If someone / something has an identity, then, presumably, they can also have an identity crisis.
The OED still highlights “sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances” as the principal meaning of the word. If anything should forever stay the same, you might be tempted to think, it is identity.
“Who am I?” is not just about me, but the question guiding the inquiry into what it is to be human. “Every man bears within himself the entire form of the human condition.”
Two related problems arise here: the first concerns identity through time, the second the mind-body problem.
More than 6M pilgrims and tourists come to the shrine every year, and it would not occur to them that they are visiting a replica, though not a single pillar or rafter remains of the “original” building. Renewal is part of the shrine’s spirit, its identity.
Cells in the human body have a limited lifespan and are replaced with new ones all the time. Could we think of ourselves, then, as a kind of walking Ise Grand Shrine?
“Whereas the human body can easily perish, the soul is immortal by its very nature.” To him the soul is an unextended substance that retains its identity over time.
Elementary school pupils are from first grade familiarized with this symbol, which thus becomes such a basic tool of mental operations that most people do not give much thought to it. Until their first class in Logic 101. Logicians do not use terms and symbols lightly, for they are after universal principles and rules of thought. Accordingly, they have produced a huge literature about identity and identification contemplating the questions of how “=“ should properly be used and what it means when it is used properly.
Because it cannot handle vagueness, classical logic has no answers to these questions. Philosophers have been divided as to whether vagueness is a property of mental representations, of linguistic descriptions, or of things of the world. Russell famously denied that there are vague things, insisting that vagueness is a matter of imprecise representation.
As he saw it, we cannot accept that the world could disobey the laws of logic because “we could not say of an ‘unlogical’ world how it would look.” The general question revolving around “identity” is this: what does how we speak imply about what there is? Does the fact that there are vague expressions imply that there are vague objects? For our topic, this is a crucial question, for many predicates essentially important to our lives are inherently vague: adult, male, intelligent, dead, alive, healthy, normal, drunk, and on and on.
Like Western thinkers, Buddhist philosophers grappled with the problem of how cognition, language, and the world are related; however, unlike the former, the latter do not take as given the “world out there,” and they do not proceed from the assumption that its secrets are for us to discover. Ultimate knowledge of the material world is not possible. A consequence for the notion of “individual” acknowledged by many Buddhist philosophers is that, rather than being characterized by positive properties, the individual is characterized negatively. The doctrine of non-self is at the heart of identity.
I became a black man when I arrived in England.
The colonialist expansion had led European scholars to discover the “wisdom of the Indians,” the “Chinese scientific genius,” and made them salute ex oriente lux (“out of the east, light comes”). However, their appreciation of other “high” civilizations did little to undermine the general assumption of the white man’s superiority, which legitimized the continuation of slavery, domination, and exploitation, in spite of the Enlightenment’s ideals of freedom and equality, which were all-inclusive only in name.
Governments highlight or deny ethnic identities, with or without the consent of those concerned. Thus an important aspect of group delimitation to note in this connection is power, which makes us see that, rather than the quasi-natural fruit of evolution, ethnic identities are often the result of conflict. And they lead to conflict in turn.
Most people do not want to be nobody and consider belonging to a community of faith, language, or race a safeguard against such an uninviting fate. Ethnic identities are not fixed, but are to some extent permeable. They include elements of assertion and ascription, although assertion is not always successful, and ascription not always refused.
Until the mid-20th century race classification in the US was “objective” and binary, rather than fuzzy. People were white or non-white.
If we, the Xs, know that the Ys are lazy, unwashed, deceitful, and irresponsible, in short, barbarians, this is very useful; for then we know that we don’t want our daughters and sons to marry a Y, sit next to a Y on the underground, or have anything else to do with the Ys. Stereotypes make life easier, relieving us of the need to think. Which is most probably why stereotyping is ubiquitous. It helps us navigate through our busy lives, since we don’t need stop to contemplate what to make of every single encounter, fleeting as it may be. In many cases, we already know and can thus direct our attention to other things. As painful experience has taught, stereotyping of other groups that solidifies into ethnic prejudice is found in most ethnic communities, however defined.
The counterpart of stereotyping is ethnocentrism, which is similarly widespread. One’s own group is the centre of the universe. Belief systems and worldviews are ethnocentric in that they explain everything from the point of view of one’s group and give event symbolic meaning with reference to it. The idea of the “chosen people” is an extreme form of ethnocentrism, implying that others, because of whatever deficit they may suffer from, were not chosen.
If you are committed to equality, it is surely more important to change the world than the language. After all, what’s wrong with maintaining distinct styles of speech (dress, hairstyle, conduct, etc.) if these distinctions do not correspond to domination and discrimination? Giving up on sex and gender distinction is not an option because gender is the primary identity any human being holds.
The birth defect of the principle of self-determination is that it fails to say what the self might be that would or should determine its own fate. The principle was proclaimed in the absence of any guidelines for drawing a distinction between nation and nationality, sowing the seeds of disputes.
Self-determination is a principle of international law which the said communities invariably invoke; but its meaning and the definition of the units to which it might apply remain imprecise.
What, then, is a nation?
The romantic position conceptualizes the nation as age-old heritage rooted in culture, custom, and above all language, in short, in a quasi-natural continuous self-sameness or identity.
