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". 

Mamdani, Weaver & the warm collective

The newly elected Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, said in his inaugural speech that he wanted to replace "the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism".

Zohran Mamdani at his inauguration

Bishop Robert Barron responded negatively, with the comment:

Collectivism in its various forms is responsible for the deaths of at least one hundred million people in the last century. Socialist and Communist forms of government around the world today - Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea etc - are disastrous. Catholic social teaching has consistently condemned socialism and has embraced the market economy , which people like Mayor Mamdani caricatures as "rugged individualism."

Fr Dave McNaughton disagreed, replying:

Bishop Barron is gaslighting...Reading the full text suggests that Mamdani was advocating for a very Catholic idea, the practice of solidarity. Shame on Bishop Barron.

So, do we follow the priest or the bishop on this issue? Even though I'm not as straightforwardly in favour of the market economy as Bishop Barron (as the market needs to be regulated carefully or else it too can be dissolving of society), nonetheless I was more disappointed with Fr McNaughton's position. 

It is a rookie error to think that the meaning of words used by progressive moderns is the same as how those words were once understood in pre-modern times or in church theology. Moderns did not abandon traditional concepts like freedom, equality or justice, but instead colonised them so that they could be used within a modernist framework. It is therefore a mistake to assume that when figures like Mamdani use words like "collective" that this is an endorsement of traditional notions of solidarity. 

Even though I am a long-time critic of the hyper-individualism of our culture, I understand why many people blanch when hearing the word "collective". It has become associated with ideological, centralised, statist, redistributist, technocratic, impersonal, distant and authoritarian forms of social organisation. This is not a type of solidarity that most people find appealing.

Some of these features come out in the politics of Cea Weaver, a young woman whom Mamdani has appointed to oversee rent control in New York. She wants to impoverish the white middle class; block the employment of white men; and discourage the procreation of white boys:

So the concept of solidarity as espoused by Cea Weaver does not extend to whites in general and white men in particular. Why? Because it has an ideological basis, as do most forms of modern "collectivism". She believes that the power structures that prevent humans from being truly free and equal are "whiteness" and "patriarchy" and therefore she sees things through a lens of white, male systemic privilege which makes her want to abolish white men rather than extend a hand of solidarity to them. 

This is surely a long way from a genuinely Catholic understanding of solidarity.

Her viewpoint is also, predictably, redistributist (wanting to make the white middle class poor) and statist. 

Ironically, the modernist view of solidarity is also, in its own way, individualistic. It seeks to "liberate" the individual from traditional forms of community, such as families, and instead provide a "socialised" care that is provided in an impersonal and detached way by a centralised, bureaucratically run welfare state. 

We have travelled a considerable distance already toward this aim. Consider that in 1932, Leon Trotsky praised the efforts of the Bolsheviks to abolish the family in these terms:

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” - that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution ... The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc.

Note that Trotsky describes the family as a "shut-in petty enterprise". It was too local for him, too enclosed within itself, it was too much its own little world. 

So what then of a more traditional understanding of solidarity? This was built around an organic concept of society, in which we belonged to social bodies such families and nations, drawn together through natural loves and loyalties.

I won't attempt a complete defence of this traditional understanding. I do, however, want to respond to Trotsky. Trotsky denigrated the family as a shut-in petty enterprise. At the surface level, this might seem to be true. The family embraces only a relatively small number of people. And it can become its own little world.

But it is not petty, not when it works the way that it should. It gives us the opportunity to fulfil important aspects of who we are as men and women. For men, to be masculine providers and protectors. To build and to leave a legacy. For women, to express maternal instincts and drives and to create a loving home. Families come with a sense of lineage, and so can connect us to generations past, present and future. They can provide some of our sense of identity and belonging. They can provide us with a sense of pride in familial achievements, and gratitude for the sacrifices of our forebears. 

And the jibe about being "shut in" might also be challenged. First, because family at its best can lead to a sense of belonging to a unique little community, one with its own quirks and its own unwritten understandings, its own little culture and its own characters. If done well, family can become more than an aggregate of its parts, so that it takes on a unique quality of its own, a distinct way of being human in the world, and therefore a good in itself.

Second, if we are formed well by our upbringing within a loving family, then this is a foundation for us to reach out toward larger communities. We are capable then of the kind of loves that make us value our neighbourhoods, our towns, our regions, our nations. The smaller, local forms of community form us, and preserve us, and support us in ways that make us capable of radiating outwards, even to universals like a concern for humanity. And if we are truly connected to the particular, local social bodies we belong to, we are more likely to see the transcendent goods reflected in these, and this too gives us a higher and more expansive experience of life.

One final point. It is also somewhat artificial to set the notion of a rugged individualism against that of a warmth of collectivism. In the older concept of an organic society, the idea was that each person had a role to play as a distinct member of a social body. It was therefore important that individuals were able to carry out these social roles, or else the social body itself would suffer harm. To give one example, it was important for men to have the strength of character - the masculine toughness - to do the hard things required of them. This was not done in opposition to the collective good but in support of it, not so that a man could live alone outside of a community, but so he could effectively contribute to it.