The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

In sum, identities come, first, with labels and ideas about why and to whom they should be applied. Second, your identity shapes your thoughts about how you should behave; and, third, it affects the way other people treat you. Finally, all these dimensions of identity are contestable, always up for dispute: who’s in, what they’re like, how they should behave and be treated.

Identities, in this way, can be said to have both a subjective dimension and an objective one: an identity cannot simply be imposed upon me, willy-nilly, but neither is an identity simply up to me, a contrivance that I can shape however I please.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it this way. Each of us has what he called a habitus: a set of dispositions to respond more or less spontaneously to the world in particular ways, without much thought. Your habitus is trained into you starting from childhood. Parents tell you not to speak with your mouth full, to sit up straight, not to touch your food with your left hand, and so on, and thus form table manners that are likely to stick with you all your life.14 Once they are inculcated, these habits aren’t consciously associated with an identity: middle-class English people don’t consciously decide to hold their knives in their right hands in order to act English, any more than Ghanaians use only their right hands to eat in order to display that they’re Ghanaian. But these habits were nevertheless shaped by their identities.

He saw the habitus as grounded in the distinctive way in which a person used his or her body, what he called the “bodily hexis,” “a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking.”

Habitus and identity are connected by the fact that we recognize certain forms of behavior—accents, but also ways of walking, styles of dress—as the signs of certain forms of identity and that our identities shape our habitus unconsciously.

And getting children to think of a group of people as a kind is very easy. The psychologist Marjorie Rhodes and her colleagues did the following simple experiment. They showed four-year-olds pictures of a fictional kind of person they called a Zarpie. The pictures were male and female, black, white, Latino, and Asian, young and old. With one group of kids, the experimenters made lots of generic remarks about these imaginary people—“Zarpies are scared of ladybugs,” and the like. With another group of kids, they avoided generics. (“Look at this Zarpie! He’s afraid of ladybugs!”) A couple of days later they showed the kids a Zarpie and said that he made a buzzing sound. It turned out that the kids who’d heard a lot of generics about Zarpies were much more likely to believe that all Zarpies made buzzing sounds. Generic talk encouraged them to think of Zarpies as a kind of person. And once kids think of Zarpies as a kind of person, they’re more likely to infer that the behavior of one Zarpie reflects the nature of all Zarpies, that buzzing flows from the Zarpie essence.

I can get you to think of people—even a group of diverse-looking people of both sexes and all ages—as a kind, by making generic remarks about them. And you’re 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. There’s an unfortunate vicious circle for you.

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. Something like that is probably right. But whatever the explanation, it seems pretty clear that we’re not just prone to essentialism, we also have these clannish tendencies, and each of us has a habitus shaped by our various identities.

however much identity bedevils us, we cannot do without it. You’ll recall the old joke. A man goes to see a psychiatrist. He says, “Doctor, my brother’s crazy—he thinks he’s a chicken.” The psychiatrist says, “Well, why don’t you bring him in?” And the fellow replies, “Oh, I would, but we need him out there laying the eggs.” Social identities may be founded in error, but they give us contours, comity, values, a sense of purpose and meaning: we need those eggs.

Did he find four separating forces between his temporary guest and him? Name, age, race, creed. . . . What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen? He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

Human beings are prone to making new religious communities, as they are to defining their own by contrast to other ones. You’re not doing it right is a powerful sentiment. There’s an old joke about a Jewish man shipwrecked on a desert island. Over the decades he builds three buildings. When he’s found, his rescuers ask him what they are. “This is my house. This is the synagogue I go to. And this,” he says finally, “this is the synagogue I don’t go to.”

scriptural determinism, which, in its simplest version, involves the claim that our religious beliefs repose in our sacred texts—that to be a believer is to believe what’s in the scriptures, as if one could decant from them, like wine from an urn, the unchanging nature of a religion and its adherents.

We do not merely follow traditions; we create them.

When the state gazes at us—with its identity cards, educational stipulations, and other instruments of recognition—it invariably fixes and rigidifies a phenomenon that is neither fixed nor rigid. I have called this the Medusa Syndrome: what the state gazes upon, it tends to turn to stone.25 It sculpts what it purports merely to acknowledge. The strategy, as we’ve learned, is inadequate to the real-world complexities, to compound identities that grow as pleated as an accordion, with all its folds and fissures.

Even if we are going to reward hard work, the capacity for hard work is itself the result of natural endowments and upbringing. So neither talent nor effort, the two things that would determine rewards in the world of the meritocracy, is itself something earned.

our largest cultural identities can free us only if we recognize that we have to make their meanings together and for ourselves. You do not get to be Western without choosing your way among myriad options, just as you do not get to be Christian or Buddhist, American or Ghanaian, gay or straight, even a man or a woman, without recognizing that each of these identities can be lived in more than one way.

We are denizens of an age in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too broad a horizon.

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.