Identity

6 EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM

The French Revolution unleashed what would become two different versions of identity politics across the world, though that term was not used to describe either phenomenon at the time. One stream demanded the recognition of the dignity of individuals, and the other the dignity of collectivities.

The first, individualistic stream began with the premise that all human beings were born free and were equal in their desire for freedom. Political institutions were created to preserve as much of that natural freedom as possible, consistent with the need for a common social life. Liberal democracies put the equal protection of individual autonomy at the core of their moral projects.

But what was meant by autonomy? Martin Luther, as we have seen, stood in a long Christian tradition that saw mankind’s freedom as a gift from God that gave human beings dignity above the rest of the natural world.[2] But that freedom was limited to the ability to have faith and to follow God’s law. Kant continued in this tradition, providing a secularized version of autonomy centered on the human ability to make moral choices based on abstract rules of reason. Human dignity for Kant was grounded in his view that all individuals were uncaused causes, capable of exercising genuine free will in a fashion not subject to the laws of physics. But Kant’s rules such as the categorical imperative were not the objects of individual human choice; they were derived through philosophical reasoning and applied categorically to all human beings.

In this tradition, then, human dignity centers on an individual’s ability to make proper moral choices, whether defined by religion or by secular reason.

The idea that dignity is rooted in human moral choice has received political recognition by becoming embedded in a significant number of modern democratic constitutions, including those of Germany, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Israel, and South Africa. For example, article I, section 1, of the German Basic Law of 1949 states, “The dignity of man is inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all public authority.” Similarly, section 10 of the South African constitution states, “Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.” The South African Constitutional Court has noted, “A right to dignity is an acknowledgment of the intrinsic worth of human beings.”

None of these constitutions defines precisely what human dignity is, and scarcely a politician in the Western world if pressed could explain its theoretical basis. To understand the provenance of such references to human dignity, one needs to look at the lexical origins of the words used, and the historical path by which they came to be written. The Kantian origin of the concept of dignity is evident in both the German and the South African cases. The German law’s use of the word inviolable implies that all other rights are subordinated to this fundamental right and harks back to the categorical imperative, as does the South African reference to “intrinsic worth.”^{1} The Christian origins of the right to dignity are evidenced by the fact that it was Christian Democratic parties primarily that pushed for constitutional protections of dignity, beginning with the Irish constitution of 1937. None of these constitutions mentions Christianity explicitly, however, or seeks to link political rights to religious belief.^{2}

The Anglo-American liberal tradition that began with Hobbes and Locke and continued through nineteenth-century thinkers such as John Stuart Mill took a less metaphysical approach to autonomy. This tradition does not build autonomy around free will; freedom is simply the ability to pursue one’s desires and passions free of external constraint. (For Hobbes, human beings are like machines propelled forward by their desires; will is simply “the last appetite in deliberating,” or an individual’s strongest desire.) As a consequence, the word dignity, with its Christian-Kantian overtones, does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, or in founding documents such as the Federalist Papers.^{3} Nonetheless, the Hobbesian notion that human beings are fundamentally equal in their natural freedom becomes the basis for the political rights on which the social contract is based. Hobbes’s natural right to life becomes embedded in the American Declaration of Independence as part of the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Thus a slightly different premise concerning the nature of autonomy leads to a similar regime dedicated to the equal protection of individual rights.

The liberal political tradition institutionalized one version of individual autonomy, by granting equal rights to citizens. But Rousseau’s version of autonomy pointed to something deeper and richer than “mere” political participation. He saw within himself a “plenitude” of feeling that was suppressed by society; his was an unhappy consciousness that was deeply alienated by the society and struggled for liberation. As Charles Taylor explains:

This was part of the moral revaluation that began with Luther. The traditional Christian understanding of the inner self saw it as the site of original sin: we are full of evil desires that lead us to contravene God’s law; external social rules, set by the Universal Church, lead us to suppress these desires. Rousseau followed Luther, but flipped the latter’s valuation: the inner self is good or at least has the potential for being good; it is the surrounding moral rules that are bad. But for Rousseau, freedom is not just the moral choice to accept moral rules; it becomes the full expression of the feelings and emotions that constitute the authentic inner self. These feelings and emotions are often best expressed in art.

As Lionel Trilling brilliantly explained in his book Sincerity and Authenticity, European literature post-Rousseau saw the rise of a genre of writing that began with Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew and Goethe’s Sufferings of Young Werther, which celebrated the artist who is unable to find a home in society, who seeks the authentic expression of his or her creative genius. Figures such as Vincent van Gogh or Franz Kafka, unappreciated in their own time, became iconic symbols of the obtuseness of a philistine society that could not appreciate the depths of individuality they represented.

This shift in literary sensibilities mirrored a deeper and more fundamental breakdown of moral consensus in Europe. The institutional church, which had defined the region’s moral horizon, came under increasing attack from Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire for its association with the predemocratic political status quo. But the underlying truth of Christianity was itself increasingly questioned, such as by the early nineteenth-century liberal theologian David Strauss, whose Life of Jesus suggested that the latter should be understood as a mere historical figure and not the literal Son of God.^{5} This trend culminated by the late nineteenth century in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, who granted that the Christian God once lived, establishing a clear moral horizon for European society. But God had since died with the breakdown of belief, leaving a moral void that could be filled with alternative values. Unlike traditional moralists Nietzsche celebrated this fact because it enormously expanded the scope for human autonomy: human beings were free not just to accept the moral law, per Luther and Kant, but to create that law for themselves. In Nietzsche’s thought, the highest form of artistic expression was value creation itself. The most supremely autonomous person was his figure Zarathustra, who could declare the revaluation of all values in the wake of the death of the Christian God.

