Review by Anand Giridharadas, New York Times, Aug. 27, 2018; see also
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IDENTITY
The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment
By Francis Fukuyama
218 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
THE LIES THAT BIND
Rethinking Identity: Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
256 pp. Liveright Publishing. $27.95.
A Japanese-American political scientist and a Ghanaian-British-American philosopher walk into a bar where a brawl over identity is underway. “Stop fighting!” the philosopher cries. “The identities you’re fighting for are lies.” The political scientist steps forward. “They’re not lies,” he says. “They’re just the wrong identities to be fighting for!”
The scholars succeed in ending the conflict, because the brawlers leave for a less contentious bar.
The political scientist in my meh joke is Francis Fukuyama, who famously declared “the end of history,” and then, when history continued, said it depends on what the meaning of the word “end” is. The philosopher is Kwame Anthony Appiah, a cosmopolitan by background and choice who argues that we are all citizens of the world. The bar, sadly, is our brawling country [JB emphasis]— and others like it.
Here are a couple of sage Ph.D.s seeing if they might intervene in the identity wars now plaguing so many nations. Both books belong to one of today’s most important genres: the Not-About-Trump-But-Also-Sort-Of-About-Trump, or N.A.T.B.A.S.O.A.T., book. There is a hunger to understand this moment, but from a remove.
And both books help explain so much more than Trump. #MeToo. White nationalism. Hindu nationalism. Black Lives Matter. Campus debates about privilege and appropriation. Syria. Islamism. The spread of populism and retreat of democracy worldwide. The rise of the far right in Europe. The rise of the far left in the United States. All these phenomena throb with questions of identity, of “Who am I?” and “To what do I belong?” Appiah and Fukuyama seek out answers.
Appiah believes we’re in wars of identity because we keep making the same mistake: exaggerating our differences with others and our similarities with our own kind. We think of ourselves as part of monolithic tribes up against other tribes, whereas we each contain multitudes. Fukuyama, less a cosmopolitan and more a nation-state guy, has greater sympathy for people clinging to differences. He thinks it a natural response to our age — but also seems to believe that if we don’t find a way to subsume narrow identities into national ones, we’re all going to die.
Appiah begins “The Lies That Bind” by observing that he, a man of ambiguous identity, is constantly asked, “What are you?” His book is an exploration of why people feel a need to pin identities down — to essentialize — and how to escape the pinning.
Appiah’s project is to point out our most common errors in thinking about five types of identity, all conveniently beginning with the letter “c”: creed, country, color, class and culture. (This gimmick lends proof to his cosmopolitan idea: A British-born philosopher can also be an American salesman.)
Among the errors we make: On “c” No. 1, creed, we tend to think of religions as “sets of immutable beliefs” instead of as “mutable practices and communities.” We make religion a noun when it should really be a verb, which gives rise to fundamentalism. When religion is “revealed as an activity, not a thing,” it is easier to accept that “it’s the nature of activities to bring change.”
On country, we create “a forced choice between globalism and patriotism.” We prefer people with simple answers to the question “What are you?”; we disparage and deport those Appiah calls “the confessors of ambivalence.” We often forget that a modern, pluralist, liberal democracy like America is “not a fate but a project.”
On culture, he argues that we should “give up the very idea of Western civilization,” because the notion of a distinct Western essence — “individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific” — ignores basic facts about the West and everywhere else. But just as people on the left finish clapping at that, he decries the left’s complaints about “cultural appropriation,” because culture is too complex to have a clear chain of title and, he says, because “those who parse these transgressions in terms of ownership have accepted a commercial system that’s alien to the traditions they aim to protect.”
Appiah’s writing is often fresh, even beautiful: 19th-century scientists who tried to make the non-thing of race a thing were being “recruited to give content to color.” Fair warning, however: This book also traffics in a disconcerting amount of philosopher-speak — both the signposting tics of “I aim to persuade you that…” and substantive sentences like “Scholarly exegesis can also run athwart older ecclesiastic interpretations,” which risk turning away many who need this book.
If Appiah has a blind spot, it is in assuming that everyone can be as comfortably cosmopolitan as he. He quotes the Roman playwright Terence: “I am human, I think nothing human alien to me.” “Now there’s an identity that should bind us all,” he writes. But this vision is afflicted by the same misappraisal of others that Barack Obama’s father made when he returned to Kenya and dismissed its tribalisms as parochial and ended up a failure, according to Obama’s aunt. “If everyone is family, no one is family,” she told the future president. People like to belong to things small enough to feel.
Fukuyama is more sympathetic to that need in “Identity.” The assertion of particular identities, and the insistence that respect be paid to them, is a hallmark of our age. And it is, in his telling, not because people are bad at reasoning or narrow, but because of how discombobulating our age has been.
Globalization, the internet, automation, mass migration, the emergence of India and China, the financial crisis of 2008, the rise of women and their displacing of men in more service-oriented economies, the civil rights movement and the emancipation of other groups and the loss of status for white people — these are just some of what we have lived through of late. Yes, the world has gotten better for hundreds of millions. But Fukuyama reminds us that across much of the West, people have suffered dislocation and elites have captured the fruits.
Amid these changes, Fukuyama writes, identity politics has come to the fore, and it has become our common culture, no longer the province of a party or side. In American politics, for example, the left used to focus on economic equality, he argues, and the right on limited government. Today, the left concentrates on “promoting the interests of a wide variety of groups perceived as being marginalized,” whereas the right “is redefining itself as patriots who seek to protect traditional national identity, an identity that is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity or religion.”
Fukuyama suggests that we are living in an era in which the sense of being dismissed, rather than material interest, is the locomotive of human affairs. The rulers of Russia, Hungary and China are driven by past national humiliations. Osama bin Laden was driven by the treatment of Palestinians. Black Lives Matter has been driven by the fatal disrespect of the police. And a large swath of the American right, which claims to loathe identity politics, is driven by its own perception of being dissed.
Unlike many avuncular critics of identity politics, Fukuyama is sympathetic to the good such politics does — above all, making the privileged aware of their effect on marginalized groups. “Outsiders to those groups often fail to perceive the harm they are doing by their actions,” he writes.
Fukuyama does have his criticisms, however. He fears identity politics “has become a cheap substitute for serious thinking about how to reverse the 30-year trend in most liberal democracies toward greater socioeconomic inequality.” Fukuyama worries that the “woker” the left gets on identity issues, the weaker it gets on offering a critique of capitalism.
Unlike Appiah, Fukuyama doesn’t seem to think it’s possible or desirable for humans to see themselves as human before all else. He is a believer in the nation-state as a healthy unit of human affairs, and he spends the final part of his smart, crisp book exploring how countries can cultivate “integrative national identities” that are rooted in liberal and democratic values — identities large enough to be inclusive, but small enough to give people a real sense of agency over their society.
A low-key shortcoming of Fukuyama’s book is that, like Appiah’s, it is a book about books about books. On the one hand, theorists gotta theorize. On the other, with an issue so fraught and a world so full of rage, each author could have made good use of a rental car and the Voice Memos app. For all their strengths, both books lack the earth and funk and complexity of dreaming, hurting human beings.
We need more thinkers as wise as Appiah and Fukuyama digging their fingers into the soil of our predicament. And we need more readers reading what they harvest.
Anand Giridharadas is the author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.”
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