Tag: Martin Luther

Francis Fukuyama, in “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment” (FSG, 218 pages, $26), sees identity politics as part of a global search for dignity that, although noble in many contexts, has weakened societal bonds of trust and loyalty. Mr. Fukuyama believes that Western policymakers have tended to adopt a “simpleminded economic model” of the human soul—a belief that people only require their governments to meet their physical and material needs. Politicians are good at talking about the dignity of individuals—the constitutions of Germany, Japan, Ireland, Italy and South Africa all use the word—but “scarcely a politician in the Western world if pressed could explain its theoretical basis.” Mr. Fukuyama’s attempt to explain the theoretical basis of dignity is a bit of a mess. “The desire for the state to recognize one’s basic dignity has been at the core of democratic movements since the French Revolution,” Mr. Fukuyama writes. “This is what drove Americans to protest during the civil rights movement, South Africans to stand up against apartheid, Mohamed Bouazizi [the Tunisian street vendor whose suicide supposedly started the Arab Spring] to immolate himself, and other protesters to risk their lives in Yangon, Burma, or in the Maidan or Tahrir Square.” Readers may wonder if the connections between Luther and Rousseau go any deeper than the simple notion of introspection, how Rousseau’s ideas jumped all the way to Burma and Iran, and how it was that the American civil-rights movement was inspired by the ideals of the French rather than the American Revolution. Mr. Fukuyama’s breezy account doesn’t stop long enough to ask these sorts of questions. He does make a persuasive case that modern identity politics arose out of post-Freudian therapeutic worldviews of midcentury America. If an individual’s unhealthy behavior was ultimately traceable to some subconscious suppressed anxiety, Mr. Fukuyama’s argument goes, the same could be true of a racial or sexual minority. Thus members of smaller and smaller social subdivisions were encouraged to look within for encouragement and blame the larger culture for their problems. His aim in “The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity—Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture” (Liveright, 256 pages $27.95) is to undermine the whole idea of what he calls “essentialism.” “In general,” he writes, “there isn’t some inner essence that explains why people of a certain social identity are the way they are.” What sounds at first like a direct challenge to our political culture’s obsession with identity turns out to be a series of highly literate but dilettantish “explorations”—discursive arguments that racial identities are sometimes based on obsolete science, national identities depend on fictions, religious identities have more to do with practice than with doctrinal belief, and so on.