Tgk1946's Blog

On Identity (Amin Maalouf, 2000) pp26-31

From the very beginning of this book I have been speaking of murderous or mortal identities. Identities that kill. The expression doesn’t strike me as inappropriate insofar as the idea I’m challenging — the notion that reduces identity to one single affiliation — encourages people to adopt an attitude that is partial, sectarian, intolerant, domineering, sometimes suicidal, and frequently even changes them into killers or supporters of killers. Their view of the world is biased and distorted. Those who belong to the same community as we do are “ours”, we like to think ourselves concerned about what happens to them, but we also allow ourselves to tyrannise over them: if they are thought to be ”lukewarm” we denounce them, intimidate them, punish them as “traitors” and “renegades”. As for the others, those on the opposite side, we never try to put ourselves in their place, we take good care not to ask ourselves whether on some point or other they might not be entirely in the wrong, and we won’t let our hearts be softened by their complaints, their sufferings or the injustices that have been inflicted on them. The only thing that counts is the point of view of “our” side; a point of view that is often that of the most militant, the most demagogic and the most fanatical members of the community.
On the other hand, when one sees one’s own identity as made up of a number of allegiances, some linked to an ethnic past and others not, some linked to a religious tradition and others not; when one observes in oneself, in one’s origins and in the course one‘s life has taken, a number of different confluences and contributions, of different mixtures and influences, some of them quite subtle or even incompatible with one another; then one enters into a different relationship both with other people and with one’s own “tribe”. It‘s no longer just a question of “them” and “us”: two armies in battle order preparing for the next confrontation, the next revenge match. From then on there are people on “our” side with whom I ultimately have little in common, while on “their” side there are some to whom I might feel very close.
But to return to the earlier state of mind, it’s easy to imagine how it can drive people to the worst kind of extremities: if they feel that “others” represent a threat to their own ethnic group or religion or nation, anything they might do to ward off that danger seems to them entirely legitimate. Even when they commit massacres they are convinced they are merely doing what is necessary to save the lives of their nearest and dearest. And as this attitude is shared by those around them, the butchers often have a clear conscience and are amazed to hear themselves described as criminals. How can they be criminals when all they are doing is protecting their aged mothers, their brothers and sisters and children?
The feeling that they are fighting for the survival of their own loved ones and are supported by their prayers; the belief that if not in the present instance at least over the long term they can claim to be acting in legitimate self—defence: these characteristics are common to all those who in recent years, throughout the world, from Rwanda to former Yugoslavia, have committed the most abominable crimes.
We are not talking about isolated examples. The world is full of whole communities that are wounded — either enduring present persecution or still overshadowed by the memory of former sufferings — and who dream of exacting revenge. We cannot remain unmoved by their martyrdom; we can only sympathise with their desire to speak their own language freely, to practise their own religion without fear, and to preserve their own traditions. But compassion sometimes tends towards complaisance: those who have suffered from colonialist arrogance, racism and xenophobia are forgiven for excesses they themselves have committed because of their own nationalistic arrogance, their own racism and xenophobia. This attitude means we turn a blind eye to the fate of their victims, at least until rivers of blood have been shed.
The fact is, it’s difficult to say where legitimate affirmation of identity ends and encroachment on the rights of others begins. Did I not say that the word identity was a “false friend”? It starts by reflecting a perfectly permissible aspiration, then before we know where we are it has become an instrument of war. The transition from one meaning to the other is imperceptible, almost natural, and sometimes we all just go along with it. We are denouncing an injustice, we are defending the rights of a suffering people — then the next day we, find ourselves accomplices in a massacre.
All the massacres that have taken place in recent years, like most of the bloody wars, have been linked to complex and long-standing “cases” of identity. Sometimes the victims are forever desperately the same; sometimes the situation is reversed and the victimisers of yesterday become victims of today; or vice versa. Such words themselves, it must be said, are meaningful only to outside observers; for people directly involved in conflicts arising out of identity, for those who have suffered and been afraid, nothing else exists except “them” and “us”, the insult and the atonement. “We” are necessarily and by definition innocent victims; “they” are necessarily guilty and have long been so, regardless of what they may be enduring at present.
