IDENTITIES IN CONFLICT: MASTERS AND SLAVES

In order to place my following comments in context I would like to start off with a couple of preambles. The first is that I am Palestinian, I am one year younger than the State of Israel, and I have lived the better part of my life in what we still call East Jerusalem. In more important ways than one, therefore, my ideas have tended to be more shaped by these forceful circumstances of my life than by my readings, though I have been lucky to come across readings from time to time which relate to the formation of my thoughts, and I have been luckier still, for this particular occasion, and for the particular topic I shall be discussing, to have come across a recent work by someone who is of special importance to this conference –and I do not mean, alas, Martha Nussbaum- to whom I shall therefore be referring.

My second preamble, only apparently disconnected from the first, has to do with my daughter, who turned fourteen only three months ago, and who has not, as far as I know, been reading Marx lately. Soon after her birthday one day, we were having a normal conversation when she suddenly pulled the carpet from under my feet, shaking my confidence in philosophy as a pursuit, and in my pursuit as a philosopher. With a gently devastating sweep of all the previous masters, she proclaimed with her wise air that a really good philosophy –one, as far she knew, did not exist- would not set out to tell us the truth about the world; rather, it would tell us the truth about ourselves. Specifically in doing this, it would teach us the tools or skills of how to live in this world. She didn’t have so-called “critical thinking”, or “argumentative skills” in mind- she clearly didn’t question those capabilities in herself: rather, she seemed to be intimating some kind of psychological skill having to do with how a person can come to understand, cope with, and ultimately fruitfully express the multiplicity of emotions and feelings rumbling together inside one’s head, and rubbing against each other, perhaps confusing one as to who one is, or should be. Well, we’ve heard a lot about the important role of education in the past few days, including its importance for the capability approach. But my daughter’s point is, I think, that an educative philosophy – therefore a really good philosophy- would less seek to teach people as a theory about the value of, say empathy, or care, or compassion, or even duty, as much as it would also seek to teach them the skill of managing these inherent, or culturally cultivated sentiments which people have, side by side with their other, similarly inherent or cultivated sentiments, such as self-love and self-prejudice, with which they seem to be constantly clashing.

And now to my comments: In his most recent book Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, Amartya Sen brings together some ideas he has been espousing lately in lectures and talks on the multi-layered nature of identity. On the one hand, as he considers the general identities of different cultures, he shows through example how threads of one culture are deeply weaved into another, often unbeknown to the people themselves who identify with those cultures. On the other hand, as he considers the specific identities of different persons, he reminds us how richly varied these are, in each instance reflecting the different associations or roles human beings have. Globally, he concludes, talk about a clash of, say, Oriental and Occidental civilizations is misconstrued, since what we essentially have is one civilization, a shared human civilization, not two, or more. Individually, on the other hand, different associations or roles human beings have, and which constitute their respective identities, can make for the enrichment of the societies where these individuals live, rather than be viewed as an inevitable source of schism in those societies.

Sen’s observations seem eminently sensible. Commonality seems to find a comfortable nesting ground in diversity. The introduction of Budhism into Shintuist Japan, for example, simply had the effect of enriching the lives of the individual Japanese, who now came to have two complementary manners of religious expressions rather than just one. Stories in the Epic of Gilgamesh, such as that of the flood, or that of the seduction of the Adam-like Enkidu, resound in the Old Testament. Turkey’s heritage is a resplendent synergy of Hittite, Greek, Byzantine and Ottoman cultures. The genius of the Arab civilization would not have arisen had it not been for the extant works and ideas of earlier Greek, Hellenistic, Iranian, Indian, or further a-field subcontinent authors and innovators. William Harvey’s essay on the pulmonary circulation of the blood may well have been influenced by the 13th century Ibn Nafis of Syria, while Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres could well have been an extension of debates by Arab astronomers such as al-Tusi or al-Qushji. Akbar’s Taj Mahal, reflecting the universalist philosophy of this founder of the Mogul dynasty, to whom Sen refers on more than on one occasion, boasts patterns of the crescent alongside those of the cross, David’s star and the Hindu lotus. The examples of a civilization continuum, in other words, or of a rich history of built-up layers of human achievements, are endless. Ideas, as the saying goes, and as Sen reminds us, have been borderless long before the advent of the internet, or of globalization.

