Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

This book would not have been written had Donald J. Trump not been elected president in November 2016. Like many Americans, I was surprised by this outcome and troubled by its implications for the United States and the world. It was the second major electoral surprise of that year, the first being Britain’s vote to leave the European Union the previous June.

Indeed, the philosopher Hegel argued that the struggle for recognition was the ultimate driver of human history, a force that was key to understanding the emergence of the modern world.

While the economic inequalities arising from the last fifty or so years of globalization are a major factor explaining contemporary politics, economic grievances become much more acute when they are attached to feelings of indignity and disrespect. Indeed, much of what we understand to be economic motivation actually reflects not a straightforward desire for wealth and resources, but the fact that money is perceived to be a marker of status and buys respect.

Take, for example, the gay marriage movement, which has spread like wildfire across the developed world in the first decades of the twenty-first century. This does have an economic aspect, having to do with rights of survivorship, inheritance, and the like for gay or lesbian unions. However, many of those economic issues could have been and were in many cases resolved through new rules about property in civil unions. But a civil union would have had lower status than a marriage: society would be saying that gay people could be together legally, but their bond would be different from that between a man and a woman. This outcome was unacceptable to millions of people who wanted their political systems to explicitly recognize the equal dignity of gays and lesbians; the ability to marry was just a marker of that equal dignity. And those opposed wanted something of the opposite: a clear affirmation of the superior dignity of a heterosexual union and therefore of the traditional family. The emotions expended over gay marriage had much more to do with assertions about dignity than they did with economics.

But while thymos is a universal aspect of human nature that has always existed, the belief that each of us has an inner self that is worthy of respect, and that the surrounding society may be wrong in not recognizing it, is a more recent phenomenon. So while the concept of identity is rooted in thymos, it emerged only in modern times when it was combined with a notion of an inner and an outer self, and the radical view that the inner self was more valuable than the outer one. This was the product of both a shift in ideas about the self and the realities of societies that started to evolve rapidly under the pressures of economic and technological change.

3 INSIDE AND OUTSIDE Unlike thymos, which is a permanent part of human nature, what was to become the modern concept of identity emerged only as societies started to modernize a few hundred years ago.

The foundations of identity were laid with the perception of a disjunction between one’s inside and one’s outside. Individuals come to believe that they have a true or authentic identity hiding within themselves that is somehow at odds with the role they are assigned by their surrounding society.

In the West, the idea of identity was born, in a sense, during the Protestant Reformation, and it was given its initial expression by the Augustinian friar Martin Luther.

Luther was one of the first Western thinkers to articulate and valorize the inner self over the external social being. He argued that man has a twofold nature, an inner spiritual one and an outer bodily being; since “no external thing has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or freedom,” only the inner man could be renewed.

Faith alone can rule only in the inner man, as Romans 10[:10] says, “For man believes with his heart and so is justified,” and since faith alone justifies, it is clear that the inner man cannot be justified, freed, or saved by any outer work or action at all, and that these works, whatever their character, have nothing to do with this inner man.

This recognition—central to subsequent Protestant doctrine—that faith alone and not works would justify man in one stroke undercut the raison d’être for the Catholic Church.

Though it was not Luther’s intention, the Reformation brought about exactly this result: the decline of Rome as the Universal Church, the rise of alternative churches, and a whole series of social changes in which the individual believer was prioritized over prevailing social structures.

In my view, both positions capture part of the truth, because causality moves in both directions at once. Material conditions obviously shape people’s receptivity to certain ideas. But ideas have their own inner logic, and without the cognitive framing they provide, people will interpret their material conditions differently.

