The trouble with identity politics

Identity politics reflected two great longings, a desire for uniqueness, and a need to belong. It’s time to ditch it.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A head and shoulders portrait consisting of large disc-like pixels that obscure the real person..

Photo by Vadim Bogulov on Unsplash.

I’ve been watching the remarkable documentary series Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, and there is one story in it I can’t get out of my mind. Richard Moore was a ten-year old boy in Londonderry in the early seventies. Charles Inness was a 30-year old British soldier in the Royal Artillery stationed in the city at the time. During a local disturbance in 1972, Inness fired a rubber bullet to disperse a crowd of youths throwing stones at a RUC base at exactly the moment the ten-year old Richard crossed his line of fire. The bullet hit the young boy in the eye, blinding him for life.

Many years later, Moore expressed a desire to meet the man who fired the gun. And so, in 2006 they met. The British soldier, cautious, a little stiff and very proper, was initially defensive, refusing to apologise as he still felt he had acted rightly at the time and in the circumstances. Moore persisted, not out of a desire for vengeance or recrimination, but simply wanting to understand. Gradually the two became friends and Inness eventually found a way to say he was genuinely sorry.

The history of the troubles in Northern Ireland is full of stories of people being murdered simply because of one part of their identity - that they were Protestant or Catholic, UDA or IRA, British soldier or Irish Republican. What struck me listening to this story was Moore’s tenacity, to get beyond the simplistic identity of Inness as ‘the soldier who took away my sight’.

Summing up what he had learnt, Moore said: ‘Finding out who he was changes everything. To me, he’s no longer a soldier, he’s a human being. A father, a grandfather – it makes a person very real. And that’s a good thing.’ There seemed to me a gem of wisdom here that can get us past much of the polarisation of modern life.

“There are two striking human passions, the passion for uniqueness and the passion for union.”

Tom Morris.

‘Identity politics’ was a term borrowed from social psychology in the 1970s and quickly gained traction. It was an attempt to enable marginalised people to find solace and support with one another, by focussing on the common characteristics of one aspect of a person’s identity. It tried to help bring particularly disadvantaged groups together by describing the common experiences they had faced.

Since then it has gained a great deal of traction and generated much controversy. So why did it hit such a nerve?

The philosopher Tom Morris once wrote:

“There are two striking human passions, the passion for uniqueness and the passion for union. Each of us wants to be recognised as a unique member of the human race. We want to stand apart from the crowd in some way. We want our own dignity and value. But at the same time, we have a passion for union, for belonging, even for merging our identities into a greater unity in which we can have a place, a role, a value.”

Identity politics was a reflection of these two great human longings - our desire for uniqueness, and our need to belong. On the one hand we all want to be special, unique, different from everyone else. On the other hand, we want a tribe to belong to, whether defined by gender, race, sexuality, nationality or the like. And so, we choose an identity that defines us, marks us off to the world, and gives us a group to belong to.

Identity politics began with good intentions. Yet the way it is often used means that it encourages me to think that once I have labelled someone with a particular characteristic, that is all I need to know about them. If I know they are black or white, privileged or deprived, young or old, gay or straight, conservative or progressive, and so on, then I know all I need to know. I can then embrace them as one of my tribe, or dismiss them as different, without any further discernment.

One of the writers of the Psalms, reflecting on his own self-awareness, wrote “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” The reality is that we are all immensely complex beings with multiple facets, different qualities and a number of overlapping identities. My neighbour may be Asian. And knowing that, I might think ‘I know what Asian people are like – and he must be like all the others.’ Yet he might also be a father, a husband, an Arsenal fan, of Bangladeshi heritage, a doctor, middle-aged, a Labour voter, suffering from occasional depression, a 2 handicap golfer. And so on. These are all part of who he is and if I want to get to know him fully, I need to understand something about all of these elements of his identity. If I fix on any one of these as the final truth about him, and ignore all the rest, I do him a disservice. To reduce the complexity and wonder of a fellow human being to one single characteristic is surely a mistake. It is to fail to do them justice, and display an unwillingness to take the time to understand them. It is, in the final analysis, a failure to love.

The final truth about each one of us can only be what is true of all of us - that we are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’. In that same Psalm, the writer relates his sense that the God he worships, in a way that is both comforting yet unnerving, knows everything about him:

“you know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar, you discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.”

We are each one known, loved, understood in our very complexity by the God who made us, and invited to become capable of that same kind love – the love that looks beyond the surface to understand the complexities of others – in other words, to grow into the likeness of God.

Richard Moore may have been blinded by that rubber bullet in 1972. Yet in a strange way he learnt to see better than most of us. He learnt to see past the simple identity of Charles Inness as ‘the British soldier who ruined my life.’ He had the tenacity to learn that that this man was, like all of us, both complex and simple - a man with unique relationships, a history, in his own way shaped by his experience, and yet at the same time, worth getting to know in that complexity - that ultimately he was, like all of us, ‘fearfully and wonderfully made.’

