs. A little self-knowledge also provides us with a little coherence in our metaphysical and moral outlook. But in a rapidly globalising world, all those things that provided us with a sense of confidence in ourselves - nation states with homogenous populations, well-established local communities, allegiance to history and tradition - are being challenged.
The sources of our identity have been made meaningless. England is no longer the sole preserve of "the English". The history and tradition that are associated with "Englishness" - the empire, the House of Lords, fox-hunting, the national anthem - either have disappeared or are under threat. They mean nothing to the vast majority of new English who now live in England. And Englishness is threatened, too, by the emergence of a new European identity, which is itself an amalgam of countless other cultural identities.
While the foundations of identity are cracking everywhere, the shifting context adds another layer of perplexity. Identity is a label, a tool kit, a compass bearing. It permits us not only to find ourselves, but to discern similarity and/or difference in everyone else. When the foundations of our identity crack we lose not only the sense of who we are, but a sense of how we connect to all other identities. All labels become confusing, multiple and problematic.
Think of the common label "black". It has no global connotation; there is no universal black identity. Being black has different meanings in different places. In New York, being black is a mark of difference from the whites, the Italians, the Irish, the Hispanics. It is also a symbol of being cool. In Nigeria, it is not important whether you are black or white but whether you are Yoruba rather than Hausa; the only way you can be cool is to be totally westernised. In Jeddah, nothing is cool, and what really matters is not whether you are black or brown but whether you are a member of the royal family. In Cape Town, to be black is, almost by definition, to be confused: once excluded, now technically empowered, blacks are still marginalised by a society that created and continues to operate a system of practical exclusion.
It is not just our racial, religious and national identities that are under question. What does it mean, for example, to be a "mother" in a world where in vitro fertilisation and surrogate motherhood are becoming common? What happens to conventional ideas of parenthood in the case of the French baby "constructed" from the egg of a 62-year-old woman, with the help of sperm from her brother, and "incubated" in a surrogate mother? What does it mean to be a "wife" in a homosexual marriage? Or "old", when you have rebuilt your 65-year-old body through plastic surgery and look like a young starlet?
Identity, then, has become a perilous notion. It is multiple and ever-changing. And the most fundamental change is this: all those other categories through which we in the west defined and measured ourselves - the "evil Orientals", the "fanatical Muslims", the "inferior races of the colonies", the immigrants, the refugees, the gypsies - are now an integral part of ourselves. It is not just that "they" are "here" but their ideas, concepts, lifestyles, food, clothes now play a central part in shaping "us" and "our society". We thus have no yardstick to measure our difference and define ourselves.
People have to ask themselves: how much of the Other is actually located within me? The quest for identity is essentially an attempt to answer this frightening question. And it is the fear of the answer that transforms, in the words of Amin Maalouf, the Lebanese-French novelist, "a perfectly permissible aspiration" - to form a secure identity - into "an instrument of war". This transformation occurs through three basic associations.
The first of these is the conventional association of identity with power and territory. America, for example, began as a new world empty of a meaningful past and ready for migrants who would build an identity based on power over a new territory. But it was only hyphenated Americans - Italian-Americans, German- Americans, Polish-Americans, Irish-Americans - who were offered the American dream of inclusion and opportunity; only hyphenated Americans have ever made it to the White House. Other Americans - blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans - are "ethnics"; outsiders who are regarded as problematic and different. Asians, too, are ethnics. Japanese Americans were the only people interned as "enemies within" during the Second World War; it was unthinkable that any such action should be taken against German-Americans or Italian-Americans.
For the British, hierarchies of race and class, derived from power over territory in an empire that spanned the world, are crucial. The British identity is based on an assumption of authority that makes the world a familiar place, a proper theatre in which to continue being British. It allows the British to be simultaneously xenophobic, internationalist and parochial: the sort of people who go on Spanish holidays to eat fish and chips and drink warm bitter. It produced a class that took a peculiar kind of internationalism for granted: the "old India hands", the "Africa men and women", all urbane cosmopolitans who knew Johnny Foreigner better than they knew themselves.
The problem with identity as power and control over territory is what happens when power wanes. Johnny Foreigner is now within; the ethnics are demanding the American dream. Power has been debunked, denounced and vilified. Does all that identifies the self go down the plughole with it? How can we be comfortable with accepting as part of our identity people previously regarded as villains? Which leads us to the second association: in order to exclude the unsavoury foreigners, we have to anchor our identity in romanticised history and frozen tradition.
