Identity

3 INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

Unlike thymos, which is a permanent part of human nature, what was to become the modern concept of identity emerged only as societies started to modernize a few hundred years ago. While it originated in Europe, it has subsequently spread and taken root in virtually all societies around the globe.

The foundations of identity were laid with the perception of a disjunction between one’s inside and one’s outside. Individuals come to believe that they have a true or authentic identity hiding within themselves that is somehow at odds with the role they are assigned by their surrounding society. The modern concept of identity places a supreme value on authenticity, on the validation of that inner being that is not being allowed to express itself. It is on the side of the inner and not the outer self. Oftentimes an individual may not understand who that inner self really is, but has only the vague feeling that he or she is being forced to live a lie. This can lead to an obsessive focus on the question “Who am I, really?” The search for an answer produces feelings of alienation and anxiety and can only be relieved when one accepts that inner self and receives public recognition for it. And if that outer society is going to properly recognize the inner self, one has to imagine society itself being able to change in fundamental ways.

In the West, the idea of identity was born, in a sense, during the Protestant Reformation, and it was given its initial expression by the Augustinian friar Martin Luther. Luther received a traditional theological education and a professorship at Wittenberg; for ten years, he read, thought, and struggled with his inner self. In the words of one historian, Luther “found himself in a state of despair before God. He wanted the assurance of being acceptable to God, but could discover in himself only the certainty of sin and in God only an inexorable justice which condemned to futility all his efforts at repentance and his search for the divine mercy.”^{1} Luther sought the remedies of mortification recommended by the Catholic Church, before realizing that he could do nothing to bribe, cajole, or entreat God. He understood that the Church acted only on the outer person—through confession, penance, alms, worship of saints—none of which could make a difference because grace was bestowed only as a free act of love by God.

Luther was one of the first Western thinkers to articulate and valorize the inner self over the external social being. He argued that man has a twofold nature, an inner spiritual one and an outer bodily being; since “no external thing has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or freedom,” only the inner man could be renewed.

This recognition—central to subsequent Protestant doctrine—that faith alone and not works would justify man in one stroke undercut the raison d’être for the Catholic Church. The Church was an intermediary between man and God, but it could shape only the outer man through its rituals and works. Luther was horrified by the decadence and corruption of the medieval Church, but the more profound insight was that the Church itself was unnecessary and, indeed, blasphemous in its efforts to coerce or bribe God. Luther himself would not be the teenager brought back to obedience by society; rather, society itself would have to adjust to the demands of the inner person. Though it was not Luther’s intention, the Reformation brought about exactly this result: the decline of Rome as the Universal Church, the rise of alternative churches, and a whole series of social changes in which the individual believer was prioritized over prevailing social structures.

Social theorists have long debated whether the monumental changes that took place in Europe following the Reformation—what we call modernization—were the product of material forces or were driven by ideas such as those of Luther. Karl Marx and contemporary neoclassical economists would say that Luther’s ideas were derivative of the material conditions: had there not been widespread economic discontents and divisions among the German princes, his views would never have spread the way they did. On the other hand, the sociologist Max Weber argued for the primacy of ideas: the very material conditions that economists study could only come about because they were legitimated by changes in the way people thought about them; similar conditions in previous times did not produce the same results because the intellectual climate was different.

In my view, both positions capture part of the truth, because causality moves in both directions at once. Material conditions obviously shape people’s receptivity to certain ideas. But ideas have their own inner logic, and without the cognitive framing they provide, people will interpret their material conditions differently. This affects our understanding of the evolution of the concept of identity, since it was driven by both an evolution in thought and the changing conditions of the broader society as Europe began the process of socioeconomic modernization.

On the plane of ideas, we can see that the distinction between inner and outer, and the valorization of the former over the latter, starts in an important sense with Luther.[1] Like many subsequent thinkers struggling with the question of identity, he began with an agonizing quest to understand himself, and the way in which he might be justified before God. This inner man was not good; he was a sinner, but could yet be saved through an inner act of belief that could not be made visible by any external action. Thus Luther is responsible for the notion, central to questions of identity, that the inner self is deep and possesses many layers that can be exposed only through private introspection.

