Some identity struggles, defensive and aggressive ones alike, are troublingly “innocent”: like birds of prey, to use Nietzsche’s metaphor, some groups engage in identity struggles by bracketing moral questions and exerting power as they feel they must in order to survive and thrive. Other identity struggles are morally hyper-charged and utterly devoid of self-criticism: with the zeal of fundamentalists, combatants inhabit different moral universes and struggle against each other in the name of their own nonnegotiable values. Still other identity struggles are culturally and morally self-aware.
