Birthday Reflections on Identity, Time, and God
[My birthday was this past weekend. This got me thinking about life, time, God, identity, and other such things, which I have often thought about in the past. Here is a crystallization of those thoughts.]
We live in an age when "identity" has become a sort of universal watchword. It has become so ubiquitous as to be virtually invisible.
As with all terms that define an era, everyone uses it, and what is more, everyone uses it in the same way. It would be tempting to see the term as essentially defining a polarity or difference or societal conflict based on whether it is used positively or negatively. This is incorrect, however. Both the American Left and the American Right attack their enemies as promoting illegitimate "identity politics" or "identitarianism"; both the American Left and the American Right then turn on a dime to asserting the sacred nature of their own and their allies' "identity." For every left-wing institution emphasizing racial or sexual identity, there is a right-wing institution promoting cultural or national or religious identity. There are even entire media operations dedicated to promoting something called (shudder) "Catholic identity."
Identity is certainly a fascinating and fundamental concept, and one I've spent a lot of my life grappling with. Yet it strikes me that contemporary rarely touch on the questions of identity that are to me most interesting, or even really most challenging in themselves.
Lurking behind most modern uses of the term is a concept of identity that I would call "voluntarist" "atomist" and/or "political-social-conflictual." Identity in this sense is most basically self-chosen or at least self-discovered, an essentially internal relationship with oneself that in some mysterious way constitutes that self. It is for this reason above all else that identity is normatively treated as beyond rational or moral criticism or analysis.
While in itself unchallengeable, however, identity is seen as something that is necessarily asserted outwards towards others and society and the political realm, coming through will to constitute and determine all external relationships of the individual. In this act of assertion, identity is treated as static, pervasive, and absolute (in the sense of incapable of being resolved or analyzed), and is represented through symbols and images that in some mysterious way express or embody it. Given that such identities must be asserted but cannot be questioned or engaged with, people and society and the state are left with the urgent, binary moral choice of either accepting and affirming a particular identity of a particular person or group in its totality, or rejecting and disaffirming it.
Despite common notions, this model is not necessarily "identitarian" in a positive sense: because it conceives of identity as individual and internal and beyond rational and moral critique, it can just as easily lead to a logic of rejection and disaffirmation as to one of acceptance and affirmation. Indeed, it is doing so now, as we speak.
In its early stages, there can be no doubt that this concept of identity did arise in large part out of a desire for social acceptance, peace, and harmony, and did lead in practice to growth in attitudes of acceptance and affirmation--at least among the relatively comfortable Americans and similar people at whom it was aimed. As always with aristocratic systems, the existentially and materially comfortable correctly perceived the practical impositions of reason and morality, and in particular the moral and practical demands and challenges of other people and other groups, as the main potential threat to their status and way of life. By entirely removing all moral and rational logics of all identity groups "off-stage" into a hermetically sealed internal-individual space, however, the new identitarian system was able to defuse all such challenges in utero.
In this, it was very much an offspring of the liberal-secular treatments of religion and economics, two areas of apparent conflict similarly "defused" by shoving all related topics helpfully off-stage into the merely "private" or "individual" realm. And once again, in the short term, it appears to have worked: unable to perceive the moral and rational or even historical or cultural challenges of other identity groups, comfortable Americans relapsed to their natural state of ease, in the process accepting these groups in at least a minimum, largely indifferentist way.
However, for non-aristocratic groups more threatened or more needy, this system presaged, as it usually does, not peace, but conflict. If the highest goal is merely indifferent affirmation, all is well and good; but if you require or desire more than that, competition and conflict sets in quite quickly, and in a manner even more difficult to deal with or defuse than before. Identity groups, after all, as Marx would have it, simply possess different interests. They also possess different desires and goals in the external world, and operate according to extremely different internal moral and rational logics. This naturally leads to conflicts of varying degrees of intrinsic or extrinsic irreconcilability, which have to be resolved or at least dealt with according to some logic or diplomacy or strategy or social or political structure. Identitarianism, however, by its very nature entirely forbids all such attempts to deal with difference and conflict.
While for comfortable Americans pushing identity into a purely internal realm free from reason and calculation served to defuse conflict, for virtually everyone else it has served rather to increase conflict: since by this logic there is little or no common ground of justice or reason or morality by which groups can be reconciled with each other or even practically ally with each other or even practically co-exist. Indeed, even to negotiate over matters of external desires and interests virtually always in practice involves intruding on the sacred internal realm of the identity itself--and hence provoking violent conflict.