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Assisted dying

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22 October 2024

9 min read

Assisted dying's language points to all our futures

Translating ‘lethal injection’ from Dutch releases the strange power of words.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A vial and syringe lie on a blue backdrop.

Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

In the coming weeks and months, MPs at Westminster will debate a draft bill which proposes a change in the law with regards to assisted dying in the UK. They will scrutinise every word of that bill. Language matters.

Reading the coverage, with a particular interest in how such changes to the law have been operationalised in other countries, I was struck to discover that the term in Dutch for dying by means of a fatal injection of drugs is “de verlossende injectie.” This, when put through the rather clunky hands of Google translate, comes out literally as either “the redeeming injection” or “the releasing injection.” Of course, in English the term in more common parlance is “lethal injection”, which at first glance seems to carry neither of the possible Dutch meanings. But read on, and you will find out (as I did) that sometimes our words mean much more than we realise.

Writing for Seen & Unseen readers, I explained a quirk of the brain that tricked them into thinking that the word car meant bicycle. Such is the mysterious world of neuroplasticity, but such also is the mysterious world of spoken language, where certain combinations of orally produced ‘sounds’ are designated to be ‘words’ which are assumed to be indicators of ‘meaning’. Such meanings are slippery things.

This slipperiness has long been a preoccupation for philosophers of language. How do words come to indicate or delineate particular things? How come words can change their meanings? How is it that, if a friend tells you that they got hammered on Friday night, you instinctively know it had nothing to do with street violence or DIY? Why is it that in the eighteenth century it was a compliment to be called ‘silly’, but now it is an insult?

Some words are so pregnant with possible meaning, they almost cease to have a meaning. What does “God” mean when you hear someone shout “Oh my God!”? Probably nothing at all, or very little. It is just a sound, surely? And yet no other sound has ever succeeded in fully replacing it. We are using the term “God”, as theologian Rowan Williams points out in his book The Edge of Words, as a “one-word folk poem” to refer to whatever we feel is out of our control.

Both of these first two interpretations look at death, in some sense, ‘from the other side’ – evaluating the end of someone’s life in terms of speculation over what will happen next.

This idea of an injection being verlossende seems to me to be the opposite. I find myself hearing it in four different (and not mutually exclusive) ways, each to do with taking control of this very uncertain question of dying. The first, releasing, sounds to me like an echo of the neo-platonic ideas that still infuse public consciousness about what it means to be dead. As we slimily carve our pumpkins for Halloween and the children clamour to cut eyeholes into perfectly good bedsheets, we see a demonstration of society’s latent belief that humans are made up of body and soul, and that at death the soul somehow leaves the body and floats into some unknown realm (or else remains, disembodied yet haunting). If we translate verlossende as releasing then we capture that idea – that of the soul, which longs to be at peace, trapped inside suffering, mortal flesh.

Google’s second suggestion for verlossende was redeeming. This could be heard theologically. Christians believe in eternal life, that the death of this earthly body is only the start of something new – a life where there will be no crying or pain, and people will live forever in the glorious presence of God. In the bible, the apostle Paul encourages those who follow Christ to trust that they have been marked with a ‘seal’, meaning that they are like goods which have been purchased for a price, and that God will ‘redeem’ this purchase at the appointed time. Death, therefore, is not a fearful entering into the unknown, but a faithful entering into God’s promises.

Both of these first two interpretations look at death, in some sense, ‘from the other side’ – evaluating the end of someone’s life in terms of speculation over what will happen next. But there is the view from this ‘side’ also. We do not need to speculate about what death means for some of those who experience acute suffering due to terminal illness, and who wish to hasten the end of their lives because of it. They too might want to speak of a releasing injection or a redeeming injection – given that both terms hint at the metaphor of life as a prison sentence. To be in prison is to have one’s rights and freedoms severely limited or entirely taken away. It is not uncommon to hear a sufferer refer to incapacitating illness as being ‘like a prison sentence’, and one can empathise with the desire to have the release date set, back within the sufferer’s control.

This is the strange power and pregnancy of words – verlossende is able to carry all these meanings or none of them. Until I began researching this article, I had always assumed that the English term, lethal injection, simply meant an injection of some substance that is deadly. This is how the term is commonly understood, therefore, in a sense, this is its meaning. Yet, when I came to consider the possible origins of the word, I realised its likely etymology is from the Greek word lēthē, meaning ‘to forget’. In the Middle Ages, if something was lethal it caused not just death, but spiritual death, placing one beyond the prospect of everlasting life. By contrast, something could be fatal, meaning only that it brought one to one’s destiny or fate.

With this in mind, as we try to speak clearly in the assisted dying debate, the term fatal injection might be a more precise way to describe this pathway to death that is in want of a name. After all, whether you believe in an afterlife or not, dying is everybody’s fate, and I can see that choosing to take control of one’s fate is, for anyone, an act of faith with regards to what comes next.

