How Much Identity Can Society Stand?

The following essay was originally published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on February 22, 2021, and appears here in translation with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.

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Community membership used to be a matter of religion and, after that, ideology. Today this function has been taken over by the concept of identity. Religion and ideology in the past led repeatedly to serious and even bloody conflicts. Will this history repeat itself under the new principle? Themes of cultural membership seem to be rattling our Western societies increasingly, splitting them along the political lines of distributive justice. Questions of identity—ethnic, gender, sexual—dominate, as the debates over racism, postcolonialism, and gender grow violent and aggressive. These are probably unavoidable confrontations in an increasingly pluralistic society, just as they give expression to social conflicts, fought over the distribution of visibility and influence, attention and recognition.

As unavoidable as these conflicts may seem, they are also confusing, opaque, and ambivalent. The violence of some attacks against traditionalist positions, as well as the violence in the defense of tradition, in addition to the radicalness of identity demands lead to the question: How much identity politics strengthens the pluralism of a society, and at what point does it turn into fragmentation? The principle at stake is this: the ethnic, cultural, and religious-worldview pluralism that is growing in Germany as elsewhere is no idyll; on the contrary it is full of disputes and conflict potential. If this multifacetedness is to be lived out in a peaceful manner, then pluralism must be more than the mere coexistence of minorities and identities that not only differ from each other but also separate from each other. Fundamental commonalities are necessary, including of course a common language, and naturally also a shared recognition of justice and law.

In addition, there must also be a constantly renewed understanding as to what holds us together despite our differences, through binding understandings of freedom, justice, solidarity, human dignity, and tolerance—that is, the core values of our open, liberal society, as well as the cultural norms, memories, and traditions that have been shaped by history. Cultural identity defined in this way is the opposite of the goal of identity politics from the right and sometimes from the left as well.

A Cultural Home

Right-wing identity politics is dangerous as well as delusional because it misrepresents national cultural identity as an ethnic and cultural homogeneity that it wants to impose: not difference, but separation and exclusion, pursued via intolerance, hate, and violence against the “other” and the “foreign.” Right-wing extremists and populists appeal to national identities. Nonetheless, in my view, homeland and patriotism, national culture and the “cultural nation” are concepts and realities that we must not abandon to the right. They are not reactionary residues of a past that is disappearing.

If one takes into account our European neighbors as well as adopts a global perspective, one finds that the “nation” is not at all a historically exhausted category. And the pandemic has in fact shown how necessary this community of solidarity remains, that is, the national social-state. In a period of dramatic changes, the need for a social and cultural home is great. One answer to this need is the nation. Refusing to recognize this is, in my opinion, a matter of elitist, arrogant stupidity.

However the changes that we are experiencing now render obsolete the fiction of a homogeneous national culture in the tradition of Johann Gottfried Herder.^[1] Nonetheless, culture is also not only “interculture,” a cultural McWorld or cultural plasma. It is and will always remain a matter of regional and national specificity, a historically formed ensemble of lifestyles and practices, including legacies and memories, predispositions and convictions, aesthetic forms and artistic figures. And precisely as this kind of ensemble, culture shapes the relatively stable identity of a group, a society, and the nation as well. I add immediately: it also changes in the process of doing so. For culture is itself the real space of the development and transformation of identities, both the reassurance of what is one’s own and the appropriation and learning of what is foreign. This is what makes culture so important, and the nation, therefore, not superfluous.

An identity politics of the left must pose the question of equality in a radical manner. It legitimately pursues the interests of minorities to achieve the same social, economic, and political rights as others. It is a response to the experience of disadvantages. Yet in its adamance, it runs the risk of not being able to accept that it is not only minorities but also majorities who have cultural claims, and these should not be simply denounced as conservative or reactionary or even as racist.

False Front Lines

Left-wing identity politics risks short-circuiting and narrowing the necessary processes of integration and communication. There is no success without difficult discussions. Yet refusing discussion is exactly what is spreading under the name of “cancel culture.” Excluding people from public discourse in the media or the universities just because they have divergent points of view and use a language different from what has been prescribed is, in my view, appropriate neither for the left nor for a democratic culture. Since the Enlightenment they have valued rational arguments, not genealogy or social standing. One’s own pain or subjective experience should not and must not replace the well-grounded argument. Biographical formations, no matter how bitter, must not be used as a pretext to discredit unsympathetic oppositional positions and to exclude them from the discourse. Of course one must listen to victims, but they are not per se in the right and should not alone pass judgment and decide the outcome of debates.