Modern liberal societies are heirs to the moral confusion left by the disappearance of a shared religious horizon. Their constitutions protect individual dignity and individual rights, and that dignity seems to be centered on individuals’ ability to make moral choices. But what is the scope of those choices? Is choice limited to acceptance or rejection of a set of moral rules established by the surrounding society, or does true autonomy include the ability to make up those rules as well? With the decline during the twentieth century in Western societies of a shared belief in Christianity, different rules and values from other cultures began displacing traditional ones, as well as the option of not believing at all. Individual choice in areas outside of morals began to expand with the market economy and the general social mobility that it required: people could pick their occupations, marriage partners, domiciles, and brand of toothpaste. It seemed logical that they should have some choice in moral values as well. By the late twentieth century, the understanding of the scope of individual autonomy had broadened immensely in most modern democracies, leading to an efflorescence of what is sometimes termed expressive individualism. A clear line ran from Nietzsche’s work Beyond Good and Evil to the assertion by U.S. Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy, in the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that liberty is “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”^{6}

The problem with this understanding of autonomy is that shared values serve the important function of making social life possible. If we do not agree on a minimal common culture, we cannot cooperate on shared tasks and will not regard the same institutions as legitimate; indeed, we will not even be able to communicate with one another absent a common language with mutually understood meanings.

The other problem with this expansive understanding of individual autonomy is that not everyone is a Nietzschean superman seeking to revalue all values. Human beings are intensely social creatures whose emotional inclinations drive them to want to conform to the norms surrounding them. When a stable, shared moral horizon disappears and is replaced by a cacophony of competing value systems, the vast majority of people do not rejoice at their newfound freedom of choice. Rather, they feel an intense insecurity and alienation because they do not know who their true self is. This crisis of identity leads in the opposite direction from expressive individualism, to the search for a common identity that will rebind the individual to a social group and reestablish a clear moral horizon. This psychological fact lays the groundwork for nationalism.

Most people do not have infinite depths of individuality that is theirs alone. What they believe to be their true inner self is actually constituted by their relationships with other people, and by the norms and expectations that those others provide. A person living in Barcelona who suddenly realizes her real identity is Catalan rather than Spanish is simply excavating a lower layer of social identity that has been laid down beneath the one nearer to the surface.

The politics of recognition and dignity had reached a fork by the early nineteenth century. One fork led to the universal recognition of individual rights, and thence to liberal societies that sought to provide citizens with an ever-expanding scope of individual autonomy. The other fork led to assertions of collective identity, of which the two major manifestations were nationalism and politicized religion. Late-nineteenth-century Europe saw the rise both of liberal and democratic movements demanding universal individual recognition and the more ominous emergence of an exclusive nationalism that would eventually trigger the world wars of the early twentieth century. In the contemporary Muslim world, collective identity is taking the form of Islamism—that is, the demand for recognition of a special status for Islam as the basis of political community.

This twofold directionality—toward universal recognition of individual rights, and toward collective recognition based on nation—was evident in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who at different moments celebrated both the peaceful solitary dreamer and the martial general will. The two were present from the early days of the French Revolution itself, which flew two banners: a universal one promoting the Rights of Man that was indifferent to national borders, and a national French one that sought to defend the French patrie from invasion by foreigners. When the Revolution was hijacked by Napoleon, he pursued both goals simultaneously, using military power to spread the liberal Code Napoléon while imposing French suzerainty over the parts of Europe he conquered.

This dual character was present as well both in the Arab Spring and in Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity. Millions of Arab citizens throughout the Middle East could sympathize with Mohamed Bouazizi, but not all of them wanted to live in a society that recognized the equal rights of all citizens, regardless of religion. Authoritarian regimes such as those of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt were equal-opportunity dictators, secularists suppressing not just Western-oriented liberals but Islamists as well. The advocates of a liberal successor regime contended with Islamists who sought a religious definition of national identity. When the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt through democratic elections in 2012, they threatened to create a dictatorship of their own, leading the military to stage a coup in June 2013. Many former Egyptian liberals supported this takeover to prevent Egypt from becoming an Islamist republic.

Similarly, the Maidan Revolution of Dignity was based on a coalition of Western-oriented liberals who wanted Ukraine to join the European Union and become a normal European country. But they joined hands with Ukrainian nationalists from groups such as Right Sector, who sought to protect a separate Ukrainian cultural identity and were less interested in a liberal, open Ukraine.

We will return to the question of how individualist understandings of dignity and autonomy evolved in liberal societies over the past century in chapters 10 and 11. In the meantime, we will look more closely at two forms of collective identity, those based on nationalism and on religion.

Both nationalism and Islamism—that is, political Islam—can be seen as two sides of the same coin. Both are expressions of a hidden or suppressed group identity that seeks public recognition. And both phenomena arise in similar circumstances, when economic modernization and rapid social change undermine older forms of community and replace them with a confusing pluralism of alternative forms of association.