Why obsessing over ‘identity' is a stupid idea

Telegraph

19 hours ago

Earlier this year, delivering the annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture, Gareth Southgate argued that in Britain today, too many boys and young men are suffering an identity crisis. They need better role models: only through emulating such figures can they reverse their own slump into academic underachievement, Andrew Tate-fuelled misogyny and feelings of worthlessness. The speech was widely praised. It seemed, if you'll forgive the pun, that the former England manager was shooting at an open goal. Few disputed that the fundamental problem was our boys' sense of identity, or that this sense needed to be made stronger and more resilient.
Or maybe not. In this incendiary and timely broadside, Australian philosopher Alexander Douglas argues that the entire concept of 'identity', as we find it in contemporary discourse, is wrong.
There's something undeniably odd about looking to others to find one's true self. Personal authenticity surely can't be a matter of imitation – and yet, for good or ill, we do it all the time. As children, we play at being superheroes, monsters, parents, criminals, police: we try to find out who we are by playing at being what we are not.
As adults, Alexander suggests, we continue this role-play, but with a twist: we're motivated by fear to hunker down in silos of identity definition. Hence, perhaps, the rise of identity politics, as manifested on all sides: Black Lives Matter, the English Defence League, #MeToo, Proud Boys, self-regarding wellness crypto-fascists, the LGBTQ+ community. It seems unlikely that Nicola Sturgeon, Nigel Farage or Donald Trump would have been elected were it not for the respectively Scottish, English and American national identities to which their supporters cleave.
Identity politics has for some time been excoriated by conservatives, but increasingly it is attacked by the Left too. Ash Sarkar, a regular panellist on Radio 4's The Moral Maze, who has described herself as 'literally a communist', proposed in her recent book Minority Rule that the Left's cause is being thwarted because the oppressed they hope to defend are being splintered into different interest groups riven by identity politics. If only black people, queer people, trans people and the white working-classes could see past their identitarian distinctions, and think along class lines, the revolution might have some actual prospects.
It's easy to understand, Douglas writes, why we shore up our identities like latter-day Canutes. 'Drowning in a world where nothing is certain, where half of what we know is probably mistaken and the other half will soon be out of date, fear drives us to cling to the driftwood of various definitions.' Tech companies monetise exactly this insecurity and desire for stability. We're encouraged to present our 'authentic selves' online, the better for Meta and other firms to exploit our private data for profit – though the more heavily redacted, cunningly filtered and therefore inauthentic, the more engagement-worthy those selves will be.
The central point of Against Identity is that these identities are not just generated by fear and algorithms but are fundamentally mendacious. As the late Christian philosopher René Girard put it: 'Individualism is a formidable lie.' That's a discombobulating axiom for the 21st century, in which individualism has become a religion for a society that's lost faith in God. Girard grew up in post-war France, when existentialism was becoming an exportable commodity, like fine wines or Brigitte Bardot, spreading its influence from Saint-Germain-des-Prés cafés to the world. The leader of the turtlenecks, Jean-Paul Sartre, argued that we have the God-like power to become our true selves ex nihilo – a tremendously hopefully message for those of us who are struggling to escape the inherited curses of family, class, sex, or (in my case) a Black Country accent.
Soon, ironically enough, everybody sought to become an individual. Girard denounced the hipster narcissists whose way of becoming themselves was, ironically, to look like what he called 'a vast herd of sheep-like individualists'. Girard called this desire to establish one's authentic identity a 'romantic lie', and it's a lie that persists today, not least in Silicon Valley. Douglas points, for instance, to Steve Jobs's much-mythologised 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, where the Apple founder hymned 'your own inner voice, heart and intuition', which 'will somehow know already what you want to truly become.'
How did we get this way? One account of human evolution, as related by Douglas, goes like this. For much of human history, there was no organised legal force to restrain the lawless thugs who sought to harm others. Coalitions of the willing thus formed to eliminate them and safeguard society. This is what the primatologist Richard Wangham calls the 'execution hypothesis': to put it roughly, the more aggressive members of society were bumped off or, presumably through some form of community-wide castration, prevented from reproducing.
Douglas contends that this domesticated human society, which has continued to the present day, produced a civilisation that wasn't violent in a reactive way, as with the elimination of those thugs, but a proactive one: it enforces conformity to norms. Humans became selected, in the evolutionary sense, for their extreme vigilance in conforming to social norms, whether out of fear of punishment or, worse, being made to look ridiculous. 'People fear breaking the social contract,' Douglas writes, 'for the same reason they fear turning up to a gala event in unfashionable shoes finding themselves in a conversation where everybody but them seems to have mastered the appropriate slang or academic jargon.' (He is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of St Andrews: one wonders if he's speaking from experience.)
One's identity, that is to say, is constrained and defined by the norms of our society. We are not meaningfully free to choose who we are. Douglas goes on: 'Many of our communities, whatever the stated purpose might be, are really identity regimes driven by egotism – patrolled and sustained by individuals determined to preserve a certain idea of themselves: a fragile idea that cannot bear much novelty.'
This rings true to me. But the alternative Douglas proposes is, to put it mildly, bracing. He counsels something called 'identitylessness', which – following the philosophies of Girard, Spinoza and the ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzhi – involves breaking out of the prison of individual identity and realising that we're all, in a profound sense, connected to everything. 'We are the others and the others are us,' he writes at his most rhapsodic, 'not because we share an identity, but because we are alike in identitylessness… I believe we have barely begun to live in the world together. Our drive for identity is always getting in the way.'
Alexander is alert to the complaint that this anti-identity vision might be deranging, that 'a world without identity is terrifying'. Not just terrifying, I would argue, but scarcely comprehensible. Yet he believes in it. At one point, he movingly recounts how he struggled to deal with his father's Alzheimer's disease. His dad's identity was being brutally stripped to nothing. A friend advised that Douglas should stop yearning for his dad to become his old self: give up the hope of trying to bring the father back to this world, and instead enter his. 'That turned out to be the secret,' he writes. 'My father was not vanishing but changing.'
Douglas set about 'letting go of the things I was exhausting myself trying to hold on to, the things by which I had defined both him and myself, and learning to find joy in what was there'. The experience allowed him to fully understand the anti-identity philosophers he celebrates here. 'Nothing can remain the same. Trying to hold on to the way things are is a losing game. But love remains, because love can flow along with the way things change… Love is as supple as the world, and the world's transformations cannot erase it. Love is the opposite of identity and the secret to adaptation.'
Ultimately, I'm not sure Douglas is right about love. Can we really love what has no personality or identity? Nor, closing Against Identity, was I convinced that we could really live identityless in a mystical communion with the rest of the universe. But the challenge he makes along the way to what many of us have become – narcissists onanistically buffing our fatuous identities, both online and in real life – seems to me more valuable and important than most contemporary philosophy.