In contrast, the republican position characterized the nation as “a daily plebiscite.” It opposed the notion of race or language as the basis of a nation and instead emphasized the will of a people to live together and shape their future rather than their remembrance of a “glorious” past.
While these two positions look quite different, they are both compatible with the less idealistic notion that nations were born in wars and for wars. Identities in politics are similarly born in and for confrontation.
At the same time, the idea of a clash of civilizations suggests the existence of solid entities that collide. By reifying civilizations — he distinguishes the following nine: Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist, and Japanese — Huntington laid himself open to criticism. For there is much overlap and interaction between civilizations. Boundaries are porous and fluid.
Confucianism in China is a pertinent example. For much of the 20th century, Chinese intellectuals and politicians condemned it for impeding China’s modernization, especially the Communist Party. But when the People’s Republic initiated radical economic reforms in the 1980s, Confucianism experienced a renaissance as an important reference point for Chinese identity. Even government officials acknowledged Confucius proudly as a contributor to China’s cultural heritage.
Like his colleagues Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, and some others, Confucius stands forever ready to be re-enlisted for supporting claims to civilization identities, which nowadays once again compete with national identities in shaping patterns of cohesion and conflict.
The industrial revolution transformed the social order of Western societies and with it the identity of many people, turning serfs into factory workers. Social class replaced feudal estate as the most relevant category for describing people’s position in society. As a response to these developments, various theories of class were put forth, Karl Marx’s and Max Weber’s models being most influential. In Marx’s view, there were basically two social classes, the bourgeoisie which controlled the means of production, and the workers (proletariat) who had only their sellable labor force to offer in the market. Weber’s model integrated 3 components of class — wealth, prestige, and power — and related them to the concept of an individual’s life chances.
Lifestyle and consumption patterns came to supersede class as a determiner of social identity.
Certified skills are still valuable in the marketplace, but at the same time, new ways of making money not dependent on any formal education have emerged in cyberspace.
Historically this was not always so. In some pre-modern societies, slaves and serfs were denied “dignity and rights,” being considered objects rather than persons.
The idea that personal autonomy and self-identity are inalienable features of all human beings took time to be universally accepted. Especially in regards to children it has been necessary explicitly to affirm their personal autonomy and individual identity; for they are unable to sustain themselves and depend on their parents, who are required (morally and legally) to provide for them and are responsible for their actions.
Changing one’s name is difficult and will not be effected without a legal deed. Only with a name will you be recognized as having rights and obligations. Without a name you have no identity, in the legal sense of the word.
Legal codes define rights, duties, and other legal characteristics for “normal persons” who can be identified unmistakably. Only normal persons enjoy the privileges offered by the law can be expected to abide by the law.
The id consists of the innate instinctual drives underlying sexual desire and aggressiveness. The superego acts as a moral agency that regulates behavior. And the ego is sandwiched in-between, mediating the wants and the requirements of id and superego. Growing up consists in learning how to deal with each part and finding a balance.
Both id and ego seek pleasure and reward, but lack any moral guidelines as to how to achieve it in an acceptable way. This is where the superego comes into play. It contains the moral standards of the immediate and wider social environment.
In addition to values and social norms, the superego part of one’s identity includes an “ideal self,” that is, an image of what you want to be. When your actions deviate from what you would expect from your ideal self, your superego interfere with your conduct and make you experience a bad conscience, a sense of guilt or shame. The two most common strategies to deal with this painful state of mind are repression and rationalization.
Nowadays, there is no limit to the kinds of subjects to which an identity crisis can be attributed: neighborhoods, streets, markets, villages, towns, cities, countries, entire continents, military alliances, political parties, churches, companies, banks, football teams, schools, and on and on. This is not just an inflationary figure of speech, but a symptom and a manifestation of the uneasiness that many experience in the face of the rapid changes characteristic of our time: “I no longer recognize the country / town / neighborhood / street I grew up in.” A sense of loss of something familiar and the inability to keep up with change is seen as a deviation from the “normal” state of affairs, an identity crisis.
In situations such as job interviews, customer service, preaching and lecturing, and other professional encounters the performance character of our behavior is very apparent, but we have ideas and scripts about our self in the private sphere, too. That we can “let loose and be ourselves” is an illusion in that we cannot shed off our socialization and do not cease to exist as social beings once we close the door behind us and retreat into solitude.
Evaluation of this sort betray the social dimension of language variation. Some dialects are more prestigious than others, not because of their inherent qualities, but because their speakers are more powerful, wealthy, and well thought of.
A voice, then, is to the ear what handwriting is to the eye.
Linguists believe that any language is as good as any other, all languages being a manifestation of the human faculty of language. Many non-linguists do not share this belief, holding that Sanskrit is the eternal language, perfect and unchanging; that Italian is the language of romance; that English is cool; that certain accents are inferior to others; that some ways of speaking are beautiful and others ugly.
Taking issue with language in one of its form that are associated with groups or individuals may be a masked attack on that group or individual grounded upon xenophobia, sexism, or nationalism.
As soon as a language becomes part of formal education or is dominated by another such language, its speakers tend to essentialize it as “our soul,” “our cultural fingerprint,” “the cornerstone of our national pride,” “a mirror of the nation,” “the preserve of our cultural memory,” etc.
Much as racists portray immigrants as undermining the integrity of “our people,” purists fight the contamination of “our language” by loan words.