On the plane of ideas, we can see that the distinction between inner and outer, and the valorization of the former over the latter, starts in an important sense with Luther.* Like many subsequent thinkers struggling with the question of identity, he began with an agonizing quest to understand himself, and the way in which he might be justified before God. This inner man was not good; he was a sinner, but could yet be saved through an inner act of belief that could not be made visible by any external action. Thus Luther is responsible for the notion, central to questions of identity, that the inner self is deep and possesses many layers that can be exposed only through private introspection. Yet Martin Luther stands far from more modern understandings of identity. He celebrated the freedom of the inner self, but that self had only one dimension: faith, and the acceptance of God’s grace. It was a binary choice: one was free to choose God, or not. One could not choose to be a Hindu or a Buddhist or decide that one’s true identity lay in coming out of the closet as gay or lesbian. Luther was not facing a “crisis of meaning,” something that would have been incomprehensible to him; while he rejected the Universal Church, he accepted completely the underlying truth of Christianity.3

The second sense in which Luther had not yet arrived at the modern understanding of identity was that his inner self did not seek public recognition of its newfound freedom.

Rousseau was the fundamental source of many ideas that would later be critical to a host of modern trends: democracy, human rights, communism, the discipline of anthropology, and environmentalism.

In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau argued that the first human being—man in the state of nature—was not sinful. The characteristics we associate with sin and evil—jealousy, greed, violence, hatred, and the like—did not characterize the earliest humans. In Rousseau’s account, there was no original human society: early people were fearful, isolated creatures with limited needs, for whom sex but not the family was natural. They did not feel greed or envy; their only natural emotion was pity for the suffering of others.

According to Rousseau, human unhappiness begins with the discovery of society. The first humans began their descent into society by mastering animals, which “produced the first movement of pride in him.” They then started to cooperate for mutual protection and advantage; this closer association “engendered in the mind of man perceptions of certain relations … which we express by the words great, little, strong, weak, swift, slow, fearful, bold, and other similar ideas.” The ability to compare, and to evaluate, other human beings was the fountainhead of human unhappiness: “Men no sooner began to set a value upon each other, and know what esteem was, than each laid claim to it, and it was no longer safe for any man to refuse it to another.” Rousseau denounces the shift from amour de soi (love of self) to amour propre (self-love or vanity); simple self-interest is transmuted into feelings of pride and the desire for social recognition.7

Rousseau says that private property emerged with the discovery of metallurgy and agriculture; while making humans incomparably richer, the ability to accumulate property also vastly exaggerated natural differences between individuals and raised jealousy, envy, pride, and shame to new heights. Hence Rousseau’s famous injunction at the beginning of the second part of the Discourse: The first person who, having enclosed some land, took it upon himself to say “This is mine,” and found people simple-minded enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society … How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up th...

Rousseau had two separate prescriptions for walking mankind back out of this catastrophe of inequality and violence. The first was outlined in The Social Contract, a political solution in which citizens return to their natural equality through the emergence of a “general will” that unites them in republican virtue. They cooperate with one another in a political union, but one that brooks no disagreement or pluralism. This solution has been rightly criticized as proto-totalitarian, quashing diversity and requiring strict uniformity of thought.

In the Discourse on Inequality, he had said that “the first sentiment of Man was that of his existence”; the sentiment de l’existence returns in the Reveries as a feeling of plenitude and happiness that emerges as an individual seeks to uncover the true self hiding beneath the layers of acquired social sensibilities.9 Rousseau’s sentiment of existence would one day morph into what is now called lived experience, which lies at the root of contemporary identity politics.

Rousseau thus stakes out a distinctive position regarding human nature. He disputes the assertion of Thomas Hobbes that man in the state of nature was violent, cruel, and selfish; Rousseau also disagrees with John Locke that private property was natural to early man. He would also disagree with Socrates and Adeimantus that thymos was a constituent part of the human soul, since Rousseau asserts clearly that the emotion of pride, and hence the desire to be recognized by other people, did not exist for the earliest human beings.

What Rousseau asserts, and what becomes foundational in world politics in the subsequent centuries, is that a thing called society exists outside the individual, a mass of rules, relationships, injunctions, and customs that is itself the chief obstacle ...

This way of thinking has become so instinctive to us now that we are unconscious of it. It is evident in the case of the teenager accused of a crime who raises the defense “Society made me do it,” or of the woman who feels that her potential...

On a larger scale, it is evident in the complaints of a Vladimir Putin who feels the American-led international order wrongly disrespects Rus...

