Culture, nation, race and religion play central and interconnected roles in contemporary identities. Each of them shapes the ways people think of their own lives. And racial, national, cultural and religious stereotypes also define how we feel and think about others, and so how we treat them. Yet the stories that come with each of these identities are an unfortunate mélange of truth and falsehood. The great nineteenth-century French historian and patriot Ernest Renan once said that, “Forgetting and … historical error are both essential factors in the creation of a nation...”[1] In the case of my own country, the United States, for example, we remember Jefferson’s moving appeal to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” but forget his enslaved children.
The point applies equally in each of the other cases: people’s beliefs about their own religions and, even more spectacularly, their beliefs about the spiritual lives of other traditions, also involve as much forgetting as remembering. Christians condemn Islam as sexist, while forgetting the long history of women’s subordination in Christendom. It is now well known that standard ideas about racial difference have no rational scientific foundation, and the ideas of a Western culture of the North Atlantic and a Confucian culture of East Asia ignore both the wide variations within each of these zones and the profound commonalities across them.
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With each of these identities we regularly make three kinds of mistakes. A first is the error of thinking that people who share an identity must share some deep inner property—an essence—that explains why they have so much in common. Americans are widely and wildly diverse. Being American guarantees very little in the way of behavior or appearance or anything else. The same is true, of course, of Brazilians, Chinese, Indians or Nigerians. Black people have little in common that they do not share with all human beings, save the fact that they have black skins. Similarly, in the vast worlds of the Muslim umma, there is an astonishing range of religious life, from the tariqas of Senegalese Sufism to the rationalizing modernizers of Muhammed Fethullah Gülen’s Jamaat; and Christianity has literally thousands of sects with distinct beliefs and practices.
This first mistake often leads to a second: the assumption that people who share an identity will therefore have a natural solidarity. The truth, however, as Renan argued, is that nations are held together by the ongoing commitments of a people, and their solidarity has to be built not assumed.
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And finally, there is a mistake that is not about how things are, but about how they should be. For with all these identities, people often assume that possessing them determines a great deal of what you ought to do. But how much your nationality (or your race, culture or religion) means to you—and therefore what it will give you reason to do—will, in the end, be up to you. This is one reason why solidarity cannot be assumed but has to be created.
[1] Ernest Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” (Conférence prononcée le 11 mars 1882 à la Sorbonne) “L'oubli, et je dirai même l'erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la création d'une nation, et c'est ainsi que le progrès des études historiques est souvent pour la nationalité un danger.” http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/renan_ernest/qu_est_ce_une_nation/renan_quest_ce_une_nation.pdf