‘Nested Belonging’: towards a Politics of ‘Nested Identity’
This is a guest post by my good friend Rob Stroud. Let me know what you think. It can be found at his blog here.
You may not be alone in noticing that while the ice-caps are melting, relations between groups are cooling. We’ve entered a new ‘Cold War’ of suspicion, distrust and fear. It is happening between nations (Russia v West), within nations (Leave v Remain), between the sexes (following #MeToo/Gender Pay Gap), within the genders (trans v anti-trans feminists), between ‘left’ and ‘right’ and between racial groups.
Two Modes of Belonging
Human beings need a feeling of belonging. We need to know where we are in the scheme of things. If we don’t know our place in the universe we find it dizzyingly disorientating. However, belonging has its dark side. Belonging can be conceived in what I will call a ‘nested’ way or a ‘split’ way. By ‘nested belonging’ I mean the idea that I belong to multiple groups at different levels. You can take this really high-end: I am, perhaps, first and foremost a human being. If I care for the environment, maybe I ought to place my first level of belonging as ‘mammal’ or ‘animal’ even. The point is we start with a really wide inclusive base. Next: I am a European; I feel a sense of pride and belonging to my common European heritage that has brought the world innumerable good things (despite its own dark side). Next: I am British. I feel a sense of identity here, too, and it gives me a shared set of culture that unites me with others and grants us a common stock of shared understandings. Next: my identity comes down to more personal distinctives–my interests, my opinions etc. All these aspects are ways in which I map myself into the world. My identity is multiple and the more widely my identities are nested, the better I will be able to know my place in the world.
If I took a ‘split’ approach to belonging I might latch onto any one of these aspects that are not shared by everyone and pitch them against others. I might say I am ‘British’ as opposed to ‘European’, or ‘European’ as opposed to ‘a member of the human race’, a ‘white, cis-gender, heterosexual, middle-class male’ as opposed to ‘a human’. It sounds rather silly to say it, but this is actually how we are often tempted to think. We are tempted to set aside who we are in the bigger picture for a narrower definition. The narrower definition my well be true—but it’s not true enough. However, it is always the case that I have at least as much commonality with every other human as I do difference. I do not, however, need to lose my distinctiveness because of my similarity, nor vice-versa. We often think we need to narrow our identity down by splitting/excluding rather than by nesting—it’s neither necessary nor true. Identity is more a both/and thing than an either/or thing. Sure, I know what I am not (e.g. female, black, homosexual, conservative etc.) but what I am is built more accurately on those things I am and they start with things shared by everyone finally (not immediately) narrowing down to things that make me unique. Identity, you see, works at all these levels, because who I am cannot be addressed by either excluding my broadest sense of belonging nor by ignoring those things that make me an individual unlike anyone else. Identity places me at one and the same time as someone altogether like everyone else and as someone altogether unlike anyone else. I am the ‘same’ and ‘other’ to everyone except myself.
Identity places me at one and the same time as someone altogether like everyone else and as someone altogether unlike anyone else. I am the ‘same’ and ‘other’ to everyone except myself.
Are You Increasing or Decreasing the Problem?
When you have children you worry more about where the world is headed. In the last few years it has been easy to envisage a future in which my children are caught up in global conflict. My worry is that the attitudes to identity we are fostering are drying the tinder for future war. Why? Because we are tearing more and more and the fabric of unity and belonging intent on pulling against each other in oppositional rather than nested ways. We don’t need to get rid of British concerns about sovereignity and immigration, say, to maintain an open and positive identity within Europe. We may need to compromise but the two identities (European and British) needn’t be seen as intrinsically at odds. When I see discussions, particularly online, particularly around gender, race, sexuality and politics I despair at the polarisation. We lose sight so easily that the person that differs from us is also a person that has at least as much in common with us. Worryingly, I see the same pattern across the political spectrum (which we’re obsessed with pressing into ‘left’ / ‘right’ categories!) and I see the well-meaning habit of identity politics as a serious culprit in this problem.
Replace the Splitting Narratives
Identity politics is essentially a tendency to pick out groups by certain shared characteristics and then fight for (or against!) their empowering. The problem is it often works off of an underlying assumption of group-guilt and group-victimhood; there will be my group (victims) who are oppressed by another group (oppressors). These narratives usually emphasise our different and opposing identities and interests rather than our shared ones. They often sacrifice our commonalities for our differences and in so doing remove the grounds upon which we will be more likely to co-operate. They are not entirely wrong, that’s not the problem; the problem is they tend to take one aspect of experience and substitute it for the whole (or near enough).
