Polarisation, Identity and How It All Went Wrong

Two American academics and public intellectuals have recently published books on the increased polarisation of many contemporary Western societies: Francis Fukuyama wrote Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment and Kwame Anthony Appiah published The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity: Creed, Country, Class, Culture. Both books received widespread attention and were reviewed in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, America’s top highbrow media outlets, thus reaching a broad audience and cementing the image of both authors as important and influential public intellectuals.

Appiah is a philosopher and, in good philosophical tradition, argues that such labels as nation, race, religion, and class are just that: labels that do not correspond to reality. In reality, no discrete and neatly bound nations and races exist. Belonging to a class is equally ephemeral and non-essential. Appiah, who was born in Ghana but lives in New York City, argues for the need to embrace a more ‘cosmopolitan impulse’ – an impulse that he has certainly embraced ever since he moved to New York. In the final analysis, Appiah finds that adhering to false and narrow identities undermines our ability to live together as human beings who share more than contemporary identity politics would have us believe.

Appiah’s book is written in the tradition of dismantling falsehood and lies so that we can, at last, face reality as it really is. This is a theme that dwells in the old European tradition of the Enlightenment, which found in Jürgen Habermas its latest and most forceful defendant. Reason and rationality, so goes the narrative, will eventually prevail in human affairs. It is the job of enlightened scholars to detect myths and dismantle them by exposing them to the light of scientific reason. This approach is simultaneously idealistic, arrogant, and naïve because it believes that evil and irrationality cannot withstand the strong forces of reason (idealistic), while also believing that European, white-male dialogic culture contains the cure for the world (naïve and arrogant).

It is hardly surprising that a cosmopolitan scholar like Anthony Appiah embraces such a Eurocentric understanding of history in light of the way that philosophy is taught in colleges and universities around the globe: as a highly biased and Eurocentric approach to knowledge production, reducing the search for wisdom to the very narrow Western tradition, without questioning how Western this tradition really is and what other nonWestern traditions should contribute to the universal quest for knowledge.

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama approaches the same issue not so much from an Enlightenment angle, but more in the style of a neo-conservative conspiracy theorist. For him, it is the political left that has unduly focused its attention too much on special rights, thus inspiring not just gay rights, but ultimately also white nationalism. Fukuyama believes this has led average white Americans to feel left out and that the same applies to the average European citizen.

Much of the current racist reaction in the United States was a response to having a black president – so much so that the Tea Party, one of the central outgrowths of this movement of political resentment, no longer exists under Trump.

While Appiah does what he was trained to do by asking for ultimate causes and hidden truths, Fukuyama’s approach tends to offer amorphous and impossible-to-prove theories such as a universal thymos (Greek for the human desire for recognition) to argue that, ultimately, leftist and multicultural social movements and minorities are the ones to blame for the current divisiveness that characterises many contemporary societies.

While it is clear that labels such as race, ethnicity, and nation are false in the sense Appiah proclaims, the problems only start there. Why is it that so many people fall for these false labels? Why are we so divided? It is true that entrenched and essentialised identities, in Appiah’s terms, are indeed a problem of our contemporary European and north American realities – but are they the main problem that explains the emergence of contemporary polarisation and division? Going against both Appiah and Fukuyama, I venture to say: no.

I believe Appiah’s and Fukuyama’s approaches are both myopic in that they refuse to consider the broader, historical moment facing Western Europe and the United States and instead choose to focus on what is immediately in front of them. I would like to suggest that identity politics, multiculturalism, LGBT rights, and movements such a Black Lives Matter are not the cause but the result of longer trends of historical social change.

I believe Appiah’s and Fukuyama’s approaches are both myopic in that they refuse to consider the broader, historical moment.

I suggest that nasty white nationalism in the USA, neo-Nazism in Germany, and widespread anti-immigrant sentiments and actions everywhere in Europe and the USA are better understood as a political backlash to the many advances that minorities and historically disadvantaged people and groups have achieved over recent years. Much of the current racist reaction in the United States was a response to having a black president – so much so that the Tea Party, one of the central outgrowths of this movement of political resentment, no longer exists under Trump.

In Germany particularly, the very progressive asylum policy that Angela Merkel pushed through in response to the Syrian refugee crisis must be seen as the cause for the racist responses we are currently witnessing in Chemnitz and other, similar, places where neo-Nazis are dreaming of a comeback.

Surveys of Brexit supporters clearly highlight this demographic fraction as the most reactionary and resentful – and with reason, as a fast moving world that discards old people and those unable to compete indeed seems to transform older generations from being respected elders who maintain memories and offer the wisdom gained from a long life into dead weight that is a burden on our private and public coffers. Can minorities, immigrants, and progressive social movements be blamed for that? Hardly. It rather seems that capitalism is the central culprit here, as good old Karl Marx already realised in 1848: under capitalism, everything solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.

Of course, ‘old losers’ face other challenges. Whites in the US are told by the media that soon they will become a minority in the USA, which for many seems to stir up considerable anxiety – an anxiety that probably reflects the fear that those minorities who have been systematically mistreated by the white majority might finally get a chance to get back at them.

As urbanisation and access to education steadily advances, the proverbial rural ‘deplorables’ characterised by Hillary Clinton in her unsuccessful presidential campaign are indeed on the wrong side of history – and they know it, or at least they feel it. We should not be surprised if these sections of the population who cannot compete, who receive no recognition or esteem from society and others, join up and form a movement. Calling them out as ‘deplorables’ will not help this situation.

Blaming those who stand up for their equal treatment for the current polarisation and division in many societies means blaming the victims.