Yet Martin Luther stands far from more modern understandings of identity. He celebrated the freedom of the inner self, but that self had only one dimension: faith, and the acceptance of God’s grace. It was a binary choice: one was free to choose God, or not. One could not choose to be a Hindu or a Buddhist or decide that one’s true identity lay in coming out of the closet as gay or lesbian. Luther was not facing a “crisis of meaning,” something that would have been incomprehensible to him; while he rejected the Universal Church, he accepted completely the underlying truth of Christianity.^{3}

The second sense in which Luther had not yet arrived at the modern understanding of identity was that his inner self did not seek public recognition of its newfound freedom. Indeed, he agonized over his own motives: he sought to avoid the taint of self-satisfaction, knowing “himself to be an incorrigible sinner, incapable of escaping what he called concupiscence (the sin of doing the right thing not merely to please God but with an eye to self).”^{4} While he received enormous recognition in his lifetime and was capable of monumental bouts of righteous anger, his doctrine of faith was built on the private relationship of man to God and not on any form of public approval.

Nonetheless, the distinction between inner and outer had been established and could be filled with new forms of inner freedom by subsequent thinkers who did not accept Martin Luther’s Christian worldview.

By the late eighteenth century, the idea at the core of modern identity had evolved much further and now took on a secular form. The Canadian political theorist Charles Taylor has written the definitive account of this process, and in it, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau plays a central role.^{5} Rousseau was the fundamental source of many ideas that would later be critical to a host of modern trends: democracy, human rights, communism, the discipline of anthropology, and environmentalism. For him, however, the natural goodness of the inner self was a theme that tied together his varied political, social, and personal writings.^{6}

Rousseau reversed the Christian moral evaluation of the inner human being. Christians such as Luther believed in original sin: human beings were fallen creatures who could be redeemed only through God’s love. In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau argued that the first human being—man in the state of nature—was not sinful. The characteristics we associate with sin and evil—jealousy, greed, violence, hatred, and the like—did not characterize the earliest humans. In Rousseau’s account, there was no original human society: early people were fearful, isolated creatures with limited needs, for whom sex but not the family was natural. They did not feel greed or envy; their only natural emotion was pity for the suffering of others.

According to Rousseau, human unhappiness begins with the discovery of society. The first humans began their descent into society by mastering animals, which “produced the first movement of pride in him.” They then started to cooperate for mutual protection and advantage; this closer association “engendered in the mind of man perceptions of certain relations… which we express by the words great, little, strong, weak, swift, slow, fearful, bold, and other similar ideas.” The ability to compare, and to evaluate, other human beings was the fountainhead of human unhappiness: “Men no sooner began to set a value upon each other, and know what esteem was, than each laid claim to it, and it was no longer safe for any man to refuse it to another.” Rousseau denounces the shift from amour de soi (love of self) to amour propre (self-love or vanity); simple self-interest is transmuted into feelings of pride and the desire for social recognition.^{7}

Rousseau says that private property emerged with the discovery of metallurgy and agriculture; while making humans incomparably richer, the ability to accumulate property also vastly exaggerated natural differences between individuals and raised jealousy, envy, pride, and shame to new heights. Hence Rousseau’s famous injunction at the beginning of the second part of the Discourse:

Rousseau had two separate prescriptions for walking mankind back out of this catastrophe of inequality and violence. The first was outlined in The Social Contract, a political solution in which citizens return to their natural equality through the emergence of a “general will” that unites them in republican virtue. They cooperate with one another in a political union, but one that brooks no disagreement or pluralism. This solution has been rightly criticized as proto-totalitarian, quashing diversity and requiring strict uniformity of thought.

The second prescription is not political but plays out on an individual level. In his late work Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau tries to recover the state of consciousness of the first man—that is, humans as they were prior to the discovery of society. In the Discourse on Inequality, he had said that “the first sentiment of Man was that of his existence”; the sentiment de l’existence returns in the Reveries as a feeling of plenitude and happiness that emerges as an individual seeks to uncover the true self hiding beneath the layers of acquired social sensibilities.^{9} Rousseau’s sentiment of existence would one day morph into what is now called lived experience, which lies at the root of contemporary identity politics.

Rousseau thus stakes out a distinctive position regarding human nature. He disputes the assertion of Thomas Hobbes that man in the state of nature was violent, cruel, and selfish; Rousseau also disagrees with John Locke that private property was natural to early man. He would also disagree with Socrates and Adeimantus that thymos was a constituent part of the human soul, since Rousseau asserts clearly that the emotion of pride, and hence the desire to be recognized by other people, did not exist for the earliest human beings.

What Rousseau asserts, and what becomes foundational in world politics in the subsequent centuries, is that a thing called society exists outside the individual, a mass of rules, relationships, injunctions, and customs that is itself the chief obstacle to the realization of human potential, and hence of human happiness. This way of thinking has become so instinctive to us now that we are unconscious of it. It is evident in the case of the teenager accused of a crime who raises the defense “Society made me do it,” or of the woman who feels that her potential is being limited by the gendered and sexist society around her. On a larger scale, it is evident in the complaints of a Vladimir Putin who feels the American-led international order wrongly disrespects Russia, and who then seeks to overturn it. While earlier thinkers could critique aspects of existing social rules and customs, few argued that existing society and its rules needed to be abolished en masse and replaced by something better. This is what ultimately links Rousseau to the revolutionary politics of France in 1789, or Russia in 1917, or China in 1949.

