The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

My main message about the five forms of identity that take us from Chapter Two to Chapter Six is, in effect, that we are living with the legacies of ways of thinking that took their modern shape in the nineteenth century, and that it is high time to subject them to the best thinking of the twenty-first.

The European and American intellectuals who founded modern anthropology in the later nineteenth century tended to think of religion as centrally about the things we believe; and that idea has percolated into the general culture. But I’m going to argue that at the heart of religious life across space and time are matters other than creed. And, once you see that creeds are not so central, you’ll also have to accept that scriptures—as sources of belief—matter less than many people think.

When it comes to modern states, shaped by a form of nationalism that also arose through the nineteenth century, law and common sense suggest that peoples have a right to determine their own fates. We speak of self-determination and autonomy, about independence and freedom. But, as I’ll argue, there’s something wrong with our models here, too, starting with ...

Much of the elaborate scientific superstructure that grew up around race was dismantled in the past century, as anthropologists and biologists worked out the implications of Darwin’s and Mendel’s ideas, and discovery upon discovery was made in evolutionary theory, population biology, and genetics. But the world outside the sciences hasn’t taken much notice. Too many of us remain captive to a perilous cartography of color.

The issue with class, which I discuss in Chapter Five, is not so much that we have a picture of it that is mistaken as that we operate with a set of pictures that is incoherent and inconsistent. And the most influential solution we’ve devised to the problems posed by class may, like the leeching and cupping of eighteenth-century physicians, worsen the condition it means to remedy.

I won’t try to summarize the multiple mistakes we make about our broader cultural identities, not least the very idea of the West. So let me just say here that they’re manifest in the temptation to imagine that people’s origins make th...

In each of my five test cases, we fall into an error I’ll describe in the first chapter: of supposing that at the core of each identity there is some deep similarity that binds people of that identity together. Not true, I say; not true over and over again.

Much of what is dangerous about them has to do with the way identities—religion, nation, race, class, and culture—divide us and set us against one another. They can be the enemies of human solidarity, the sources of war, horsemen of a score of apocalypses from apartheid to genocide. Yet these errors are also central to the way identities unite us today. We need to reform them because, at their best, they make it possible for groups, large and small, to do things together. They are the lies that bind.

When I was young, the idea that you could be properly English and not white seemed fairly uncommon. Even in the first decade of the twenty-first century, I remember the puzzled response of an older Englishwoman who had just heard a paper on race I gave at the Aristotelian Society in London. She just didn’t understand how I could really be English. And no talk of thirteenth-century ancestors in Oxfordshire could persuade her!

In America, once I got there, things seemed at first relatively simple. I had an African father and so, like President Obama later, I was black. But the story here, too, is complicated . . . and has changed over the years, in part because of the rise of the idea of mixed-race people as an identity group. Color and citizenship, however, were quite separate matters: after the Civil War no sensible person doubted you could be black and American, at least so far as the law was concerned, despite a persistent undercurrent of white racial nationalism.

When I turned, over the years, to thinking about nationality and class and culture and religion as sources of identity, and added in gender and sexual orientation, I began to see three ways in which these very disparate ways of grouping people do have some important things in common.

The first is obvious: every identity comes with labels, so understanding identities requires first that you have some idea about how to apply them.

Explaining to someone what Ewes or Jains or kothis are begins with some suggestion as to what it is about people that makes each label appropriate for them. That way, you could look for someone of that identity, or try to decide, of someone you’d met, whether the label applied.

what social scientists call an “ethnonym”; which means that if your parents are both Ewe, you’re Ewe, too.

That’s because of the second important thing identities share: they matter to people. And they matter, first, because having an identity can give you a sense of how you fit into the social world. Every identity makes it possible, that is, for you to speak as one “I” among some “us”: to belong to some “we.” But a further crucial aspect of what identities offer is that they give you reasons for doing things. That’s true about being a Jain, which means you belong to a particular Indian religious tradition.

They do things, in short, because they are Ewe. And this, too, depends, in part, on their recognition that not everyone is Ewe, and that non-Ewes may well behave differently.

People who give reasons like these—“Because I’m a this, I should do that”—are not just accepting the fact that the label applies to them; they are giving what a philosopher would call “normative significance” to their membership in that group. They’re saying that the identity matters for practical life: for their emotions and their deeds.

But just as there’s usually contest or conflict about the boundaries of the group, about who’s in and who’s out, there’s almost always disagreement about what normative significance an identity has. How much can one Ewe or one Jain legitimately ask of another? Does being Ewe mean you ought to teach the Ewe language to your children?

One further reason that’s true is the third feature all identities share: not only does your identity give you reasons to do things, it can give others reasons to do things to you.

But among the most significant things people do with identities is use them as the basis of hierarchies of status and respect and of structures of power.

Dominant identities can mean that people will treat you as a source of authority; subordinate identities can mean you and your interests will be trampled upon or ignored.

