A reader comments on Peter Drew

In my last post I looked at the beliefs of Peter Drew, an Australian left-wing artist, particularly on the topic of identity. Drew thinks of identity as something fluid and superficial:

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...

I went on to argue that this take on identity reflects the liberal concept of freedom, of a self-determining autonomy, and that it is difficult to assert alternative understandings of freedom if you have a nominalist world view in which we have no natural ends toward which we would rationally want to develop.

A reader, Cameron, wrote a comment that I thought put the situation in a strikingly effective way:

One thing this piece (as many of your other ones) makes clear is that the claim of liberalism to make us "free" to be whatever we want is equally well explained, and perhaps better explained, by a denial of freedom to be anything FOR REAL.

Identity is "not entirely real." The true reason that anyone can be an Aussie, in this mindset, is that being an Aussie is not REAL.

This is the real tragedy of nominalism and runs through all of its promises. Men are free to be women only because women are not even free to be women--because there ARE no women, it's all just "labels."

This is something to ponder. Do liberals think there is a real quality to being Australian, but reject it out of principle? Or do they not think in terms of things having real qualities and therefore there is no real content to being Australian and so logically anyone can be one?

I'm not sure that the latter explains everything. For instance, liberals do give some real worth to indigenous culture and identity - which seems to reflect second-wave liberalism's idea that pre-civilised cultures are worthy in ways that Western bourgeois cultures are not. 

Even so, if your philosophy denies essences (this would include postmodernism) that give distinct qualities, (i.e., a definite nature), to things, then you're likely to go down the path that these things are just conventions or constructs of some sort and therefore as Drew puts it "superficial in some sense" and "not entirely real" and so not really constitutive of self.