VISIONS: Identity –
Seeking a home in the Brave New World
By Edward Rothstein
Each day, in the courtyard of the nation’s most secure federal prison in Florence, Colo., a strange convocation takes place. Three men stand in isolated mesh cages and talk for an hour. One prosecutor has called it “the oddest kaffeeklatsch in the history of Western civilization.” Its members are Timothy J. McVeigh, who bombed the federal office building in Oklahoma City; Theodore J. Kaczynski, the Unabomber; and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing. And recently, a place was reserved for Luis Felipe, the leader of the violent Latin Kings gang in New York, who arranged three murders from his prison cell.
And what do the members of this kaffeeklatsch discuss? Movies, we are told – the one cultural experience shared by all Americans, no matter what their criminal proclivities. But there may be other common ground. This right-wing extremist, mathematical Luddite, Islamic fundamentalist and Latin gang leader not only compose the oddest kaffeeklatsch in Western civilization, they also share a disgust of Western civilization. Broadly speaking, each has rebelled against the 20th-century culture of “modernity.” And the rebellion reveals much about the contested status of “identity” at the beginning of the 21st century.
Consider their common enemy. Mr. McVeigh’s militia mind objected to the liberal institutions and democratic process born in the European Enlightenment; in their place he was determined to establish a new world in which his notion of identity would reign supreme. Mr. Kaczynski left a trail of mutilation and murder in his attempt to overturn the life of “modern man,” dreaming of an identity that would rise, he wrote, out of untamed Nature, “independent of human management and free of human interference and control.” Mr. Yousef could chat about how modern Western ideas of rights and liberty are a plot by the Zionists, whose modern nation-state trespassed on the religious claims of Islam. And Mr. Felipe might explain why his creation of a violent ethnic gang, ruthlessly demanding its own laws and loyalties, should displace the blandly secular, melting-pot kingdom of society.
In each case, the modern world is attacked for standing in the way of identity’s claims because identity is not just a declaration of belonging; it is a declaration of opposition. Identity is a dissent from the universal; it declares an exception.
The exception it declares is also from the demands of modernity. The 18th-century Enlightenment gave birth to the idea that there is something beyond identity, that one might be more than a citizen, or an aristocrat, or a deist or an Aryan. One might be, in the best of all possible worlds, a member of a species, endowed with inalienable rights, deserving guaranteed liberties. Society was to be defined not by inherited difference but by inherited humanity. The American Declaration of Independence is not a declaration of identity but a declaration of freedom from compelled identity. Modernity has often accommodated identity, but only by requiring that it submit to a higher law.
This opposition between identity and modernity has defined the main struggles of the 20th century. Identity’s evil triumph was in fascism. Nazism opposed the notion of a universal humanity united under the rule of reason; it celebrated a national identity that staked its claims in blood. Other violent declarations of identity have occurred when national sovereignty lost its power: recent tribal genocides in Africa and Eastern Europe were assertions that identity should define civil authority.
The forces of Enlightenment, though, have led to problems as well. Universal principles might seem noble enough, but in practice they often led to atrocity. How, after all, did communist tyrannies develop? By asserting that the rulers possessed a humane vision justified by science and reason; sacrifices would have to be made in service to that vision, but they would be made for the good of all. The number of deaths attributable to such utopian visions in the last century easily rival those attributable to national genocides.
Each pole, then, has its dangers. And the struggle between them will cast its shadow into the 21st century. But how has this future struggle been envisioned? And what is most likely to unfold? Forecasters during this century have been far less worried about identity madness than Enlightenment madness, embodied in the triumphant technological state. That state has provided the familiar dystopia of 20th-century science fiction – from Aldous Huxley’s still-disturbing vision in “Brave New World” to films like “Blade Runner” or “The Matrix.”
