The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

People have long known in America what many in Europe have come to grasp—that we can hang together without a common religion or even delusions of common ancestry. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, various independence movements gained traction in Europe, from Caledonia to Catalonia. Neither the logic of territorial integrity nor that of national sovereignty can resolve such matters. But let the arguments not be made in terms of some ancient spirit of the Folk; the truth of every modern nation is that political unity is never underwritten by some preexisting national commonality. What binds citizens together is a commitment, through Renan’s daily plebiscite, to sharing the life of a modern state, united by its institutions, procedures, and precepts.

As Grégoire put it, bleakly but bluntly, “People have slandered Negroes, first in order to get the right to enslave them, and then to justify themselves for having enslaved them.

class can get you respect, but if it comes merely from ancestry, it’s hard to see why anyone, including you, should think of it as something you are really entitled to. Shouldn’t we care most about the forms of esteem that reflect things we ourselves have achieved? This ideal may not be new, but it has achieved its greatest influence under a modern term: meritocracy.

“American meritocracy,” the Yale law professor Daniel Markovits, drawing on similar research, argues, “has thus become precisely what it was invented to combat: a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations.” To the extent that you can predict that disproportionately many of the children of the elite will—and disproportionately many of the children of the precariat will not—achieve a position in the top tier of wealth, power, and privilege, you have something too much like the intergenerational transmission of status that marks systems of caste. In Markovits’s view, “Meritocracy now constitutes a modern-day aristocracy, one might even say, purpose-built for a world in which the greatest source of wealth is not land or factories but human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.”

Often, in recent years, “the West” means the North Atlantic: Europe and her former colonies in North America. The opposite here is a non-Western world in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—now dubbed “the Global South”—though many people in Latin America will claim a Western inheritance, too. This way of speaking takes notice of the whole world, but lumps a whole lot of extremely different societies together; at the same time, it delicately carves around nonindigenous Australians and New Zealanders and South Africans, so that “Western” here can look simply like a euphemism for white.

Nobody in medieval Europe would have used the word “Western” to contrast Europeans with Muslims. For one thing, the westernmost point of Morocco, home of the Moors, lies west of all of Ireland. The Muslim world stretched from west of Western Europe into Central and South Asia; much of it, if the points of the compass matter, was south of Europe.

In some of the darker recesses of the Internet, enthusiasts for the idea of North America or Europe as the home of the White Race celebrate the achievements they claim for the West as somehow theirs. They claim National Socialism and Shakespeare, eugenics and Euclid, democracy and Dante.

We live with 7 billion fellow humans on a small, warming planet. The cosmopolitan impulse that draws on our common humanity is no longer a luxury; it has become a necessity. And, in encapsulating that ancient ideal, I can draw on someone who’s a frequent presence in courses in Western Civ., the dramatist Terence: a slave from Roman Africa, a Latin interpreter of Greek comedies, a writer from classical Europe who called himself, like Anton Wilhelm Amo, “the African.” 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.