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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Digital

General Election 24

Politics

7 June 2024

4 min read

Are we really our vote?

Elections exacerbates the worst of our digital personality.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

A AI generaed montage shows two politicans back to back surrounded by like, share and angry icons.

The divide

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

All the world’s a stage. Never more so than in a general election. Amidst the usual stunts and gimmicks of political leaders in election season (and much of the drama unintended or badly scripted) we too have become the performers. It doesn’t matter that Rishi and Keir are ‘boring’ - the digital space has created platforms for us also to posture and present our political positions. But in acting for the crowd, I worry that we’re losing a sense of who we are.

If fame is the mask that eats the face of its wearer, then we’re all at risk of losing ourselves. Absurd! You might say, I’m not famous! But we have become mini celebrities to our tens and tens, if not hundreds or thousands of followers. Every post, story, or reel is an opportunity to project who we are and what we’re about, and what we think. Times columnist James Marriott goes so far as to write that ‘the root of our modern problem is the way opinion has become bound up with identity. In the absence of religious or community affiliations our opinions have become crucial to our sense of self.’

A recent study by New York University shows that many people in America are starting with politics as their basis for their identity. They say, "I'm a Democrat or a Republican first and foremost", and then shifting parts of their identity around like ethnicity and religion to suit their political identity. I’ve stopped being surprised when I see someone’s Twitter bio listing their ideology before anything else that might be core to their identity. But are we really our vote, or is there more to us than that?

The platform is a precarious place to position yourself, as is the harsh glare of the smartphone blue light.

If politics is the mask that we are presenting to the world, then we are engaging in a hollowing out of our representative democracy. Who needs an MP if we’re all directly involved? Don't get me wrong – I'm not in favour of apathy, inaction, or even lack of protest. But we elect members of parliament because we can’t all be directly engaged all of the time. Speaking all the time, about all of the things. Strong opinions used to be the possessions of those who had too much time on their hands… now you can be busy watch and pass on a meme in a matter of seconds without proper reflection and engagement. And so we’ve imported the very worst of student politics into our everyday digital lives and identities.

Student politics is the often-formative, immature peacocking of ideologies one way or the other. It also often reduces others to caricatures, and the campus culture has increasingly become one that cancels rather than listens and illuminates. And so, the loudest voices dominate and intimidate others to comply. Someone I barely know recently sent me an invitation to reshare a strong opinion on social media. We’ve never spoken about this topic, and they have no idea if I've in fact developed an opinion on it. Marriott writes, ‘For many, an opinion has achieved the status of a positive moral duty… the implication: to reserve judgement is to sin.’ And without a merciful judge, sin means shame: not just what I do is bad, but who I am is bad too.

The dopamine hit we get from these short bursts of antisocial media use is killing us. Martin Amis said that 'Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.' That was 1996. Now engaging in politics in the era of the smartphone, we are addicted to the current age’s offended/being inoffensive dichotomy. Like the drug that it is, wrongly used, it will disfigure us as it propels us to play the roles the crowds want. The platform is a precarious place to position yourself, as is the harsh glare of the smartphone blue light.

Every general election transforms the wooden floorboards of school halls into holy ground.

Countless commentators have offered the wisdom that you are who you are when nobody’s watching. But we’re all watching, all the time. First, we had the Twitter election, then the Facebook election, and now political parties have recently launched accounts on TikTok (all the while wondering if they are going to try to ban it). What we need is a post-social media election. If the world is facing impending doom, then we don’t need doomscrolling to help. Whether it’s activism or slacktivism, our politics need not be our identity. We need a greater light source that reveals our truest selves, and helps us to be fully ourselves. This ‘audience of one’ is a much simpler, if not easier, way to live.

After all, a secret ballot means nobody’s watching, and we don’t have to broadcast our vote, unless we really want to. On the 4th July, the ‘only poll that matters’ is private. We step out of the spotlights of our screens, and we cast a vote for the kind of leaders we want. Every general election transforms the wooden floorboards of school halls into holy ground.

We’d do well to treat the online world as a sacred space too, and each person as a sacred person. Perhaps it’s time not only for a general election, but also a personal election: to step out of the spotlight, and the light of our phones, and quietly cast a vote for who we want to be.