Once we realize that most identities are ephemeral social constructions, killing for such abstract, arbitrary, and transitory things as nations, religions, or civilizations will end.
John Lennon’s song “Imagine” provides a template for world peace that asks us to imagine that there are no countries, no religions, and, hence, nothing to kill or die for. The point is to stop fighting about the abstractions of religion, politics, and identity. Too many tears have been shed in defense of empty words. And too much blood has been spilt over lines drawn in the sand.
The compulsion to fight about identity is an understandable manifestation of the human struggle for recognition. But this struggle can be manipulated by political opportunists or hijacked by authoritarians, who may channel it in sinister directions. And in the long run, an over-emphasis on identity lies at the root of a variety of dogmatic and militant points of view. Rather than remaining mired in struggles for identity, we should reconsider rigid identity claims from a pragmatic and less dogmatic perspective.
Identity Politics and Identitarian-ism
Militant dogmatism is often found in so-called “identity politics,” and in the associated idea of “identitarian-ism.” Identity politics is part of the general struggle for recognition, as described by Hegel, Marx, and others. The basic idea is that human identity is defined in relation to others. This occurs within the life of an individual, and also within the history of social groups, economic classes, religions, nations, and cultures. Identify formation is a dialectical process in which people, groups, and nations work to establish their own power and autonomy while also struggling for recognition from others.
This struggle optimally results in reciprocal recognition. But as each individual and group makes demands, there are resulting counter-demands made by other groups—and by dominant parties who want to preserve an unequal status quo. This can become ugly, even leading to violent class conflict and war. And there is the risk that fanatical, supremacist versions of this struggle will employ exclusionary or exterminatory tactics. Francis Fukuyama explained this in his 2018 book, Identity. Fukuyama writes:
Contemporary identity politics is driven by the quest for equal recognition by groups that have been marginalized by their societies. But that desire for equal recognition can easily slide over into a demand for recognition of the group’s superiority. This is a large part of the story of nationalism and national identity, as well as certain forms of extremist religious politics today.[1]
Identities, words, and categories are helpful aids in cognition. But these tools are not metaphysical absolutes. They are convenient social constructions, which provide a useful map of the world and our ideas. But this map is not set in stone. Rather, it is produced by the ephemeral currents of history, politics, culture, and ideology.
Theorists distinguish between identity politics and identitarian-ism. Identity politics typically unfolds within a general shared value of equality and liberty while aiming at inclusion and equal recognition. Left-wing liberation movements aim to provide racial, sexual, religious, and gender identity groups with recognition. The term “identity politics” is meant to indicate that those groups are struggling for equality and inclusion within the liberal-democratic status quo.
Right-wing responses that seek to defend traditional identities—and traditional hierarchies—have been described as “identitarian.” This term has been used by scholars of European politics to describe a right-wing ideology that insists on an old-fashioned notion of a natural and homogeneous cultural identity that is threatened by the presence of “the other.” As Zúquete and Marchi explain in their 2023 book on the topic, identitarian-ism “is about who and who does not belong to the community of Europeans.”[2] Right-wing identitarians view the struggle for recognition by minority groups as a threat to the dominant cultural, religious, and ethnic status quo.
European identitarians fear that Western civilization is threatened by the presence of non-European immigrants, the rise of secularism, and the demographic decline of native European populations. Zúquete and Marchi highlight the identarian fear of “the great replacement” and its link to the goal of “remigration.” Right-wing identitarians fear that foreigners are replacing authentic Europeans. The solution is to get “the other” to leave. This could be manifest as limited, nonviolent, and legal restrictions on immigration. But it could extend to more violent, less limited, and extra-legal forms of ethnic cleansing.
We might use the notion of identitarian-ism to explain Trumpianism in the United States. The effort to ‘Make America Great Again’ appeals to nostalgia for a supposedly simpler era in which American identity was more narrowly defined and did not include all of the ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual diversity that Trump maligns as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) run amok.