Yet, in spite of these salient threads that run through the world’s cultural mosaic, not only are we witnesses to constant wars and military conflicts, either kindled or reinforced by supposedly conflicting identities of all sorts and descriptions: these have been alarmingly on the rise, with many more people having been killed by them during the last century than at any time before. It is, incredibly, in the midst of the so-called “Judeo-Christian West” that anti-Jewish sentiment at one time began to run high, eventually leading to the Holocaust. Some of us might also vividly remember the madly murderous flare-out between the Hutus and the Tutsis, leading to the internecine massacre of more than half a million people in the small ex-Belgian African colony of Burundi. One journalist at the time cynically reported the only difference between the fighting groups was the height of the average man. Memories of the Serbo-Croatian war, as former Yugoslavia was dismantled, still haunt us. Religious riots still flare out in Akbar’s India, home of the second largest population of world Moslems, while the dust from Darfur’s ethnic excesses has not yet settled. In Iraq, American and British soldiers are still being targeted by Iraqis who view them as occupiers, while Sunnis and Shiites blow up each others’ worshipper-packed mosques. Closer home to my own region, we have just been witness to yet another battle between Lebanon’s Hizbullah and the Israeli Army, following on the heels of a five-year old violent confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians, where civilians have been known to be crushed to death under falling edifices blown up by rockets or suicide-bombs. And if wars and genocides are thought to be exceptional eruptions of disdain towards humanity, we would still have to make sense of that sweepingly harmful moral indifference to the less endowed, whether on individual or national scales, manifested in every walk of life, arising simply from the sense that identities essentially are islands unto themselves, disconnected from one another and floating, so to speak, in free space.

Sen’s observations on the multi-layered nature of more global or cultural identities, and on the multi-layered nature of personal identities are meant to show us that world ideologies are not irreversibly programmed or in-built to clash with one another –hence the second part of the book’s title, “the illusion of destiny”. Quite the contrary, given the multi-layered nature of identities, and the rational capability of human agency, there are as many reasons to look for and expect harmony as there are to forecast violent discord and doom. And if common features in different ideologies weren’t enough to convince us that is possible, we’d still be left with the simple fact that it is not, in the final analysis, Shiism which battles Sunnism, for example, or Westernism which battles Khomeinism, but a human being who is Iraqi, an Arab, a Moslem, but a Shiite, who battles another human being who is also Iraqi, Arab and Moslem, but a Sunni; or one person seeking to live by so-called “higher values” who battles another. Why then, the question springs to mind, if there are no essential, or numerically preponderant differences between different complex or multi-layered identities, whether at the individual or collective levels, are there prejudice-propelled conflicts –or conflicts sustained by prejudiced identities? Are the commonalities between them, perhaps, less numerous or essential than the differences? Even economically- or politically-propelled wars and conflicts between States or nations, though at one level appearing to be easier rationally to understand –for they seem explicable in terms of the calculated pursuit of advantages- do not ultimately escape the scrutiny of our question: for surely, even as Israelis fight Palestinians for control over their lives and resources, or Palestinians fight Israelis for control over their lives and resources, it is each side’s self-perceived and prejudiced uniqueness, distinctness and primacy of its respective national or religious identity which propels it to engage in fighting in the first place. Or when the world nuclear club, for instance, tries to put the lid on Iran’s attempt to build up its nuclear capacity, it is hard to see an ultimate reason behind that except a self-perceived essential difference -embedding a perceived potential conflict- between oneself and the other – a difference, needless to say, necessarily tilted or prejudiced in favor of oneself. Are we destined, as human beings, to be victims of our self-prejudiced identities?