And then, of course, the oasis of ordinary, comfortable middle- and upper-class Americans has itself been nearly entirely transformed by the events of the past ten years, and in particular by the pandemic, into a world not of material and existential comfort, but of existential and moral panic.
Hence, in the last few years one might argue that we have reached a new stage in the identitarian system, or at least added a new dogma to it. This dictum is that certain identities are by their very nature opposed to each other, not only in practical interests or external relations, but in fundamental, internal essence. Hence, each act of affirmation of a particular identity becomes at the same time and necessarily also a rejection and disaffirmation of all opposed identities.
Indeed, in the last few years, and especially in the context of the Internet and social media, it is quite clear that a societal ethos and logic of affirmation and acceptance has been largely replaced by one of disaffirmation and rejection--not only for the reasons discussed above, but also because of the basic nature of the Internet as a chaotic homogenized realm of symbols where in practice nearly everything is defined through symbolic opposition or negation. In such a realm affirmation of or membership in a particular identity category is practically expressed largely through acts of rejection or disaffirmation of that group's enemies.
As I said, though, this is not really what I wanted to talk about in this post--because it does not really, for me at least, have very much to do with the problem of human and personal identity. I want to talk about it in more fundamental terms.
Who Are We?
Human persons are rational, relational beings existing in time. This is the problem.
To be rational is to be internally ordered towards receiving and relating to reality in its totality. To be relational is to be constituted as a person by your relationship with other rational persons and social bodies of which you are a member. To exist in time is to be the sort of creature whose existence and nature is never wholly actualized at any one moment, but has to be fulfilled and brought to completion through a finite process proceeding through a succession of moments and states.
Identity for such a creature is necessarily complex--and most importantly, and by definition, never merely internal and self-related. Human beings by their very nature are ordered not merely to existing as unrelated atoms, but to exist in relation to others and to the world--and hence to being rationally comprehensible, and rationally known by others and oneself. To exist in this way, though, some sense has to be made out of the complex of relations and rational conceptions and states and moments that constitute the self--or, in other words, some comprehensible order has to be found in and/or lived out through it.
One approach, related closely to ancient philosophy, to resolving this problem of the self is the concept of nature or essence or substance. In its fundamental form, this dictum states that rational sense can be made out of the self as a member of a kind with a nature received through procreation and possessing certain rational ends or purposes or teloses that in turn feed into the larger rational teleological order of the cosmos.
(Parenthetically speaking, I am always struck by the way in which modern Americans tend to assume that constructions of nature and telos are inherently more repressive and constricting than modern voluntarist identity-constructions. In most important ways, it strikes me that the opposite is true. Nature and telos are in practice broad concepts creating fields of possibilities and an indefinite diversity of pathways extending through an indefinite succession of states or moments in time and only constrained by a limited set of ends. Modern identity-constructions, on the other hand, are static, absolute, and largely symbolic constructions that by their very nature have no place for change and development and diversity. They are in almost every dimension far more restrictive for the one who accepts them.)
Another basic approach would be the social or political one. That is, the self can be made sense of, not merely as a member of a natural kind defined by procreation, but also as the social member of a particular group. This status as member imposes certain additional ends (mostly of a part-to-whole) nature on the individual, and also provides various rational ways to understand their characteristics, especially their more human characteristics.
Emerging out of these two nexuses, and also associated with ancient philosophy, is the concept of ethics, or more accurately habit or virtue. Accepting that the self is defined by some sort of basic nature and ends and membership in some sort of human social group, virtue brings these goals home to the individual by providing them with specific means to those ends, means that can only be actualized over time, through effort and habit. As Aristotle defines it, a rational habit instantiates a particular end in such a way that it comes to constitute the self in a very real and immediate way, becoming a kind of second nature--that is, an additional set of characteristics and ends beyond those provided by one's first nature, which come to define and constitute the self in a specifically human and individual way, precisely with and over time, and so render the self rationally comprehensible.
Virtue or morality in this sense is more or less the goal of all ancient philosophy and much of modern philosophy: but what ancient philosophers knew, and modern philosophers often do not, is how difficult this is to implement into the practical, existential chaos of the human self existing in time.
