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

by Paul Verhaeghe

  The ‘science wars’ are veiled debates between different ideological viewpoints. Veiled, because they go back to something that cannot be acknowledged: the fact that values are at stake. The previous century saw similar wars on a larger scale, sparked by the question of the best design for society, based on the right ideology. No convincing answer was advanced, and the few instances in which a supposedly scientific ideology was able to achieve its ideal society ended in complete disaster. By the latter half of the 20th century, the debacle of Nazism and communism had caused a serious loss of faith in ideals. Some even saw the fascist concentration camps and the communist gulags as a legacy of the Enlightenment, arguing that it was time to put on the brakes. The fall of the Berlin Wall put the final nail in the coffin of ideology, and so the idea of an engineered society was shelved. Change and perfectibility remained keywords, but the focus now shifted to the individual.

  The end of the previous century marked the beginning of a radical new take on identity. People became responsible for perfecting themselves, for engineering their own success.

  The perfectible individual

  Where previously the focus had been on social progress, in the last quarter of the 20th century it shifted to the perfectibility of the individual. This took on three dimensions. First, individuals were expected to perfect their minds; soon, they were also expected to perfect their bodies; and last, but certainly not least, they were given the message to perfect themselves in a socio-economic sense.

  During this period, identity suddenly became a very personal matter. It had to be ‘authentic’, not to say autonomous and original, and thus opposed to the group and bourgeois society. As an individual, you were expected to discover your true self. The voyage of self-discovery couldn’t really be done at home; ideally, you needed to go to India or Nepal. If your budget didn’t stretch to exotic travel, you could undertake a virtual voyage with the aid of ‘mind-expanding’ drugs, possibly in combination with alternative forms of psychotherapy. It is from this period that contemporary misconceptions about a ‘unique’ identity date.

  Around the turn of the millennium, the focus on discovering oneself shifted to perfecting oneself, a youthful body being the main goal. Nowadays, we must all go to the gym for the latest fad (from body building to Zumba), and if that doesn’t work, there’s always Botox and cosmetic surgery. ‘Be eternally young and sexy’ is the message; turning 30 spells doom. This period has also seen a spectacular rise in certain psychiatric ailments, such as self-mutilation and eating disorders, and depression and personality disorders. The former two are all about the body; the latter two, all about identity.

  Meanwhile, a lot has changed in society without us noticing it: we’re all much too focused on ourselves. The death of ideology has meant that political parties no longer engage in traditional debate. The elected representatives of the people now dance tamely to the tune of an economy driven by the stock exchange. In fact, things have got to such a pass that some politicians are dedicated to dismantling the state, leaving its citizens orphaned. One of Margaret Thatcher’s most cited political pronouncements was, ‘There is no such thing as society.’ She went on to make this come true.* The dissolution of society gradually eroded people’s sense of community, and increasingly turned individuals into each other’s competitors. Initially, this had a positive side: everyone would get their just deserts; those who made the most effort would reap the most success. The notion of self-discovery shifted from perfecting oneself to engineering one’s own success. It would take a while before the postmodern Narcissus perceived the ruins of society behind the emptiness of his mirror.

  [* The quotation comes from the following paragraph in an interview with her that was published in Women’s Own on 31 October 1987.]

  I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations.

  A generation later, we can see how Thatcher’s politics effectively brought this about.]

  At first sight, this would appear to be the heyday of psychology: individuals have been liberated; they are free to develop themselves. Yet that freedom is extremely relative, because it is linked, in a way that is almost unnoticed, with a return to social Darwinism in its most recent incarnation, whereby no longer the species but the individual is acted upon by ‘natural’ selection. The strongest man or woman makes it, at the expense of all those other men and women. Success is the defining criterion. Just like its predecessor, the new social Darwinism was soon given a pseudo-scientific foundation, this time with an obligatory reference to The Selfish Gene, a title with which Richard Dawkins perfectly heralded the new zeitgeist in 1976. The battle to be the best apparently isn’t confined to individuals; even genes have got each other by the throat. So I don’t need to be ashamed of elbowing others out of the way; it’s in my genes. Just like the racism of days gone by, the current egocracy needs a scientific loincloth.

  This shift from group to individual is linked to a shift in responsibility. I can have everything I want as long as I come off best in the struggle for life — and that’s my responsibility. Society must not hinder me; on the contrary, it must give everyone equal opportunities, and ‘may the best man win’. By the same reasoning, care for individuals that have not made it is an anomaly. After all, they only have themselves to blame for their failure, so why should we help them? Progress requires effort, and those who sit around on their backsides must bear the consequences. Adversity can be overcome, and there is no such thing as chance. To fail is to be guilty.

  People can perfect themselves if they try hard enough — perfection being measured in terms of success and power. All too easily equated with economic success and financial power, these two factors combine to generate the new goal in life.