While earlier thinkers could critique aspects of existing social rules and customs, few argued that existing society and its rules needed to be abolished en masse and replaced by something better. This is what ultimately links Rousseau to the revolution...

Like Luther, Rousseau establishes a sharp distinction between the inner self and the outer society demanding conformity to its rules. Unlike Luther, however, the freedom of that inner individual does not lie only in his or her ability to accept the grace of God; rather, it lies in the natural and universal ability to experience the sentiment de l’existence, free of the layers of accumulated social convention. Rousseau thus secularized and generalized the interiority opened up by Luther, accomplis...

Rousseau’s secularization of the inner self, and the priority he gives it over social convention, is thus a critical stepping-stone to the modern idea of identity. But Rousseau, as we have seen, did not believe that the desire for recognition was natural to human beings. He argued that the emotion of pride and the proclivity to compare oneself to others did not exist among early human beings, and that their emergence in human history laid the foundation for subsequent human unhappiness. The recovery of the inner self thus required divesting oneself of the need for social recognition; the solitary dreamer does not need anyone’s approval.

Today we know that feelings of pride and self-esteem are related to levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain, and that chimpanzees exhibit elevated levels of serotonin when they achieve alpha male status.13 It seems unlikely that there was ever a moment when behaviorally modern human beings did not compare themselves with one another or feel pride when they received social recognition. In this respect, Plato had a better understanding of human nature than Rousseau.

That the distinction between an inner and an outer self emerged in Europe between the Reformation and the French Revolution was not an accident. European society was undergoing a series of profound economic and social changes that created the material conditions by which such ideas could spread.

All human societies socialize their members to live by common rules; human cooperation, and hence human success as a species, would not be possible otherwise. All societies have had rebellious teenagers and misfits who didn’t want to accept those rules, but in this struggle, society almost always wins out by forcing inner selves to conform to external norms.

Though provoking!

Hence the concept of identity as it is now understood would not even arise in most traditional human societies. For much of the last ten thousand years of human history, the vast majority of people lived in settled agrarian communities. In such societies, social roles are both limited and fixed: a strict hierarchy is based on age and gender; everyone has the same occupation (farming or raising children and minding a household); one’s entire life is lived in the same small village with a limited circle of friends and neighbors; one’s religion and beliefs are shared by all; and social mobility—moving away from the village, choosing a different occupation, or marrying someone not chosen by one’s parents—is virtually impossible. Such societies have neither pluralism, nor diversity, nor choice. Given this lack of choice, it did not make sense for an individual to sit around and brood over the question “Who am I, really?” All of the characteristics that make up an inner self are fixed. One could perhaps rebel by running away to another village, but there one would find oneself trapped in an identical limited social space. There was no concept of “society” standing outside the individual, limiting a person’s choices, and no valorization of an inner self over that society.

Invention of the printing press led to the spread of literacy and the rapid diffusion of new ideas.

These broader social and economic changes meant that individuals suddenly had more choice and opportunity in their lives. In the old society, their limited social choices determined who they were on the inside; with new horizons opening up, the question “Who am I?” suddenly became more relevant, as did perceptions of a vast gulf that existed between the inner person and external reality.

Who am I? Haha :) End of chapter 3, Inside and Outside. What a chapter! Francis traces us back from Plato's outside Republic society, to Augustine inner self, to Luther's priority of the inner relation to God over the outer relation to the church society, to Rousseau's natural inner self over the social contract as the human environment progressed from isolated hunter gatherers to agrarian societys fixed to small single minded rules to commercial societies with diverse open infinity possibilities to the inner self identity his or her identity.

The broadening and universalization of dignity turns the private quest for self into a political project. In Western political thought, this shift took place in the generation after Rousseau, through the philosophers Immanuel Kant and particularly Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

The centrality of moral choice to human dignity was underlined by the Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., when he said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”—i.e., by the moral choices made by their inner selves, and not by their external characteristics.