One answer to our main question, which draws on Amartya Sen’s own logic, can perhaps be formulated in terms of the degree to which one is a master or slave of one’s identity – a degree which can be taken to be at once a measure of one’s freedom, as well as a function of the propensity to prejudice-propelled conflict or violence. In order to explain this admittedly strange-sounding notion let us assume that what we begin with is a wide range of identity-layers, or layers which together make up or constitute an identity. Shiism, for example, as one of several constituent layers of one’s identity, can either be over-blown and made or allowed to reach a size where it comes to dominate or reign supreme over all other layers of that identity –thus reducing to minimum effect the role of other layers- or it can be kept in check by what we call one’s will or determination, or by the vibrant roles of the other layers. Remaining under the control of one’s will, or synchronized with the other layers, regulated in terms of both size and function, it has the capacity to enrich rather than exasperate human relations. Getting out of control, or left itself to be in control, and becoming what we refer to sometimes as “larger than life itself”- that is, than the instinctive and primary identification of ourselves as living human beings- it can easily turn men into instruments of death, or of its voraciousness. If we think of the multiplicity of layers as constituting a field-range of identification-capability, not only expressing what we can do but also who or what we can be, reflecting the individual’s options as a conscious agent to choose at will and according to circumstance which layer, or group of layers, to give prominence on which occasion, and in effect to choose what identity to have, then to the extent that one can make those choices one can be said to be master of one’s identity; and to the extent that one particular layer comes to dominate and in an exclusivist manner therefore to limit one’s choices one’s capability range, or freedom, is diminished, thereby reflecting the transformation of the agent from being master to being a slave of their identity. This enslavement of individuals can be reflected by how they act, but also by how they perceive- both themselves as well as others. An al-Qaidah Islamicist becomes so impassioned by an exaggerated version of his religious beliefs that his actions come to reflect a total blindness to any other value, such as the value which life has- even his own- or any other identity-constituent of his. More generally, our perceptual capability can be drastically impaired, when we find ourselves, also as we view others, limited to seeing one aspect of their identity while being blind to other aspects. The airport official stamping Sen’s passport at Heathrow assumed he was stamping the passport of Trinity’s cook! Here we have a case of a prejudicially-imposed restriction on the range of perceptual capability in the process of identifying others. Gender issues loom large in this area, incapacitating fully rational decisions, or disabling a full mastery of objective choices. Palestinians and Israelis who feel themselves compelled to fight each other are also slaves in this respect of their respective identities; but those who also refuse to see each other but in a negative light are equally enslaved, perceptually. In sum, a Moslem can see, and act towards others as the Moghul Akbar did, or as Bin Laden does.

But how does this discourse tally with how we talk about identity philosophically? What does it mean to say we can either be slaves or masters of our identities? Or to say that our identity consists of a cluster of layers, in some cases controlled by our will, but in others controlling that will? Is identity, then, a predicate, or a cluster of attributes ascribable to a subject? What is the subject, then? How would we define or understand its identity? And if we can’t make sense of what the subject, stripped of its layers, is, then how could we make sense of saying “it” can control or be controlled by those layers which we have come to see as attributes pure and simple?

These are, of course, pretty tricky questions that have been, in one form or another, a source of unfailing amusement to philosophers for quite a long time. Is there an ultimate I that is other than what I happen to be and do, and other than what you can come to know? But let me, without answering these questions directly and immediately, add perhaps to their complexity by taking some further steps, or strides, along the line we have been discussing: whether we are talking about personal, collective or ideological identities, what may be understood from what Sen is saying, significantly, is that such identities are not only multi-layered, but being so they are also amenable to the human agent’s control, as a function of the agent’s freedom or capability. This immediately raises, or throws light on, a number of important points, which I will first mention, then explain. First, besides the initial principle that identities are not hermetically-sealed entities, independent from one another, they are not, also, necessarily or entirely prefixed, nor are they immutable. Thus, we do not only “come by” our identities, but can also make them. A second, and telling corollary point that can be made here –one which signifies an immense source of power- is that, given this conception of identities, not only are we capable of shaping our own identities, but that there is no reason to suppose we are not also capable of shaping the identities of others: in this sense we can claim that we do not only happen to find enemies or friends in the world; we can also make them. A third point, which can perhaps be thought to add to the fuzziness of this discourse is this: identities, in the sense we are talking about, are not discrete but continuous. Stated differently, identities admit of degrees, or they are subject to “less or more” rather than to “either/or” judgments. We could claim that on an identity scale, for example, one can be said to be more, or less in charge of one’s identity; or that one can be more, or less, enslaved by that identity- in the sense, that is, and stated differently, that one’s passion-for-wealth layer for example, or one’s self-adulation layer, or the layer that makes for one’s passion to make other people live by one’s own values, can be more, or less pronounced.