  An unexpected association then arises, with unexpected ethical implications. Rich people are rich by virtue of their own effort and dispositions. Ergo, they are strong characters and, ethically speaking, at the top of the ladder (closest to God, the maker of the ladder). Financial power is equated with moral authority. As a result, we look to bankers and captains of industry to act as leaders of society. Conversely, everyone who fails must be weak characters, if not downright parasites, with dubious norms and values. They are scum, in other words, who are too lazy or stupid to help themselves.

  Contrast this with Aristotle’s day, when the best leader was the individual with the greatest self-knowledge, which was used to place his or her arètai — that is, intellectual and moral virtues — at the disposal of the community. Later, when Christian morals prevailed, the leader was divinely appointed, and his or her task was to curb innate sinfulness to the greater glory of the Kingdom of God. Not so long ago, a press baron could determine the British prime ministership, just as financial lobbies in the US designate presidential candidates.

  And thus we have made a complete U-turn without noticing it. The Enlightenment assumed that society and ethics could be engineered; evolutionary theory proved that change is the rule. Social Darwinism, by contrast, argued that intervention was wrong, that nature should be allowed free rein: the innate good in man would cause the worthiest to rise to the top. The latest mutation of social Darwinism goes by the name of neo-liberalism, and interprets nature to mean market forces. The underlying reasoning remains the same, being demonstrated, where possible, with ever more figures and tables.

  A plea of this kind to let nature take its course places the ideas of perfectibility and progress in a surprising l
ight. It seems that perfectibility amounts to removing obstacles, so that the ‘true’ individual can emerge. Apparently, progress is mainly thought to lie in a return to a ‘state of nature’, in which humanity’s true nature, its true identity, and its innate norms and values can come to the fore unhampered.

  A state of nature? Wasn’t that exactly what Hobbes was warning us about when he talked about man being a wolf for his fellow men, and about a war of all against all? We are back at square one, with the notion of a true, ‘natural’ identity.

  FOUR

  THE ESSENCE OF IDENTITY

  This brings us right back to a classic debate: is identity determined by heredity (nature) or by environment and upbringing (nurture)? To put it more strongly: does a person possess an inherent identity, an essential individuality, or does he or she start life as a blank sheet of paper, a tabula rasa, that is filled in by environment? And are we essentially good — meaning that if we do go wrong we can blame our environment (from unsuitable friends to too many additives in our baby food)? Or are we innately evil — meaning that only a strict upbringing can keep us on the straight and narrow? Is there such a thing as free will and choice, or is everything determined by genes and neurons, as the latest version of predestination would have it?

  The implications of this debate are inescapable. If we assume that identity is a biological given, then change is well-nigh impossible. The same applies, by extension, to society. In that case, we might as well abolish programs of aid, because that’s just money down the drain. According to this school of thought, such assistance is literally unnatural: nature has better solutions to offer.

  I imagine (and hope) that many readers will find such thinking extremely un-nuanced and wonder who still argues along these lines. The answer is, unfortunately, a great many people, and their number is increasing, though this black-and-white reasoning is usually embedded in other debates, making it less obvious. There is a growing tendency to brandish scientific proof in the process. ‘Research shows that …’ is without doubt the most common conversation-stopper of the last decade. What arguments are used to champion nature and nurture respectively?

  According to the former school of thought, individuals possess an innate identity that is programmed in our genes and brains. The origins of this biological reasoning can be traced right back to Aristotle. Growing up entails self-realisation, whereby we cultivate ourselves from the seed of self that we were born with. The extent to which we succeed in doing so depends on how well we know ourselves and draw the necessary conclusions from that self-knowledge.

  The link with Aristotle is appealing, but the modern scientist soon encounters a problem. For Aristotle, biology and ethics were intrinsically linked — a notion that now seems highly suspect. Indeed, it’s untenable, according to current thinking, which takes its lead from Darwin. Animal species, including Homo sapiens, are the product of evolutionary selection, a timeless process based on self-preservation and reproduction. That’s all there is to it. Norms and values don’t enter the picture; they are purely cultural phenomena. But this clear distinction becomes considerably less clear if we ask ourselves what ‘self’ means in the context of self-preservation. Are we talking about species? Or individuals? Or perhaps even genes? The answer has far-reaching consequences, because to focus on the individual is to claim that evolution selects for individualism — that is, egotism. Conversely, if the focus is on the group, the pressure of selection moves in the direction of social behaviour and altruism. Egotism? Altruism? Thus we have strayed, without realising it, from evolutionary biology into the territory of ethics.

  The opposite view, that we start life as a blank slate, is based on psychological reasoning, prompted by humankind’s immense capacity to adapt, and the variety of identities, norms, and values that result. We even need an academic discipline — anthropology — to chart all those differences. Enlightenment thinkers found an explanation for both adaptability and diversity in the human capacity for reason, which made conscious choice and targeted change possible. At the beginning of the previous century, the belief that individuals could be moulded through upbringing was a central tenet of educational theory. Later, this view was given scientific underpinning in the form of early behavioural psychology, and was subsequently bolstered by cognitivism, the theory being that conditioning and learning processes make it possible to steer individuals and society in a targeted way.

