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.
In some sense this is the logical corollary to the recognition that when we talk about what something “is” we are (in fact we must be) referring to something necessarily unchanging about it. We want to know about what it always is, not something it may be now but wasn’t in the past and may not be in the future.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, this is merely what thinking itself necessarily must be: the recognition of form, which is what the intellect operates on. This necessarily also means recognizing what something isn’t — or, in other words, discrimination; recognizing that this thing and that thing are not the same thing.
Now, since liberalism is irrational I’m not sure it makes sense to try to look for a rational explanation for the seeming exception of primitive peoples. Which is to say that there’s no reason this “exception” can’t be not an exception at all, no matter its contradiction of the also-held principle of anti-essentialism. That said, I am fairly sure that when pressed liberals would still choose anti-essentialism over primitive peoples. This can already be seen by the fact that there is a strong insistence that what defines, say, an Aboriginal (or in the US an Amerindian, or in New Zealand a Maori) is not actually essence but something else, like descent (no matter how vanishing). A parallel might be how leftists spent decades complaining about things like deforestation and whatnot but now quietly go about destroying old growth forest in the US or Germany for wind farms. However strong the old feeling was, it was not a matter of principle and so has given way.
Liberalism is not only inhuman but anti-human, and consequently for the vast majority of its adherents will cause feelings of revulsion and horror that must be managed somehow as a practical matter. One example is the horror as the instrumental view of humans liberalism’s bosom-mates foster, the view of human societies as being mere components of some engine or machine that exists for some other purpose. This rightly causes revulsion even in leftists, but since they can’t bring themselves to ditch the principles the view derives from in the first place they try to square the circle by making the purpose of these “civilizational engines” creating freedom and good lives for everyone, leading to such obsessions as socialized healthcare. Sentimentalism about primitive peoples is probably another example. Revulsion at deracination is channeled into some sort of search for “authenticity,” always located elsewhere or in some form not threatening to liberalism. After all, leftists do not even raise an eyebrow at members of these primitive peoples voluntarily being assimilated into liberal modernity’s Borg-like mass and thereby deracinated, nor do they care to take any real measures to protect these groups as groups. It is merely that they do not expect most of them to be assimilated (or be able to) and, since they are not threatening, are content to leave them as strange proximate outsiders whose yearned-for but rejected possession of identity can be safely admired from afar in some sort of cathartic purgation ritual that safely disposes of anti-liberal sentiments and impulses.