There are, of course, also young deplorables, who feel equally left behind and jealous at the advances of others – particularly if those others look different from themselves or speak another language. Statistical projections, as far as we can trust them, show that millennials in the United States risk becoming the first generation in modern US history to earn less than their parents. This, to many, is quite anxiety- provoking. We are also told that US millennials have an average personal debt of US $33,000, mostly composed of student loans. Many of them think, and they are probably correct, that they will never be able to pay off their debt during their lifetime.

Like the old losers, many of them tend to blame their problems on others – and, once again, particularly if and when these others are non-white and/or come from somewhere else. Why? I fear that instead of conjuring something as mystical as Fukuyama’s thymus, there is a much simpler explanation: it is easier to blame others for one’s own misfortune. Doing so also offers emotional relief as it channels resentment away from oneself to another, thus contributing to one’s own emotional wellbeing. It is also à la mode in socities that define themselves more and more as societies of rights and entitlements – and less and less as societies of responsibilities toward others. More and more people in ‘advanced’ Western societies, particularly the younger generations, feel that society owes them something; that they have the right to happiness and fulfilment – without ever asking what they need to contribute for these rights to be upheld and ensured.

More and more people in ‘advanced’ Western societies […], feel that society owes them something; that they have the right to happiness and fulfilment.

Let me be very clear: in former slave-holding societies, such as the United States of America, whites as a group have benefited from over 300 years of exclusive all-white affirmative action policies. They have enjoyed exclusive access to wealth, property, literacy, and social standing within their society. It is high time and an absolute moral imperative for all those who have suffered from enslavement, discrimination, misrecognition, and systematic mistreatment to gain equal treatment, respect, and an equal opportunity to succeed – and hence at times to win – in the very competitive systems they find themselves in today. To achieve justice today requires a systematic undoing of the inequalities of the past so that all people can face each other as equals. Blaming those who stand up for their equal treatment for the current polarisation and division in many societies means blaming the victims. It is an undignified thing to do.

In the European context, of course, today’s resentments are not based on the enslavement of people who share the same living space, but on something very similar: the ‘good old days’ for Europe when ‘everyone knew their place’ and social, cultural and economic hierarchies went unchallenged. Here too, European colonial powers benefited from an international division of labour that was entirely based on the artificial invention of ‘race’.

In many ways ‘coloniality’ prevails to this day.

White Europeans were the colonisers and beneficiaries and different non-whites were the colonised, condemned to suffer under the systems put in place by European powers to oppress them. The colonised laboured for free or, later, almost for free in order to ensure the accumulation of wealth in the global north.

Colonising nations did not allow their colonies to grow and develop national markets. Once market control and dominance was established worldwide those same former colonies were forced into a competitive world market where they have zero chance of success or recording the occasional win over their former colonial masters, thus making this situation similar to the one that former slaves experience today in former slave-holding societies. Resentful Europeans believe that in the ‘good old days’ former slaves and colonials knew their place and stayed in the places that Europeans have exploited for centuries. Now that some of them have found the means to come to those places that are largely responsible for their own country’s misery, the good old days are over.

Europeans are finally facing the kinds of injustice and misery that they have sown around the world over the last five centuries. Most immigrants simply come to work in a system where work can actually lead to a decent life, a life with dignity, but they are faced by those who have never questioned their own merits, their own contributions, and the flip side of their own prosperity. May the best women get the job – this now fuels a fear that, without the unfair burdens of racism, hetero-normativity, chauvinism, and sexism, the traditional winners might not win any more. That maybe those others are better – better trained, better equipped, more willing, and more eager to succeed in the very systems created by the global north: competitive market systems. This is the kind of anxiety that breeds resentment and concerted action to defend unearned privilege.

What are potential solutions to the today’s problems of polarisation and division? One easy solution, following the reasoning here, would be: the good old days are over. Make your peace with it. They were never good for the majority of people. It is time for those who always won in the rigged games of slavery and colonialism to finally lose once in a while. Justice would actually require losing systematically for the next 300 or 400 years until all those undue and unearned privileges constructed during the ‘good old days’ are undone. Get over it. Or, more constructively: let us all make an effort to bring the full consequences of slavery and colonialism into everybody’s consciousness through educational and cultural programmes so that, at least, those who now might lose once in a while understand why this is happening to them. Maybe this will help them to find it within themselves to accept it more readily. I actually doubt that knowledge leads to an acceptance of the loss of unearned privileges, but I also think it is worth a try.

Here too, European colonial powers benefited from an international division of labour that was entirely based on the artificial invention of ‘race’.

No amount of nationalism or patriotism can undo the ills and disadvantages created in the past. All they can do is continue to shield the people who have reaped the benefits of yesterday’s wrongs from having to face up to their own responsibility.

It requires taking on responsibility, however, to face the heavy legacies of the past. This is a political responsibility and it cannot thrive and develop under most current political systems, where political responsibilities are passed on to elected officials and political elites who then exercise political responsibility on behalf of the people – and only insofar as it earns them re-election – while the people insist on having rights and entitlements. Responsibility requires becoming political subjects (again) and doing politics instead of leaving it to politicians. Political responsibility is a responsibility for others and for the community – not the selfish defence of unearned privilege that characterises our current systems of political representation. Political responsibility also has legitimate limits – the limits of community, because we can only feel responsible for a limited number of people.

So if we want to fight against the much bemoaned polarisation of today’s advanced capitalist countries, I suggest moving towards more direct and involved political systems where normal citizens get actively involved in political decision-making, take on responsibility for others, and are able to make political decisions for their own communities. Paradoxically, the path to greater solidarity with others requires more localisation.