Philip the Spy
Philip Pullman is eloquent on identity and related subjects. He makes the point that ‘What we do is morally significant. What we are is not.’ Which relates to what I (and other people) keep saying about the religious hatred bill: that religion is not the same kind of thing as race, because it’s not what you are, it’s what you do (and doing includes thinking). Yes, it’s not always easily voluntary, but it’s still not as unchosen as ‘race’ is.
At its extreme, it can lead to a sort of cognitive dissonance, when people claim an inner “identity” that has nothing to do with their actions: “Yes, I murdered my wife and children, but I’m a good person.”…So “being”, in the eyes of many people, apparently has its own moral quality, which may be good or bad, but which is resistant to any form of change except the miraculous (being born again). “Being” trumps “doing”.
Probably that guy in Herat thinks he’s a good person.
It’s hard to convey the sheer bafflement and distaste I feel for this attitude towards “identity”. I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike “identity”, must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest (“gay”, “black”, “Muslim”, whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity. Literally vulgar: from vulgus. It’s crowd-thought.
That’s exactly what it is – in more than one way. It’s a crowd way to think, and it’s about thinking of oneself as part of a crowd.
For myself, I like it best when I have no such simple and public “identity”. I don’t know what I “am”, and I don’t especially want to. But I know full well that I am free to feel anonymous and invisible, which I like feeling…
Oh, yeah. Same here. I like to go out in the world, to walk to and fro in it, like a spy. Unnoticed, unseen, unwatched.
There’s a great deal more – it’s a long piece, and very good. I have to go, I have some spying to do.
Angiportus – yes, and related – I get damn cross when the pious & effete elite parp on about faith schools here in the UK, sticking all those poor bemused kiddies in boxes; ‘Muslem’children; ‘Catholic’ children, ‘Knights that Say “Ni”‘ children. At infant school, at around 5 yrs old, I was still dealing with fairies, monsters, angels, all of which I was pretty sure didn’t exist, and was launching a campaign to get my peers to realise that the sky started just above the horizon, not an inch below the top of their paintings. (Tough call, that). I had know idea about what being a ‘Methodist’ was; this was my mother’s familly’s idea. I was not a ‘Methodist’ child to anyone apart from the local lay preacher, (who drank with my father) and the Sunday school leader (snore)… but I reckon I would be a ‘Methodist’ child now, to all kinds of interfering busybody sanctimonious twits, crudely shaping my ‘identity’ to fit with with their big boneheaded dogmas. Like, ‘Lay off, you wierdos!’.
“know idea”?
Jeff. Phone rang. Smart-ass.
Okay, okay. I went to a bad school…
If you had gone to a proper Methodist School, spelling would have been properly drummed into your head-due to your fear of hellfire. :)
Brian, ‘fraid so. I didn’t though, cos pappy was a godamn atheist commy.
Knights That Say Ni school – I wish I’d gone there. I’d be a better person today.
Ooh no. Not the Knights who say Ni school. With tuition costs going up soon there will not be a single shrubbery left in all the land.
Oh well, we’ll just replace them all with glass fronds.
With fronds like these who needs anemones? [All right, somebody had to say it…] But what’s this about knights pushing the 28th element?
And all this identity stuff, what folks supposedly are, brings to mind an earlier brouhaha involving “what “is” is”.
an earlier brouhaha involving “what “is” is”.
Ha ha.That was a classic! So entertaining and diverting.
“With fronds like these who needs anemones?”
Brilliant!
Why do people always apologize for puns, even brilliant ones?
Because–well, sometimes, anyway–they aren’t the one that made it up, they don’t recall just who they stole it from, and they might not really feel apologetic but are imitating someone else they thought witty. Or something. I don’t typically consider puns a “low” form of humor and could never understand those who do; maybe they are just jealous. By the way, there is also a story about a primitive tribe that discovered a type of fern which, when used as a suppository, would cure several illnesses, and the first modern investigator to find out about this said, “With fronds like these who needs enemas?”
[wiping eyes]
Well, anyway, that was brilliant. Five stars.