Identity In the Modern World

Humans now have more choices than we know what do with, more frames of reference than we can consciously sift through, and more information than we can process. We often find ourselves with too many options, and none of them are particularly good. Millennials are among the first generations whose lives have often been characterized by geographic and relational impermanence. Our generation has been defined by moving around, parental divorce, and nonstop technological change. Many of our parents were writing their term papers on typewriters, and now we're writing ours' on computers carried in our pockets. 

The problem with all this impermanence and change is that we've lost our identities. Our ancestors spent their whole lives on a family farm. Most of the young men who marched in the Civil War had never traveled more than ten miles from the homes they grew up in. Most of them never attended college, and if they did, they wrote their term papers on the same type of paper their great great grandfather used. America's religious and racial demographics remained almost the same from the arrival of the first colonists in the 1600s up until the end of the 1800s. In the last fifty years, however, our demographics have changed more than in the preceding three centuries. Additionally, we've largely ostracized our religion from public life and neglected it in private.

Much of the subconscious foundation of our ancestor's identities has dissolved. The inherited meaning taken for granted by a thousand years of Western Civilization has been swept away. The economic and technological paradigm we now find ourselves in is comparable to nothing in history. In this storm of change we've lost our identities. 

Identity is important. It's from a firm sense of our own identity that we make daily life decisions. The facets of our identity, our religions and families and races and nations, have recently been discredited or rendered irrelevant. We've replaced them with subcultures, fashion styles, politics, ideologies, sports, and online forums. The void once filled by faith and blood and soil is now filled by social media and shopping. We once defined ourselves by our ancestors, now we define ourselves by the sports team we cheer for on TV.

Our absurd new identities, however, don't fulfill us. Our primitive need to belong to a familial clan or tribe can never be fulfilled by wearing the team jersey of a famous man child we've never met who's prestige was built on throwing a ball. Our need for a deity to explain the universe can never be fulfilled by voting for another incompetent politician who will not and cannot change the dysfunctional status quo. This isn't to say sports and voting are worthless, it's just that they can't substitute for true identity. Michael Jordan can't be there for you when you fall ill. Obama can't calm your existential horror.

The rise of identity politics has been much bemoaned in intellectual thought pieces by "sensible adults" who like to moralize about the virtues of capitalism and "hard work." What the identitarians understand that these old fogies don't is that there's nothing to work for without an identity or purpose. Having a six figure salary doesn't mean anything if we don't have a tribe or meaning. There's a sizable portion of the population that doesn't care about money as much as they care about marching in the streets or rediscovering themselves. All the "hard work" in the world won't buy us meaning if our civilization is melting away.

The challenge of the twenty first century was supposed to be the acquisition of the latest iPhone, but it turns out a lot of people don't think that's enough. They'd rather ruin their lives in street riots than save money towards a McMansion with their future ex-wife who transitioned into a male after being brainwashed by the latest Netflix sitcom pushing "woke" narrative. What's the point of "hard work" in the final phase of capitalist modernity? If history is over, and society's last struggle is against gender identity, why would the average person want to participate in it? There's nothing left to fight for.

Except, there is. The rise of liquid capitalist modernity has created the problem of lost identity. Or, rather, we have a need for identity that hasn't been met by the thing we created to solve all our problems. The struggle for identity is essentially the struggle to go backwards into territorialization. Our struggle for identity is re-tribalization and re-sacralization. The Islamic State, the self proclaimed caliphate, was a massive live action role play (LARPing) in which thousands of young middle class Muslim men left their pseudo lives of consumerism to blow stuff up, burn people alive, and take concubines in a sandy wasteland. Why? Because identity matters, and comfortable modern gluttony makes us feel like garbage after the third vente latte at 9 PM while sitting alone with our news feed. The girl across the coffee shop might be pretty to look at, but last night she hooked up with a random guy she met on Tinder. There's no point dating her because she doesn't want to get married, she doesn't want kids, and she doesn't believe in God. She doesn't have an identity, and she doesn't even know she needs one. 

We live in a spiritual wasteland. We'd like to think people would use their extra free time and gadgets to read philosophy and build moral discipline. Instead, they buy new tech, use it for porn, and then kill themselves when life stops being fun. From a secular liberal capitalist perspective, we can't judge anyone for their decisions. They have the right to live their lives any way they choose. Everyone's choices are equal, and in our world of equality nothing has value because everything has value. Your sports team identity isn't worth dying for because it's not a real identity, it's just a consumer choice. 

Jesus was able to act in the world because he possessed a strong understanding of his own identity. He was the Son of God, the Israelite messiah, and the founder of a spiritual kingdom. How could Jesus have begun understanding his destiny in the world without his religion and ancestry? What would Jesus' life have been like if he'd never known he was a descendant of David and God destined to fulfill the ancient prophesies of his race? We'd be utterly lost if Jesus never knew his identity. The world would be a dark place. 

The ability of humans to communicate with one another and live out their personal destinies is reliant upon our understanding ourselves. Among the most important philosophical principles is "know thyself." Why? Because how can you act without first knowing who you are? 

People never really had to struggle with the question of identity for thousands of years. Like a first language, people once absorbed identity after birth. It was almost subconscious, and it was written in first principles carried through a hundred generations. Today, everything is scrambled. We've broken from the past and forgotten it. We're like men awakening with amnesia and incapable of remembering our own names. This is the legacy of secular multicultural modernity. This is the legacy of half our youth being born out of wedlock.

The twenty-first century will be defined in large part by a struggle to rediscover our identities after having spent so many centuries taking them for granted. We lied to ourselves for centuries. We thought humanity just longed for economic security, but it's turned out that wealth and long life expectancy can't satisfy our souls. We must rediscover what God created us to be. We must re-become what he made us.