This article was part-inspired by Theo Boer’s original article Euthanasia of young psychiatric patients cannot be carried out carefully enough, in Dutch newspaper Nederlands Dagblad. Theo is a professor of health ethics at the Protestant Theology University, Utrecht.

Read the original article in Dutch or an English translation below. Reproduced by permission.

Euthanasia of young psychiatric patients cannot be carried out carefully enough

Theo Boer

How is it possible to determine that patients who have suffered from psychiatric disorders for five or ten years and who are between the ages of 17 and 30 have ‘completed their treatment options’, wonders Theo Boer. It also conflicts with perhaps the most important task of psychiatrists: ‘offering hope.’

The patients we are talking about now are not physically ill and therefore do not have the ‘comfort’ of an impending natural death.

A letter was recently leaked in which leading psychiatrists ask the Public Prosecution Service to investigate the course of events surrounding euthanasia of young psychiatric patients.

One death mentioned by name concerns seventeen-year-old Milou Verhoof, who received the redeeming injection from psychiatrist Menno Oosterhoff at the end of 2023. It will not have escaped many people's attention how much publicity the topic has received in the past year or so. Together with a colleague and a patient (who later also received euthanasia), Oosterhoff wrote the book Let me go.

The tenor was: it is good that euthanasia is possible for this group of patients, the taboo must be removed, their suffering is often terrible, they have already had to undergo countless 'therapies' without effect - can one time be enough?

Or would we rather have these patients end their lives in a gruesome way? And who really thinks that psychiatrists make hasty decisions when they decide to comply with a euthanasia request?

To be clear: we are talking about something completely different than what has been called 'traditional euthanasia' for years: euthanasia for physically ill patients with a life expectancy of weeks or months. Given the excellent palliative care that has become available, such euthanasia will actually be less and less necessary in 2024.

Panic

No, the patients we are talking about now are panicky, anxious, confused, depressed, lonely, often unemployed, poorly housed, without prospects. But they are not physically ill and therefore do not have the 'comfort' of an impending natural death.

I have heard several of them say: if only I were terminal, then euthanasia would not be necessary. The fact that there is now attention for this group of patients, with whom we in our hurried and solution-oriented society know so little how to deal, is a gain. At the same time, I am happy with the leaked letter. You can criticize Oosterhoff's procedural approach ('why not an ethical discussion instead of a legal one?'), the lack of collegiality, this perhaps underhanded action ('why did you go straight to the Public Prosecution Service?'). But in my opinion, the letter writers are definitely hitting the mark with this crooked stick. Firstly: how is it possible to determine that patients who have suffered from psychiatric disorders for five or ten years and who are between the ages of 17 and 30 have ‘completed their treatment options’ (a criterion from the Euthanasia Act)?

Review Committee

Nobody disputes that their suffering is unbearable. At the same time, I know from my time on a Regional Euthanasia Review Committee that an illness becomes unbearable when all hope is gone.

A psychiatrist who gives euthanasia to a young adult is also undeniably sending the signal that, like his patient, he has given up all hope of improvement. That is actually risky, because even patients who have suffered for years sometimes recover and, moreover, our brains are not fully developed until we are 25. But it also conflicts with perhaps the most important task of psychiatrists: offering hope. In their training, the risk of transference-counter-transference is consistently pointed out: a patient takes his therapist with him into despair, the psychiatrist transfers those feelings to this and other patients: ‘this kind of suffering is untreatable and cannot be lived with’.

In the recent NPO television documentary A Good Death we see an embrace between a psychiatrist and her emotional patient. In doing so, this psychiatrist offers a unique form of involvement. But does she provide sufficient resistance to the cynicism, despair and negative vision of the future that is also widespread outside psychiatry?

Sensible decisions?

That brings me to a second objection: is it sufficiently recognised how much a psychiatric illness can affect someone’s ability to make sensible decisions? The hallmark of many psychiatric illnesses is a deep desire to die and an inability to think about it in a relative way. As a result, many are unable to think in terms of a ‘possibly successful therapy’.

Boudewijn Chabot

The main character in the book Zelf heeft by Boudewijn Chabot, Netty Boomsma, responds to Chabot's suggestion that there might be a life after depression: 'Yes, but then I won't be it anymore.' She wants to go down with her depression. I know differences. The people with a death wish who remark about a possible therapy: ‘I hope it is not effective, because then I will have to go through it again.’

Another hurdle

If a second psychiatrist is consulted and, for example, suggests trying one or two more therapies, many patients see this as yet another hurdle on the road to euthanasia. They do not see it as a serious opportunity to be able to cope with life again. There are no easy answers here. Nor are pillories appropriate. But let euthanasia remain complicated here, and let us continue to look for hope.

Reproduced by kind permission