These predictions of modernity’s evils have also come to embody the way we see our world. In novels, films and computer-hacker fantasies, we imagine ourselves to be powerless puppets and pawns, caught in the identity-crushing maw of corporate capitalism, government, law, media and social institutions. Typically, salvation is offered by an iconoclast, an outlaw who shatters the oppressors’ bonds, ushering in a new age. In practice, this revolutionary myth can occasionally lead to real reforms. But it also leads to exaggerated perceptions and ready-made villains familiar in American culture. The kaffeeklatsch members see the world this way. They claim to be its saviors.
But generally the myth does not, like the kaffeeklatschers, invoke premodern identity to overturn modernity; the state is not replaced with an ethnic, religious or romantic paradise. Instead, identity is itself seen as a creation of the corrupt world, “socially constructed,” as many academic studies now assert. It, too, is imprisoning, ruthlessly imposed. After the libertarian revolution, even identity’s constraints will be shed; one will finally be able to freely invent oneself.
This is an old fantasy, imagined by communist tyrants as well, but technology is reinvigorating it. Internet role-playing games allow the invention of identities. Test-tube conceptions have clouded notions of parents and children; genetic engineering will go even further. And bioengineering is creating human-mechanical hybrids, in which artificial limbs and organs are united with blood and flesh. The inventor Raymond Kurzweil has even argued that in the next century computers will develop consciousness, creating a new species of humanity, amplified in its powers. We are being constructed? Well, then, let us construct ourselves. Technology will liberate us from the oppressions of technology. The future will free us from both identity and modernity.
These grand hopes are also being encouraged by the weakening of the most significant political invention of modernity: the nation-state. Commerce and conversation are becoming borderless transactions. Cultural distinctions are dissolving. In Europe, countries have already ceded some economic and symbolic independence to form the euro, the first modern currency not associated with a particular country. The United States, in recent military actions, has declined the prerogatives of a world power and insisted on multinational consensus.
Some think that transnational corporations will become all-powerful, requiring further revolutionary spasms. But utopians, undeterred, believe that racial and national identities will fade, that distinctions between the sexes will disappear along with traditional family roles, that a global union based on libertarian principles will evolve, that technology will be so inexpensive that it will democratize the world.
Yet these prospects seem unlikely. Yes, social roles will change with prosperity and technological innovation, just as they have in the past. Yes, there will be a greater need for international authority. Yes, humans will have engineered parts and machines with human qualities. But identity’s demands will not disappear, nor will the challenge of mediating between those demands and those of a grander social compact.
There may be no escaping identity, because – so it seems – humanity cannot exist without creating such distinctions and allegiances. We seem to have an inalienable tendency to establish circles of identity, beginning with allegiances of family or tribe, extending outward to allegiances of profession or religion or material interest, encompassing the allegiance of nation, and, only finally, the allegiance of the human. These circles may change shape and range, but can they ever be eliminated? Every utopian project tries to undo these bonds, beginning with the family circle; and every attempt becomes inhuman in its demands.
There may also be no escaping modernity. It provides the premises and vocabulary – of rights, reason and representation – that permeate even efforts to demolish it. So as the new century begins, many of modernity’s opponents deal in paradox. They reject the Enlightenment in the name of the Enlightenment. They celebrate the particular in the name of universalism. Identity is treated as the apotheosis of reason. Some supporters of multiculturalism, for example, at once reject Enlightenment ideals – claiming that even reason is culturally relative and unjustly imposed – and enthrone them, invoking equal rights.
Far more unsettling, though, is the already familiar sight of terrorist groups, kaffeeklatsch types and rogue states taking arms against modernity in the name of identity, invoking notions of rights and equality while violently undoing their meanings, turning modernity against itself.
So, as the 21st century begins, the struggles of the 20th will mutate.
But their consequences may remain familiar. We will still be tempted to prefer extreme formulas to messy truth. Even now, dystopian visions are so prevalent, we tend to forget that imperfectly just societies really do exist, all around us; utopian visions are so tempting, we tend to forget their impossibility. Modernity is so frequently attacked, we tend to forget its necessity. And the passions of identity can be so frightening we tend to forget their inevitability.