Collective identity is based on the selective processes of memory. British identity was the acknowledgement of a common past. But history is a deliberate human creation, itself another wilful act of power, artificially constructed to support an artificial identity. Europe engineered a cultural identity based on a common descent from the supposed traditions of ancient Greece and Rome and 2,000 years of Christianity. In the textbooks, British history always began with the arrival of the Romans, and thus submerged, barbarised and differentiated itself from Celtic history. Celt and Welsh are words whose linguistic roots (the one Greek, the other Saxon) mean "stranger". Yet Britain, as its new history, written in the age of devolution, records, does not have a shared past but a record of continuous contest and conflict. Britain is the creation of dominance by kings and barons and upwardly mobile yeomen who practised colonialism at home and who, after perfecting the technique, moved abroad. Significantly, Ulstermen marching with fife and drum regard themselves as more British than the British. As they so often tell us, the marching season, with its demonstration of dominance, is the very essence of their culture.
It really is quite astonishing how much of Britishness and, by association, Englishness is based on fabricated history. Consider the whole notion of Anglo-Saxon Britain, and the importance of Anglo-Saxon history and literature at the older English universities. But the Anglo-Saxon heritage is a very minor part of British history and it is designed to bury what is really a European identity. The British have not been ruled by the Anglo-Saxons for nearly a millennium. The Norman kings - who hardly ever spent time in Britain, who spoke French rather than English, and who were most concerned with dominating Europe from their French possessions - were followed by the Welsh Tudors and Scots Stuarts, and then by a succession of imported Dutch and German monarchs.
History always seeks ancient roots, the better to justify its innovations. Ancient Anglo-Saxon liberties were purposely invented on a number of occasions, notably by Oliver Cromwell, who insisted that those liberties rested on property-owning. The pomp and ceremony of the British monarchy were a late-Victorian invention. The royal family as the model, normative family and ideal for a nation was a post-Edwardian invention; Victoria's son Edward was hardly a model husband and father.
The notions of race and class are intrinsic to the self-definition of the English. As despairing Tories demonstrated in the 2001 election campaign, without the idea of race, there is little left for English identity to hold on to. As recently as 1940, George Orwell could state that "when you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing different air". Identity as difference is less easy to define in a world awash with globalisation, whose most notable feature is rampant Americanisation. Where is the British sandwich? McDonald's, Starbucks, pizza parlours, doner kebab, chicken tikka masala, the rise of ciabatta and the pret a manger syndrome have transmuted the air that Orwell breathed into wafts of everyone else's fragrant confections. "How shall we eat tonight?" - meaning shall we eat Chinese, Indian, Italian, Vietnamese or whatever? - is a very English question, one not asked in Italy, Greece, France or Spain.
And the constant need to choose has become a very basic element of being British. Do we embrace the global Americanisation of the high street, the merchandised model of individualism, the free-market identity of buying into who you want to be in terms of dress, sex and politics? Or do we follow the European model of capitalism, with its emphasis on collective social welfare and high-quality public services?
So we arrive at the third association: the negotiation of identity between the alternate poles of desire and death. As the American scholar Cornel West has suggested, we construct our identities from the building blocks of our basic desires: desire for recognition, quest for visibility, the sense of being acknowledged, a deep desire for association. We long to belong. All these desires are expressed by symbols - pomp and ceremony, marches, festivals, national monuments and anthems, cricket and football teams, and so on. But in a world where symbols are all we are, all we have, holding on to these symbols becomes a matter of life and death. It is for the glorification of these symbols that the bloody tale of national history is written and enacted in the campaigns of nationalists everywhere around the world.
Identity not only invokes the desire to be different, it also summons the desire to express similarity. Indeed, there can be no difference without similarity. But similarity is always seen as the opposite pole to difference, as the appeal of making everyone the same. It is often posed as "our" similarity against "their" difference. Once, the doctrine of similarity was the underlying principle of the communist ethos: now it has become essential to the internationalist-libertarian-individualist doctrine that underpins globalisation. "Workers of the world unite" has been replaced by "liberal capitalism is the only way". Such championing of similarity can become war on those who fight to maintain their difference. Similarity in such contests becomes an ethos to die for.
If we are to come to terms with our contemporary crisis of identity, we need to transcend simplicities. We can celebrate difference, but we do not need to demonise it. We can desire similarity, but not homogeneity. We can value traditions and customs but, if they do not adapt, they become instruments of oppression. Identity has historic anchors but it is not fixed to a limited, unchanging set of traditional signs and historic symbols. Identity is not what we buy, or what we choose, or what we impose on others; rather, it is something from which we learn how to live, discover what is worth buying, and appreciate what it is to be different.
We need to recover our confidence in identity as the product of various and diverse traditions. We need to move away from the politics of contested identities that heighten artificial differences and towards acceptance of the plasticity and possibilities of identities that focus on our common humanity.
Living identity, as opposed to the fossilised to-die-for variety, is in constant flux. It is an ever-changing balance, the balance of similarities and differences as a way of locating what it is that makes life worth living, and what connects us with the rest of the changing world. The challenge is to change and yet remain the same.
The A to Z of Postmodern Life by Ziauddin Sardar is published this month by Vision (£15.99)
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