The philosopher Hegel accepted this link between moral choice and human dignity; human beings are morally free agents who are not simply rational machines seeking to maximize satisfaction of their desires. But unlike Rousseau or Kant, Hegel put recognition of that moral agency at the center of his account of the human condition. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, he argued that human history was driven by a struggle for recognition.

These struggles for Hegel do not play themselves out primarily as individual journeys into the self, as they did for Rousseau, but politically. The great conflict of his day was the French Revolution, and its enshrining of the Rights of Man. The young Hegel witnessed Napoleon riding through his university town after the Battle of Jena in 1806 and saw in that act the incipient universalization of recognition in the form of the principles of the French Revolution. This is the sense in which Hegel believed that history had come to an end: it culminated in the idea of universal recognition; subsequent events would simply carry this principle to the far corners of the earth.1

A liberal democratic regime based on individual rights enshrines the notion of equal dignity in law by recognizing citizens as moral agents capable of sharing in their own self-government. In Hegel’s day, this principle was being imposed on countries by a general on horseback, but for the philosopher this was a small detail in the larger story of the growth of human freedom.

By the early nineteenth century, most of the elements of the modern concept of identity are present: the distinction between the inner and the outer selves, the valuation of the inner being above existing social arrangements, the understanding that the dignity of the inner self rests on its moral freedom, the view that all human beings share this moral freedom, and the demand that the free inner self be recognized. Hegel pointed to a fundamental truth about modern politics, that the great passions unleashed by events such as the French Revolution were at base struggles over dignity. The inner self was not just a matter of personal reflection; its freedom was to be embodied in rights and law. The democratic upsurge that would unfold ...

5 REVOLUTIONS OF DIGNITY The demand for the equal recognition of dignity animated the French Revolution, and it continues to the present day. On December 17, 2010, police confiscated the produce from the vegetable cart of a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, ostensibly because he did not have a permit. According to his family, he was publicly slapped by a policewoman, Faida Hamdi, who confiscated his electronic scales as well and spat in his face. (That Hamdi was female may have increased his feeling of humiliation in a male-dominated culture.) Bouazizi went to the governor’s office to complain and to get his scales back, but the governor refused to see him. Bouazizi then doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire, shouting, “How do you expect me to make a living?”

What was shared among all of these protesters was resentment that they had been humiliated and disregarded by their governments.

In subsequent years, the Arab Spring went horribly wrong. The greatest tragedy occurred in Syria, where that country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, refused to leave power and launched a war against his own population that has to date killed more than 400,000 people and displaced millions more. In Egypt, early democratic elections brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power; fears that they would impose their brand of Islam on the country led the military to stage a coup in 2013. Libya and Yemen have descended into bloody civil wars, and authoritarian rulers tightened their grip throughout the region. Only Tunisia, where the Arab Spring originated, looks anything like a liberal democracy, but it is hanging on by a thread.

the goods on which his living depended were arbitrarily confiscated, he was publicly humiliated, and when he tried to complain and receive justice, no one would listen.

For millions of people in the Arab world, his self-immolation crystallized the sense of injustice they felt toward the regimes they were living under.

The choice between aligning with the EU or with Putin’s Russia was seen as a choice between living under a modern government that treated people equally qua citizen and living under a regime in which democracy was manipulated by self-dealing kleptocrats behind a veneer of democratic practice. Putin’s Russia represented the epitome of this kind of mafia state; closer association with it rather than Europe represented a step into a world in which real power was held by an unaccountable elite. Hence the belief that the Euromaidan uprising was about securing the basic dignity of ordinary citizens.

But freedom typically means more than being left alone by the government: it means human agency, the ability to exercise a share of power through active participation in self-government.

This freedom is institutionalized in the franchise, which gives every citizen a small share of political power. It is also institutionalized in the rights to free speech and free assembly, which are avenues for political self-expression.

Equality in a modern liberal democracy has always meant something more like an equality of freedom.

The rule of law limits power by granting citizens certain basic rights—that is, in certain domains such as speech, association, property, and religious belief the state may not restrict individual choice. Rule of law also serves the principle of equality by applying those rules equally to all citizens, including those who hold the highest political offices within the system.