Identity and Recognition Are the Polarized Polis’s Chief Virtues
We live in a polarized time riddled with conversations about—and fixation on—the concept of identity. It seems the discussions of modern policy have become less about policy and rights and more about a struggle for recognition.
Enlightenment liberalism was generally characterized by politics as a framework of rules, most famously in the Lockean “night watchman state,” where the government’s role is limited to protection of rights. However, right now, the very idea of politics has taken on entirely different questions. Most notably, “Does the public see and affirm who I believe myself to be?”
Philosopher Charles Taylor discusses this shift in his 1994 essay “The Politics of Recognition,” presenting the move from honor under the premodern system, to dignity in the age of Enlightenment, to authenticity in the postmodern and postliberal era. This has drastic implications for the practice of politics and has in many ways rewritten the social imaginary of the Western world. This leads to a culture in which authenticity and dialogical identity reshape politics, no longer mediating interests, but turning the public square into a battleground where every group demands recognition as a precondition for flourishing.
Taylor best characterizes the cultural mood by explaining that “nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.” Those who have not received this recognition are said to have “internalized their own inferiority,” leading to internal self-depreciation, or perhaps a more well recognized term of “internalized oppression,” discussed often by the contemporary political left. In the world we live in, recognition is no longer seen as a mere courtesy, but a vital human need.
This is far different from the social imaginaries of our forefathers. In the premodern world, most notably in medieval Europe, honor was a far more preeminent virtue, scarce at some level and demanding preference and distinction, such as the valor of a knight in the king’s court, or the respect given to the clergy. This highly hierarchical structuring, dating back to classical antiquity and earlier, was the status quo for many millennia. But the rise of Christianity, exacerbated by the Reformation’s “priesthood of all believers,” shifts the paradigm from honor to the concept of dignity.
This newfound dignity is ideally universal and egalitarian, possibly only in democracy, and grants equal status regardless of culture and gender. It is the ultimate result of liberalism, especially of Lockean natural rights, extended to outgroups through thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft and others. With this newfound dignity comes a romantic notion of individual identity that is self-discovered. Wollstonecraft discussed frequently the importance of feeling and notion shaping who one is morally. This self-discovery grants “an intuitive feeling of what is right and wrong,” according to Taylor, to be contrasted with consequentialist impulses; it is instead “anchored in our feelings, … a voice within.” The biggest cultural shift here is not the mere existence of feelings, but instead the extent to which feelings are emphasized—no longer a “means to the end of acting rightly,” but an end in themselves, or “displacement of the moral accent,” as a prerequisite for being true and full human beings.
No figure characterizes this better than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who points to morality as following an internal voice of nature, and the recovery of le sentiment de l’existence, or the sentiment of existence. For Taylor, this is best described as the “principle of originality,” in which “I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s life. But this notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life: I miss what being human is for me.”
This notion of authenticity raises a critical challenge: identity was previously socially generated by way of hierarchy, or a fixed position in society. However, this new form of identity cannot be socially derived by definition, but must be inwardly generated. This then conflicts with a broadly understood essential characteristic of human life: sociability. There can be no such thing as “inward generation” monologically understood, since human life is fundamentally dialogical. Humans possess the gift of expression, both in language and broader forms, and “[p]eople do not acquire the languages needed for self-definition on their own. Rather, we are introduced to them through interactions with others who matter to us.”
The only way to reconcile this tension of anthropology is to define identity in either agreement or disagreement with the things our significant others want to see in us, moving the conversation about self-definition from the monological to the dialogical. One may attempt to fight this and live “freely,” but the seemingly autonomous person who attempts this is only doing so in rebellion against the ties that bind, so is still engaging in the dialogical. In many respects, life has always had this dialogical characteristic, but before modernity it was taken for granted in light of social categories. A blacksmith’s son became a blacksmith, a king’s son became a king, and so on.
This brings us back to the category of recognition itself. Because the culture has pushed in the direction of self-discovery, and because the nature of human life requires a dialogical understanding of such self-discovery in social relationships, the only way for people to feel vindicated in their identity is by that recognition. Hence, human beings will chase it, depending on the categories of the group in which they place themselves. Once identity becomes something others must affirm for us, politics becomes the primary arena where that affirmation or refusal is fought out.
Nowhere is this more clear than in particular coalitions of American politics. In the LGBTQ movement, for example, the emphasis is on sexual identity, the best example being the transgender movement, where (to repackage Rousseau), sentiment truly does claim to determine existence. However, it is not enough for transgender-identifying persons to live in the sentiment of their choosing; they must be actively affirmed in their identity, even when this involves deep tensions with embodied reality. A lack of recognition and affirmation within this social imaginary must naturally lead to alienation, and is often said to constitute an act of violence, especially in cases of the divisive topics of sexuality.
While it is easy to point out the left’s obsession with identity, certain factions on the right are just as much ingrained in the politics of recognition. The difference, however, is that the MAGA movement’s identitarian tendencies are more recent, and much more tied to institutional alienation: they claim that the “deep state,” China, “the globalist neocons,” or some form of “the elites” have stripped their ability to flourish and fully participate in the American dream. Their criticisms come with valid observations about the challenges of globalization, creative destruction, and at times institutional overreach; but nevertheless they reflect an identitarian “them versus us” mentality that lacks an empirical basis. This broader form of alienation can easily be detected domestically: affluent coastal elites lack an understanding of the values and culture of middle America, and fail to recognize their existence, or so the right claims. This phenomenon can also be seen in the form of populist nationalism, in which identity is placed in a particular quality related to one’s nation or cultural group. When a particular threat to this quality is detected, such as mass migration or religious conflict, impulses kick in to protect the fundamental quality that constitutes one’s “national identity.”
The problem with political validation’s being predicated on recognition is that it fails to turn the agent toward self-accountability, placing people in cycles of victimhood that can only be reconciled through the approval of others. As Alexis de Tocqueville points out, “public opinion is a sort of mistress whose slaves the men of democratic ages are.”
Tocqueville’s insight anticipates Taylor’s: a democracy built on dialogical identity easily turns into a society where individuals depend on the crowd for self-definition. Taylor’s 1994 work speaks volumes about our current cultural moment, in which the need for recognition becomes the main driving force in political engagement, lacking a regard for the common good and the improvement of the polis.