The Solitarist View of Identity
John Gray is not entirely convinced by Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence, despite his admiration.
Impassioned, eloquent and often moving, Identity and Violence is a sustained attack on the “solitarist” theory which says that human identities are formed by membership of a single social group…There is a deeper unrealism in Sen’s analysis, which emerges in his inability to account for the powerful appeal of the solitarist view…Along with many liberal philosophers, he seems to think human conflict is a result of intellectual error. But if the error of solitarism is so blatantly obvious, why do large numbers of people continue to believe in it and act on it? Sen refers repeatedly to manipulation by malevolent propagandists…But are people really so stupid? Or is the failure of understanding actually in the liberal philosopher?
I’m very interested in that question, because I share in the failure of understanding (if it is one), at least partially. I think I understand the appeal of the solitarist view, up to a point, but I do have trouble understanding why it doesn’t break down fairly quickly under pressure from non-solitarist views. In other words, I see the temporary appeal of identifying with other (whatevers) – women, Muslims, Americans, Jews, gays, blacks, Asians, whatever – but I don’t fully see how one item on the menu manages to trump all the others all the time. I don’t. I extrapolate from myself, and so I don’t see it. I think of myself as a woman (and a feminist) some of the time, and I certainly don’t ever think of myself as not a woman (or a feminist), but I don’t and don’t want to think of myself as primarily a woman all the time; in fact I hate it. It bores me and it makes me feel claustrophobic and above all it makes me feel diminished. If the most important thing about me is that I Am A Wooman along with some 3 billion other people on the planet – well I might as well decide that my identity is all wrapped up in being a mammal, or a vertebrate. I might as well be a grain of wheat in a thousand-acre field (as of course I am, but I don’t particularly want to make that a Badge of Identity). I want to think about other things, and that precludes always uninterruptedly obsessing over and massaging my identity as a woman – or as anything else. So that’s my blind spot, that’s why I have trouble understanding the solitarist view: why do other people want to hug just one identity? Why don’t they get bored?
What does Gray tell us on this point?
For Sen, as a good liberal rationalist, it is an article of faith that the violence of identity is a result of erroneous beliefs. He cannot accept that its causes are inherent in human beings themselves…The people who knifed the day-labourer in Bengal and who dragged off the man to his death in Petrograd made no error. They did what they did from fear, desperation or cruelty. Such atrocities express deep-seated human traits that are not going to be removed by the kind of conceptual therapy offered by Sen.
That answer seems to me a good deal less satisfactory than anything Sen writes. Just for a start – the people who knifed the day-labourer in Bengal did make an error, because whatever fear, desperation or cruelty prompted them to do it, it certainly didn’t gain them anything. That is an error – an error is exactly what it is. To be so crazed with fear, desperation or cruelty that you murder someone of the ‘wrong’ religious or ethnic (or both) group just because he is of the wrong group and is in ‘your’ neighbourhood – is a big fat error. It’s not an error in arithmetic or spelling, but it’s still an error. So what does Gray mean saying it isn’t? In other words – I think he’s right that the appeal of solitarist identity has to be explained, but I don’t think he did anything at all in the direction of explaining it, and I think he made an error besides.
I dunno. I have a great deal of trouble understanding why there seems to be this need for an ‘identity’ at all. From the idea of ‘role models’ to this ‘solitarist’, thing to people saying ‘I’m a Muslim, catholic, Spartacus, black, lesbian, whatever.’ The first response to this seems to me to be, ‘And? So what?’. But often it is seen as the end of the debate.
I don’t know what I am, I feel that I, that everyone, should be moving towards something, not being something and that is that, the end. But it seems to me that rather than seeing life as this journey of exploration, people are so keen to find a place that makes them feel comfortable in all their assumptions, that explains why the world is so indifferent to them, and so on. Then, when they get to this place they lock the door, close the windows and sit there and… well… just sit there, waiting for the end.
As a white, male, educated, British individual, I used to think I didn’t have “an identity” either, but then I realised that thinking that was the thing that proved that I did. Much like imagining I don’t have an accent — always a good laugh at Stateside parties, that one.
“The various strategies of violence for individual and group advantage are actually rational”
Are they indeed – what on earth does that mean? All such “strategies” are rational? All make people’s lives go better?
“I feel that I, that everyone, should be moving towards something, not being something and that is that”
Yeah. Same here. And Sen’s point about shifting among identities, and choosing among them, is similar. But…apparently solitarist identity is more appealing to most people. But then again, that appeal is so heavily reinforced on all sides right now that it’s hard to tell how natural and inevitable the appeal is – it’s hard to tell how much of a self-fulfilling prophecy it is, rather than natural and inevitable.
If group selection is a good model for cultural evolution, then in-group vs. out-group dynamics – including strong identification with groups and hostility/violence between groups – is something that one would expect to see lots and lots of. And we do see it. But I think that saying that such behavior is “rational” is confusion. Rather, the more plausible thing to say is that sense can be made of this behavior. It is not rational, it is predictable – which is a very different thing.
Ah – that makes sense; thanks, G. People are trying to say it’s understandable (predictable) that group identification is prevalent. Very different thing from rational: just so.
Robin Dunbar is interesting on this subject. Self and other; your beliefs are not my beliefs; others can be manipulated via that knowledge. That’s one reason a big brain is useful enough to be worth all the calories. Social groups are one form of that manipulation; useful but risky.
Stating the obvious again (I’m really good at it!) but surely a lot of this is about power? B&W spotlights many cases where people, especially women, would LOVE to manifest alternative identities but suffer all kinds of psychological and physical harm if they try.
Let’s face it, telling people how to behave, how to think and what they can and can’t do has always been the biggest power trip.
Yes…actually that raises a point I’m not sure I’d thought of before – I wonder if there are any statistics or polling data on gender and identity. I wonder if the impassioned kind of ‘identity’ is a mostly or almost-exclusively male phenomenon, that is taken to be a general phenomenon in precisely the same way that ‘Muslim rage’ is taken to be: just because lazy or clueless journalists somehow forget to notice that they’ve been talking only to men. The BBC (for instance) is really bad about that…