What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society

by Paul Verhaeghe

  General beliefs of this kind have everything to do with the second important other with whom we establish a more-or-less lasting relationship — namely, the other as authority. Our attitude to authority figures forms an important part of our identity. Critical and rebellious? Submissive and supportive? Aggressive and competitive? This, too, is something we learned in our relationship with our parents as the first authority figures. Traditionally, authority is vested in the father. This is a hangover from the patriarchal system common to most societies, where men were assigned authority to use as they saw fit, as the representatives of God and King. And the different ways in which fathers assert their authority has a knock-on effect. Children of harsh, critical fathers retain their fear of authority as adults. Abuse by a father makes all authorities suspect. Fathers who are honest and upright inspire confidence.

  The relationship with the other as a representative of the opposite sex, and the other as authority figure, determine two important (and interwoven) strands in our identity. Authority figures tell us in the first instance what we can and can’t do with our bodies and those of members of the opposite sex, and which pleasures are sanctioned and which are not. In Bollywood films, kissing is taboo; in our society, a woman who has more than one lover tends to be looked at askance, whereas a man with a string of girlfriends is seen as successful. All this feeds straight into the debate on norms and values, meaning that our beliefs about these matters are fully part of our identity — in the classic Freudian terminology, our Super Ego (or conscience), alongside and opposite our Ego (the self).

  Who should I be (and who or what not)?

  Identity consists of a collection of characteristics that have been assigned to us by the other. Together, they form a more-or-less coherent package of ideas about where we come from and where we’re going. At the same time, they also tell us how to behave towards our bodies and towards others, both as members of the opposite sex and as authority figures. The body stands for a wide range of issues, from our external appearance to eating and drinking, sexuality, pain, disease, and death. Do you like to sit down and eat communally, or would you rather eat alone on the sofa, in front of the television? Do you eat at fixed times, or snack throughout the day? Who do you want to have sex with? Yourself, another — which other? From what age? Is it okay for ten-year-olds playing at doctors and nurses to force a five-year-old to join in? What do you do when you’re ill or in pain: do you tough it out, or immediately reach for painkillers? When are you ill enough not to have to work? Who should society look after? Should we be able to make decisions about our own death?

  The way in which someone handles these questions will be regarded as ‘typically him’ or ‘typically her’. It is seen as inherent to their make-up, part of the label that they have been given: weakling or go-getter, nymphomaniac or prude, Burgundian or Calvinist. And this tendency to define characteristics in the form of value judgments is nothing new. Not so long ago they were couched in the form of virtues such as caution, justice, self-control, perseverance, charity, or as cardinal sins such as pride, avarice, lechery, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. This prompts a conclusion that may sound surprising: our identity isn’t a neutral assortment of personal characteristics, but has everything to do with the norms and values that we have (or haven’t) espoused. So the current social debate about norms and values is nothing less than a debate about identity.

  Every identity stems from a coherent ideology, a term that I interpret very broadly as a collection of notions about human relationships and ways of regulating them. History shows that ideologies are often devised in opposition to other ideologies, resulting in an us-against-them mindset, and distinctive norms and values that determine the identity of a ‘true’ socialist or a ‘typical’ Catholic. In other words, the difference between ideologies and their attendant identities lies in different interpretations of what is regarded as the ‘normal’ or ‘right’ attitude towards the body and towards the other. A freethinker will tend to view illness and death quite differently from the ways a believer does.

  Though they differ in terms of their content, ideologies share a number of common characteristics. Attitudes towards the body, for instance, always come down to attitudes to pleasure. Ideologies have quite different norms and standards for regulating pleasure, and also differ in the strictness with which they enforce them. Here in the West, for example, rules about diet have almost entirely disappeared, and we look down on cultures that find it necessary to impose all kinds of prescriptions about food (such as kosher or halal stipulations). In our moral superiority, we tend to forget that just about every Western woman is on a permanent diet and that eating disorders are rampant: we are winning the battle against smoking on all fronts, but we have lost the war on drugs. In the West, regulation of sexual matters is confined to setting an age of consent. In the East, child marriages are not exceptional, and in the South, female genital mutilation is still practised. Man and woman are equal, but in China and India, two of the most populous and (increasingly) economically important countries in the world, women are still second-class citizens.

  All ideologies regulate access to pleasure, but differ greatly in the way they do so. And they have one last thing in common: each thinks its own doctrines superior, dismissing those of others as backward or decadent.

  Aggression and fear

  The relationship with the other is based on various shared or contrasting factors, such as gender, social class, skin colour, and clothing. Visible differences express different identities, reflecting disparate values and social relationships. A man in a tailor-made suit creates different expectations from a 30-year-old in a T-shirt and baggy jeans. Someone who too closely resembles us makes us want to distance ourselves, in order to differentiate ourselves. And when someone is too different, we either want to make them like us (integration) or we want to be like them (if you can’t beat them, join them).

