throwing around a bit of identity

My life is and always has been very proletarian, whether I knew it or not. Even in Rhodesia, where I was supposedly riding high and dry on my white horse, I had no pretensions, since what was imbued in me was rather a sense of fear, (something next to godliness), in terms of my place in the world -- where Christianity was supposed to help make life for me only slightly less than tenuous.

I came to Australia, and found people had rights, and colours, and that these were the markers of a fixed identity, considered unalterable. My Christian servility did not help me work my way around these markers. My attitudes, in the eyes of others, remained opaque. I remember trying an art course, and finding much of the critique of culture being made to relate little to my experiences. "Shutters" were falling down around my eyes, I was told -- but truth be told, my eyes had yet to be enlightened as to the meaning of the culture, and thereby as to the meaning of the critique brought to bare on it. No shutters could fall when there were none to know about.

I found Australians abrasive in their demands that I should know all sorts of things, which hadn't yet been discussed with me. "Abrasive", however, was a word that only came belatedly to my lips. My real impression is that they were superficial, joyless.

I found that most of them would not respond to the human being inside -- instead most of them related to you as if they were judging whether you were living up or down to your identity. As I didn't yet have an identity, the nature of this game flew by me. Instead, I registered a kind of flightiness, and sort of superficial disregard for what I felt.

Race and identity are important to Australians, I later discovered. They're really so important, because according to the mentality I encountered, identity is fixed. It's not supposed to require learning, adaptation, or reflection to have an identity. You've simply got one and you're stuck with it. However, my deeply felt concern was the need to learn, to adapt and to reflect upon the meaning of reality within an entirely different cultural system.

My failure to immediately assimilate -- which no doubt many Aussies thought was natural to me, since I was white (the Chinese visitors were given more obvious care) -- meant that I stuck out like an injured thumb. I was thought "immature" -- a surmisal that I readily agreed with, for I sensed that the paralysing confusion I typically experienced was due to not knowing or having experienced very much.

Having alighted upon this thesis, I set about trying to find ways to experience the world that would plug up my missing gaps of knowledge. My approach was slow and hit and miss and often paralysed by fear.

It was the stress of not knowing how to adapt -- yet knowing that I needed to -- that caused my chronic fatigue syndrome, and sudden onset of all sorts of food allergies. (My parents took this as a sign that I was turning decadent, by losing track of what was necessary for Christian rectitude -- however, as Nietzsche points out, it was the Christianity itself that was the decadence. One does not live by "spirit" alone, but requires actual knowledge to get by.)

Australians still considered me quite immature many years later, when I got my first job. Only this time it struck me, you know, that the workplace bullying and the slights, and ongoing antagonisms that pivoted on my "identity" were actually majorly immature. I began to see the constant onslaught of snide remarks and belittlement as being a symptom of deep immaturity on a moral level. An insight struck me that such people who employed such tactics had a very suave and clever way of covering their bases and making themselves look good; but deep down they were deeply underdeveloped, had no ethical training, and saw reality in oversimplified terms, based on what they took to be their and my "identity".

Over the years, I have been able to piece together, bit by bit, some of the logic of this philosophy of identity, this morality of identity, which prevents people from looking beneath the surface to see the human who resides there. Much of what I have written on my blog goes towards that end.

It is not easy to understand a way of thinking that you were not brought up with. Just as many Australians find it hard enough to imagine that I was not brought up on a white horse with a birch to discipline the natives, I also find it hard to grasp the emotional importance that they attach to their identity politics. In particular, I don't see that the tendency to view others in terms of a fixed and immutable identity makes those who think in these terms particularly moral.

We have a long way to go.