Mistaken identities - fighting identity politics

National Review, Nov 25, 1996 by John O'Sullivan

IN HIS New Yorker review of the biography of Philip Larkin, Martin Amis gave a strong defense of Larkin against the charges of sexism, racism, moral squalor, and so on, then making the literary rounds. Much of this defense was built around the idea that Larkin had grown up at a time when racism, as now defined, was so common as not to invite censure, and when sexism did not exist as a category of sin into which one could fall. But, perhaps feeling that he needed to guard Larkin against the secondary charge of making no effort at all to move when the times did, Mr. Amis reflected as follows:

Larkin the man is separated from us, historically, by changes in the self. For his generation, you were what you were, and that was that. It made you unswervable and adamantine. My father has this quality. I don't. None of us do. There are too many forces at work on us. There are too many fronts to cover. In the age of self-improvement, the self is inexorably self-conscious . . .

Mr. Amis is making an important point here: that this concept of the self as almost infinitely malleable has been so widely popularized, moving from the philosophy lecture room to the cinema, that it is now challenging an older religious and social concept of identity, built around such ideas as conscience and the soul. This modern theory of identity has broken out of the laboratory and, as in a 1950s science-fiction movie, is stalking through the town, inserting itself into the heads of regular citizens, and transforming them into other-directed aliens.

Of course, the two theories start with much in common: namely, that an individual identity is put together from three elements. The first is that set of psychological abilities innate to all human beings and evident in early childhood -- consciousness, memory, and the moral sense.

Consciousness makes us aware of ourselves as existing separately from others. Memory extends that awareness backward through time. And the moral sense tells us the terms on which we should deal with those others. Together they generate that aspect of identity we call the conscience. This is more than just a voice telling us not to take wrong actions here and now. It forces us to feel moral responsibility for past actions, and so helps to establish identity as something that exists through time.

It is sometimes said of a vicious criminal who has undergone a moral transformation in prison and performed good works, that he should be released because he is clearly "no longer the man who committed the crimes." But would the criminal himself agree? Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, who tortured and killed several children, is on record as saying that someone who has committed such crimes has indefinitely forfeited any right of release. Indeed, criminals like the Birdman of Alcatraz, who seemed to experience a moral transformation, probably did so precisely because they felt they were the same men who had committed the crimes and wanted to build up equally impressive services on the opposite side of the moral ledger. They wanted to atone.

The second set of qualities making up identity is our genetic inheritance from our particular parents. Psychologists seem to have established that we are predisposed by our individual genes to have a particular level of IQ, to enter particular occupations, to attend particular churches, to marry a particular kind of spouse, to be law-abiding or criminal, mad or sane, healthy or sick, friendly or suspicious, shy or forward, party animal or wall-flower, long- or short-lived, and even, as W. S. Gilbert foretold, "either a little Liberal, or else a little Conservative."

Every school class has a class hero, a class clown, a class bully, a class victim. Such identities cling. His fellows expect certain kinds of behavior from him; he learns to provide or modify them as popularity dictates.

WHICH brings us to the third element in identity: the influence of environment. For many of the most important components of identity arise from our being born in a particular family, in a particular place, at a particular time in history, and therefore into a particular set of traditions and customs. The first language we learn is an accident of birth. Our religious identity is something we embrace long before we can grasp its importance. Our sexuality is probably determined in the main genetically, but how we regard it is at least strongly influenced by social custom. We pick up the manners of our social class, assuming them to be universal laws of good behavior. We obtain automatic membership in our nation or ethnic group, together with a legacy of accompanying songs, myths, and stories. And all of these things, though external and pre-existing, are absorbed by our fledgling identity and become as much a part of us as our temperament, our IQ, or our digestion. Some of the most important elements of our identity are external, accidental, and above all social.

From the point of view of the traditional theory of identity, that poses little or no problem. "Art is man's nature," said Burke, and man is a social animal who draws upon social materials in building his identity. Without the influence of society, a person's identity would be like Hobbes's description of natural society: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (and, one might add, speechless). The social elements in identity are the means whereby someone's natural gifts and disposition enter the world.