Our IDs, Ourselves
Recently, reading Taki’s High Life in The Spectator has given me a rare revelation. The controversial playboy millionaire heir-turned-columnist has been a staple at the magazine for four decades. His very existence has provoked the sheer anger and unease of many fearsome detractors even within the magazine’s loyal readership itself. Yet, somehow against all odds, the man retains the weekly column, where he continues to write childish satires and reveal what he perceives as the hypocrisy in today’s elite culture.
Not that I was inspired by Taki’s views. You’d have to freshen your face with an ice water bucket and look in the mirror if you seriously subscribe to everything he writes, or believe that anyone who reads him is a devout practitioner of his life’s creed. His columns, after all, are works of satire and should be entertained in the realm as such.
However, it was after reading a number of his past columns when I realized how surreal our modern culture has become. Taki’s satires, lurid and farcical as they are, were considered harmless by most when the column was first launched in the 70s. His style has survived more or less intact, even as our culture underwent a tectonic shift in the past few decades. What was considered a harmless joke thirty years ago has become a social taboo for the more educated nowadays. You don’t have to be a post-modern avant-garde gender theorist or a professor of racial theories to see how far we’ve traveled.
Yet, I was immensely intrigued by this idea of identification. Most of us today take our political views so seriously that they have become more or less synonymous with ourselves. If you wonder what I meant, do a mental exercise. Let’s say if you believe in the virtue of fighting for social justice, and you glimpse at the Facebook post of a close friend who just shared a piece ridiculing the tactics of Black Lives Matter. How would you feel? Conversely, if you support the tenets of classical liberalism, imagine a close friend shared an Instagram story belittling the virtue of free speech. How would you feel?
I would imagine many of you might at least feel a little unease, anger, and distress at your friend who espoused these criticisms. You might feel the urge to engage them and correct their supposedly flawed beliefs. Now swap this friend with some random colleague or classmate of yours. How would you feel about this person? Would you still be happy to grab tea with them the next time you run into each other? Feel free to share your thoughts on this, but based upon my limited observations, I would imagine it is quite unlikely for most people.
What does this thought experiment teach us about ourselves and our culture?
I see it as a contemporary phenomenon where we have developed an intimate association of our identity with the political beliefs that we endorse. Instead of seeing our political views as just an ordinary part of our identity, we give it so much emphasis that it overwhelms the other aspects of who we are. We see our political beliefs as the only righteous cause, which, in our minds, assumes more or less the status of a religion. This is why we feel personally maligned and hurt when someone attacks our political views, even if they do not intend to harm our feelings.
This phenomenon poses a real threat to our wellbeing and that of our society. In the past, leaders holding different political views also have other “IDs” that they regard as essential. Take, for example, Nelson Mandela and MLK, the two most celebrated and respected leaders in modern times. Both men shared an earlier personal history of advocating for anger and violence, but as their careers grew into prominence, they both took on reconciliatory roles as the unifying figures. In addition to a resolute conviction of their benevolent vision for the society, both men deeply cherished their Christian faith and regarded it as the foundation, the “rock,” of their life and their fight for social justice. If you watch the way these two men speak, you feel the aura of humility, compassion, and strength flowing out from the bottom of their hearts.
Their faith gave them depth in their fight for a better world. When Mandela was jailed and tortured by the apartheid regime, he was able to show love to his prison guards and earned their great respect. Having suffered unthinkable cruelty in captivity, he was able to espouse and carry out a vision of healing (not revenge) for people on both sides in a deeply divided and wounded nation. This is why MLK, having witnessed first hand the rampant, debilitating racism, was able to embrace a benevolent vision not only for Black America but for everyone in the society and achieve the monumental milestone in civil rights reform. We could regurgitate his words a million times, but it is almost impossible for anyone today to replicate the electrifying, soul-lifting effect of “I Have A Dream,” let alone to show indefatigable love to our opponents to convince them to respect and embrace our vision.
I believe that these traits — humility, empathy, love, compassion, and strength — are perennial truths related to but not dependent upon their political views. These traits are rooted in their faith, which is never tenuous and falsifiable. It gave them the much-needed inner strength when all odds were stacked against them, and their approach to politics flowed naturally from their faith.
Our political views, on the other hand, are easily falsifiable and quite tenuous. Most of what we believe in politics is based on theories that a large swath of the population can easily find evidence not to subscribe to. Some of these theories are fresh out of the oven from the faculty lounge of liberal arts colleges just thirty, forty years ago. Some of them boast a longer history of existence, but they have at most two or three hundred years. Of course, there is no problem for anyone to subscribe to these theories. But their falsifiable nature would undoubtedly ensure that there will almost certainly be many people who are eager to show us the invalid aspects of our views.
If we’ve come to base our identity primarily on these theories, we would constantly feel offended and hurt when someone attacks them. We would naturally feel angry and want to hit back, which will only exacerbate the division between us and those who disagree with our views. In other words, we are unknowingly building a castle on the marsh.
Of course, the great religions have all been misused by previous generations of believers, who took advantage of particular creed within the holy scriptures for personal gains. However, all of these religions at least contain the elements of love and compassion from which MLK and Nelson Mandala could draw sustenance in their fight for social justice when they needed it the most. It is precisely these elements that allow them to unify all sides and make unprecedented progress for humanity.
Our political views, on the other hand, contain nothing like these. So if we base our entire identity primarily on our political views, we would have nowhere else to turn to when someone attacks these views (and by extension, ourselves) and can only resort to anger and contempt. These are soul-crushing experiences and are conducive neither to our wellbeing nor to our cause.
I don’t think that anyone has to be a believer to have a firmer foundation in our life. We can all practice the notion of compassion and love, regardless of the degree of our spirituality. As human beings, we all possess the innate preference to love and to be loved. The next time your views are attacked, remind yourself that the other person, like you, is a fellow member of humanity that you are a part of. Like you, they believe in certain political theories that are falsifiable like yours. Like you, they want their voice to be heard and their perspective included in the discussion. And like you, they want to be respected and loved.
Above all, we need to understand that we need as many people as we can to support the fight for our cause, whatever it is. My dad always told me, “Our world is a reflection of ourselves.” If we achieve our goals using anger and contempt, we will be left with a society more divided and the problems we are trying to solve more pronounced. But if we fight for our goals with love and compassion, we will have a community more cohesive and a society more united. If we smile at the world, more often than not, it tends to smile back at us.