  Our identity is pre-eminently determined by this balancing act between merging with and distancing from — that is, between identification and separation. I am who I am because I belong to this group — and certainly not to that one. The more I can reject another group, the ‘different’ other, the more I feel a tie with my own group, the ‘same’ other. When group cohesion diminishes, identity becomes weaker and more chaotic, and aggression within the group, against the same other, invariably increases. Politicians intuitively exploit this fact: when popular rebellion threatens, create an external enemy, a different other, and the ranks will close again. Ancient Jewish law prescribed that a goat — a scapegoat — be symbolically loaded with the sins of the community and sent into the desert on the Day of Atonement.

  Establishing a healthy balance between sameness and difference is enormously important, both in society as a whole and in our own personal relationships. The difficulty of this task is illustrated by the current populist focus on topics such as integration, tolerance, and racism, which boils down to attempts to impose sameness or difference. (And if anyone is tempted to think that this is all about Islam, I suggest they take a good look at national Belgian politics over the last few years, dominated by bitter disputes between the Walloon and Flemish communities.)

  From a psychoanalytical perspective, identity-forming can go wrong in two ways, both leading to aggression. If identification, or sameness, is taken too far in a society, a uniform (and often uniformed) group arises, headed by an authority figure who makes sure that aggression is given external focus by targeting another group. There are, alas, all too many examples of this in history. Ironically enough, Freud described this mechanism with great accuracy in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego — some ten years before the Nazi movement came into being, perfectly illustrating his theory.

  Conversely, if the focus comes entirely to lie on separation and individualism, group forming suffers, leading to competition, social isolation, and loneliness. In the jargon of my profession, this provokes narcissistic aggression against the mirror image that
we perceive in the other, creating a cycle of dissatisfaction and envy. Since this aggression is directed at others in the direct vicinity, it doesn’t take much for violence to ensue.

  A society in which differences are too great is as flawed as a society that imposes total uniformity: both breed violence. History is full of examples, from the French Revolution to the disturbances that are currently flaring up in European suburbs (merely a taste of what is to come); in the language of ideology, such aggression is called class warfare. The fact that violence can also result when differences disappear or are denied makes less intuitive sense to us, partly because we have less experience of it.* These days we behave more and more like an assortment of individuals without a common tie.

  [* The idea that mirroring and sameness are a source of aggression is lacking in contemporary theories about bonding, though this idea is to be found in the older Lacanian studies on the mirror stage. Another contemporary elaboration of this notion has of course been conceived by René Girard with his mimetic theory. A good introduction can be found in van Coillie (see Bibliography).]

  A society is deemed successful when it achieves a healthy balance between sameness and difference, diverting aggression into less-dangerous outlets. Football is indeed war, music does soothe the savage breast, Mardi Gras allows licensed misbehaviour, and sending ritual scapegoats into the desert isn’t such a bad idea. This insight needs to be cherished: every group, or, more broadly, every society, needs a safety valve to deal with inevitable aggression. Without that safety valve, every group sooner or later creates actual scapegoats, and sacrifices them on the altar of its anger — bullying is an example of such a practice. From this point of view, football is a small price to pay.

  Identity is ideology

  We aren’t born with our identity — far from it — but we are born with a range of abilities and tendencies. Who we become depends on interaction with the other, or, more broadly, with the environment and culture from which we adopt or reject identity-conferring messages. The process of interaction with the other continues throughout our lives; our self is never complete. After we reach maturity, changes to our identity are rarely spectacular: they become a matter of nuance, of slight shifts and modifications. Yet when you are 50 you are not the same person you were, say, at 25, especially if you have meanwhile become a parent or grandparent. In a stable environment, identity changes gradually. A sudden upheaval — as, for instance, in the former Eastern-bloc countries — creates a radical break with the past, leading to rapid change. This applies just as much to individuals. Radical breaks with the past, typically after an accident, serious disease, or trauma, bring about radical changes. In such cases, someone is no longer ‘themself’.

  Since identity-conferring messages come from the other, individual identities within a group (from family to nation, with language as a binding factor) show a marked degree of similarity. In that sense, it is possible to speak of group identity, as in references to ‘Liverpudlians’, ‘the Welsh’, or ‘the British’. And collective identities, too, are formed by interaction, albeit in a broader setting and on a greater timescale, and are never completed or static. By way of illustration: nowadays, German identity conjures up a vision of efficient and disciplined types with engineering degrees and steel-rimmed spectacles, in who the Prussian lurks just below the surface. This stereotype is a legacy of the two World Wars. In films like Die Hard, the well-organised villains still speak German. Meanwhile we have forgotten, as have modern Germans, that in the 19th century the stereotypical image of a German was part pipe-smoking farmer, part poet and philosopher — in other words, a completely different animal.

