Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

Second-generation European Muslims in particular are caught between two cultures, that of their parents, which they reject, and that of their adopted country, which doesn’t fully accept them. Radical Islam by contrast offers them community, acceptance, and dignity.

Many terrorists have come from comfortable middle-class backgrounds, and many were apolitical and unconcerned with global politics for most of their lives. Neither these issues nor any kind of genuine religiosity drove them so much as the need for a clear identity, meaning, and a sense of pride. They realized that they had an inner, unrecognized self that the outside world was trying to suppress.

Is the rise of Islamist radicalism in the early twenty-first century best understood as an identity problem, or is it at base a genuinely religious phenomenon? That is, is it the by-product of the sociology of our age and the dislocations brought on by modernization and globalization, or does it represent a timeless feature of one particular religion, and the independent role of ideas in motivating human behavior?

Both nationalism and Islamism can thus be seen as a species of identity politics. Stating this does not do justice to the full complexity or specificity of either phenomenon. But they nonetheless have a number of important similarities. They both appeared on the world stage at moments of social transition from traditional isolated agrarian societies to modern ones connected to a broader and more diverse world. They both provide an ideology that explains why people feel lonely and confused, and both peddle in victimhood that lays the blame for an individual’s unhappy situation on groups of outsiders. And they both demand recognition of dignity in restrictive ways: not for all human beings, but for members of a particular national or religious group.

Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations.6 Similarly, in the contemporary Middle East, a letter addressed to classes has been delivered instead to religions.

What they seek is not some absolute level of wealth, but rather status relative to that of other billionaires.

The problem with the contemporary left is the particular forms of identity that it has increasingly chosen to celebrate. Rather than building solidarity around large collectivities such as the working class or the economically exploited, it has focused on ever smaller groups being marginalized in specific ways.

all human beings were held to be capable of moral choice, a capacity that in Protestant thought was said to reside deep inside each individual. This concept of universal dignity was then secularized in the form of rational moral rules by Kant. To this, Rousseau added the idea that the inner moral self was not just capable of binary moral choices, but was filled with a plenitude of feelings and personal experiences that were suppressed by the surrounding society; access to those feelings rather than their suppression became the moral imperative. Dignity now centered on the recovery of the authentic inner being, and society’s recognition of the potential that resided in each of its members.

A liberal society increasingly came to be understood not just as a political order that protected certain minimal individual rights, but rather as one that actively encouraged the full actualization of the inner self.

In the Christian tradition, the inner self was the source of original sin, but was also the seat of moral choice by which sin could be overcome. Dignity rested on the ability of an individual believer to comply with a host of moral rules—regarding sex, the family, relations with neighbors and rulers—at the expense of inner sinful desires. With the erosion of the shared moral horizon established by common religion in Western countries, it became less possible to award dignity only to those i...

Consistent with the modern concept of identity was the idea that the individual’s self-actualization was a higher need than the requirements of the broader society.

ideas that ultimately trace back to Rousseau: that each of us has an inner self buried deep within; that it is unique and a source of creativity; that the self residing in each individual has an equal value to that of others; that the self is expressed not through reason but through feelings; and finally, that this inner self is the basis of the human dignity that is recognized in political documents such as the Declaration of Independence.

The view that self-esteem is based on an individual’s ability to follow certain substantive social rules—to possess virtues—is a much more traditional understanding of human dignity.

the decline of a shared moral horizon defined by religion had left a huge void that was being filled by psychologists preaching a new religion of psychotherapy. Traditional culture, according to Rieff, “is another name for a design of motive directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.” As such it played a therapeutic role, giving purpose to individuals, connecting them to others, and teaching them their place in the universe. But that outer culture had been denounced as an iron cage imprisoning the inner self; people were told to liberate their inner selves, to be “authentic” and “committed,” but without being told to what they should be committed. The void left by priests and ministers was now being filled by psychoanalysts using therapeutic techniques “with nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being.”