And when we, the outside observers, go in for this game and cast one community in the role of the sheep and another in that of the wolf, what we are unwittingly doing is granting the former community impunity in advance for its crimes. In recent conflicts some factions have even committed atrocities against their own people, knowing that international opinion would automatically lay the blame on their opponents.
This first type of complacency carries with it another, equally unfortunate form, whereby, at each new massacre arising out of identity, the eternal sceptics immediately declare that things have been the same since the dawn of history, and that it would be naive and self-deluding to hope they might change. Ethnic massacres are sometimes treated, consciously or otherwise, like collective crimes of passion, regrettable but comprehensible, and anyway inevitable because they are “inherent in human nature”.
The laisser-tuer attitude has already done great harm, and the realism invoked to justify it is in my opinion a misnomer. Unfortunately the “tribal” notion of identity is still the one most commonly accepted everywhere, not only amongst fanatics. But many ideas that have been commonly accepted for centuries are no longer admissible today, among them the “natural” ascendancy of men over women, the hierarchy between races, and even, closer to home, apartheid and the various other kinds of segregation. Torture, too, was for a long time regarded as a “normal” element in the execution of justice. For centuries, slavery seemed like a fact of life, and great minds of the past took care not to call it into question.
Then new ideas gradually managed to establish themselves: that every man had rights that must be defined and respected; that women should have the same rights as men; that nature too deserved to be protected; that the whole human race has interests in common in more and more areas – the environment, peace, international exchanges, the battle against the great scourges of disease and natural disaster; that others might and even should interfere in the internal affairs of countries where fundamental human rights are abused. And so on.
In other words, ideas that have hitherto prevailed throughout history are not necessarily those that ought to prevail in times to come. When new facts emerge we need to reconsider our attitudes and habits. Sometimes, when such facts emerge too rapidly, our mental attitudes can’t keep up with them and we find ourselves trying to fight fires by pouring oil on them. But in the age of globalisation and of the ever-accelerating intermingling of elements in which we are all caught up, a new concept of identity is needed, and needed urgently. We cannot be satisfied with forcing billions of bewildered human beings to choose between excessive assertion of their identity and the loss of their identity altogether, between fundamentalism and disintegration. But that is the logical consequence of the prevailing attitude on the subject. If our contemporaries are not encouraged to accept their multiple affiliations and allegiances; if they cannot reconcile their need for identity with an open and unprejudiced tolerance of other cultures; if they feel they have to choose between denial of the self and denial of the other — then we shall be bringing into being legions of the lost and hordes of bloodthirsty madmen.
But let us return for a moment to some examples I quoted at the beginning of this book. A man with a Serbian mother and a Croatian father, and who manages to accept his dual affiliation, will never take part in any form of ethnic “cleansing”. A man with a Hutu mother and a Tutsi father, if he can accept the two “tributaries” that brought him into the world, will never be a party to butchery or genocide. And neither the Franco-Algerian lad, nor the young man of mixed German and Turkish origin whom I mentioned earlier, will ever be on the side of the fanatics if they succeed in living peacefully in the context of their own complex identity. Here again it would be a mistake to see such examples as extreme or unusual. Wherever there are groups of human beings living side by side who differ from one another in religion, colour, language, ethnic origin or nationality; wherever there are tensions, more or less longstanding, more or less violent, between immigrants and local populations, Blacks and Whites, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Arabs, Hindus and Sikhs, Lithuanians and Russians, Serbs and Albanians, Greeks and Turks, English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians, Flemings and Walloons, Chinese and Malays — yes, wherever there is a divided society, there are men and women bearing within them contradictory allegiances, people who live on the frontier between opposed communities, and whose very being might be said to be traversed by ethnic or religious or other fault lines.
We are not dealing with a handful of marginal people. There are thousands, millions of such men and women, and there will be more and more of them. They are frontier-dwellers by birth, or through the changes and chances of life, or by deliberate choice, and they can influence events and affect their course one way or the other. Those who can accept their diversity fully will hand on the torch between communities and cultures, will be a kind of mortar joining together and strengthening the societies in which they live. On the other hand, those who cannot accept their own diversity may be among the most virulent of those prepared to kill for the sake of identity, attacking those who embody that part of themselves which they would like to see forgotten. History contains many examples of such self-hatred.