Peter Drew is a left-wing Australian artist. He is best known for his posters which show people from different ethnic backgrounds being described as "Aussie".
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| Peter Drew with his posters |
In an interview with a local Indian media outlet, Drew explained his views on identity as follows:
All identity should be fluid in some sense, whether that’s the make up of our blood, that being our race or nationality, or our job, or the behaviour we exhibit, or the clothes we wear. It’s all superficial in some sense, it’s not entirely real, there is some substance to it, but none of it can say who we really are, and so it is fluid in some sense and so it says Aussie on all my posters, it’s a provocation….it’s really to open up the discussion and then allow us to talk about identity in a fluid way, because I think that’s what ultimately is empowering to individuals and gives us the most freedom. [1]
This is not an original thought. It is an orthodox expression of the liberalism which has dominated the Western political class for many decades.
The basic idea of this liberalism is that the overriding good in life is a freedom to be an autonomous individual, i.e., an individual who is self-determining or self-authoring. This principle has momentous consequences. It means that anything that is not self-determined, but rather predetermined, is thought of negatively as a restriction on individual freedom. And traditional national identities, based as they are on our unchosen ethny, fall into this category. Someone who is ethnically Japanese did not choose to be so, they were simply born into this identity. This type of identity is relatively fixed - this Japanese person cannot suddenly decide that they are ethnically Nigerian.
Which is why Peter Drew is so concerned that identity be fluid, because this is what then opens up the possibility of moving between identities.
One cost of having easily discarded, or traded in, identities is that they then become merely external to the self-authoring individual. The "I" that chooses must be separate to whatever identities are either selected or abandoned. So therefore it would not be accurate for a person to say "I am Japanese" as the two things would be distinct. As Drew puts it, in this liberal view our identities are "all superficial in some sense" and "not entirely real". Our identities are also flattened - they are all equally choices, so our choice of national identity is spoken of by Drew in the same terms as our choice of the clothes that we wear. It is possible that Drew's use of clothes to illustrate identity is revealing, as a kind of metaphor for identity as he understands it, as he sees identity as something that we can put on or take off, as something that is more of an external cover or adornment, rather than being part of who we truly are.
So how do we challenge this liberal logic by which a commitment to individual autonomy leads to a rejection of deeper forms of unchosen communal identity?
One possibility would be to assert a different understanding of freedom. We could think of freedom not as a radical act of self-authorship, but as the liberty to pursue our given ends, the "telos" which is given to us as part of our nature.
Why don't we have this understanding of freedom? It would be possible to do so had we kept to an older Western philosophy:
...things have natures, as Aristotle and Aquinas said, that let us know what they ought to be, what their telos, or end is. What makes a human being flourish, and become more human, and what doesn’t? What is good, and what is bad? Are there things we know through our knowledge of the thing’s nature, of man’s nature?In this philosophy, it makes sense to think of freedom as a freedom for excellence - to pursue that which makes us flourish and become more human; to orient ourselves toward the good; to become what we ought to be.
But there is a more modern strand of philosophy which blocks this path because it rejects the idea of essences. This philosophy took a nominalist and voluntarist stance:
Philosophical voluntarism is the doctrine that assigns a primary role to the will (Latin: voluntas) over intellect or reason in human action, metaphysics, and theology. It posits that free choice and desire are the fundamental drivers of reality and moral obligation, often arguing that truth and morality are created by divine or human will rather than discovered through rational contemplation.
If you hold to this kind of voluntarism you are more likely,
I think, to support Peter Drew's claim that there is nothing all that real to
be discovered within our given natures, but that what matters is the freedom to
assert our own will, even if the identities that we self-create are necessarily
superficial.
Nominalism denies the real existence of universals. This
means that there are only individual instances of things, with universals being
names we give to things:
Nominalists offer a radical definition of reality: there are no universals, only particulars. The basic idea is that the world is made exclusively from particulars and the universals are of our own making. They stem from our representational system (the way we think about the world) or from our language (the way we speak of the world).
If there are only particulars, then there is no "virtue," "apples," or "genders." There are, instead, human conventions that tend to group objects or ideas into categories. Virtue exists only because we say it does: not because there is a universal abstraction of virtue. Apples only exist as a particular type of fruit because we as humans have categorized a group of particular fruits in a particular way. Maleness and femaleness, as well, exist only in human thought and language.
Take, as an example, masculinity. For a
nominalist this is not a real quality or essence that inheres to being a man:
For a nominalist, there is no "essence" of masculinity that exists independently; rather, there are only particular men and specific actions that society conventionally labels as "masculine".
Masculinity is viewed as a social construct or a useful fiction rather than a natural, fixed, or metaphysical reality. It is a label applied to behaviors (e.g., strength, emotional restraint) that may vary across cultures and time periods.
Instead of saying, "These men are masculine because they share the quality of masculinity," a nominalist would say these individual men simply resemble each other in certain ways, and we use the term "masculine" to describe that resemblance.
The characteristics defining masculinity are not fixed by nature but are arbitrarily selected and grouped together by human beings. Because masculinity is a label rather than an inherent property, nominalists recognize that its definition is subjective to cultural contexts, and it can change based on social conventions.
Again, if this is your understanding, then it becomes difficult to see freedom as a movement toward our natural ends, in which we cultivate virtue or identify objective goods to embody or to serve. The nominalist position suggests, first, that such things are merely conventions or constructs, and, second, that lacking an essential nature that might be held in common, that we cannot know what the good for others might be, that there is only what we know of our own selves. But this then pushes in the direction of the liberal definition of freedom, in which individuals are not part of a natural order of existence, but can autonomously make whatever they choose of their own individual being.
[1] The Indian Sun TV. “In conversation with Peter Drew Artist/Activist" (Video).” YouTube, 20 May 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1TJBnBiz9g
Postscript: When reading Peter Drew's account of national identity I was reminded of the writing of Judith Butler on gender identity. The quote by Butler below illustrates the nominalist position very clearly:
... gender is a performance ... Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction...
You can perhaps see a connection here to Drew's claim that our identities are superficial and "not entirely real".
