The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Say that Joe, who’s a white man, claims to speak as a man, or as a white person. What does that mean, beyond the fact that he’s speaking and he’s male or white? Having an identity doesn’t, by itself, authorize you to speak on behalf of everyone of that identity.

more likely to accept a generic claim about a group if what it says is something negative or worrying. We humans are more likely, then, to essentialize groups about which we have negative thoughts; and more likely to have negative thoughts about groups we’ve essentialized.

Our third psychological truth, then, is just that we humans ascribe a great deal of significance to the distinction between those who share our identities and those who don’t, the insiders and the outsiders, and that we do this with identities new (like Rattlers or Eagles) and long-established, large and small, superficial and profound.

We’re clannish creatures. We don’t just belong to human kinds; we prefer our own kind and we’re easily persuaded to take against outsiders. Evolutionary psychologists think these tendencies were once adaptive; they helped people survive by creating groups they could rely on to deal with the hazards of prehistoric life, including the existence of other groups competing for resources.

it is often safer to be entirely out than halfway in.

I found myself reflecting that in the ethical realm—whether civic or religious—we have to recognize that one day we, too, shall be ancestors. We do not merely follow traditions; we create them.

Being a people is not just a matter of how you think of yourselves. What others outside the group think is important, too.

But something new really did enter the way of thinking about peoples toward the end of the eighteenth century in much of Europe. In reaction against the rationalism and restraint of the Enlightenment, Romanticism produced a great upwelling of new feelings and ideas, especially in the expanding middle classes. Among the many marks of the movement were a miscellany of attitudes: a new enthusiasm for the emotions, an appreciation of nature in the face of the encroachments of industry, a passion for the democratic spirit of the French Revolution, and a paradoxical celebration both of folk traditions, like Grimm’s fairy tales, and of modern heroes.

As a rule, people do not live in monocultural, monoreligious, monolingual nation-states, and they never have.

Given these realities, how have we dealt with the fact that self-determination—which could disrupt any imaginable political order—remains a sacrosanct ideal? Well, with caution and inconsistency.

Instead, Western diplomats questioned the procedural and the empirical validity of the Crimean referendum. But they could also invoke self-rule against self-rule. The argument was that all the Ukrainian people, not merely those who lived in Crimea, should have been consulted. Indeed, was there really a Crimean people to consult? It’s a time-honored strategy, since what a “people” wants is always going to depend on where you draw the lines. One of Abraham Lincoln’s arguments against Southern secession is the same as China’s argument against Tibetan independence and Spain’s against Catalan independence: namely, that the people, that is, the majority of the citizens of the whole country, do not favor it.

that the ideal of national sovereignty remains a profound source of legitimacy, however obscure and unstable our definition of a people.

Svevo’s observation that “inventing is a creation, not a lie.”

What makes us the wise species—sapiens, remember, is the Latin for “wise”—is that our genes make brains that allow us to pick up things from one another that are not in our genes.

Within networks of hierarchy, people distinguish sharply between bearing the resentment of someone of lower status and bearing the contempt of someone of higher status. One annoys; the other wounds.

Real poverty, it has been observed, is about social isolation as much as it is about material deprivation; the poor don’t have the sort of friendship networks that the advantaged draw upon.

an emerging cohort of mercantile meritocrats who “can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.

The central task of ethics is to ask: what is it for a human life to go well? The answer, I believe, is that living well means meeting the challenge set by three things: your capacities, the circumstances into which you were born, and the projects you yourself decide are important.

Whatever you choose to distinguish Englishness now, it isn’t going to be that. Rather, as time rolls on, each generation inherits the label from an earlier one; and, in each generation, the label comes with a legacy. But as the legacies are lost or exchanged for other treasures, the label keeps moving on.

What holds us together, surely, is Tylor’s broad sense of culture: our customs of dress and greeting, the habits of behavior that shape relations between men and women, parents and children, cops and civilians, shop assistants and consumers.

we should resist using the term “cultural appropriation” as an indictment. All cultural practices and objects are mobile; they like to spread, and almost all are themselves creations of intermixture.

Putative owners may be previous appropriators.

The real problem isn’t that it’s difficult to decide who owns culture; it’s that the very idea of ownership is the wrong model.

But, again, the problem isn’t theft, it’s disrespect.

The offense isn’t appropriation; it’s the insult entailed by trivializing something another group holds sacred.

culture is messy and muddled, not pristine and pure.

The delusion is to think it suffices that we have access to these values, as if they’re songs in a Spotify playlist we’ve never quite listened to.

Values aren’t a birthright: you need to keep caring about them.

The values that European humanists like to espouse belong as much to an African or an Asian who takes them up with enthusiasm as to a European. By that very logic, they don’t belong to a European who hasn’t taken the trouble to understand and absorb them.

The story of the golden nugget suggests that we can’t help caring about the traditions of “the West” because they are ours: in fact, the opposite is true. They are ours only if we care about them.

culture isn’t a box to be checked on the questionnaire of humanity; it’s a process you join, in living a life with others.

Here’s how Publius Terentius Afer, writing more than two millennia ago, put it: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I am human, I think nothing human alien to me. Now there’s an identity that should bind us all.