Either politics or identities

Neither "identity politics", nor "political identities"

Photo by Random Thinking on Unsplash

Who am I? This is a question that can have several different depths of meaning. The deepest would probably be when it’s a metaphysical question, and maybe the shallowest when the answer is one’s name. In between these extremes lie most of its practical uses. Teenagers try hard to find who they are, for instance, when they reach an age in which they are no longer “Mr. and Mrs. X’s child”. But are they unique, as unique as mass media uniformly paints them to be, are they as categorial as mass media tries to make them be, or — more probably — where in this spectrum will their real identity be found?

A few centuries ago, it wasn’t much of a question, or at least the answer wasn’t complicated, as a kid’s path was more or less pre-ordained: Mr. X’s son would eventually become the heir of Mr. X’s possessions, titles, and jobs, and Mrs. X’s daughter would be just like her mother, but with a different family name. It’s still like that in more aspects than our civic legends would accept it to be: a doctor has a much stronger probability of being the child of another doctor than, say, the child of a bricklayer or agricultural worker, and vice-versa. Some will attribute this fact to genetics, while others will blame economic disparities entirely; as with almost everything in society, though, it’s probably a mix of reasons, among which these may perfectly well be somehow important. Still, it’s hard to deny that reality has a way of wrecking ideological dreams, of putting abysses, tall walls, and mountain ranges where there should only be a nice tabula rasa on which one could build one’s dreams.

Mr. X’s son, however, is not a perfect clone of Mr. X (eugenicists would probably blame it on Mr. X’s stupidity in marrying beauty instead of brains). Just as the dream would have it, even if not as much as the dream would have it, he really is unique, at least up to a certain point. Besides, even if he were his own father’s twin, Ortega y Gasset was right when he said “I am myself and my circumstances”. Mr. X’s son was born in a different generation, grew up under different influences, and had to find out by himself who he was, just like everybody else, including his father at a certain point in life.

Our identity — who we see ourselves to be — is in a very important sense a social question. Each of us contributes to society in our own way, each of us depends on society in our own way, and all of us are constrained by society to adhere to thousands upon thousands of small unwritten laws, some of them moral, some of them not. Our uniqueness is in many ways the shape our pliant selves take while bending around so many unmovable obstacles or spreading on so many open paths.

Not all paths and obstacles are external, even if one way or another all of them are social, at least in the sense that they inform the way we interact with society. If we take, for instance, a kid who is the child and grandchild of great doctors, and another who is born in poverty to a family whose members can only dream of finding a nice indoor job. Let’s say both had a Mozart-level musical talent; for the latter, it would be his way up in life, almost a winning lottery ticket, while for the former it would probably be at most a hobby, or at least an obstacle in his relationship with his parents if he insisted on dedicating his life to it. If he wanted to identify himself primarily through his talent. If he wanted to be Mozart instead of Dr. Mozart III.

Now, our relationship with society happens within a sphere the ancient Greeks would call the polis, the “city”, as they had city-states (like Singapore), not national states. “Politics”, “policy”, “police”, and many other modern terms refer to that sphere. It was simpler in their time; 90% of the population was composed of enslaved people and strangers, and all that referred to the polis would be the exclusive reserve of the 10% of the population with full citizenship rights. It’s a lot more complicated when not only the proportions are inverted, but the theory has it that everybody is equal while reality sharply discriminates between the children of doctors and those of laborers, when the theory has it that everybody is unique while reality has its ways of making sure each of us is first and foremost a member of a category first, with our supposed uniqueness restricted to a few details on the way we express our belonging to that category. A goth teenager spends hours in front of the mirror composing her “unique” appearance and goes out looking like a cookie-cutter goth teenager, no more, no less. A young man expresses his “uniqueness” in the form of full-arm tattoos that look exactly the same as those of all his peers from a couple of meters away. As little as they would like to realize that, it’s not that different from picking neckties or formal shoes when one wears a suit to work.

It’s as if we lived in two worlds at once, like the Chinese philosopher who once dreamed he was a butterfly and then spent the rest of his life uncertain whether he was a butterfly dreaming of being a Chinese philosopher or a Chinese philosopher who once dreamed of being a butterfly. One is the world of theory, in which we are all at once equal and unique, and the other is that of hard experience, in which we are at once different and categorial.

In many ways, it happens because we lost our sense of polis. Society in post-modern times lost the cohesion that makes it a society, and this loss is more or less directly related to its degree of modernity (therefore, post-modernity, which can also be called and considered hyper-modernity). That’s why both sides of the American political divide see the presidential election as the last opportunity to avoid the total destruction of everything they hold dear, something the other side would be itching to do. That’s why the Japanese are not having children, but each year a bunch of new “tribes” will wear funny clothes on the streets of Tokyo. That’s why most Northern European societies have made it a dogma that it’s not polite to wish for immigrants to integrate into the society that hosts them and adopt its culture.