Like Luther, Rousseau establishes a sharp distinction between the inner self and the outer society demanding conformity to its rules. Unlike Luther, however, the freedom of that inner individual does not lie only in his or her ability to accept the grace of God; rather, it lies in the natural and universal ability to experience the sentiment de l’existence, free of the layers of accumulated social convention. Rousseau thus secularized and generalized the interiority opened up by Luther, accomplished through an exploration of Rousseau’s innermost feelings that was as anguished and prolonged as that of the Augustinian friar. According to Charles Taylor, “This is part of the massive subjective turn of modern culture, a new form of inwardness, in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths.”^{10}

Rousseau’s secularization of the inner self, and the priority he gives it over social convention, is thus a critical stepping-stone to the modern idea of identity. 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. The recovery of the inner self thus required divesting oneself of the need for social recognition; the solitary dreamer does not need anyone’s approval.

We might note how, given our present knowledge of early human societies and of human evolution, Rousseau was profoundly right about certain things, and profoundly wrong about others. He was largely correct in his description of the broad stages of human social evolution, tracing the transitions from what we would now call hunter-gatherer to agrarian and then to commercial societies. He was also correct in his emphasis on the importance of the discovery of agriculture: how it led to the institution of private property, and to agrarian societies that were far more unequal and hierarchical than the hunter-gatherer ones they displaced.^{11}

But Rousseau was wrong about some important things, beginning with his assertion that early humans were primordially individualistic. We know he was wrong, first because we see no archaeological or anthropological evidence of presocial human beings, and second because we know with high confidence that the primate ancestors of modern human beings were themselves highly social. Existing primates have complex social structures along with, evidently, the emotional faculties needed to sustain them.^{12} Rousseau’s assertion that pride emerged only at a certain stage of social evolution is curious; it begs the question of how such an intrinsic human feeling could spontaneously appear in response to an external stimulus. If pride were socially constructed, young children would have to be somehow trained to experience it, yet we do not observe this happening to our children. Today we know that feelings of pride and self-esteem are related to levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain, and that chimpanzees exhibit elevated levels of serotonin when they achieve alpha male status.^{13} It seems unlikely that there was ever a moment when behaviorally modern human beings did not compare themselves with one another or feel pride when they received social recognition. In this respect, Plato had a better understanding of human nature than Rousseau.

That the distinction between an inner and an outer self emerged in Europe between the Reformation and the French Revolution was not an accident. European society was undergoing a series of profound economic and social changes that created the material conditions by which such ideas could spread.

All human societies socialize their members to live by common rules; human cooperation, and hence human success as a species, would not be possible otherwise. All societies have had rebellious teenagers and misfits who didn’t want to accept those rules, but in this struggle, society almost always wins out by forcing inner selves to conform to external norms.

Hence the concept of identity as it is now understood would not even arise in most traditional human societies. For much of the last ten thousand years of human history, the vast majority of people lived in settled agrarian communities. 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. Such societies have neither pluralism, nor diversity, nor choice. Given this lack of choice, it did not make sense for an individual to sit around and brood over the question “Who am I, really?” All of the characteristics that make up an inner self are fixed. One could perhaps rebel by running away to another village, but there one would find oneself trapped in an identical limited social space. There was no concept of “society” standing outside the individual, limiting a person’s choices, and no valorization of an inner self over that society.

All of this began to change as a broad modernization took hold in Europe. A commercial revolution was unfolding that vastly expanded trade and began to upend established social hierarchies. Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations that “the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market”; as markets grew through technological change, new occupations appeared and different social classes emerged. Cities were growing in power and independence, cities that served as havens for peasants seeking to escape the tyranny of their lords. The Reformation set off a century and a half of religious warfare that scrambled the political map of Europe. It opened up possibilities for religious choice in ways that had not been possible under the medieval Church. Invention of the printing press led to the spread of literacy and the rapid diffusion of new ideas.

These broader social and economic changes meant that individuals suddenly had more choice and opportunity in their lives. In the old society, their limited social choices determined who they were on the inside; with new horizons opening up, the question “Who am I?” suddenly became more relevant, as did perceptions of a vast gulf that existed between the inner person and external reality. Ideas shaped the material world, and the material world created conditions for the spread of certain ideas.