An Unsustainable Identity, A World Stuck On its Axis
Dr. King’s civil rights movement ended racial segregation in the 20th Century. Today, social identity movements distract us from global cooperation.
Without seeing our reflections in the mirror, one could hardly imagine we’d differentiate ourselves from people. Our self-definition begins and ends with superficiality and influence. We rarely veer too far from an assumed standard. From the age of three, we notice differences in skin color and hair texture. It takes us far longer to acknowledge differences in cultural norms. Today, we’re learning to recognize subcultures emerging around hegemonic opposition to geopolitical cooperation.
What is America? Who are Americans? One single nation of people under God undivided through our belief in liberty and justice for all? An oversimplification at best, and at worst, a dismissal of the changing composition of our society at large. Our past identity was shaped by the aggressive spread of liberal democracy and free markets. Toward the end of the last decade, we stopped believing in the merits of our own society. Our influence is infinitesimal, our allies are looking at us sideways, and our enemies have brought us down to their level.
We look a lot like our enemies because we’ve rejected our core values and isolated ourselves. We fled accountability to a geopolitical standard. It was too hard for us. Our value system, then, not our social identities, reflect what we trust and who influences the groups we belong to. For every path walked is an identity that informs and inspires our affiliations.
American exceptionalism was not one of these value systems, but an implicit bias.
Our differentiation was an assumption we carried zealously; that we were untouchable. Our unique style of democracy, at its conception, was an innovation of sociopolitical norms. The American revolution was a plead for independence. We ultimately transformed the way we imagined relationships with our peers and our government. But as our identities become more influenced by algorithms, we risk losing control of our relationship with ourselves. This highly identifiable and undifferentiated existence becomes nothing more than a societal obligation. We risk limiting our potential by inundating our minds with a deterministic montage.
In-group affiliations build trust and allow us to effectively cooperate. They protect our greater interests. Recently our trust in public institutions and each other has dwindled. This could be temporary or foreshadowing a future where large scale cooperation is less promising. Our social identities organize us into groups based on gender, race, and class — though over time we learned to bypass these differences. But the world is changing and differences ordinarily reconcilable now splinter us into factions. The resulting distrust stagnates our progress. It impedes our response to cyber extremism, environmental crisis, and disease outbreak.
The need for affiliation is an immutable part of our evolution, but where we place our loyalty may vary. For millions of years, humans lived in small intimate communities rather than in large societies. A shared culture allowed the framework for completing greater and more complex tasks. These cultures remained broad enough to adapt to changing conditions. There wasn’t only one type, but many variations of tribes, city-states, empires, churches, and corporations. Some have envisioned a global society given we’re capable of decentralizing our differences.
Human civilization in the way it has developed was not necessarily the natural trajectory of our species. Our ancestors worked together to confront challenges they couldn’t solve with small tribes. Shared beliefs and public trust in uncertain times allowed increasingly complex teams to solve the problems of their day. Historian Yuval Harari, author of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, describes what this looked like for early tribes who lived on the Nile River.
The river was their lifeblood. It watered their fields and carried their commerce. But it was an unpredictable ally. Too little rain and people starved to death; too much rain and the river overflowed its banks and destroyed entire villages. No tribe could solve this problem by itself, because each tribe commanded only a small section of the river and could mobilize no more than a few thousand laborers. Only a common effort to build huge dams and dig hundreds of miles of canals could hope to restrain and harness the mighty river. This was one of the reasons the tribes gradually coalesced into a single nation that had the power to build dams and canals, regulate the flow of the river, accumulate grain reserves for lean years, and establish a countrywide system of transportation and communication. — 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Chp 7: Nationalism
Environmental challenges facing these early tribes are comparable to challenges we face today. Preparing for rising oceans involve public trust in leadership and mitigation. In an unpredictable world, we’ve relied on faith to motivate our efforts. Regulating water flow demanded the faith of many people and so did the creation of laws which protect us from social discrimination.
Americans oberserving the decline of interpersonal trust, point to social ills. Before the pandemic, three-quarters of Americans said people would cooperate with each other in a crisis, even if they didn’t trust each other. As we saw, 2020 was a year that enflamed sociopolitical divisions. These divisions solidified around nonpartisan matters like wearing protective equipment to prevent disease.
These issues have given rise to emergent group identities formed around denialism and inactivism. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. campaigned for civil rights legislation with the guidance of four pillars.
- Collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive
2. Negotiation
3. Self-purification
4. Direct action
The first step stands out above the rest, for it counts now more than ever before. MLK imagined an integrated future. We hold an assumption that we could never go back to living in a segregated society. We don’t have to. Our algorithms will show and hide exactly what we want and understand exactly how we identify. The three-dimensional world dictates an objective reality. The digital space is an alternative to legislative norms and embraces comforting distortions of truth.
When political affiliation overlaps with opinion-based identities, identity fault lines can emerge that make objective appraisals of evidence psychologically implausible.
We voted early because it was responsible. They waited until Election Day to confirm their social identity.
Suppressing votes and refusing safety measures don’t achieve much, as we saw. They simply delay progress. Non-compliance is stagnant energy, much like the stasis we’ve experienced in the last four years. It’s part of a bigger trend of denialism that rejects election results and denies climate change. The fossil fuel industry acknowledges the substantial evidence around human-induced carbon emissions. Instead of challenging these facts, they distract environmental efforts by provoking social divisions.
An e-mail sent to journalists in 2020 by CRC Advisors [a PR firm that represents industry players and others] contained talking points that appeared to attempt to sow racial division within the climate movement. The e-mail suggested that the Green New Deal — supported by white environmentalists — would hurt minority communities. It is an attempt to drive a wedge right down the center of the progressive movement — between social activists and climate activists.
Special interests weaponize social identity to delay meaningful action, but we also play a part. Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and conspiracy theories manufacture cultural sentiment. They produce segregationist attitudes more effectively than any “whites only” sign ever did. The Klan doesn’t need to spread fear via lynchings and bombings. Why would they? Algorithms can flood your feed with police killings and daily doses of discriminative content.
Social disruption begins with viewing cooperation as resisting hegemony. What follows is akin to a power struggle between human desire and the human proclivity to gauge its own destruction of nature and society. We want to believe our behavior is natural, not influenced by thousands of years of conditioning. Our race, gender, and class hold center stage while our opinions become unquestionable. We fear and resent people, places, and things that don’t confirm the identities we worked so hard to build.
Describing our specific human experiences as “natural” ignores the fluidity of our being. We’ve performed various sociological possibilities throughout history. We tend to forget that we take part in a global league of cultures. Identity is human-caused and so is our impact on the environment. If you propose building a dam to control water flow, you’re not harming anyone’s social identity. But once our lifestyles are scrutinized, we reject and dismiss evidence on social grounds, regardless of science and truth. In open-ended questions, most Americans mention family when describing what provides them with a sense of meaning. 2) Their career and 3) spirituality and faith. Alas, we still derive the most meaning from those who look like us, pay us, and worship whom we worship.
Public safety and environmental regulations are reasonable appeals to environmental changes. But it’s not that simple for those with strong social identities who feel alienated by necessary protocols. This won’t be an easy task, but if we focus on what matters, we can regain consensus. We must remind ourselves of own mortality, no matter how uncomfortable it makes our more avoidant citizens. Our defeat is avoiding the sobering ecological realities of pandemics and Climate Change. We lose every time we allow ourselves to become distracted by who we see in the mirror and on our news feeds. We’re still reaching for an integrated future where we can struggle and overcome our challenges together. While we reach for the nearest olive branch, let’s not snap it while pulling ourselves up.
