The Daily Telegraph - Features
In a world obsessed with identity, what do you do if you don’t have one?
There’s no area of life that can’t be traduced by identity politics, and that includes stupid plastic badges. The human need to express a sense of self or belonging is entirely natural. The trouble with literally labelling people is, well, you are literally labelling them. Rainbow lanyards in the NHS and pronoun badges in the office are merely the outward signs of how atomised we’ve become, but they provide a neat illustration of our obsession with identities and how we project them. It’s even more confusing when you don’t know what yours are.
Enforcing pronouns in public or signposting an allegiance to a cause is not so much the politicisation of the workplace, as Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, is warning, but another way to be isolated. In trying to make everyone feel included, we’ve ended up in identity ghettos. Ultimately, aggressive expressions of identity reduce social cohesion and empathy because they must constantly divide like bacteria. Identities can become only smaller and more exclusive.
Camden People’s Theatre has been ridiculed for seeking to recruit, among other insulting categories, applicants who identify as “working class, benefit class, criminal class and/or underclass”. It takes a special level of misguided self-righteousness to set out to promote those you identify as “disadvantaged”, but end up sounding like a Victorian eugenicist. Ditto, the futility of arguing over who should or shouldn’t be allowed to be cast at Shakespeare’s Globe as Richard III, a disabled king who died 539 years ago in a play written more than 400 years ago.
Most people will feel in their hearts who they truly are, but with the pressure to be ever more distinct comes the urge to separate. Religion has always done this to some extent, and in our multi-religious society, in which an individual’s faith has suddenly become – for some – the primary source of political identity, opposition and rivalry are replacing tolerance. Religious identity is becoming religious exceptionalism.
LGBTQ+ communities are in a state of unofficial civil war over the trans debate and multiple-gender identity. This means the movement has to keep adding colours and shapes to a flag until it’s a symbol of incoherence. A flag of unity has become divisive. Pro-trans and pro-Palestinian LGBTQ+ groups cancelled Eurovision parties as if they were the heroes of Mao’s Long March, while gender-critical and pro-Israel commentators (often from the LGB bit) derided them, each coalition drifting apart into dissolution.
We are always looking to codify new identities, hence our current obsession with generational branding. How far will badges at work go? “Hi, I’m Gen X and I’ll be droning on about clubbing in the 1990s. Please humour me.” There is a flag for polyamory (in simpler times, it was just a hobby) so perhaps we could introduce badges for these sensitive souls:
“Hi, my name’s Darren and I’m a randy bugger.” The aptness of the polyamory flag is that it features the symbol pi, which expresses the great trick of our identity addiction: it knows no end.
This is a particularly odd phenomenon for me because I have almost always felt that I have no identity at all. As a middle-aged, straight white man I accept, up to a point, that this is a luxury not everyone can afford. On paper, my identity is that of the dominant group in society, and that’s why identity politics exists. But for me it is a little bit more complicated.
Maybe I’m incredibly lucky that I don’t feel the need to belong to this or that group. I can’t claim to be neurodiverse. I have only the faintest echo of class consciousness.
Having grown up in a featureless London suburb, I have no sense of regional or municipal belonging. I’m glad to say that ethnocentrism is off the table. Other than during the Ashes, my patriotism is such a low hum as to be almost indistinguishable. I don’t even support a football team anymore. I’m not asking for pity, but it’s easy to feel left out.
Wearing an awareness ribbon doesn’t necessarily mean you care about something, but it’s a neat way of telling others what you want them to know. A lot of identity politics is all fur coat and no knickers. Of course, the real winners are the marketing and advertising industries. The more you define yourself, the easier you are to sell to.
It’s no coincidence that those who do not subscribe to our own particular definitions of identity are increasingly seen as enemies, rather than just different. Identity politics is supposed to promote acceptance of “difference”. What it increasingly promotes is narcissism. It’s coercive, rather than liberating. The more we enforce labels the more we are diminished by them, no matter how good the intention. I’ve just remembered I have one leg shorter than the other – does that count?
Rainbow lanyards are merely the outward sign of how atomised we’ve become