A few thoughts about an imaginary problem

“Identity” is not a word that need ever pass our lips - not if we have zero respect for the liberal analysis, and wish to be free of its formative power.  For this is a word of the left, and like all words of the left it pressages on us a modern conception of Man which is fatally light and relativistic.

How so?  Well, shouldn’t it be a grave and weighty responsibility for a man to define who and what he is?  After all, modernity places the highest possible value on the individual, denying all bonds, all blood their primacy.  To use the Schmittian formulation, “None but the individual shall dispose of the life of the individual.”  Surely, then, that life should be sufficiently valued by its owner to imbue the exercise with a high seriousness and a desire for some specificity.  Yet in practice the reverse is the case.  We live in the Age of the Left.  It is an age when realization of the Self, once the preserve of the religious and Chivalric orders, has been democratized and, in democratization, has been relativised.  When the measure of a life is mere personal taste all claims are equal.  There is salience but there is no depth.  There is “progress” but there is no movement.  Something vital, something authentic and original has fallen out of the equation.

In the sociological sense what remains is the modern us and the meaning of us.  For well over a century nationalist and traditionalist thinkers have judged that meaning in historical terms and found it wanting.  The ineluctable conclusion is that we are moving away from our truth as men, and putting on the cloth of an increasingly artificial self.  And we are doing this, most of us, because we are ignorant of politics and of ourselves, and we are weak and suggestible.

Artificiality in the modern conception of Man (modern in the context of an industrialised and, later, consumerised society) is precisely a sign of lost being.  It seems improbable, somehow, that the men and women of pre-industrial European societies, filled as those societies were with brothers to the ox, with men listed in the Orange and the Blue, and their widows in the pews, and the widows of the sea, would have had any reference point at all to the narcissism of a self-ascribed “identity”.  Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims assuredly did not define themselves according to their fascinations with the Self.  They were fixed by their relation to kin, to the soil and the seasons or the tides and the wind, to the economy as manor, town or village, to Nature and to God.  These were givers of riches aplenty for all but the high elites of the Court and Barony, of the Church, and of learning.

Liberalism arose as a revolt against that order.  By the time of Jane Austen, the first novel-writer and chronicler of the new leisured class, the constituency of the Self was already in evidence.  Modernity can be interpreted as the process of that constituency’s democratization.  It has spread out in our time to encompass even the human tragedy of transsexualism.  That, too, can be an “identity” no less “valid” than any other, and no less worthy of our, of course, always assiduous non-judgementalism.

There are a few liberal adventurers hoping that the democratization process won’t stop there.  Within the EU, for example, a paedophile ramp is clothing its self-advocacy in a call for the reduction of the age of homosexual consent to sixteen.  In the Guardian there have been articles advocating the legal extension of the principle of human rights to all animal life.  But it seems to me that the confused chromosome is the constituency’s limit.  Together with the elites’ distaste for political entanglement with paedophilia and animal rights extremism, it marks the boundary of our self-estrangement and the point where Nature makes its stand.

Now, a moment ago I made the point that traditionalist thinkers have long revolted against modernity and sought to make their stand in the idealised dream-scape of an order of a reborn European spirit overseen by an ascetic, natural aristocracy.  Obviously, if such an order was ever realized that would do for liberalism good and proper.  No more constituency of the Self, no more non-judgementalism.  But I firmly believe that beauty leads only to beauty, and to nothing else.  This beautiful vision would produce more artifice, more reification of “identity”, more hollow   “personality”.  None of these things would be quite as harmful as the version we are living as children of liberalism.  But neither would they be as good as a European order of the true!

So, that’s the contribution of Idealist philosophy dealt with, basically.  I can see no active continental European philosophy elsewhere - in de Benoist, for example.  And I confess to puzzlement at Dugin.  So what has American empiricism to say?  Well, here is the leading empiricist in racial consciousness in America, talking to Tom Sunic at Voice of Reason radio last week:

Tom Sunic: This concept of identity, it’s not necessarily racially based.  It can have a mechanical, so to speak, base as well. 

Kevin MacDonald: That’s correct.

