The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah
JANE O’GRADY The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity By Kwame Anthony Appiah Profile Books £14.99 Oldie price £9.50 inc p&p
‘I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians etc. I know, too… that one can be a Persian. But as for man, I declare I have never met him in my life.’ When uttered by the philosopher Comte Joseph de Maistre in 1797, this was the epitome of a crabbed, unenlightened, reactionary approach.
Now it is the young, ‘woke’ way to think. ‘Identity politics’ – in which
the distinctions (and affiliations) of race, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality are primary – has replaced the Enlightenment’s ‘we are citizens of the world’ universalism, which is denounced as a mask for colonialism, Eurocentrism and racism.
The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah used the Reith Lectures in 2016 to examine the ambiguities, fallacies and paradoxes of ‘identity’. The Lies that Bind develops his thoughts further.
Identity, says Appiah, ‘is negotiated between insiders and outsiders’ and has an objective and a subjective dimension. Initially a category thrust upon a group, and often grimly determining the fate of those within it, social identity of various sorts now tends to be eagerly embraced by those it categorises, as a badge of honour uniting them and serving to
distinguish them from society at large. The book’s five main sections are devoted to disentangling the respective origins and evolution of identities of creed, colour, class, country and culture, and showing how multifarious, arbitrary and incommensurable they are; that identity is less a state than ‘an activity’.
Being of mixed Ghanaian and English heritage, Appiah considers himself an apt investigator. He writes lucidly and engagingly, and deals in fascinating nuggets – such as his description of the Cagots of the French and Spanish Pyrenees who exemplify how haphazard yet solidifying classification can be. They have absolutely ‘no distinguishing features’ of ethnicity, culture or appearance, yet somehow constitute a group with pariah status.
However interesting in themselves,
such nuggets don’t add up to an argument. His method of focusing each section on a particular person – Amo Afer (an 18th-century African philosopher) in Colour; Michael Young (coiner of ‘meritocracy’ and founder of the Open University) in Class — is journalistic and patronising to his readers, who might expect less blandness and sharper analysis.
Nothing is added to the already standard views that notions of nationalism mainly arose in the 18th and 19th centuries (exacerbated by Romanticism’s reaction against Enlightenment reason and universalism); that ‘race’ is only a recent, 19th-century label which has proved biologically unsound; and that ‘the West’ is also a comparatively recent concept.
Also familiar is his argument that religions are characterised, not by their texts, but by their practice – the argument is made whenever violent and misogynistic passages in the Koran are cited by the extremist who invokes them to justify his terrorism, or by the Islamophobe to inveigh against Islam. Appiah’s term for what he criticises (‘scriptural determinism’) may be new, but he is no more convincing than the usual apologists in giving priority to practice in this chicken/egg question.
Appiah argues that what is condemned as ‘cultural appropriation’ is immemorial and inevitable – and only reprehensible if involving disrespect – but he never gets embroiled in the bitter complexity of this issue.
Also tantalisingly brief is his discussion of ‘intersectionality’, a 1989 term for the ways identities ‘interact to produce effects that are not simply the sum of each of them’ (to be a black lesbian is not just ‘some easy act of addition’: woman + black + gay; to be a gay Chinese man is quite different in San Francisco from how it is in China’s Henan province where you are liable to be forcibly treated for ‘sexual preference disorder’).
Since Appiah mentions the ‘liberal fantasy’ of identity being just a matter of choice, why doesn’t he examine fraught, fascinating instances of ‘identification’: the American Rachel Doležal electing to be black; the TERF (Trans-exclusionary Radical Feminist) wars over how far gender is biologically determined?
Despite his laudable aim – to smooth out tensions – Appiah tends instead to smooth them over.