It seems like everyone and his mother is talking about identity politics.
The story goes: The traditional left–right economic divide has been usurped by an identitarian divide, where the demand for recognition has replaced the demand for redistribution. One's stance on this divide depends on one's view of social identity — whether one takes identity markers such as sex, class, and gender to be thin and fluid or thick and determined.
Those who play identity politics take the latter view of social identity, or at least their actions reflect such an attitude. Individuals are members of x or y group, and political success is equivalent to the achievement of collective rights for that group. One is either “Eastern” or “Western,” “black” or “white,” “man” or “woman,” “Muslim” or “Christian.” Improvements in individual experience come by way of improvements in shared experience. The politics of recognition is an arena for competing group interests.
British-Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah accepts that these identity markers bind us together, but he argues they can divide us, too. In The Lies That Bind, he dismantles five touchstones of modern identity: creed, country, class, color, and culture. According to Appiah, each source of social identity rests on fiction, a story of commonality that has its basis in contradiction. Each group is far messier than our terminology would suggest; whereas identity politics essentializes these identity markers, none are indicative of an underlying reality.
With regard to creed, for example, we falsely assume that religion is a matter of fixed scripture, when in reality, scripture is only one facet of religious practice. Ironically, the incorrect view is shared by fundamentalists: Extremity of faith equates to extremity of scriptural belief. While scripture certainly has a role in people's religious practice, “traditions do not speak with a single voice.” Interpretation is a practice, and interpretation constitutes religion; to be religious is to participate in a living, changing community.
Nationalism follow a similar pattern. Appiah notes that “the reality of linguistic and cultural variation within a community” is often “in tension with the romantic nationalist vision of a community united by language and culture.” The idea of a modern nation-state was formed only as recently as the 19th century, when romanticism led nations to view their people as a people. But no nation is homogeneous; the boundaries of a nation are entirely arbitrary. Difference in accent and rates of literacy among people meant that populations did not even understand one another until recent years.
