Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity is an intriguing and wise reflection on one of the crucial rhetorical and conceptual problems of the 21st century. Appiah takes a historical approach to the development of several versions of identity (class, creed, culture, country, color), but the historical approach is meant to reveal philosophical and rhetorical strands that we might otherwise miss.
The most important service of the book is to sharpen a conceptual problem: On one hand, there is widespread agreement among academic students of identity that most of the categories we in the 21st century name for ourselves are “socially constructed” rather than somehow “natural”. Generally (though not for everyone) it is accepted in universities and left-of-center publications that perceptions and language about race, gender, nationality, religion, and other intersecting categories are not caused by scientifically observable facts about the world, but are to a large extent effects of the way various societies come to perceive and speak through their historical interactions.
For example, according to this view (which I share), the idea of “race” emerged in the 17th century as a result of European investment in the African slave trade and the consequent apologeteics for holding property in human beings. Race, in this view, does not describe genetic differences. For example, we often hear that there is more genetic variation between people who are socially identified as being of the same race than there is between people who are said to be of differenet races. Not biology, but social “constructs” account for our perceiving and talking about Black people and White people, for example.
Much of Appiah’s book is about the historical origins of certain namings, and about the obvious absurdity of claiming that the names can be understood as indices pointing to something specific in the world. One of his most fun bits of historicizing is his deconstruction of the idea of the West, or Western civilization, or Western culture. At one time “West vs. East” referred to Europe and Asia. Sometimes people spoke and still speak of “Western” as Christian and “Eastern” as Muslim, Hindu, or Confucian, for example. But Western as Christian is now often enlarged to Western as Judeo-Christian and encompasses not just Europe, but Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and Israel, i.e., Europe’s White-dominated former colonies. The opposite of the “West” in this sense is the Global South, which makes no sense geographically, and which includes all of “Latin” America. Even neo-Nazis sometimes support Zionism as holding the line for Western culture against Arab, Asian, and African onslaughts—a bizarre racist example of the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In similar ahistorical fashion, the foundation of Western culture is often said to coincide with Plato and Aristotle, but the Greek philosophers were largely unknown to Europeans until the 13th century, while Islamic scholars in places like Baghdad and Alexandria read, translated, and absorbed Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid many centuries earlier. In fact, Europe learned about the Greeks mostly from African Muslims in occupied Spain as well as from “Eastern” scholars fleeing the collapse of the Byzantine Empire.
Appiah’s point is that to the extent that identities hinge on labels like Western, Christian, French, African, White or Asian, we should be clear that we are not on solid ground. Identities are unstable, negotiable, historically conditioned, not only socially determined, but socially indeterminate and eternally mutating.
On the other hand, identity labels are crucial political, social, and emotional tools that we cannot do without. Despite the fact that Black and White are categories invented by Europeans to justify a system of violent oppression, few African Americans today would willingly give up their identity as Black, their property in Black music and Black joy, their legacy in the Black struggle for freedom. Similarly, though many of us critique the patriarchal binaries of man/woman and want to leave the door open for the existence of all kinds of sexuality and desire, we protect and defend any individual’s right to claim a concrete identity for themself: “male,” “female,” “gay,” “bisexual,” and so on. Or take class: in the United States we have been taught since World War II to understand “class” as socially constructed. We are all taught to think of ourselves as “potentially rich”; there are no fixed classes, just unending upward and downward mobility, but with the general trend being upward, so that most of us usually think of ourselves as “middle class”, meaning at war neither with the rich, nor with the poor. But for those of us who believe capitalism is an evil system there is a clear political advantage to sharpen class identifications and class solidarity—that is, of the working class against the rich. Believing that I am “essentially” a worker can create a perspective and analysis that is more effective in organizing resistance to colonialism, exploitation, and violence. Identity categories may be human creations, slippery, and rife with contradiction, but they are nevertheless useful tools that we are loath to abandon when they serve a pragmatic purpose.
Appiah is sensitive to both sides of this coin—identities as illusory, and identies as deep realities of each person. What he promotes is an openness to flexibility and tolerance, a willingness to be comfortable in the middle of many identities, and in two senses: first, to be comfortable in the middle of people who have many different ways of identifying or labeling themselves; and second, to be comfortable as an ego in the middle of my own many identies, my own intersections, histories, and questions.
Appiah wisely points out that the majority of our identity labels today are leftovers from 19th and early 20th century theorizing of various kinds. He believes it is time that we advance our theorizing to fit better with historical developments which have changed many kinds of relationship and so many feelings about identity. In one of the most beautiful stories in the book, Appiah describes the career of a person named Amo taken in 1707 as a five-year-old child from the town of Axim in what is now Ghana to Wofenbüttel in what is now Germany. Amo, called Anton Ulrich, eventually studied at the University of Wittenberg, became a renowned professor of philosophy, proficient in law, theology, medicine and astronomy, and was fluent in Dutch, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and German. In 1747, however, at the age of 40, Amo decided to return to the villages of his birth, near Axim on the coast of West Africa. He never returned to Europe, nor did he leave any record of his reasoning, but Appiah notes: “It’s impossible not to wonder whether his was a flight from color consciousness, a retreat to a place where he would not be defined by his complexion…Indeed, his odyssey asks us to imagine what he seems to have yearned for: a world free of racial fixations. It asks if we could ever create a world where color is merely a fact, not a feature and not a fate. It asks if we might not be better off if we managed to give up our racial typologies, abandoning a mistaken way of thinking that took off at just about the moment when Anton Wilhem Amo was a well-iknown German philosopher at the height of his intellectual powers” (p. 134).
Can we imagine this? I think it’s an open question whether most of us even want to. Each of us has a great deal to lose.