Readers may notice that I often get a bit worked up about how particular words are used. It’s not just the writer in me, annoyed by people saying “I could care less” instead of “I couldn’t care less,” or other degradations of the language. Oh, I have that tendency all right. Strunk and White’s Elements of Style had a strong influence on me. But a stronger influence was George Orwell’s brilliant essay Politics and the English Language, which I read when a teenager. Orwell was interested in how political ideologies tend to debase language. But I came, over the years, to be more concerned with the way language is used to debase political and philosophical thought, and to serve the interests of the powerful. I tend to get most on my high horse when I feel that some stupid or wicked notion is being smuggled into our subconscious by a turn of phrase or an implied definition.
This is exactly the case with the currently accepted use of the word identity. You see this word used all the time, and phrases like “identity politics” are assumed to have an easily recognizable meaning. I’ve just been reading a spate of archaeological papers which routinely refer to “identity” interchangeably with ethnicity. These papers, from a variety of academics, constantly repeat phrases like “negotiating their identity” — inane jargon which the field has borrowed from sociology, and which is now firmly entrenched. Archaeology is impoverished by this kind of rubbish, and drifts away from scientific rigour.
When someone casually refers to religious affiliation, or to ethnicity, or nationality, or gender, as being their “identity,” there is an implicit assumption that membership in large, formally defined or organized groups of people is the essential characteristic of an “identity.”
Now, I find this a profoundly wrong, and extremely offensive assumption. Your identity, as far as I’m concerned, and as I’ve believed throughout my life, is that which makes you uniquely yourself. My “identity” is composed of those things which refer to me and only me, experiences that occured to me alone, passions and ambitions that are mine, private symbols that only I understand, inner experiences that belong only to me. These unique, individual characteristics form, all together, my Identity. No characteristic that I share with some arbitrary group of other human beings, or that is demanded of me by some collective mush, or imposed on me by some proclaimed Authority, can constitute my identity. Certainly no group that I am merely associated with by accident of birth can ever be my identity. I find the idea that anyone would consider their identity to be, say, Norwegianess, or their skin colour, a profoundly disgusting notion. It is to abandon individuality entirely, to crush and erase identity, not to describe it.
This is a particularly creepy kind of creeping collectivism. The meaning of the word identity has been distorted, perverted, inverted. I don’t believe such things are random accidents. There are always powerful forces that seek to obliterate respect for, and recognition of, the individual human being. If you can pursuade people that their “identity” is nothing more than their membership in a collective blob, that there is nothing specifically notable or significant about themselves, then half the work of enslavement has been accomplished. It is easier to control and exploit people who are not capable of thinking of themselves as anything but a member of a group, a class, or a tribe, than it is to control people who have a strong image of themselves as unique and individual. Tyrants have known this since the beginning of time, and every cult, army, ideology, and state seeks to erase individual consciousness and substitute a collective existence in which you, or I, as individuals, don’t matter.
That is why we should be very careful about how we use words said to describe or define ourselves, and reject any usage that serves these despicable ends.
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