It goes back and forth: there are black people, for instance, feeling this about white people (not without good reason) and white people feeling it towards black people (not always without good reason). Some feminists argue men in general ‘enjoy’ a privilege not shared by women in general–that there’s a ‘patriarchy’ in place that maintains this status quo. Some men argue back saying that women have it easier very often, live longer, have less dangerous jobs etc etc. They play the game on the same oppressor-victim narrative. Two ends of the nested reality get overlooked in this approach: the unique individual and the wider human race—individuals get amalgamated into a group (you’re just a white/black/male/female) and humanity gets turned into (opposing) blocks.
Partly True but Fatally Flawed
There are some for whom the very fact that I am a white, middle-class, heterosexual male puts me into the class of ‘oppressor’. For people minded in this way, if I am not part of a conscious conspiracy to hold back women, put down homosexuals, trample non-whites, I most probably am non-consciously. They have a point. We know we all have unconscious preference for ‘people like me’. That’s the broader point, though: we all have this unconscious preference. The point they make is partly true but doesn’t address the bigger truth. The problem is a common human one we all share. If you take a young infant (around 1 years of age) they will bond with their care-giver but they will also automatically (this is true irrespective of the attitude of the parents) react with fear to strangers. It’s an evolved sense: humans have been well-served over the millennia by a fearful aversion to unknown humans that are not their close carers. We begin to grow out of it—to some extent—but you don’t have to look at human behaviour for too long to see that in-group preference is something that exists the world over. In a sense: we’re all racists, all dividers, all biased to favour our kith and kin. We all favour ‘people like me’. Sure, there will be cultures where the problem is much worse (we can’t equate Nazi Germany with inner city London) but we do need to look for the common problems, interests and solutions if we are not going to drive people further apart.
Suggestions
What do we do about this? We acknowledge that we all need belonging and we all have a part of us that resists nested belonging in favour of exclusive splitting identities. We don’t demonise it. We simply realise it’s as human as the desire to belong. However, we do not simply stop there but we balance it out through learnt openness. We push against our safety-seeking, self-preserving, in-group preference (and fear of the strange) by practising hospitality of spirit. Many cultures do this explicitly–they make an almost sacred duty out of extending the most vulnerable and safe space (!)–the home–to the stranger.
In the best stories of my religious tradition we find such an ethic: the Good Samaritan overcomes racial barriers and assists a wounded Jew; we are exhorted to welcome the stranger ‘for in so doing we entertain angels unaware’.
We need to avoid two equally false doctrines doing the rounds at the moment:
- Prejudice, bias and privilege are not real—no they are; it’s just it affects all of us more than we realize.
- We overcome others’ prejudices by retreating into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ camps—no, we’re all capable of prejudice and retreating into polarised camps only strengthens the fear of the other group
It may be tempting to attempt to dissolve human ‘groupish-ness’. Good luck with that! It’s not going away any time in the next several millennia! No. What we need to do is encourage better groupish-ness.
Here’s my basic suggestion. When people begin discussing some group-based issue (on gender, race, sexuality, class, faith, finance, nationhood, left/right etc.) listen to them, but also ask this question too: how are these ideas and these people helping to create a narrative of ‘nested belonging’? People often identify important concerns but fail to join them up to the concerns of wider humanity. Ask people–and yourself : ‘So, what in your view, will help all of us come closer together?’ ‘What’s your part in helping address the concerns of other groups as well as your own?’
Bankers are here to stay. They’re not all evil! Socialists identify serious problems in the very structures of how societies tend to distribute resources. Capitalists often create great goods for the world, etc. When that little urge rises in you to dismiss others as ‘one of them’, stop! Most people have something worth hearing even if it’s just to adjust your understanding. Even Donald Trump has risen because there are problems that are afflicting his constituency that the status quo was ignoring.
The fool splits the world into simple categories, the wise person sees the many complexities. Most of us do both! (See what I did there?).
The narrative is almost always broader than that favoured by groups. Ask the bigger questions. Find the broader story.
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