Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

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.

But Rousseau was wrong about some important things, beginning with his assertion that early humans were primordially individualistic.

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.

The modern concept of identity unites three different phenomena. The first is thymos, a universal aspect of human personality that craves recognition. The second is the distinction between the inner and the outer self, and the raising of the moral valuation of the inner self over outer society. This emerged only in early modern Europe. The third is an evolving concept of dignity, in which recognition is due not just to a narrow class of people, but to everyone.

He asserts that we can point to nothing as unconditionally good other than a good will—that is, the capacity for proper moral choice.

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.

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.

Successful democracy depends not on optimization of its ideals, but balance: a balance between individual freedom and political equality, and between a capable state exercising legitimate power and the institutions of law and accountability that seek to constrain it.

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.

Most people do not have infinite depths of individuality that is theirs alone. What they believe to be their true inner self is actually constituted by their relationships with other people, and by the norms and expectations that those others provide.

Both nationalism and Islamism—that is, political Islam—can be seen as two sides of the same coin. Both are expressions of a hidden or suppressed group identity that seeks public recognition.

And both phenomena arise in similar circumstances, when economic modernization and rapid social change undermine older forms of community and replace them with a confusing pluralism of alternative forms of association.

But they were universalists insofar as they believed in the equality of dignity of all human beings based on their potential for inner freedom.

The thinker who was critical in shifting the focus of recognition struggles away from an individual if universally shared freedom to collective freedom based on particular national or cultural characteristics was Johann Gottfried von Herder, a late-eighteenth-century student and contemporary of Kant.

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

Like Rousseau, he did not believe that those who lived in later historical times were necessarily better or happier than the “primitive” peoples who came before.

He sought recognition, not for an abstraction like the “Man” in the Rights of Man, but rather for his particular people and, by extension, every other human community.

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

As the social anthropologist Ernest Gellner explained, “A society has emerged based on a high-powered technology and the expectancy of sustained growth, which requires both a mobile division of labour, and sustained, frequent and precise communication between strangers.”

He is no longer under the thumb of his parents and local priest and finds people with different religious affiliations than those in his village.

Ferdinand Tönnies as the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, or from (village) community to (urban) society.

The answer given to a confused peasant like Hans from ideologists such as Lagarde was simple: You are a proud German, heir to an ancient culture, connected by your common language to all of the millions of other Germans scattered across Central and Eastern Europe. The lonely and confused worker now had a clear sense of dignity, a dignity that, he now realized, was disrespected by bad people who had somehow infiltrated his society.

The identity problem is particularly acute for young second-generation Muslims growing up in immigrant communities in Western Europe.

Like classic nationalists, contemporary Islamists have both a diagnosis of the problem and a clear solution: you are part of a proud and ancient community; the outside world doesn’t respect you as a Muslim; we offer you a way to connect to your true brothers and sisters, where you will be a member of a great community of believers that stretches across the world.

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.

Kepel argues that the turn toward violence and extremism cannot be understood apart from the religious doctrines being promoted around the world, and in particular the brand of ultraconservative Salafism exported out of Saudi Arabia.

The Roy-Kepel debate centers around a critical question: 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?

These alternative interpretations are not, however, mutually exclusive; they may complement one another.

Moreover, earlier generations of radicalized youth did not seek to blow themselves up in suicide attacks; specific ideas motivate this fashion.

It took a brilliant political entrepreneur and ideologue such as Hitler, and the huge economic dislocations experienced by Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, to permit the rise of the Nazi movement.

The extremist forms of Muslim identity being proffered in the early twenty-first century are no more compatible with international peace than were the nationalist doctrines of the early twentieth century.

Both nationalism and Islamism can thus be seen as a species of identity politics.

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 vi...

These leaders include Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Erdoğan, Hungary’s Orbán, Poland’s Kaczynski, and finally Donald J. Trump in the United States, whose campaign slogans were Make America Great Again and America First.

But as the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, within-country inequality around the world has seen a large increase since 1980; contrary to the long-accepted theory of the economist Simon Kuznets, rich-country incomes have been diverging rather than converging.

In the United States, the strong economic growth of the 1980s and ’90s was not evenly distributed, but went overwhelmingly to those with good educations.

How do we explain the failure of the left to capitalize on rising global inequality, and the rise of the nationalist right in its place?

Good question

The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations.

great deal of what we conventionally take to be economic motivation driven by material needs or desires is in fact a thymotic desire for recognition of one’s dignity or status.

Much of the agenda of modern feminism has been set not by working-class women hoping to get jobs as firefighters or Marine grunts, but by educated professional women seeking to rise closer to the top of the social hierarchy.

Rather, the anger felt in such situations is not so much about resources as about justice: the pay she is awarded by the firm is important not so much because it provides needed resources, but rather because salary is a marker of dignity, and the firm is telling her that she is worth less than a man even though her qualifications and contributions are equal or even superior.

The real indignity of racism in the North was that African-Americans were invisible to their white peers, not necessarily mistreated but simply not seen as fellow human beings.

Consider that the next time you give money to a homeless person, but fail to make eye contact with him or her: you are relieving the material want, but failing to acknowledge the shared humanity between the beggar and you.

One might think this is related to absolute levels of income, except that people with comparable relative status report comparable levels of happiness regardless of their absolute wealth: 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.

People who think of themselves as middle class, by contrast, have more time for political activity and are better educated and easier to mobilize.

But perhaps one of the great drivers of the new American nationalism that sent Donald Trump into the White House (and Britain out of the European Union) has been the perception of invisibility.

Hochschild presents a metaphor of ordinary people patiently waiting on a long line to get through a door labeled THE AMERICAN DREAM, and seeing other people suddenly cut in line ahead of them—African-Americans, women, immigrants—aided by those same elites who ignore them.

“The point is not to become acceptable or worthy, but to acknowledge the worthiness that already exists.

Yeah

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.

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.