Identity and conflict

Social Research, Spring, 2007 by Isaac Levi

It may be objected that the notion of identification just mentioned does not cover the notion articulated by Patrick Henry when he declared "My country right or wrong!" But this is not so. The constraint imposed by a commitment to support the decisions taken by one's "country" is far from clear. But minor adjustments might clarify the constraint imposed. The scope of the commitment also involves obscurity. Does it cover the decisions of all citizens or merely "patriotic" citizens? Here too minor adjustments can rescue some clarity. Some value commitments are simply obscure.

Thus, in the sense of identification (commitment identification) I am taking as an elaboration of Bilgrami's idea: to identify with a group is to embrace a value commitment or system of value commitments whose scope covers agents who are members of that group.

Returning to Sen's contention that we all have many identities, can Sen's notion of identity be equated with the one just elaborated? I think it can. As Sen himself acknowledges, it is not enough to point out that each of us has many different characteristics to sustain his thesis that we have many identities. Nonetheless, he is right to maintain this view. Each of us identifies with many different groups that support diverse commitments. X can identify with the Muslims, be a member of the American Bar Association, belong to the PTA in some school in Ann Arbor, etc.

Bilgrami does not think this is quite right. He does not deny that agents can have multiple identities in the weak commitment sense according to which an identity is the type of affiliation that is associated with endorsement of a system of value commitments. But he thinks there is a stronger notion of identity that it is important to understand.

   The notion of identity can be characterized in terms of
   what I ... called an agent's most "fundamental commitments."
   These are desires that she most identifies with.
   How are these to be characterized? It is not enough to
   repeat that these are the desires that are highly reinforced
   because those will be too many to deliver anything
   so focused as the notion of identity. To the extent that we
   believe in the notion of identity, we will have to do better
   and specify desires that have an even greater centrality in
   our psychological economy. These are specified in counterfactual
   terms. A desire is a fundamental commitment if one
   wants it fulfilled even were one not to have the desire. In case
   this sounds too abstract, it can be indexed to times a desire is a
   fundamental commitment at a given time, if at that time
   one wants if fulfilled at a future time, even if one believes
   that at the future time one may not have that desire. This
   temporal elaboration of the counterfactual will be crucial
   to my argument against the classical liberal picture. For
   now an intuitive sense of such a commitment can be given
   by an example. Many of our desires are not fundamental
   commitments in this sense, but a few indeed are. Take,
   for example, the fact that certain sections of the Iranian
   government are explicitly arguing that increasingly
   modernizing influences around them may well have the
   effect in the future that they will lose their desire to live by
   Islamic tenets, nevertheless they now want their future to
   be one where they are in fact living by Islamic tenets, even
   if they do not have the desire to do so then (and they are in
   fact arguing that they should entrench things so that that
   can happen) (Bilgrami, 1999: 172).