  Content-related changes of this kind are macro-social; they concern the evolution of society. Our way of typifying individuals according to their identity and their relations with others can also be used as a tool to understand societies. For the sake of convenience I will discuss this issue in polarised terms: full versus empty, open versus closed, unstable versus stable.

  Ideally, societies provide their members with a rich and varied store of narratives to draw on as a starting point for their own identities. A ‘full’ society has ample cultural resources for those seeking answers to existential questions. Its ‘empty’ counterpart has only an impoverished and scanty supply; the mirror it holds up reflects a stereotypical image. A society that heavily censors cultural expression and presents its members with a standard narrative produces stereotypical individuals. Taken to extremes, societies of both types can induce characteristic identity disorders. In the case of the former, a society can be so full of ‘itself’ that megalomania results — take the British during the Victorian era, with their ‘Britannia rules the waves’ mentality. In the latter case, individuals mean nothing; people are nobodies. This gives rise to the symptoms typical of depression — take the Russian ‘soul’ of the Eastern-bloc era, empty and anaesthetised with vodka.

  Open and closed societies have another significant feature. In an open society, different narratives are allowed to coexist, giving people more options to choose from. As a result, they tend to develop a more open mind. In closed societies, people must make do with a closed narrative, in which everything that is different is shunned as bad and threatening. When taken to extremes, open societies produce a hysterical personality that constantly has to adjust to the latest hype. Closed societies, by contrast, induce classic obsessional neuroses. Like people who are phobic about germs, its members try to keep the outside world at a distance and to have as little to do with it as possible.

  Finally, a society can be stable or unstable. This largely depends on the power of the dominant narrative — the more robust it is, the more stable exchanges and thus identity-forming will be. Too much stability can lapse into authoritarian rigidity, with the risk of developing the ‘authoritarian personality’ postulated by the cultural philosopher Theodor Adorno. These days, there is little risk of this, as we are shifting to the other side of the spectrum. In the absence of a clear narrative, as in today’s protean society (or ‘liquid modernity’, as the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called it), a kind of ‘liquid identity’ has come into being. Beyond a certain point, this liquidity results in borderline personality disorder, when unstable identity causes a constant seesaw of emotions.

  This brings me to the most important conclusion of this chapter: identity is always a construct that derives from an interaction between the identity holder and the wider environment. Identity can be classified as full or empty, open or closed, stable or unstable. Its core is formed by a more-or-less coherent set of norms and values going back to notions and ideology shared by the group, or — to put it in professional jargon — the larger narrative of a particular culture. If that set of norms and values changes dramatically, the identities that are tied to it will invariably change, too, evolving in the direction of the new narrative with the new norms and values.

  Identity is all about ethics.

  TWO

  ETHICS: FROM SELF-REALISATION TO SELF-DENIAL

  These days, you can’t open a newspaper without seeing an article lamenting the loss of norms and values. An image springs to mind of an old gentleman anxiously patting his pockets and looking around him. Where was I last, did I take my jacket off, and who else was sitting at the table? We seem to regard norms and values as something that you can have or lack, and thus be able to lose and retrieve. Nowadays, it’s generally agreed that we have lost them.

  In that respect, modern times are a constant Mecca for prophets of doom and populist politicians. The papers are full of under-age criminals, bullying bosses, paedophile bishops, shillyshallying politicians, greedy bankers, and youngsters who don’t know the meaning of public-spiritedness. It’s hard to know where to start. In line with ancient religious tradition, we look for a scapegoat; that makes it easier to sleep at nights. The short-sighted among us blame the long-haired riffraff of May 1968, who wanted free love rather than jobs. Concerned intellectuals trace the rot back a bit furt
her, to the Enlightenment of the 18th century; the long-haired riffraff of the time (who were bewigged, in their case) had the brilliant idea of casting doubt on all traditional norms and values — abolishing religion, creating a republic, and being guided by reason. And look where that got us is pretty much what some writers are saying.

  The most prominent among them in my language area is the philosopher Ad Verbrugge, author of books such as Tijd van onbehagen (Time of Unease). He, like many others, lays the blame for virtually all evil at the door of our growing individualism and declining spirituality, a process set in motion by those accursed Enlightenment philosophers. In After Virtue, the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre places the issue in a broader historical setting: rational morality can only exist where there are still traces of a religion — once those have been erased, it is everyone for themselves, and according to him that is what we are now experiencing. The English political philosopher John Gray gives a more popular spin to this theory, seeing the disappearance of tradition, the predominance of reason, and by extension the utopian notion of progress, as signs that the Apocalypse is near. This disenchantment has even reached the general press. In The Guardian of 12 October 2010, columnist George Monbiot described the ‘Enlightenment model’ as being at odds with human nature and the source of the current social mess.