It’s not something as simple as if the question were about having an American, Japanese, or Scandinavian identity, in general. That they have. Both sides of the American political divide consider their way of being American the true one, it wouldn’t cross the minds of Japanese tribalists that they weren’t Japanese, and politeness has always been seen as a Scandinavian virtue, at least in modern times. It’s about no longer having a common sense of identity within which one can find one’s own. It’s as if we no longer believed there was such a thing called medicine (controversies about vaccines may well be a first step in that direction, by the way); if that were the case, why would the child of a doctor want to also become a doctor?

The categories that define and restrict our supposedly absolute uniqueness multiply because there is no longer a consensus societal narrative to define and restrict them. While the poorest keep trying to avoid homelessness and misery, those higher in Maslow’s pyramid frantically add category to category, ceaselessly trying to define their uniqueness within those ever-changing mass identities. The very categories they pick already put them in yet other categories, recursively, helping dismantle the little there still is of a common societal narrative. Further dismantling the polis, then. Someone who picks “autistic”, “non-binary”, and “performance artist” will not be in the same polis — or the same political space, if we wrestle the notion down to the ground — of someone who picks “Christian”, “married with children”, and “law enforcement officer”. Needless to say, the latter’s categories do not mean the same as they did a couple of generations before, because these days they will be largely defined in opposition to the former’s.

That’s why politics become impossible: there is no longer a polis. It’s not a matter of the Left playing a game of identity politics, for the Right plays the same game, only with different identities and different categories. It’s a matter of having two different games being played at once within the same physical territory. A territory that no longer has a common polis, that no longer has the very possibility of politics. When “the other side” is seen as Armaggedon, as sheer chaos, no dialogue is possible. Without the possibility of a dialogue, there is no longer any possibility of playing the political game.

In the 20th Century, the political game was often played with sticks and stones, but it was not, as it is now, a game of fractal dissolution. All Communists had the same Communist narrative and all Fascists had the same Fascist narrative in the 1930s, but the differences between one narrative and the other were minimal compared to the similarities. Later, in the cooler-headed 1950s, a Eurocommunist and a Christian Democrat were even closer in the paths they believed open in the political sphere. The Cold War happened between systems that did not share a physical territory. While each had its own polis and wanted to enlarge it by absorbing the territory of the enemy polis, within each side everybody was fundamentally in agreement and the disputes were more often than not between groups vying for power.

Now we still talk about “sides” because the theory says there are sides (which would be the suave competitors within last-century political spaces), but each of them is shattered into myriads of “unique” cross-sections of categories with worldviews so far apart that they would never be able to form a true common political space. The only thing they have in common is seeing “the other side” as absolutely evil; even the reasons why they picked “their side” are incompatible. What is there in common between, say, the political worldview of Elon Musk and that of a Fundamentalist preacher who sees Trump as a literal Messiah?

When Aristotle said that man is a naturally political (or social, according to the translation) animal, he did not mean that societies would flow and evolve without a hiccup. He just meant that humans tend to form (or re-form) societies, as whenever things get too far from their nature they revert to it in due time. We are now on the brink of a worldwide, or at least modernity-wide, societal disruption. Its main cause is the artificialness of modernity and its dream of conforming reality to ideological thinking. That’s why the societies that have some sort of pre-modern safety net will have it easier, or less hard, and that’s why I always say that the original BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), plus Iran — or rather Persia, as I’m talking about cultures, not states —, were the best horses in that particular race. The more modern a society is, the more it is dissolving, the less of a polis it has or can have, and the more identities sprout like mushrooms after the rain.

It’s not the end of the world, but it’s the end of a world. A short-lived one, for modernity started only 500 years ago and only became powerful enough to dictate to whole nations how to live almost half as recently. In terms of human history, it will have been a flash in the pan, a short burst of lunacy that nevertheless managed to invent industrial genocide, carpet bombing, nuclear weapons, vast-scale pollution, radioactive waste, and a few other gifts that keep on giving. Future generations will see the last one hundred years as a cautionary tale about hubris, about how humans can be evil and reckless. Every once in a while, for the next tens of thousands of years, whole groups of humans will be killed by the poisons, both radioactive and chemical, we have been planting all over the world for them to find and die.

For now, however, the insanity still persists. Not for much long, though, as we can easily see by the end of each modern polis that is both heralded and hastened by our present identity troubles.

It’s impossible to know what will come in a few centuries, as impossible as it was to predict the Middle Ages when Rome was falling. But some other form of polis will appear, as we are naturally political animals and nature always reverts to form. Eventually.