Let me, by way of an explanation; take the example of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: An Israeli can submit herself to the view that she is Israeli in so far as she can settle in Palestinian Hebron. If asked, and she were a philosophy student, she might claim that “being a settler” counts for her as a rigid designator –or as a description which is true of her in every possible world. For her, therefore, it is inconceivable or self-contradictory to be an Israeli and to be denied (or to deny herself) that act of settlement. To be able to settle in the vicinity of the Tomb of the Patriarch is what being an Israeli means, or is all about. An Israeli’s identity for her is thus pre-defined. It is what one inherits, “comes into”, or gets dressed up with or puts on, as a ready-made and pre-fabricated fixture. She refuses to see, or is simply blind to, other options. But another Israeli, cognizant of other world factors, or other values, or other ways of being and doing, may choose to forge for herself an identity as an Israeli without the act of settlement being constitutive of that identity, or after having shed that layer. The first Israeli is a slave to her identity, in that she submits herself to that self-definition, whereas the second is master of that identity, in that she consciously re-composes the relative weight-distribution of her various layers, or even constitutes new ones. Furthermore –and this is a foretaste of the second significant point- as an extension of how an Israeli defines herself, others’ identities can be impacted. The two Israelis can equally contribute, consciously or otherwise, to the formulation of the identity of their Palestinian neighbors: the first Israeli can make anti-Israelism a constituent part of the neighbor’s Palestinian identity. The second Israeli can contribute to making co-existence with Israel a constituent part of the neighbor’s national identity. How one defines oneself (or whether and how one decides to metamorphose, or to shape or define one’s identity) can therefore impact how others come to relate to one, and can impact the kind of life one might have as a result. On the positive side this can be, amazingly, and in Ghandi-like fashion, a far more effective source of political power than nuclear capability. I shall have more to say about this forthwith. Finally, however, and regarding my third point, it is probably self-explanatory how the degree to which one masters one’s identity, as Isiaah Berlin observed, and Sen noted, reflects itself on how much “one’s own person” one is. Here, identity comes to merge as a notion with something like “strength of character”: at some level, all individuals share a prototype identity –perhaps an identity in potentia- but surely, some individuals manage to become more of their own persons than others. Personal identity can easily come to be seen in this case as being differentially nurtured or constituted rather than as being evenly distributed. In this sense, we might say one person is distinguishable as a person from the next precisely insofar as they seem to be masters of their identities, and in how they manage to shape those identities.

As I said earlier, being able to master sufficiently one’s identity, and to shape it, can be a powerful tool in helping shape the identities of others. Recalling Ghandi in this context, it is easy to see how much power individuals possess, which is not that of force or violence, which if one learns to use consciously and purposely [this is the part I should be telling my daughter], can positively transform peoples’ lives. We are not entirely oblivious to the existence and effect of this power, though we often tend to ignore it in favor of cruder means at our disposal. For a start, we seem to be more inclined by nature to recognize and admit the negative effect of such power, as when we rush to blame the other side for our excesses. We have no qualms about claiming that we have been made to become like this because of the other side, or because of what they have done to us. In this sense, we readily attribute to others the incredible power of shaping our identities, of pushing us, so to speak, “against our better judgment”, into becoming militaristic, or into making the military doctrine our earthly bible. Yet it is easy to see how force and violence can in fact be counter-productive: our own claims prove it! If we admit we have been turned into monsters only by the violent actions perpetrated by the other side, what else should we expect to find on the other side as we carry out similar actions but monsters, too. At any rate, just as it can prove to be useless to try to break another party’s will through force or the use of violence – quite the contrary, that use of force can in fact harden the will and push further the desired results- the very same power of shaping the other’s identity, but used consciously and purposely in the opposite direction, may surprisingly elicit the required political results. The employment of attraction- rather than confrontation-tactics can prove to be far more fruitful as a means to change or bend the will of the other side to one’s advantage. To win would be the imperative in both cases, but in one case the energy is expended to win over or against the other party, essentially reinforcing that party’s identity as an enemy; while in the other the energy is expended to win the other party over to one’s side- essentially helping to bring out or reinforce those aspects that can make that party positively disposed to the results one wishes to achieve. But those results must clearly first be formulated in such a way as to provide space for oneself as well as for the other. One cannot rationally expect to be able to woo the other party into self-annihilation! To return to force as a counter-productive means of winning out a contestation, not only is a start-out military advantage insufficient: even successively increasing levels of military capacity in an ongoing confrontation can prove to be totally useless as a means to a political end. Israel’s recently-built demographic wall is paradoxically a statement of recognition of the failure of its mighty military capability, the latest in a series of proofs of the failure of the military option. Right from its inception, with each military success it thought it had achieved Israel has had to discover the futility of that success. Palestinians, to quote one relevant example, have simply not faded out, but have on the contrary been increasing in numbers and strength. To achieve its required security Israel needed right from the beginning, as it needs now, to win Palestinian sympathy and understanding, not to demonize the other as an organically-intrinsic enemy which needs to be dispossessed or imprisoned within cement walls. Palestinians, on the other hand, who proved their wills are unbreakable whatever the force used against them, should also recognize that they also cannot break the will of the other side, and can more easily achieve their objectives by winning Israeli sympathy and understanding. Demonizing the Israelis as an intrinsic enemy cannot but be a self-fulfilling exercise.