What White People Don’t Want to Hear about Racism but Should Know is the programmatic title of a book by Alice Hasters.^[2] Yes, we white people should listen and recognize discrimination. But the criticism of the ideology of white supremacy should not turn into a myth of the original sin of the white man. Talk of a structural, ubiquitous racism in our society turns it into something ineluctable, in the sense of the claim: whoever is white is a priori guilty. And for that reason blackfacing or cultural appropriation across the border of skin color and ethnicity are said to be impermissible. Taboos and directives concerning linguistic designations follow. The result is the construction of the wrong front lines, insecurities and defensiveness: a defensiveness that evidently does not only inform the far right but reaches well into the center of society. The result is a further confirmation of the accusation of racism, and we end up in a vicious cycle.

Commentary, Not Destruction

The call for a language that is sensitive not only to gender but to minorities in general does not always facilitate communication that can build community. If professors, timid and unsure of themselves, have to ask students how they want to be addressed, whether as Mr. or Mrs. or with a neutral alternative, or with “he” or “she” or “they,” this is no longer harmless.^[3] Those who regard this as excessive are not simply reactionary, as little as are those who reject any policing of language by decree or prohibitions.

We are encountering a new iconoclasm. The elimination of names, the toppling of statues, and the denunciation of great thinkers have belonged historically to bloody, revolutionary upheavals. Today this is more a matter of symbolic acts of liberation from a history that was burdensome, troublesome, and evil. The subjective pain counts more than the close look at the semantic history of a name, a moment, or a person, as the examples of the “Mohrenstrasse” or “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in Berlin show. Because a name insults me and wounds me, it must go: such is the maxim of action. The purging and liquidation of history has been, so far, the work of dictators, authoritarian regimes, and religious-worldview fanatics. This must not become the way of democracies. In every single case, a broad public discussion is more meaningful, and, as a consequence, commentary rather than destruction is the better path. A contradictory historical landscape of objects is in any case a better starting point for a common historical learning. We need the stumbling blocks^[4] of history.

Solidarity Is Not a One-Way Street

We are living more than ever in a pluralistic society in terms of ethnicity, culture, and religious worldview. Diversity is not the goal but rather the real foundation of our democracy and culture. Denying this fact or wanting to revoke it is the fatal and dangerous flaw of right-wing identity politics. Elevating diversity to the goal of all social and cultural aspirations is the problematic of left-wing identity politics. The goal should instead be to accept diversity and find ways to live with it, peacefully and productively. Reaching this goal does not only require energetic engagement for the recognition and realization of one’s own respective identity, in terms of both individual and group interests. It also requires, to an even greater degree, the readiness and ability to think what is one’s own in relation to what we have in common, to consider the common good, and to practice it by relativizing what is one’s own. Working on what Ralf Dahrendorf once called a “sense of belongingness” is more important than ever.^[5] Proponents of diversity should in any case also act as proponents of commonality.

The unqualified respect for diversity and difference is not everything. Instead it should be embedded in the recognition of rules and obligations, and also in the acceptance of majority decisions. Otherwise social cohesion faces threats or even destruction through radical opinion ghettoes and the perception of profound differences as well as competing identity claims, especially in the digital public sphere. Because social cohesion is no longer a given in a “society of singularities,” as Andreas Reckwitz has called it, fragmented along diverse social and cultural lines, it has to be the goal of any democratic politics and cultural efforts, including by Social Democracy.^[6] Its cultural program must be to insist that solidarity—this is what it is all about after all—is not a one-way street, nor only a claim on others; it depends instead on reciprocity within an embrace of the whole.

Notes

1. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), a highly influential German philosopher, one of whose claims involved the character of original culture as rooted in language and folk.

2. Alice Hasters, born 1989, German journalist and author.

3. For an example of German struggles with gendered forms of address see here and here.

4. The stumbling block project involves placing markers in sidewalks in front of the former homes of Jews and others arrested, deported, and murdered by the Nazis. See more here

5. Ralf Dahrendorf (1929–2009), German-British social scientist and politician, a theoretician of social conflict and democracy.

6. Andreas Reckwitz, born 1970, German sociologist.