DEMOCRATIC IDENTITY

I have come across a rather interesting short essay by György Schöpflin, a Hungarian academic and politician. He is a Member of the European Parliament for Fidesz and the European People's Party, and sits on the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs. It relates in some measure to my research into identities. It is worth a read and a ponder. I have reproduced only a portion of the piece.

George Schöpflin

The construction of identity

Schöpflin

The deepest threats to human existence only appear to be concrete - wars, disease, famine, natural catastrophes - as we have begun to move towards a post-material age, the threat from non-material factors, quite logically, has intensified. [1] First and foremost, it is identities that are threatened by the expansion of our interests into the non-material sphere. Here we encounter new phenomena, a mounting complexity, the unknown, the different, for which we have no solutions, which we have no way of decoding. These phenomena impact on our world of meanings and devalue our existing forms of knowledge, with the result that we are beset by post-modern fears, a new set of unknowns. [2] We take refuge in what we have, our collective identities, and look to them to resolve our individual fears.

Collective and individual identities exist and impact on one another reciprocally. In this sense, there is a continuous construction of self both explicitly and through doxa, the world of implicit meanings. [3] Reflexive processes can accelerate and relativize the sense of identity, making it less secure, but they cannot eliminate it; they can add to a sense of unease, a sense that the world is not as it should be. The entire system constitutes a thought-world with a corresponding thought-style. [4]

Thought-worlds organise modes of thinking about problems and thought-styles determine the way in which these are articulated. Every form of collective activity gives rise to an identity and corresponding thought-worlds, though some of these are short lived. The literature on corporate cultures attempts to make sense of the accepted way of doing things in enterprises and bureaucracies; the argument here is that ethnic and national identities generate thought-worlds that are far-reaching, sometimes claim to be all-encompassing and offer answers to all questions. These can be termed cosmologies. [5]

All forms of collective human existence depend at some level on tacit or overt cosmologies, in as much as collective existence is about making cosmos out of chaos, a way of ordering the world and thereby making it intelligible and, therefore, safe. [6] An ordering of this kind has certain qualities of its own. It is necessarily bounded, though insiders will treat it as universal. It exists simultaneously with other cosmologies, meaning that each cosmology and corresponding identity will look for recognition from the others with which it is in contact. In a global world, this is of a wider range than ever. Equally, every identity includes and excludes and will establish mechanisms for attaining this. Finally, every such collectivity will seek to secure its own existence over time and, therefore, engages in cultural reproduction using a variety of instruments to secure its future.

Identities

Identities are anchored around a set of moral propositions that regulate values and behaviour, so that identity construction necessarily involves ideas of "right" and "wrong", desirable/undesirable, unpolluted/polluted etc. These norms are not absolute and are not fixed definitively, though they are made to appear timeless in order to ensure their inviolability from questioning. One of the most potent forms of securing these norms is to present them as natural, by relying on natural metaphors ("blood", the body, kinship, the cycle of the seasons, growing crops etc.); these are profoundly suggestive, but are, in reality, only metaphors. Scientific metaphors still have considerable significance, though more in the area of legitimating ideas than of identity construction. Given the prestige that we continue to attribute to scientific knowledge, even if this has come in for serious questioning latterly, if something can be declared scientifically proved, it will be hard to refute. Thus the language of the sciences (natural, human, social) is regularly invoked in this way, together with representations of the scientific like tables and statistics.

In every such system of identity construction, there has to be a hierarchy of norms, as well as lateral, reciprocal relations and this requires people to be "judgmental", in as much as they must have the criteria to condemn certain kinds of behaviour or judgements and approve of others. Without such a value hierarchy, and it may be hidden in our most basic assumptions (like "common sense"), the collectivity can find itself helpless in the face of new challenges.

A system of moral regulation is, therefore, central to collective existence; the absence of it means anomie, fragmentation, desolation and, to counteract it, collectivities will go to extreme lengths with the aim of recreating it - cultural reproduction is targeted at precisely this. Overall, the system is one of shared meanings, which are continuously valorised and devalorised, according to the predetermined pattern of classification and ordering constructed by that particular collectivity. And it follows from the foregoing that such meanings are bounded, are specific to the collectivity that has generated them, though to that community, these values are understood as having universal applicability.

The articulation of identity, of collective norms, of the value hierarchy and its criteria are encoded in various discourses. These modes of expression are specific to the community that has generated them and are simultaneously a form of recognition and an instrument of cultural reproduction. In complex communities, the number of discourses will be considerable, they may well be contradictory and as a rule they will be marked by gaps, leaving space for innovation. Discursive fields, therefore, are a means of maintaining collective existence; discourses that are alien to us can be troubling or meaningless and all collectivities seek implicitly to make theirs unchallengeable because they articulate moral values.

In the world of today, there are a number of such values and corresponding discourses that have acquired an apparently universal legislative quality, notably human rights normativity and multi-culturalism.[7] The anti-terrorism warfare promoted by the United States in the wake of the 11 September has a similar explicit valorisation - it is offered as something that is inherently good, possessed of moral virtue that demands no further justification. These universal discourses claim to transcend local, particular values and those controlling them exercise a potential or actual power over other collectivities less privileged in the hierarchy.

NOTES

[1] Hankiss, Elemér Az emberi kaland: egy civilizació-elmélet vázlata (Budapest: Helikon, 1997).

[2] Bauman, Zygmunt Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

[3] Bourdieu, Pierre The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity, 1993).

[4] Douglas, Mary How Institutions Think (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press,

1986).

[5] Berger, Peter The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967).

[6] Eliade, Mircea The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History (London:

Penguin, 1954).

[7] On the concept of legislation in this sense see, Bauman, Zygmunt Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity, 1987).