The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

The impulse to keep things tidy in the sphere of race and language and religion spills over into taking littering with great seriousness and severely limiting political criticism of the government. Singapore’s extraordinary efforts to avoid internal cleavages, through a national project of respectful accommodation of racial and religious differences, embody the promise and perils of what the Canadian philosopher Charles

Promise and perils: to recognize is to respect, but it is also, to return to one of my themes, to essentialize.

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.

Today, a brown-skinned Scot, whose grandfather came from Mumbai, can take pride in the Scottish Enlightenment or thrill to the tale of Bannockburn. But, as Renan also argued, what really matters in making a nation, beyond these shared stories, is “the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.” That’s why he said that a nation’s existence “is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite.”30 What makes “us” a people, ultimately, is a commitment to governing a common life together.

The Romantic state could pride itself on being the emanation of one Volk and its primordial consciousness; the liberal state has to get by with a good deal less mystical mumbo-jumbo. The Romantic state could boldly identify itself with the General Will; liberal states must content themselves with a general willingness. The Romantic state rallies its citizens with a stirring cry: “One people!” The liberal state’s true anthem is: “We can work it out.”

Burns realized that Scotland was not a fate but a project.

But to come to terms with Svevo’s complex allegiances is to understand that we don’t have to accept the forced choice between globalism and patriotism. The unities we create fare better when we face the convoluted reality of our differences.

When Leibniz wrote about what distinguished one people from another, he thought what mattered was language. (Indeed, he spent much of his life trying to persuade people to send him information about the languages of various peoples in Europe and Asia, for exactly this reason.) And if you read contemporaneous accounts of what distinguishes the various peoples of the world in the writings of European travelers and the thinkers who read them, the great debates were about the role of climate and geography in shaping color and customs, not about inherited physical characteristics. This shouldn’t be very surprising.

word “biology” was invented only around 1800 (in Germany, as it happens). Until then, the discussion of the nature of living things took place under the heading of Natural History.

As he wrote to a colleague, “But I seek from you and the whole world the difference of kind between men and monkeys that follows from the principles of Natural History. Very certainly, I know of none.”

The philosopher David Hume, one of the beacons of the Scottish Enlightenment, wrote in a footnote in 1753, “There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.” No empire of Mali, then, no Chinese philosophy, no architectural glories of the Mughal Empire. Immanuel Kant, the most influential European philosopher of the eighteenth century, famously declared, in 1764—it was not his best moment—that the fact that someone “was completely black from head to foot” was a “distinct proof that what he said was stupid.”

And many, many people in the world live at the boundaries between the races imagined by nineteenth-century science: between African Negroes and European Caucasians there are Ethiopians and Arabs and Berbers; between the yellow races of East Asia and the white Europeans are the peoples of central and South Asia. Where in India is there a sharp boundary between white and brown and black?

In the second chapter, we saw how the scriptures of a religion were supposed to determine its unchanging nature. In the third, it was the nation, bound together through time by language and custom. In the fourth, it was a racial quiddity shared by all blacks or all whites. In the last chapter, we saw how unhelpful it is to look for the essence of a class. In each case, people have supposed that an identity that survives through time and across space must be underwritten by some larger, shared commonality; an essence that all the instances share. But that is simply a mistake.

In English, the very idea of the “West,” to name a heritage and object of study, doesn’t really emerge until the 1880s and 1890s, during a heated era of imperialism, and gains broader currency only in the twentieth century. So you can wonder about an age-old concept with such a recent name. For that matter, talk of “civilizations,” in the plural, is pretty much a nineteenth-century development, too.

Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that premodern Europe was none of these things, and that until the past century democracy was the exception in Europe, something that few stalwarts of Western thought had anything good to say about. The idea that tolerance was constitutive of something called Western culture would certainly have surprised Edward Burnett Tylor, who, as a Quaker, had been barred from attending England’s great universities.

If the West was spawned by Greece, which was spawned by Egypt, then wouldn’t black people inherit the moral liability of its legacy of ethnocentrism? Other Afrocentrists, favoring a separate development, were happy to disclaim Greece, while elevating the civilizational achievements that were peculiarly African. Either way, this lineage-based model of culture confronts a challenge.

I am caricaturing a caricature, of course. At such levels of abstraction, almost everything and its opposite can be claimed of almost anything we might call a culture. When non-Western cultures are extolled for their collectivism, cooperation, and spiritual enlightenment, it is typically in order to criticize the West for complementary vices such as rampant materialism, selfish individualism, and rapacious exploitation. This move is itself a familiar part of Western Europe’s cultural repertory.

Unfortunately, the vigorous lobbying of huge corporations has made the idea of intellectual property go imperial; it seems to have conquered the world. To accept the notion of cultural appropriation is to buy into the regime they favor, where corporate entities acting as cultural guardians “own” a treasury of IP, extracting a toll when they allow others to make use of it. This isn’t to say that accusations of cultural appropriation never arise from a real offense. Usually, where there’s a problem worth noticing, it involves forms of disrespect compounded by power inequities; cultural appropriation is simply the wrong diagnosis.

Imagine how an Orthodox Jewish rabbi would feel if a gentile pop-music multimillionaire made a music video in which he used the Kaddish to mourn a Maserati he’d totaled. The offense isn’t appropriation; it’s the insult entailed by trivializing something another group holds sacred.

Those who parse these transgressions in terms of ownership have accepted a commercial system that’s alien to the traditions they aim to protect. They have allowed one modern regime of property to appropriate them.

To be sure, the stories we tell that connect Plato or Aristotle or Cicero or St. Augustine to the contemporary American or European world have some truth in them. These grand arcs are sustained by self-conscious traditions of scholarship and argumentation. Remember those medieval Christians digging back through Averroes looking for Aristotle; or Chrétien claiming chivalry from Rome. 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.

For these labels belong to communities; they are a social possession. And morality and political prudence require us to try to make them work for us all.

a world of empowered women is enriching for men as well.

We all have many things to “do out there” in the world. And the problem is not walls as such but walls that hedge us in; walls we played no part in designing, walls without doors and windows, walls that block our vision and obstruct our way, walls that will not let in fresh and enlivening air. The modes of identity we’ve considered can all become forms of confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral ones. But they can also give contours to our freedom,