Freud remained morally neutral in the standoff between the inner self and the demands of society, recognizing that both had powerful claims; if anything, he was on the side of society. But he was part of an “unmasking trend,” in Lionel Trilling’s words, founded on the belief that “beneath the appearance of every human phenomenon there lies concealed a discrepant actuality and that intellectual, practical and (not least) moral advantage is to be gained by forcibly bringing it to light.”7 Many of Freud’s followers, such as Herbert Marcuse, and those in subsequent psychiatric traditions, were less neutral than Freud and saw their role as that of liberators of the individual against a broadly repressive society.

The affirmation of inner identity depended, in the final analysis, on the truth of Rousseau’s assertion that human beings were fundamentally good: that their inner selves were sources of limitless potential (what Rousseau called perfectibility), and that human happiness depended on the liberation of that self from artificial social constraint.

Nietzsche was ruthlessly honest in foreseeing the consequences of personal liberation: it could just as easily pave the way for a post-Christian morality in which the stronger ruled the weaker, rather than a happy egalitarian outcome.

Lasch, who argued that the promotion of self-esteem enabled not human potential but a crippling narcissism, indeed, a narcissism that he felt had come to characterize American society as a whole. People were not liberated to fulfill their potential; rather, they were trapped in emotional dependence: “Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience.”

Even when therapists speak of the need for “meaning” and “love,” they define love and meaning simply as the fulfillment of the patient’s emotional requirements. It hardly occurs to them—nor is there any reason why it should, given the nature of the therapeutic enterprise—to encourage the subject to subordinate his needs and interests to those of others, to some cause or tradition outside himself.

Lasch

In an American context, Lasch argued that narcissism as a social phenomenon would lead not to fascism, but to a broad depoliticization of society, in which struggles for social justice were reduced to personal psychological problems.

If therapy became a substitute for religion, religion itself took an increasingly therapeutic turn. This was true of both liberal and evangelical churches in the United States, whose leaders found that they could reverse the trend toward declining attendance if they offered what amounted to psychological counseling services built around self-esteem.

Rick Warren, whose Church Growth Movement has transformed many thousands of evangelical churches in recent decades, has put forth a similar therapeutic message. His trademarked Purpose Driven Life movement emphasizes the importance of pastors attending to the “felt needs” of nonbelievers, deemphasizing traditional Christian doctrine in favor of an overtly psychological language. Like Schuller, and like the California task force, he downplays sin and any judgmental aspect of traditional religion; the Gospel is more of an “owner’s manual” for how to achieve happiness in this life rather than in the one beyond.11 Luther’s Christian dignity was something hard to achieve; the Purpose Driven Life by contrast is available to everyone.

Under the therapeutic model, however, an individual’s happiness depends on his or her self-esteem, and self-esteem is a by-product of public recognition. Governments are readily able to give away public recognition in the way that they talk about and treat their citizens, so modern liberal societies naturally and perhaps inevitably began to take on the responsibility for raising the self-esteem of each and every one of their citizens.

This rapid expansion of therapeutic social services triggered a conservative backlash in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, along with efforts to cut their growth. Yet by then therapeutic responses to life problems were demanded by millions of ordinary people, who were now less comfortable turning to pastors, parents, companies, or other traditional sources of authority. The therapeutic state metastasized across a wide number of institutions, including a large nonprofit sector that by the 1990s had become the delivery vehicle for state-funded social services.

justification for the curricular shift is entirely psychological: the current canon is “crushing the psyche” of minority and female students, and hurting people “mentally and emotionally in ways that are not even recognized.” A wider reading list will not necessarily transmit valuable or timeless knowledge that would be educationally important; rather, it would raise the self-esteem of marginalized students and make them feel better about themselves.15

The therapeutic model arose directly from modern understandings of identity. It held that we have deep interior spaces whose potentialities are not being realized, and that external society through its rules, roles, and expectations is responsible for holding us back. This requires both an individual plumbing of that inner space and a potentially revolutionary agenda to liberate us from the restraining rules. The therapist was not particularly interested in the substantive content of what was inside us, nor in the abstract question of whether the surrounding society was just or unjust. The therapist is simply interested in making his or her patients feel better about themselves, which required raising their sense of self-worth.