To these concepts Christianity made a few important additions. In the first place, it added the idea of the person, or rational individual constituted in their identity not just by group membership or natural kind, but by specific, direct relationships with other human persons that are, thanks to those relationships, unrepeatable and irreplaceable. This lends a new sort of important to the individual person and also provides a new polarity on which to make sense of the self. A person defined by such relationships must have, not merely abstract or social virtues, but very specific and extreme ones. Since these particular relationships are like all things in human life are by their nature mutable, transient, unfolding over time, and capable of being accepted or destroyed by particular acts of will, this created an almost entirely new class of virtues to be practiced, or at least aspired to, in order to form such relationships and live them out and make them constitutive of the self in a rationally comprehensible way. Among these are the free act of the vow by which one willing commits one's whole life to a specific personal relationship and accepts it as constitutive of his or her identity, and the essential virtue of fidelity or faith within such relationships; but there are many more, with which Christian literature is full.
Finally, Christianity did not entirely introduce, but certainly helped fix and institutionalize, a more specific concept of the self as most fundamentally defined, not just by a relationship with a natural kind in a cosmos, not just by a relationship with a group or political unit, not just by relationships with unique persons, but above all else by a single, overriding, direct relationship with absolute, transcendent reality--also known as God. By its very nature, such a relationship must take precedence over all other things, must be capable of rendering everything in a human life rationally comprehensible, however chaotic or otherwise disorderly, and hence must impose its own set of overriding ends and its own set of overriding virtues or habits.
The claim and task of Christianity and in particular Catholicism, with its institutions and vocations and laws and saints, has been to assert the actual existence of such a relationship by providing and demonstrating the actual existence of such ends and their accompanying habits in the chaos of history and individual human lives.
What About Us?
All this may appear quite abstract--but, for me at least, it is also incredibly, intimately personal. I have experienced very directly the extremes of chaos and disorder and rational incomprehensibility which time, social membership, habits, and personal relationships gone wrong can introduce into the inner, moment-to-moment existence and experience of a human person. And the only way to deal with such experiences instead of being consumed by them is to find some rational order and meaning amidst the chaos, to introduce it into the self, allow it to shape it and form it and cast out what is opposed to it.
This I have found to be true, for myself and for many other people. And this, I have come to believe, from my own life, from the lives of others, from the study of philosophy, from the study of history, is in fact the great struggle and the great challenge of human life and existence.
This is a truth that can be known in many ways, including those I have discussed above; but it can also be know more simply and easily from our uniquely human relationship with stories. For what is a story, what even is a character, if not the assertion of a rational shape and meaning and fulfillment amid time and change and conflict? In the deepest parts of our subconsciousness and our desires, there are stories that have captured and defined us; and somewhere in the future, waiting with each day, is the story of our life: or rather, there is our life, out of which we are challenged to make a story.
To render the self knowable; to give the self an identity that is knowable, an identity that is true; and to maintain this identity in the face of time and the chaos of the world and society and politics and human relationships: this is, I would go so far as to say, a much more complex and difficult task than to merely self-create or merely discover a merely self-related, unchallengable identity that one then asserts against others and the world. It is also far more worthwhile.
We all came into this world from somewhere, from some origination, with some nature, with some membership, in some genuinely personal relationships, and in a direct and transcendent relationship with God--all these things preceded us, and gave us our first and purest self. And then, we have strayed and suffered, had our wars and our wanderings.
To be able to look back on our birth, on our childhood, and say I am still the same person; I have been true to that from which I came; I have been true to my nature and my people; I have been true to my relationships, and to my vows; I have been true to God; and therefore, I have been true to my true self: this is the greatest and most desirable thing: and if we have achieved it, we can look back on our life, at its end, with peace and joy.
On the other hand, looking around at the world of modern identity, it is impossible not to see despair staring back from every side. To be one thing, and then suddenly another thing, with no bridge of meaning except the will; to be something that cannot be known or communicated to any other, that cannot be reconciled with others, that brings one into necessary and absolute conflict with others; to be something that cannot be reconciled with one's origins and nature and first ends; to commit oneself to one person, and then for that person to vanish as if they never were; to be part of a group, and have that membership consume all one's other relationships and destroy one's whole life: all these things, the badges of modern "freedom" and "identity," are in reality the failures of identity and nothing more.
Still, there is a great comfort offered by Christianity amid all this that I cherish above anything else. By proposing a transcendent relationship, it gives hope in an entirely new sense to every human life until its final moment. For even if we fail and cease to exist rationally and meaningfully in every other dimension of human life, in our nature, in our social memberships, in our personal relations, our relation with God can in itself transcend all these things. The God who calls us is the same God who made us, in our first nature and our first self: and if we turn to him, he can merely through that turning bring order and peace to our whole lives, restore our first and truest self, and fulfill it beyond time.
That is my hope; and, I think, the hope of us all.
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