When I argue that people take their identities too seriously, critics often object that I’m covertly trying to replace marginalized identities with the identity of the dominant group. The mere fact that your culture is richer or more populous does not transform your way of life into the Platonic Idea of Truly Human Existence. This panel from Mat Johnson‘s Incognegro compellingly captures the critics’ stance:
In effect, the critics embrace a Law of Conservation of Identity: The total quantity of identity is constant. Although identity changes its form, it cannot be created or destroyed.
The critics make some decent points. Every manner of speech, no matter how prevalent, is “an accent.” There’s no deep reason why businesspeople should wear suits rather than kimonos. And hamburgers are no less an “ethnic food” than Doner kabob.
But the gripping claim is not that identity sometimes merely changes its form, but that the total quantity of identity is fixed. And on reflection, that’s false. Picture an Orthodox Jew who stops observing Passover. He doesn’t switch to a substitute holiday; he just stops celebrating an old one. His commitment to his ethno-religious identity has clearly eroded – perhaps to the great alarm of his community. Or compare two Lutherans. One refuses to marry a non-Luthean; the other doesn’t much care. The former clearly has a stronger sense of Lutheran identity than the latter. Or to take an extreme case, an Irishman willing to die for an independent Ireland has a stronger sense of Irish identity than one who’d rather not get involved. In each of these cases, identity has a volume dial that ranges from rootless to militant.
Note the analogy to religion. Religious people have been known to claim that “Even atheism is a religion.” But they’re wrong, too. Religiosity is a continuous variable. And while some atheists – such as Marxists – replace religion with a new body of dogmas, many atheists just turn their religion dial down toward zero until it clicks “off.”
Further point: Switching from one cultural practice to another can dilute identity rather than merely redefine it. How is this possible? When you switch from a cultural practice your group takes for granted to one you’re convinced is better. This could be as banal as a Russian eating lots of Italian food because he prefers the flavor, or as deep as a born Muslim joining the New Atheists. In both cases, if you choose “I deem this better” over “This is our way,” the total quantity of identity in the world has diminished. The same is true, of course, if you follow your group’s folkways because you deem them better.
Final point: There are weighty arguments that richer and more populous cultures really do tend to be better than others. Richer cultures tend to be better because both accurate information and wise social attitudes cause wealth. More populous cultures tend to be better because, as Julian Simon emphasized, the human mind is the ultimate resource. The more minds your culture has, the greater its expected contribution to human knowledge.
Yes, neither argument is decisive; the ancient Greeks punched far above their weight class despite their small numbers and absolute poverty. But when you see members of a primitive, isolated village setting aside their traditions in favor of Western culture, you should at least consider the old-fashioned view that they are following the path of reason.
READER COMMENTS
Ilya Novak
Jul 3 2018 at 3:57pm
I don’t agree with the last paragraph. I suspect that most primitive people who convert to western culture are not doing this due to changes in demand, but to supply.
Thomas Sewell
Jul 3 2018 at 5:53pm
A lot of people also conflate every portion of cultural identity as having the same value and seem to assume people non-rationally have an issue with every piece as well.
Real life objections tend to be much more nuanced, objecting to things which actually affect people’s lives.
It’s a cultural compatibility continuum:
How you cut your hair? People are very unlikely to care, except to compliment you on something unusual they like. At most you might see some looks for beards. stuff like that.
What clothes you wear? A little more likely to care, sometimes positive (unusual, but pretty, I’d wear that!) and sometimes negative (Fully covers the face so I can’t see them?!?)
Your accent? People only care to the extent they can’t understand you. Some accents are more compatible than others and many take time to get used to, requiring developing an “ear” for them and thus advantaging those accents which the most people speak with. My personal accent is ideal for this, growing up in Southern California I speak “like TV people”, so just about anyone can understand me because they’re already used to hearing that accent.
Your food? Almost always positively received. Most people like to try new foods and can avoid eating foods they don’t like. The major exception is smells… many times people living in close proximity with different diets and related smells will object until their nose adapts.
Your study habits? People will likely either admire or reject this one. If you’re more successful than average, admire. If your culture rejects learning and working hard to learn as not part of your cultural identity, people will understandably be a lot more skeptical.
Your work habits? This is a weird one. Many cultures have varying comfort zones with how much work you do (and when!) and in some of them the individual can really undermine the cultural assumptions when motivated, leading to some cognitive dissonance depending on which someone knows. Contrast the siesta culture vs. hard working landscapers. Individual evidence should always be triumphing over cultural markers, but for some people it doesn’t.
Your philosophies and religions? Generally celebrated and respected, unless there is some characteristic which threatens physical harm.
The general pattern to me appears to be that people care more about, positively or negatively, the cultural identity items which impact others most directly and tend to not care about things which don’t impact others. Of course there are out-group-style exceptions, but in general that seems to be a pretty rational response to others’ cultures.