But, it must be said, in concluding these observations on the futility of the military doctrine, that it is a sad statement on human intelligence that we only seem to be able to learn the lesson that violence is inherently useless by the very use of violence!

To return to Sen, and to the background philosophical discussions on a priori and constitutive identities, while I have not addressed the underlying puzzle of how one is supposed to constitute one’s identity, I hope it is at least initially clear that that puzzle –in the context of our own discourse- should not immediately impose itself if the contention –as a first step- is simply that one can -to all intents and purposes, as it is sometimes said- impact the constitution of another party’s identity. There at least, I hope it is initially clear, one is spared having to figure out how to close the gap between self and attribute, or whether, indeed, such a gap exists, or whether its existence is at all relevant. In practical terms, it is sufficient unto itself if the designation “the Israeli settler” ceases to be true of anyone, but did at one time pick out exactly that person I now designate as “my friendly neighbor”. Meantime, this settler has to have metamorphosed into a person who now comes to view herself- or to define herself- as a non-settler Israeli. But how could she metamorphose, it may be asked, and remain the same person, therefore in one sense at least having the same identity, but in another sense having changed that identity? The only fitting answer, I believe, lies precisely in the theory of layers: that the pronouncement of one layer of her identity, the settlement-layer, comes to be downsized in relation to other layers that come to assume more weight or importance in the general constitution of her identity. I need not, in other words, nor indeed can I, given my contention I could change her, in addressing her in order to bring about such a change, postulate an immutable self other than and behind those layers anyway. But neither could I in this case address her to bring about that change, it might be claimed. Well, that witty claim is debunked by the fact that, in my general practice, I simply do!

But by extrapolation, and as a second step in the process of figuring out how this metamorphosing process can apply to myself as opposed to others, I need not, by analogy, or going by how I view others, be logically intimidated by supposing that I myself am nothing other than the sum or set of my own layers, some of which I can create as I go along, and all or most of which I can regulate. Let me put this in another way: if I have no logical or practical qualms about understanding and dealing with her personhood in terms of a layers-multitude, it should be an easy exercise to apply that understanding to my own personhood as well. Indeed, this is not such an outlandish suggestion, as it is arguably only possible in the first place to form an idea of my own identity having first, and through others or a societal context, formed the concept of personhood or of identity. The late Oxford philosopher Peter Strawson, in a remarkably lucid and early work of his on personal identity, contends that that concept is primitive, and that I can only form a notion of myself as a person if I have already worked out, from interacting with others, what being a person means. Therefore, to extrapolate the constitution of my own identity from that of others is not only possible: it is arguably necessary. There remains, of course, the natural partiality I have for myself, which I am inclined normally to explain, not by the existence of an over-blown partiality-layer, but by an actual, immutable, I, standing behind or above those layers, surveying them as I might survey a property or a landscape. But there is no reason to suppose that my introspective Cartesian ruminations must imply a total break between, say, the “layers-set” we describe as a thinking subject, and the range of thinking (as well as feelings, and emotions and sentiments, etc.) which we include as operations in that set. One can imagine a working model, in other words, where postulating such a generic distinction is not necessary. And so, if we agree that I can literally and not only metaphorically change myself, just as I can literally and not only metaphorically change others, it is then surely the degree to which I can create or regulate the comparative composition of my constituent layers that my freedom or capability can be measured. Using that metamorphosing power positively, in my own case as a Palestinian for example, one rational way for me to act in order to achieve my political objectives is to so formulate my identity or metamorphose as to cause the required metamorphosis in my neighbor, that is, to transform her from being a settler to being a friendly neighbor. The only proviso here, of course, would be to ensure that by becoming my own master, I do not succumb to being somebody else’s slave!

