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Just how far does agreeing to respect someone's identity go? Let me introduce you to a strange case that I read about over the weekend, of a Jewish woman named Daryln Madden. Darlyn is much more violent than the typical woman, having murdered at least three people, with the most recently discovered one being the horrifying cold case of Bill Newton:
Now, if dismembering gay porn stars doesn't really sound like the sort of thing that you typically expect Jewish ladies in Southern California to get up to, there's certainly a good reason for that, and you've probably already guessed the explanation - Daralyn was Darrell at the time that "she" was gruesomely butchering men for fun and profit. Here's where things get weirder though:
...
Indeed.
So, which of Ms. Madden's identities are to be respected? Is "she" truly an Orthodox Jew, entitled to the superior kosher diet instead of standard prison slop? Well, if a man can become a woman, surely a Nazi can become a Jew, I suppose. Still, even by the standards of trans-in-prison debates, the level of cynicism or true belief (there can't be any in between, right?) to acknowledge Ms. Madden as an authentic Jewish woman boggles the mind. Point deer, make horse.
I think we are overfocused on identity and have an impoverished shared/folk understanding of what it is actually like to 'be a self'.
While this was true previously it is particularly true now, with the internet, which creates I argue a sense of disembodiment.
Being a self is much more than just having an identity. A self is the space that our separate, overlapping identities arise in. It contains something ineffable that can't be captured by propositions around 'who one is'
Now we obviously need to operate with others which is where identity/persona is relevant. But we should enrich our vocabulary of what it means to 'be a human's, with all its attendent existential anxieties so that we don't mistake ourselves and each other as identities, as well as helping young people understand their experience.
I know I'm a bit late, but that reminds me of a thought I often have, which sadly I'm not able to properly put into words:
A year ago I was telling my father about people I met and their identities(mostly a few strangely similar depressed feminists) and about me struggling with having no real identity I can think of. And he was extremely annoyed with the way people today emphasize their identities and with me feeling like I needed one. I on the other hand wasn't sure whether anything really changed or whether most people were always this way and their identities just were different to today. Maybe being transgender/woke/MAGA/PUA-adjacent is similar to how being an officer at the royal navy in the mid 19th century felt. Probably there was also a lot of behavior which was unnecessary for the fulfillment of their duties, but which helped to sustain one(or a few) coherent identity. My father thinks, that this is maybe true, but in the 70s and 80s and more generally after WW2 people in western countries actually started having less and less strict identities and we were kind of at peak individualism when it comes to identity construction and now have regressed a bit.
Anyone any intuition on whether the "strict/normed identity" vs "plain/naked individual" actually changes and if in what way historically?
It would be interesting to look at what people find salient, what identities they inhabit, in different times. I imagine a colonial governer in India would draw on that tradition of 'Great Englishman'. All of these kind of identities, nationhood, ancestry identities seem to have a strong component of fortifying myth, while other identities are perhaps just closer to roles, eg engineer, internet troll etc. Which is not to contrast or make any particular point except to try to tease 'identity' out a bit.
My point was more around how we don't typically have good language to describe our moment by moment experience as a Self and what that encompasses. From religious traditions and phenomenological philosophers, cognitive science, we actually have a rich model and language of direct experience, but this hasn't made it into the public space.
I mean existence is actually pretty weird. For example it's possible to find yourself in fairly uncertain states about what is actually happening in moment to moment consciousness and life and our interactions with others can be coloured by a certain weirdness. While we can often retreat to a sensible perspective of ego, or small self, with our identities, beliefs, and homoncular experience, we also may be plunged into existential anxiety and shifting reality.
I think the failure to communicate this reality underequips young people to appreciate that they might have difficult, uncomfortable experiences where they don't feel like a coherent whole. They might mistake this as a kind of mismatch, where something is wrong with them, and search for a path of certainty by over attaching to an identity they can perform.
I very much agree with the weirdness of human experience. I sometimes find it so strange, that I seriously wonder whether reality is really all that real.
I am glad that I know that my family understands this and I will try to show my future children that having even unsettling weird experiences is a normal part of human condition.
I am formulating a post on this. I'm thinking that the branding, or framing, of strangeness or weirdness might not be a great draw, but nonetheless there is a great potential uniter in a better description of how we actually experience reality. Of course religious people are already playing in this space, but this always requires some extra beliefs.
For me, this sense of reality, which as you describe can include a feeling of unreality, has been the starting point to a notion of God, but a God akin the Spinoza's God, ie God as the 'other' or the universe. The universe is somehow unfolding in front of us and while quite strange is also magical. It takes me out of the plain scientific frame of my specific beliefs and thoughts running around my brain and into some other space.
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