Poster boy of the Australian left

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".

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". 

Why the dysfunction in relationships?

In "The Load-Bearing Relationship" Cat Orman sets out to explain the dysfunction in modern relationships. She begins with the statistical trends:

In 2000, the percentage of Americans between the ages of 25 and 50 who had never married was just 21%. By 2018, the share of never-married adults climbed to 35%. The median age at first marriage was 25 for women and 27 for men in 2000; by 2022, it was 28 and 30. Today, 41% of Americans ages 18-29 are single, and about a third of never-married single adults say they have never been in a committed romantic relationship.

Her explanation for the decline in relationships is what she calls the "contractual moral framework":

Traditional societies held that we are born into our roles and responsibilities. You owed certain social and practical tributes to your neighbors, siblings, and countrymen, even though you didn’t sign up for them. Confucianism and stoicism made these systems of reciprocal obligations explicit in “role ethics.” Abrahamic religions treated one’s responsibility to the community as part of their obligation to God. Hinduism and the related traditions of the Indian subcontinent contain injunctions from dharma, the personal and social moral duties expected of every spiritually upright individual. While the roles and responsibilities differed greatly across time and place, all of these societies agreed on the necessity and even nobility of fulfilling unchosen roles and responsibilities.

As a consequence, doctrines of how to be a good person centered on the idea that we hold a positive duty of care to others, be it through tithing, caring for sick family members, or raising our neighbor’s barns on the frontier...

The last decade is defined by a shift away from a role ethic and towards a contractualist one. In a contractual moral framework, you have obligations only within relationships that you chose to participate in—meaning, to the children you chose to have and the person you chose to marry—and these can be revoked at any time. You owe nothing to the people in your life that you did not choose: nothing to your parents, your siblings, your extended family or friends, certainly nothing to your neighbors, schoolmates, or countrymen; at least nothing beyond the level of civility that you owe to a stranger on the street.

This is well put. It is part of the shift toward seeing individual autonomy as the highest good in life (which itself has a connection to "voluntarism" in the sense of seeing the will as the ultimate source of value). If it is my autonomy, i.e. my ability to choose as I will in any direction, that is the highest good, then stable commitments to others are a limitation on this good, a kind of fetter or chain, that I should seek to liberate myself from. The focus becomes my freedom to revoke my commitments, rather than my obligations to fulfil my given roles in life. It is not surprising that this focus would lead to a lower trust society with less stable patterns of family life.

Cat Orby goes on to make an interesting observation, namely that if we cannot rely on the support we once received from our unchosen forms of relationships, then too much comes down to the support from a spouse, placing excessive burdens and expectations on that one relationship. 

One small criticism I have of Cat Orby's piece is that the shift toward moral contractualism is much older than she realises. The idea that human society is governed by a "social contract" voluntarily entered into goes back to the proto-liberalism of the seventeenth century. Again, the first wave feminists of the nineteenth century emphasised the idea of maximising autonomy for women, which meant valorising independence rather than family commitments. A female student at Girton College in the 1880s expressed this ethos by stating that,

We are no longer mere parts - excrescences, so to speak, of a family...One may develop as an individual and independent unit.

Unsurprisingly, the same dysfunctions in relationships we see today were also present toward the end of first wave feminism, including delayed family formation and a low fertility rate.

Another minor criticism is that Cat Orby might have extended her argument to go beyond that of obligations. For instance, if what matters is an autonomous freedom to choose in any direction, then the qualities that we are born with, rather than choosing for ourselves, will also seem to be constraints that limit us as individuals. This includes our given sex. And so instead of cultivating the positive qualities of our own sex, it is common for moderns to think negatively of these qualities. Modern women, for instance, have a difficult relationship with their own femininity. This too disrupts heterosexual relationships.

Then there is the issue of equality. It is common now for people to conceive of the very categories of man and woman as political classes vying against each other for power in a zero sum game, where if men win women lose and vice versa. There is little sense of men and women realising themselves more fully in relationship with each other and therefore having a mutual interest in upholding family life as a common good. 

Another way of framing this is that there is no longer a sense of unity governing the relations between men and women. Instead there is fragmentation and the only way of overcoming this fragmentation, within the current way of thinking, is a non-reciprocal one in which either men must strive to meet women's needs and desires or vice versa (or else, as suggested in the recent Barbie film, the sexes achieve equality by going their own way).

To be fair, if there were an emphasis again on role ethics, then this would challenge some of these other problems, because there would once again be a consideration of what we owe to others in virtue of our given roles and responsibilities. What Cat Orby emphasises is therefore not a bad starting point for tackling the current malaise.

Why the incoherence?

One of the most obviously incoherent aspects of modern thought is the presence, at the same time, of both voluntarism and materialism/naturalism/scientism. These things would not seem to go together well at all. The voluntarism suggests that it is our own wills which define reality. If I say I am a woman, even if I am a man, then that is what I am and I should be treated as such by society. This conflicts with the materialism/naturalism/scientism which sees reality in terms of material processes. According to this outlook it would be genetics, chromosomes and hormones and such like that would determine my sex.

Many moderns hold to both voluntarism and scientism with equal force, despite the apparent incompatibility. How can we explain this? I don't personally have a modern type mind, so cannot answer with confidence, but I can suggest three possible explanations.

a) Accretions 

It can be the case that certain philosophies influence a culture over the course of that culture's history. Instead of these philosophies being harmonised, they simply "enter the mix". If this is the explanation, then the voluntarism might come from a variety of sources, e.g. from the theological voluntarism of the Middle Ages, or from German idealist philosophy of the nineteenth century, or more generally from the emphasis on autonomy as the goal of a liberal politics. The scientism/materialism/naturalism is derived from the rejection of scholastic philosophy in the Early Modern period and perhaps from empiricist schools of philosophy.

b) Science as a servant of human desires

My understanding is that modern science was launched, in part, with the idea that by understanding natural processes, humans could obtain the resources to satisfy unlimited wants. In other words, if the larger aim is not to live within the natural order, but to pursue our individual wants and desires to the furthest extent possible, then science could be employed to create the conditions in which those wants and desires could be fulfilled.

If this is so, then you can understand why moderns cleave to both scientism and voluntarism. The voluntarism represents the unfettered pursuit of whatever we will for ourselves. The scientism the means by which to obtain these wants and desires. 

c) The loss of value in nature

If nature is seen only from a scientistic/naturalistic viewpoint, then it will seem merely mechanical. It will no longer be a bearer of value in the way it once was when it was appealed to morally (i.e. when saying "it is natural/unnatural to do x, y or z" as a way of endorsing or condemning certain acts). 

I think it can be difficult for those raised within a Christian tradition to understand this. Christians are used to the idea of a purposeful act of creation, so that our relationship to the natural world is invested with meaning (even when we apprehend a certain mystery in the created world). But there are moderns for whom nature is just a mechanical process coldly indifferent to human life. There is nothing for them to relate to in the natural world.

So values, for such moderns, must then come from ourselves: they must come from our own subjective wills. We do not discover objective values inhering in the created world; instead, we assert the power to create values through an act of will (which perhaps represents a deification of ourselves in the image of a voluntarist concept of God).

You can see, then, why the scientism/naturalism/materialism goes together with a voluntarism. The scientism disenchants and de-values; the voluntarism is then necessary to reassert value. You get both, despite an apparent incompatibility between the two.

I'm not sure which of the three explanations is the more likely reason for the coexistence of both voluntarism and scientism. Perhaps all have had an influence, or there might be some other reason I have not considered.