If you think about it, the upshot of my observations is quite paradoxical: even under occupation, and therefore ostensibly deprived of my freedom, and certainly deprived of objective freedoms, I can in fact, measured by myself, be free. But this is not a Stoic freedom, sufficient unto itself. On the contrary, it is a source of objective power. Indeed, by that freedom, I happen to possess the incredible power of being able to cause a metamorphosis in others, and therefore to impact the objective conditions of my living. Here I wish to make the point, in reference to Henry Richardson’s comment on Sen’s dispositive freedom yesterday morning, that while the capability to choose to act in a certain way does not necessarily guarantee the actualization of the object of choice, it is still possible to view Sen’s understanding of the causal relation between them (i.e. between choice and actualization) as being one of presupposition –that if my life changes into how I wish it to become, then it is only because I chose to act in this manner. There is an even more paradoxical conclusion arising from this contention of freedom: for, as we turn to the seemingly locked entanglement of occupier and occupied, otherwise viewed as a relationship where the stronger of two parties (the masters) has the weaker party (the slaves) floored, it is a strange observation of human nature that, of the two sides, it is the apparent “underdog” which possesses more power (in the sense discussed). A party already in control by force of another party will find itself, strategically speaking, at the risk of losing its upper-hand advantage if it were to initiate a process of metamorphosis in itself- for example, by unilaterally beginning to lift off its militaristic instruments of control. In terms of our earlier discourse, it is in a sense enslaved by that strategic advantage, or by that layer. The floored party, on the other hand, has no strategic advantage to lose. It therefore has a wider range of choice. It could resort to the use of force, or it could employ another tactic, such as non-violent resistance, but also those tactics which, by an appropriate self-metamorphosis, could in fact initiate a process of change in the expansionist or militaristic identity of the occupier. The occupied, in other words, has in terms of capability, or choice over options, more power than the occupier!

I wish before I conclude my remarks, and in acknowledgement of this HDCA event, recall my first preamble to this talk, and specifically to the Palestinian condition. It is only proper, in this regard, finally to invoke Martha Nussbaum. As you survey the devastated Palestinian landscape, various ideas might come to your mind. National sovereignty, or a formal expression of national identity, may well be a forerunner. A major economic reconstruction program may also present itself as an urgent need. Emergency financial aid from international agencies such as the World Bank may be thought to be essential. However, as one looks more deeply into the Palestinian condition, and wonders about what it is essentially that requires addressing, one cannot help but realize that, underneath it all, what cries for attention is human dignity, and equal worth- those basic values informing Nussbaum’s capability approach. Because, if I think about it, what motivates me most in my Palestinian identity-layer is only my sense that it is through pronouncing that layer I could finally reach a situation, or create the external conditions, where my capabilities can be protected and enhanced. I view my national identity, in other words, as a means, not as an end. That is why I am not catholically wedded, so to speak, to the idea of a Palestinian State, the natural formal abode of Palestinian national identity. And that is why, even as I ponder a State, I ponder it in the context of whether it will provide me with the values I uphold. A Politics or an economic program which ignores these ultimate values of the individual is, I believe, bound to be misconstrued. That is why, even as a Palestinian, I am more concerned with the values of being free, and being treated as of equal worth with others, even in the context of one State including Israelis and Palestinians, than I am with the symbols of national sovereignty. It is not one State, or two that matters: it is the human dignity of a Palestinian’s life.

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