Identity
When we say “I am” or “You are,” we are practicing emotional and cognitive shorthand. Everyone is much more than the predicate nominative that completes the sentence yet we must accede to the confines of language and the demands of our social roles. We will be known; we want to be known. How those two impulses play out against one another often determines how a life is lived. Society’s knowing is reductive: “You are a slave or peasant or housewife.” That is peremptorily that. What a person knows about him or herself (to keep the matter within traditional, historical, societal frameworks), a matter at once vast and minute, may be very hard to put into words. All those twinges, bafflements, and intuitions that make up a life do not comprise a neat package, despite the outline that life has taken. So much is felt but not spoken. What is spoken must in some way agree with some social agenda the society has set forth. Within that realm, each declaration of identity must maneuver.
It is tempting to propose a law to the effect that the more mass society has grown in modern times, the more the need to assert one’s identity has grown. The more a person feels anonymous, another number or name, the more a person needs to proclaim how that person wants to be known. Identity agrees with the notion that people can profit from tags, if they come from the person not from the society’s often blunted and tainted perceptions. Calling the Native peoples of the Americas “Indians” was, for all practical purposes, lunatic, yet that tag became a staple of identity. The names that one powerful group bestows upon a less powerful group are too often an exercise in misunderstanding, to say nothing of denigration. To push back against the overt and insidious ways an identity is enforced can be the work of centuries and even, as in the case of Jew hatred or caste systems, millennia.
The hazard of asserting an identity is that a person or group is joining in a version of an often unhappy charade in which people are slotted according to unalterable categories. Categories offer a haven—being a self-respecting part of a group—but categories easily swallow the individual and the individual’s quibbles. The quibbles, that “yes, but” aspect, are what make any human being particular and engaging. Anyone can endorse a broad identity and submerge him or herself in it. Part of the work of being human lies in proposing qualifications and conditions. The terrible categorizations proposed by totalitarian governments in modern times made identity into a vicious Janus. One side of the face was the blind identification with a group and the absolute binding of the individual to that group. The other side was the vilification of those outside the group. Such vilification reached an almost unthinkable endgame in which the vilified group was considered to not be human.
I think of movies where someone on a train in the middle of the twentieth century is asked by the police for his or her “identity papers.” Though I was sitting in some cozy theater in the United States, the phrase’s bureaucratic malevolence was palpable. Without those papers the individual did not exist, but the individual might not exist with those papers either. The individual existed to be categorized and processed accordingly by the State. W.H. Auden’s poem “The Unknown Citizen” in honor of citizen “JS/07/M/378” who “was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan / And had everything necessary to the Modern Man” is droll but not droll. It was not a long step to the tattooed numbers on the arms of concentration camp inmates.
The assertion of individuality, whether the nattering, possessive “my” or the thoughtful responses of writers such as Thoreau and D. H. Lawrence, mattered so deeply in modern times because those numbers dwarfed any individual life. If words such as “unique” and “special” came to seem somewhat battered, that was understandable. Desperation, a hunger for acknowledgment, along with numbness, lay not far beneath the surface. The great sum belittled the mere person. The slogans that emanated from the May events in France in 1968 were redolent of childish insight, the desire to push back against uniformity. “You will all finish up by dying from comfort” and “Be realistic, demand the impossible” are mottoes that stem not only from petulance but from frustration.
The May events, like the brief Occupy movement in the United States, foundered because they were not part of any organized concern. They weren’t meant to be. They spoke not only for a lack of interest in mass norms but contempt also. They spoke for a feeling that what the society considered to matter—consumption, efficiency, ambition—did not matter and that what the society considered not to matter—sensibility, taking one’s time, paying attention to the earth, valuing human interchanges and human inwardness—mattered very much. Practicality—the best way to make more widgets—was a steep price to pay.
In some ways, individuality is natural. Unless they are identical twins, no two people look quite alike or act quite alike. Yet individuality needs to be nurtured to find its way. All the byways of predilection—feeling this not that—matter. Moment by moment, those predilections make daily life feel alive. We want, in that regard, to be consulted. We want our particular tastes to amount to something more than choosing a product off a shelf. We want, however much the impulse is beaten down by the acquisitive hurry of mass society, to live with the savor of being on our tongues and in our ears and eyes—the true “quality of life” that has played out over centuries in cuisine, dress, and gardening, to name three areas. The tags of identity, even when they are well-meant, only go so far down the road. The latitude to declare our humanity, regardless of those tags, remains as fraught as it ever was. The “accelerated grimace” Ezra Pound pointed to, over a hundred years ago, remains very much in place.
These essays manage to distill so much insight into such brief space—it’s amazing to receive one each week. To me they feel a little bit like it might have felt to people watching newsreels in the movie theater.