  Both arguments are keenly espoused by adherents of conflicting ideologies, so are formulated in extreme terms. The tabula-rasa notion is traditionally associated with progressive schools of thought: individuals can change and are therefore perfectible; the same applies to society, and the quicker such transformation takes place, the better. In imitation of American and French revolutionaries, socialists and communists also preached revolution: the goal was to achieve the ideal society — peopled with ideal individuals — with all possible speed. On the other side of the fence are the reactionary ideologies, which regard human flexibility and reason as a mere thin skin around an immutable, passionate core that is best kept in check by a strict upbringing. Any change should preferably be gradual, and revolution of any kind is anathema. Tellingly, the first political party in the Netherlands was called the Anti-Revolutionary Party, in opposition to the ideals of the French Revolution.

  Closer scrutiny shows that those who brandish these two opposing notions conveniently forget the little things that contradict the central tenet of their own school of thought. Social Darwinism swears by the struggle for survival as the biologically determined essence of existence, and therefore ignores any form of co-operation — the argument being that this is simply veiled or deferred egotism. Remarkably, one can use the same scientific data to argue the opposite. It wouldn’t be too hard to rewrite Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene as The Co-operative Gene, without doing any more or less violence to the truth than the original version.*

  [* I wrote this paragraph in the summer of 2011. Six months later, on 7 January 2012, the Flemish newspaper De Morgen published an interview with Richard Dawkins. In it he mentioned that the book could just as well have been given the title The Altruistic Individual. But it wasn’t, and an entire generation has since grown up with the conviction that egotism is a genetic and therefore human trait. Scientific research might be objective in a methodological sense; but as soon as scientists use words, they lose their objectivity.]

  And then in the other corner you have the progressive ideologies that swear by reason (cognition), and refuse to take account of irrationality and passion. They see these as primitive and typically feminine characteristics — and science, just like religion, is hostile to women. These ideologies reject the notion that global relationships are shaped by emotions — as the French political scientist Dominique Moïsi argues in his book The Geopolitics of Emotion — just as they believe that the economy is driven by rational calculations, despite the stock market clearly behaving more like a teenager with hormonal mood swings.*

  [* We didn’t need to wait for neurology to come along to be aware of the obvious connection between sex, risky behaviour, and the economy, but it’s nice to know that contemporary neuroscientific research provides evidence of this: when you watch pornography, the same areas of your brain light up as when you take financial risks, and men gamble away more when they are sexually aroused — hence the pretty girls in casinos. A study by Knutson et al. explodes the myth that economic decisions are rational. This subject is discussed in much more depth in Akerlof & Shiller.]

  Not only do both parties ‘forget’ the facts that contradict their own views, they even both need the central tenet of the opposing party to uphold their own reasoning. Thus, humanity’s presumed innate characteristics (nature) can only be achieved with the help of its environment (nurture). Language is a good example. There is undoubtedly some kind of genetic basis for language, but you will not find a single geneticist who claims that there is a gene for English, French, or German. Innate characteristics can apparen
tly manifest themselves in very different ways, depending on the environment in which they develop. Nurturing behaviour, for instance, is universal, but it takes very different forms in different cultures. The conclusion is inescapable: innateness allows for a considerable degree of variation.

  Nuance is likewise called for in the case of the tabula rasa school of thought, which holds that we are entirely shaped by our environment, that nothing is predetermined, and that individuals have the power to become almost anything they choose. Its adherents forget that free choice and mutability would literally be unthinkable without the prefrontal cortex so typical of our species — an organ that is a quintessential product of gradual evolution.

  In other words, reality is infinitely more complex and nuanced, yet at the same time simpler, than these theories would suggest. Common sense and an open mind will take you a long way. And on the subject of behavioural biology, it is high time to give the floor to a real expert: Frans de Waal.

  Ethics and biology

  These days, it would be unthinkable to have a university course entitled ‘Introduction to the biological principles of ethics — social organisation’. With the notions of master race and slave morality still too fresh in our memory, we’re inclined to regard Nazism as the most recent form of social Darwinism. Yet it’s not hard to see neo-liberalism as its latest reincarnation, and in his book The Age of Empathy Frans de Waal inveighs against the hijacking of biology by neo-liberals. According to him, we need to see the big picture; in it, empathy occupies a central place.

  As a behavioural biologist, de Waal proceeds from the assumption of gradual changes between animal species in general, and between humans and the great apes in particular. In contrast to what the Church and dominant Enlightenment thinkers have argued, there is absolutely no question of strict distinctions between humans and their nearest relatives. Viewed in evolutionary terms, a mammal is a Russian doll around a smaller doll that contains a yet smaller doll. The older characteristics (the smaller doll) are retained, though often modified in response to the new form (larger doll). I understand this to mean that what is characteristic of our closest relatives, primates, will in very many cases also apply to humans; at the same time, we have developed certain characteristics that these cousins lack. The most obvious of these is language, along with reflection, consciousness, and the related ability to make choices.*