Jay
Jul 7 2018 at 3:37pm
People tend to object when they feel like they don’t have a choice but to adopt a new way. Nobody cares if you open a Lithuanian restaurant, but people would care if so many Lithuanian restaurants opened that they drove out all the rest. More realistically, a group with a strict work ethic is likely to experience friction when in contact with groups with less of a work ethic. In my own workplace, my Black and Asian coworkers have a low-grade mutual disgruntlement that appears to stem from basic disagreements about how hard a person should be obligated to work.
Ryan Muldoon
Jul 3 2018 at 7:37pm
You don’t need to assume something like a law of the conservation of identity to reconstruct the arguments that your interlocutors are making. It’s easy to agree that different identities can come and go, new ones can be created, etc. However, the base claim that I think you’re missing is that when one is in the majority culture, it’s easy to feel like the different elements of that culture are neutral or not present, even though you actually value them. This comes out when one travels or puts oneself in a different cultural context. All that stuff that you previously could take for granted is now culturally contested and different in that new context, and it’s not hard to see how those things that seemed neutral or unimportant are all of the sudden extremely salient.
As a very silly example, I would never strike up a conversation with someone in a bar in my hometown upon finding out that they are from my hometown. That’s too thin of a connection to sustain a conversation. But if I’m in a bar in Beijing or Madrid or somewhere culturally rather different, that would be more than enough to talk to someone for the evening. That connection is now much more salient because it’s unusual in the new context.
Being in the majority makes it easy to take one’s culture for granted. Being in the minority generally means that one doesn’t have that luxury, and it’s much more salient that their culture is different. If that minority were in a context in which they were a majority, they’d likely stop seeing their culture as highly salient, rather than just a general feeling of this is just the way things are.
Evan Smiley
Jul 6 2018 at 11:37am
My thoughts exactly:
Distance of outlie = Degree of identity
JFA
Jul 5 2018 at 10:32am
I don’t really care about these culture wars one way or the other, but Bryan’s argument seems to be that of his detractors, in that they are afraid of the dominant culture snuffing out their own. So if they can’t wear a dashiki or eat a taco that doesn’t have bulgogi and isn’t wrapped in a Dorito or have names that are Hamid or Fatima instead of James or Lindsay, then they believe not that these are just different identities but that their culture is being lost (thus no conservation).
The only difference is that Bryan doesn’t mind all this and thinks that all this is just fine and his detractors don’t. It has absolutely nothing with conservation of identity. That’s why people who have strong religious beliefs worry about intermarriage: because their religion might be watered down or they will lose their religious compatriots. I think Bryan completed whiffed on this one.
Ricardo
Jul 5 2018 at 10:49am
‘And while some atheists – such as Marxists – replace religion with a new body of dogmas, many atheists just turn their religion dial down toward zero until it clicks “off.”’
I’m not sure about that. (“Not sure” as in not sure, not as in I disagree.) Most people have dogmas… maybe all? Is Bryan dogmatic about liberty? Does not Bryan have a quasi-religious belief in open borders (with which I agree, though taking into account Tyler’s backlash concerns as well)? Yes, Bryan can provide a rational defense of his belief in open borders… just as the religiously observant can defend their beliefs in their deities!
Hazel Meade
Jul 5 2018 at 12:11pm
The thing is it is hard to distinguish which aspects of the dominant culture are actually “better” and worthy of adoption and which are not. Consequently, you may not want to wholesale adopt all aspects of the dominant culture without figuring that out first. If you think that the dominant culture has some major problems, and the situation is framed as if “identity” is some cohesive unitary whole – you can only be one thing, not both, then you will be inclined to stick rigidly to the identity that was handed to you by your original culture, people being risk averse.
The problem isn’t that people think that there’s a fixed amount of culture, but that people think individuals can only ever be one thing or the other, so that non-whites have to completely assimilate, hamburgers and beer and all, or else they aren’t really American. Any amount of cultural distinctiveness is taken as some sort of rejection of American culture as a whole – if you stick to eating kimchi and jasmine rice, you’re not assimilating, no matter how well you can recite the declaration of independence by heart. And on the other side, any amount of assimilation is taken as a rejection of the original culture – if you’re not wearing a Hijab, that means you hate Islam and are turning your back on your culture. it cuts both ways.
Conscience of a Citizen
Jul 5 2018 at 4:36pm
That seems pretty-obviously false. Having more high-IQ minds predicts contribution to human knowledge. Having more dull minds does not. A small culture of smart people is worth much more than a large culture of dull people.
Mexico has twice as many minds as France but the latter’s contributions to human knowledge are far greater. Or compare Bangladesh to Germany– twice the people but far, far, fewer contributions.*
*Bangladeshis are famously expert in the cultivation of jute. In case you want jute, which you probably don’t.
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