Re: Should we embrace or reject our differences?

Description: We should find a middle ground to moderate the our extremes of identity.

Question: Should we embrace or reject our differences?

Transcript: My general philosophical, as it were, temperament is to find a middle ground between . . . between extremes. This is something that Aristotle also recommended. And I think there are two natural thoughts about identity which are both wrong. One natural . . . but they are sort of at opposite ends. One natural thought which has been taken out by much identity____________ is this is really great stuff. It’s important. It’s wonderful. We should . . . No human life can be made sense of without lots and lots of identity stuff. And at the other end is the view that no, what really matters is that you’re a human being. And all these other things merely divide us from one another. And we should focus on our common humanity. And that what it is to lead a good life is to lead a good human life; not an American life; not a good gay life; not a good straight life, whatever; not a good Christian life, but a good human life and so on. I think these are both wrong. That is to say, I think that it is important that identities can be a source of limitation and constraint; and that therefore we shouldn’t celebrate them unreservedly. But I think it’s also important to recognize that they can be a source of liberation and freedom and meaning; that they can help us make sense of our lives. And so neither of the view according to which all identity is sort of ethically and politically to be escaped from, nor the view that we should settle into our given identities and just sort of live through them seems to me quite right. Now that’s a very abstract way of charactering a contribution; but I think that it pays off when you start thinking about some of the things that I’ve written about like, you know, how religion should fit into politics; or questions about racial identity and belonging; and the balance between accepting that racial identities are important for historical reasons in our societies on the one hand, and on the other hand recognizing that they can be sources of limitation and constraint; and that they therefore need to be modified and developed . . . changed in ways that allow people to do good things with them.

Question: What about race?

Again on the race question in particular, people are rather inclined to suppose either that one should sort of settle into one’s racial identity, or that in the end we should abandon racial identity; that we should move beyond race because, after all, race is a social construct and biological fantasy and so on. I think from the fact that it’s a social construct or a biological fantasy, it just doesn’t follow that we have to abandon it. Of course we have to abandon those features of it that are committed to these untruths. But something remains after that. Something historically remains. And whether people should give up racial identities depends on, I believe in the end, on the moral question that is, “Can you find racial identities that allow you to be a decent person in your treatment of other people?” to which I think the answer is yes. And also it depends on whether people want to go on with it. If people want to abandon their racial identities, hey I don’t care. I mean that’s fine by me. It’s up to them. That’s the liberal thought. The liberal thought is people have to make their own lives. They have to decide which aspects of their identities to draw on. If they don’t want to draw on a racial identity, it’s not anybody else’s job to force them into doing so. But if people want to, and if they can do so in a way that’s morally responsible, then I see nothing wrong with it. And again it tends to be that the world is divided between people who have one of these extreme views. We must move beyond racial identity. Or we must stick into the racial identities that we have. I think people should . . . I don’t think we have to move beyond them, and I think people should be free to make their own sense of their racial identities to develop them in the sort of way in which over the last generation we’ve been reshaping the social meaning of gender; we’ve been reshaping the social meaning of race. Those are fine things to be doing. And again, just as it would make no sense to me to say we should abandon gender identities on the grounds that sexism has led to some very bad things; so I don’t think it’s obvious that we should abandon racial identities because racism has led to some very bad things.

Recorded on: 7/31/07