Now that Trump has been reelected, American identitarian-ism is bearing fruit. Trump has been focused on eliminating DEI, while shoring up and defending the American identity. We see this in his vow to increase deportation, his attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship, and his executive order declaring English as the official language of the United States. We also see a kind of identitarian-ism in his executive order, “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness,” which created the “Gulf of America” and returned Alaska’s Denali to its prior name, Mount McKinnley.[3]
In a speech before a joint session of Congress (March 6, 2025), Trump appealed to a kind of identitarian-ism when he said, “The Panama Canal was built by Americans for Americans, not for others.”[4] Trump insisted that he was going to lead the American people to a new American golden age. He said, “We are going to rediscover the unstoppable power of the American spirit, and we are going to renew the unlimited promise of the American dream. Every single day, we will stand up, and we will fight, fight, fight for the country our citizens believe in and for the country our people deserve.” [5] This fight, presumably, is against the non-American “other” who poses a threat to the real Americans of Trump’s coalition.
Pragmatic Post-Identitarianism
The distinction between identity politics and identitarianism is imprecise, and some authors use these terms in different (and admittedly confusing) ways.[6] However, whichever way we use these terms, a philosophical problem remains: what is the status of all of these identity claims? This is linked to a practical political and social problem: what kinds of identity claims are worth fighting, killing, and dying for?
In a sense, it does not matter whether we call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Names are arbitrary. But if this is true, then it also does not matter much whether a person uses “he,” “she,” or “they” as their personal pronouns.[7] One might go so far as to suggest that identity is all up for grabs, and that we should be free to name and rename things as we see fit. A kind of anarcho-pacifism could develop from this point of view that would view most forms of violence as an absurd battle over lines drawn in sand.
Now, a critic might point out that the struggle for recognition is not merely a fight about names. It also involves a struggle for power, domination, liberty, and life. People suffer and die as a result of these struggles. But it is also true that much of what we fight about fades into oblivion when viewed under a critical historical lens. Religion and nations are as real as sex, gender and race. But the meaning of these things is the result of arbitrary historical, social, and political forces. And when you start to probe the ontological status of any of these things, you discover they are a lot less real than any naïve identitarian thinks they are.
Identities, words, and categories are helpful aids in cognition. But these tools are not metaphysical absolutes. They are convenient social constructions, which provide a useful map of the world and our ideas. But this map is not set in stone. Rather, it is produced by the ephemeral currents of history, politics, culture, and ideology.
Dogmatism, fanaticism, and other malfunctions of the human spirit result from a mystical faith in words and categories, and other conventional markers of identity. Dogmatists view texts as revelations which give voice to deep structures of reality. These revelations contain commandments that require devotion and sacrifice that can easily become militant. This kind of dogmatism can be found in religious zealotry, nationalism, and other ideological movements that insist upon the metaphysical reality of social and political categories.
As an alternative to this kind of dogmatism, we might consult the tradition of thought associated with the American pragmatist philosophers. Rather than fanatically insisting upon the essence of things, pragmatism, as William James says, “unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.”[8] The point for a pragmatist is not to insist upon an absolute and then fight over a line in the sand. Rather, the goal is to think, work, and play in the middle of an open-ended and evolving multitude of ideas, concepts, and identities.
We might understand pragmatism as a kind of post-identarian-ism. When identitarians struggle to defend an abstract notion of a nation or civilization, a pragmatist may wonder what all of the fuss is about. Nations come and go, and they change in the natural course of things. The same is true of individuals, families, businesses, religions, and civilizations. Change is inevitable. So, it’s not wise to get too worked up in defending something unstable and ephemeral.
In considering the varieties of religious experience, William James suggested that the root of “absolutism and one-sided dogmatism” can be found in “over-simplification.”[9] Religion, when discussed pragmatically, does not have a single essence, nor can it be reduced to one dogmatic set of texts or ideas. Instead, religion consists of a variety of experiences and ideas. These ideas and experiences each have some kind of value. But no one of them is essential. And for the most part, none is worth fighting over. This point of view exposes the absurdity of Christian nationalism and other forms of militant religion.
