More on Identity

While waiting to see how Sarah Palin presents herself on Saturday Night Live, I want to return to Amin Maalouf's "On Identity." He wrote this essay because identity appears to be the cause of the great genocides of the twentieth century; Germany and the Holocaust, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Darfur, Iraq among the Shiites and Sunis, India and Pakistan. His examination of identity illuminates how dangerous each of us becomes when we get stuck in a primary identity.

After each ethnic massacre we ask ourselves, quite rightly, how human beings can perpetrate such atrocities. ...When an otherwise normal man is transformed overnight into a killer, that is
indeed insanity. But when there are thousands, millions of killers; when this phenomenon occurs in one country after another, in different cultures, among the faithful of all religions and among unbelievers alike, it's no longer enough to talk of madness.

Add threat to the situation, add threat to the tribe, and what happens:

...if the men of all countries, of all conditions and faiths can so easily be transformed into butchers, if fanatics of all kinds manage so easily to pass themselves off as defenders of identity, it's because the "tribal" concept of identity still prevalent all over the world facilitates such a distortion.

We can slice our identities, or we can view ourselves, like the vast number of people who have moved from their origins, as a combination of identities, molded and changed by experience.

[Tribal]... is a concept inherited from the conflicts of the past, and many of us would reject it if we examined it more closely. But we cling to it through habit, from lack of imagination or resignation, thus inadvertently contributing to the tragedies by which, tomorrow, we shall be genuinely shocked.

By the way: While flying back from Chicago, I watched Barack Obama's speech at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner on Thursday night. He looked adorable in his white tie and tails, but more importantly, he was so cool and endearing in his delivery. Contrast that to how uncomfortable McCain was in trying to respond to Obama's jokes without exploding from his anger.