Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

an aristocratic class whose claim to high social status lay in the fact that they, or their ancestors, were warriors. The Greek word for “gentleman” was kaloskagathos, or “beautiful and good,” while the very word aristocracy derives from the Greek term “rule by the best.” These warriors were seen as morally different from shopkeepers because of their virtue: they were willing to risk their lives for the public good. Honor accrued only to people who deliberately rejected rational utility maximization—our modern economic model—in favor of those who were willing to risk the most important utility of all, their lives.

not everyone is a Nietzschean superman seeking to revalue all values. Human beings are intensely social creatures whose emotional inclinations drive them to want to conform to the norms surrounding them. When a stable, shared moral horizon disappears and is replaced by a cacophony of competing value systems, the vast majority of people do not rejoice at their newfound freedom of choice. Rather, they feel an intense insecurity and alienation because they do not know who their true self is. This crisis of identity leads in the opposite direction from expressive individualism, to the search for a common identity that will rebind the individual to a social group and reestablish a clear moral horizon. This psychological fact lays the groundwork for nationalism.

“Let it not be imagined, that human art can with despotic power convert at once a foreign region into another Europe.”

Nationalism is a doctrine that political borders ought to correspond to cultural communities, with culture defined largely by shared language.

The French Middle Eastern scholar Olivier Roy has pointed out that many recent terrorists, such as those who staged the Bataclan attacks in Paris in 2015, have a similar background: they are second-generation European Muslims who have rejected the Islam of their parents. (About 25 percent of the new generation of jihadis are converts to Islam with personal stories similar to those of jihadis who were born Muslim.)7 In their early years they appeared to be westernized, drinking alcohol and smoking weed, dating girls, watching sports, and otherwise seeming to fit into their surroundings. Yet many failed to find regular jobs and began a descent into petty crime and run-ins with the police. They lived at the margins of their own communities, with no history of great piety or interest in religion, until they are suddenly “born-again” by watching videos of radical imams or being converted by a prison preacher. When they showed up in Syria with a long beard and toting an AK-47 or staged a murderous attack on their fellow Europeans, their families always professed surprise and incomprehension at the transformation. Roy has described this not as the radicalization of Islam, but the Islamicization of radicalism—that is, a process that draws from the same alienation that drove earlier generations of extremists, whether nationalists such as Paul de Lagarde or Communists such as Leon Trotsky.

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.

The connection of income to dignity also suggests why something like a universal guaranteed income as a solution to job loss from automation won’t buy social peace or make people happy. Having a job conveys not just resources, but recognition by the rest of society that one is doing something socially valuable. Someone paid for doing nothing has no basis for pride.

upper-income Nigerians are just as happy as their German counterparts, despite the economic gap separating them. One compares oneself not globally to some absolute standard of wealth, but relative to a local group that one deals with socially.

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. Adolf Hitler would end up doing nothing more than following his inner star, as countless college graduates are constantly enjoined to do.

Christopher 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.” This had hugely negative social implications: 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.

Weak national identity has been a major problem in the greater Middle East, where Yemen and Libya have turned into failed states, and Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia have suffered from internal insurgency and chaos. Other developing countries have remained more stable, yet remain beset by problems related to a weak sense of national identity. This is the situation throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and it is a major obstacle to development. Countries such as Kenya and Nigeria, for example, are ethnically and religiously divided; stability is maintained only because different ethnic groups take turns in power to loot the country.1 High levels of corruption, poverty, and failed economic development are the result.

Ethnic diversity led to the breakdown of the liberal Austro-Hungarian Empire in the decades prior to World War I, when its component nationalities decided they could not live together in a common political structure. Fin de siècle Vienna was a melting pot that had produced Gustav Mahler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Sigmund Freud. But when the empire’s narrower national identities—Serbs, Bulgarians, Czechs, and Austro-Germans—asserted themselves, the region descended into a paroxysm of violence and intolerance.

national identity is important for the quality of government. Good government—that is, effective public services and low levels of corruption—depends on state officials placing public interest above their own narrow interests. In systemically corrupt societies, politicians and bureaucrats divert public resources to their own ethnic group, region, tribe, family, political party, or to their own individual pockets because they do not feel obligated to the community’s general interests.

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.

In Federalist No. 2, John Jay opens the debate on the proposed American Constitution in the following terms: Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manner and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side through a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence. Note how specific and narrow Jay’s definition of American identity is. It is based on shared religion (Protestantism), ethnicity (descent from the English), common language (English), and belief in the same republican principles of government. Even Thomas Paine, considered a left-wing radical at the time of the Revolution, claimed brotherhood only with “every European Christian.” Thomas Jefferson doubted that he shared the same blood as the “Scotch” and worried about immigrants from the wrong parts of Europe coming to the United States, who would bring “the principles of the government they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness.”

“Would America be the America it is today if in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.”

the EU should create a single citizenship whose requirements would be based on adherence to basic liberal democratic principles, one that would supersede national citizenship laws.