Sunic: Post-modernity, now I know folks with different lifestyles … they are sun-worshipers, they are drug-worshipers, they are speed worshipers, and what have you.  So … we are losing our former racial in-group identity.

MacDonald: Yes, the idea of having an identity is psychological - that is, it’s not something that is set in stone.  If you think about historical periods in Europe, say, most people probably did not have a sense that they were white because everybody in their society was white.  It was only after the explorations and we started having contact with other peoples that we saw ourselves as being a race, and having certain differences, and so on.  Before that, our primary source of identity was probably religious.  Then, of course, once you had the rise of Protestantism then people had different religious identities, and those identities were far stronger than any sense of racial identity.  So, it’s a psychological concept and it can change.  As you say, you can have a personal identity as a base ball fan or a sun worshiper or a Buddhist.  It doesn’t matter.  This is all psychological.

But the question is what sorts of identity are useful?  What sorts of identity are adaptive?  And that sort of thing.

Sunic: Are you basically suggesting that anything is interchangeable?  Is it interchangeable, does it shift?  Or is it something already racial and genetically inborn in us?

MacDonald: Well, my view is that, unfortunately perhaps, it’s not genetic.  It is psychological, and it’s something that can be changed and can be something that people have conflict over.  If you look at the media throughout the Western world any sense of white racial identity is not legitimate, and it is something that is morally obtuse ...

Sunic: Reprehensible, yes.

MacDonald: Completely reprehensible.  So, certainly, it’s OK for blacks, Asians, Mexicans in America to have a sense of their ethnic identity, their racial identity.  But for whites it’s not.  So even if whites have some sort of small racial identity they have to keep it hidden.  So it’s much more psychologically acceptable to figure themselves as a professor or a baseball fan or a Christian, which is probably the most common one.

Sunic: In your books and your writings you are referring to implicit and explicit identity.  I just want you to elaborate on this.  What I understand after reading you, implicit identity does mean that every person knows, probably subconsciously, which tribe they belong to.  Every person, let’s say a white person, he may be completely unaware of his racial … he may completely shed the racial consciousness and all this issue involved with it.  But when push comes to shove he may be reminded of his racial conciousness.  He may be reminded of his primeval identity.  Am I reading you correctly?

MacDonald: Yes, that’s exactly right.  I think it’s one of the most important concepts that we have.  Even though very few white people have a sense of themselves as white, as having a racial identity, in fact they tend to socialise with other white people.  If you look at what kind of culture they prefer – country music, classical music -  if you look at their friends, at their spouses, if you look at where they live, they tend to want to associate with white people.  And that’s what we call implicit identity.  If you asked them, they’d say, “Well, I moved to this neighbourhood because it’s the schools.”  They wouldn’t explicitly say, “I moved to this neighbourhood because it’s a white neighbourhood, and I feel more comfortable there, I feel more, sort of ties, I trust the people more.”

Even though it’s not explicit there is this implicit stance, and that is because we do have an attraction to people like ourselves.

Sunic:  Which means that this is a genetic feature.

MacDonald: … people feel more comfortable with people like themselves, and that’s well established psychologically.  And it really goes to some of the very basic psychological mechanisms from our evolutionary past.  We have a tendency to prefer people like ourselves.

MacDonald goes on to argue in this interview that the sense of racial consciousness is rising among America’s whites.  “And it has to,” he says.  That may be the case - Nature is making its stand.  But I, for one, see insufficient agency in this very late development (by dint of insufficient philosophy, of course).  I am also puzzled as to why such an able psychologist doesn’t do more to communicate his model of Man.  Why the confusion over the relationship of our acquired personality and our natural being?  How difficult can it be to elicit understanding of these, even over the radio?

Something like:

“Of course the liberals are right.  All identities are equal.  They are, after all, strictly unreal sets of ideas ... something to do with our suggestibility and our ownership by the times in which we live.  We are not as free as we like to think we are, quite the opposite in fact.

“Being, on the other hand, is eternal and beyond the grasp of the modern world.  And even though we Europeans and European-Americans have collectively turned our back on it for decades now, and possibly even centuries, and in the process internalised so many ideas that do us harm, it is never lost to us.  Just to cease harming ourselves would lead us back to it, and to the life we deserve.”