The rise of the therapeutic model midwifed the birth of modern identity politics in advanced liberal democracies. Identity politics is everywhere a...

Research on ethnic movements around the world has shown that individual self-esteem is related to the esteem conferred on the larger group with which one is associated; thus the political would affect the personal.

By the end of the 1960s, however, groups such as the Black Panthers or the Nation of Islam emerged that argued that black people had their own traditions and consciousness; black people needed to take pride in themselves for what they were and not for what the broader society wanted them to be. In the words of the poem written by William Holmes Borders, Sr., and recited by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, “I may be poor, but I am—Somebody!” The authentic inner selves of black Americans were not those of white people, but were shaped by the unique experiences of growing up black in a hostile white society.

The idea that each group has its own identity that was not accessible to outsiders was reflected in the use of the term lived experience, which has seen explosive growth in the popular culture since the 1970s.

Modernization entails the emergence of a complex society with an elaborate division of labor, the personal mobility that necessarily underlies modern market economies, and the movement from village to city that creates a diverse pluralism of individuals living next to one another. In contemporary societies, these social changes were deepened by modern communications technology and social media, which allow like-minded individuals in geographically separate places to communicate with one another. In such a world, lived experiences, and therefore identities, begin to proliferate exponentially, just like YouTube stars and Facebook circles on the internet. What erodes just as rapidly is the possibility of old-fashioned “experience,” that is, perspectives and feelings that can be shared across group boundaries.

Identity, which had formerly been a matter for individuals, now became the property of groups that were seen as having their own cultures shaped by their own lived experiences.

The social democratic left also reached a dead end of sorts: its goals of an ever-expanding welfare state bumped into the reality of fiscal constraints during the turbulent 1970s. Governments responded by printing money, leading to inflation and financial crisis; redistributive programs were creating perverse incentives that discouraged work, savings, and entrepreneurship, which in turn limited the size of the pie available for redistribution.

The left continued to be defined by its passion for equality, but that agenda shifted from its earlier emphasis on the conditions of the working class to the often psychological demands of an ever-widening circle of marginalized groups. Many activists came to see the old working class and their trade unions as a privileged stratum with little sympathy for the plight of groups such as immigrants or racial minorities worse off than they were. Recognition struggles targeted newer groups and their rights as groups, rather than the economic inequality of individuals. In the process, the old working class was left behind.

Inspired both by the 1979 Iranian Revolution and by Saudi support for Salafist mosques and madrassas, Islamist groups began to appear in Europe that argued that Muslims should not seek to integrate, but should maintain separate cultural institutions. Many people on the European left embraced this trend, regarding Islamists as more authentic spokesmen for the marginalized than westernized Muslims who had chosen to integrate into the social system.

national identity also extends into the realm of culture and values. It consists of the stories that people tell about themselves: where they came from, what they celebrate, their shared historical memories, what it takes to become a genuine member of the community.

Identity is rooted in thymos, which is experienced emotionally through feelings of pride, shame, and anger. I’ve already noted the ways in which this can undermine rational debate and deliberation. On the other hand, democracies will not survive if citizens are not in some measure irrationally attached to the ideas of constitutional government and human equality through feelings of pride and patriotism.

most democracies were built on top of preexisting nations, societies that already had a well-developed sense of national identity that defined the sovereign people. But those nations were not created democratically: Germany, France, Britain, and the Netherlands were all the historical by-products of long and often violent political struggles over territory and culture under nondemocratic regimes. When these societies democratized, their territorial extent and their existing populations were simply taken for granted as the basis for popular sovereignty.

The idea that states are obsolete and should be superseded by international bodies is flawed because no one has been able to come up with a good method for holding such international bodies democratically accountable. The functioning of democratic institutions depends on shared norms, perspectives, and ultimately culture, all of which can exist on the level of a national state, but which do not exist internationally.

national identity in a well-functioning democracy requires something more than passive acceptance of a creed. It requires citizenship and the exercise of certain virtues. A creedal identity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for success.