James explained that the pragmatist is “a happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature.”[10] This playful and open-ended approach can be productively applied to questions of nationality, culture, tradition, and even personality. This approach teaches that there is no single thing that counts as an authentic version of a culture, a nation, or a person. As the great American poet Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”[11] If we accepted Whitman’s comprehensive vision, it would be much harder to find things to fight and die for.
The De-Glorification of War and of Identity
Before we throw the baby of identity out with the bathwater of fanaticism, we should note that even a concept such as nationalism has its uses. Nearly a hundred years ago, as nationalism continued to inflame European wars, John Dewey explained that nationalism can be both beneficial and “sinister.”[12]
It is beneficial insofar as it helps people overcome provincial and parochial points of view while inspiring revolutions against unjust imperial authorities. However, the inspirational and emotional power of nationalism can be abused, as unquestioned patriotism means that dissidents are shamed, and propaganda becomes a substitute for thought. Dewey warned that “patriotism degenerates into a hateful conviction of intrinsic superiority.” He also noted that patriotic nationalism of the sinister sort often culminated in the “glorification of war.”
This problem — the glorification of war and other abstractions — was a central concern for the American pragmatists. James is famous for suggesting that a “moral equivalent of war” could provide a more humane outlet for the martial instincts of the human race. But the problem of war is ultimately a conceptual one. In his scathing critique of the American war in the Philippines (in a series of essays from 1899), James condemns the “horrible, simply horrible” way that American imperialism rests upon a fantastic set of abstractions such as “the white man’s burden,” the idea of “national destiny,” and “the whole bloated idol termed modern civilization.”[13]
He also lambasts the insincere “cant” of President McKinley and the “abstract war worship” of Theodore Roosevelt. The outcome of all of this abstraction, idolatry, and identitarian nonsense is suffering and death for real individuals who are sacrificed in defense of a set of “bald and hollow abstractions.” There is little glory to be gained from this, despite what the politicians say.
World peace is obviously not as simple as John Lennon suggests. Nor did William James’s pragmatism cure the world of “war fever.” But it helps to recognize that we can imagine things differently. We don’t have to draw lines in the sand, nor do we have to kill or die for such abstract, arbitrary, and transitory things as nations, religions, or civilizations. The struggle for recognition is serious and important. However, identity politics can fail to account for the lived experience of diverse individuals. And identitarian movements of all kinds — religious, nationalistic, racial, or civilizational — can become dogmatic, fanatical, and violent. When we understand that most identities are ephemeral social constructions, we may begin to imagine a path toward peace.
Image Credit: “Chapuy 48563289 copie” by Jean-Baptiste Chapuy (1760–1802), after Louis-Simon Boizot (1743–1809), licensed under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Notes:
[1] Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2018), Chapter 2, no page numbers.
[2] José Pedro Zúquete and Riccardo Marchi, Global Identitarianism (New York: Routledge, 2023), Introduction, no page numbers.
[3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-names-that-honor-american-greatness/, accessed March 21, 2025.
[4] Trump speech to Congress, March 6, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/remarks/2025/03/remarks-by-president-trump-in-joint-address-to-congress/, accessed March 21, 2025.
[5] Trump speech to Congress, March 6, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/remarks/2025/03/remarks-by-president-trump-in-joint-address-to-congress/, accessed March 21, 2025.
[6] See David Brooks, “Why We Got it Wrong” New York Times, Nov. 14, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/opinion/identity-groups-politics.html, accessed March 21, 2025.
[7] See Andrew Fiala, “If Trump can rename the Gulf of Mexico, why can’t a trans person adopt a new name and pronoun?” Fresno Bee, Feb. 22, 2025, https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article300673459.html, accessed March 21, 2025.
[8] William James, Pragmatism (New York: Longmans, Green, and Col, 1932), 53.
[9] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), Lecture II, p. 26.
[10] William James, Pragmatism, 259.
[11] Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version, accessed March 24, 2025.
[12] John Dewey, “The Fruits of Nationalism” in John Dewey: Later Works: 1927-28 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), vol., 3, pp. 152-157.
[13] William James, Essays, Comments, and Reviews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