Once identities exist, people tend to form a picture of a typical member of the group. Stereotypes develop. They may have more or less foundation in reality, but they are almost always critically wrong about something.

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

Having an identity doesn’t, by itself, authorize you to speak on behalf of everyone of that identity.

while your identity affects your experience, there’s no guarantee that what you’ve learned from it is going to be the same as what other people of the same identity have learned.

Yet the familiar fact that our identities are multiple and can interact in complicated ways is consistent with a pretty frugal account of what, conceptually, any identity consists in: taking a label and a picture of how to apply it that entrains norms about how people who have the label should behave and how they should be treated.

What’s new is thinking of these diverse sorts of labels—Englishman, woman, kothi, and so on—as things of the same kind. The rise of identity is the rise of that thought.

“Essentialism is the view that certain categories have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly,” the developmental psychologist Susan Gelman says, “but that gives an object its identity, and is responsible for other similarities that category members share.”

What essentialism means is that children assume that these superficial differences—the ones that lead to applying the label—reflect deeper, inward differences that explain a great deal of how people behave.

Research with young children suggests that one of our most basic strategies for making sense of the world is to form the sorts of generalizations that linguists call “generics”—generalizations like “Tigers eat people,” and “Women are gentle.” It also turns out that it’s very hard to say what makes generics true. They’re not equivalent to universal claims like “All tigers eat people.”

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.

And when we first discover some who don’t—men who don’t desire women, for example—we can be taken aback. Our next step is usually not to abandon the thought that men desire women, but to note an exception, while sticking to the old generalization. Only later are we likely to adopt a new category, gay men, that allows us to return to the old generalization, now about a new group, straight men.

So it’s worth insisting from the start that essentialism about identities is usually wrong: in general, there isn’t some inner essence that explains why people of a certain social identity are the way they are.

Notice that the boys felt no need for a collective name until they learned about the presence of those other boys on the campgrounds. But, as our theory predicts, to form identities they needed labels.

Labels came first, then, but essences followed fast. The boys didn’t develop opposing identities because they had different norms; they developed different norms because they had opposing identities.

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.

Every religion can be said to have three dimensions. Sure, there is a body of belief. But there’s also what you do—call that practice. And then there’s who you do it with—call that community, or fellowship. The trouble is that we’ve tended to emphasize the details of belief over the shared practices and the moral communities that buttress religious life.

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.”

Despite the antiquity of the word religio (which Lucretius famously condemned in the De rerum natura more than 2,000 years ago), the modern concept of religion—as a class that includes, say, Islam, Christianity, Taoism, and Buddhism—gained currency only in the nineteenth century.

The fundamentalisms have something else in common: though they venerate old texts, they’re all new—reactions to the modern world. They respond to two central aspects of that world. First, almost everyone became aware of the existence of great differences in religious belief across the world.

Second, the growth of mass literacy created a world in which almost everyone could look at the scriptures for themselves, and break from what they saw as the compromised or corrupt authority of traditional interpreters.

Yet, as we’ve seen, the same ahistoricism is shared by critics of fundamentalism who equate a religious identity with some fixed set of beliefs or some reading of its scripture. They succumb to what might be called the source-code fallacy: the idea that the true nature of a religion lies with its deepest, most foundational texts, abstracted away from the real-world range of its actual adherents; that access to these codes can reveal that religion’s essence.

Once you think of creedal identities in terms of mutable practices and communities rather than sets of immutable beliefs, religion becomes more verb than noun: the identity is revealed as an activity, not a thing.

We do not merely follow traditions; we create them.

Schmitz lived in an era when nation-states were only gradually becoming the dominant form of political organization around the world. In his youth, when Europeans used labels like “German” and “Italian,” they were not usually thinking about political citizenship. They were thinking, as Schmitz would have, about individuals with a language, culture, and traditions in common.

A people, as I said in the previous chapter, is a group of human beings united by a shared ancestry, real or imagined, whether or not they share a state.

Today, in what we like to think of as a postimperial age, no political tenet commands more audible assent than that of national sovereignty. “We” aren’t to be ruled by others, captive to a foreign occupation; “we” must be allowed to rule ourselves. This simple ideal is baked into the concept of the nation itself. It helped to propel the collapse of empires and the era of decolonization. Maps were redrawn to advance the cause; even in our own time, borders have given way to it. It remains a vaunted principle of our political order. And yet this ideal has an incoherence at its heart. That is the next of the great mistakes about identity that I want to explore.

ask yourself why, if everyone agrees that “we” are entitled to rule ourselves, it is often so hard to agree about who “we” are. The nationalist says, “We are a people, we share an ancestry.” But so does a family, to take the idea at its narrowest; and the whole species, at its widest, shares its ancestry, too. In seeking nations, where should we draw the line?

That is a first quandary—one of scale. A second is that, though we often speak of someone as belonging to one nation—Schmitz’s mother, I said, was Italian—all of us in fact belong to more than one group with shared ancestry. The