What if Your Supposed Identity Is Nothing But a Story You’ve Constructed In Your Mind?
Here’s a little story.
You and your fellow astronauts land on a strange planet and make contact with an intelligent species. The aliens, in true Star Trek fashion, are basically human with some tiny differences: they have strange noses — some of them have three nostrils, some have four.
Based on your research, there is no discernable advantage to having four nostrils over three. The difference appears to have been based on a minor genetic mutation some millions of years hence and simply bred true over the millennia. The difference between having three and four nostrils appears to be cosmetic, nothing more.
And yet, the species informs you, their society is bitterly divided, precisely along nostril-quantity lines. The four-nostril variety exclusively breeds with their own “kind” not wishing to “pollute” their bloodlines with inferior three-nostril blood, and they accuse the three-nostril variety of evildoing and oppression against their kind. The three-nostril variety exclusively breed with their own “kind” not wishing to “pollute” their bloodlines with inferior four-nostril blood and accuse the four-nostril variety of all manner of evildoings and oppression against their kind.
There are no cultural differences between the groups that you can perceive. They dress the same. They talk the same. They sing the same songs. They worship the same gods. They enact the same myths and stories, re-telling them almost identically over their village fires at night. They seem to share lifestyle, music, art, religion and sport. They have the same concerns and they want the same things: peace, prosperity and a good life for their families.
They simply have different nostril quantities.
And yet, listening to the leaders of the respective nostril “kinds”, each believes the other are a race spawned in their version of Hell, or are an entirely different species altogether, or are in some way undeserving of life. They conclude all manner of things about the opposing “kind”: their thoughts are evil, their actions are evil, their lifestyles are evil. Everything, from their parenting tactics to their philosophies to their choice in dinner wear is wrong. They even conduct routine celebrations for their own kind, wherein they exalt their own nostril-quantity as a sacred number, and teach their children to celebrate their differences from the opposing nostril-kind.
The children learn to use nostril quantity as a framework by which to judge others: one must associate with one’s own nostril-quantity type, and beware and even shun opposing nostril-quantity individuals.
And, over time, as it inevitably must, shunning becomes outright harm. Celebrations of one’s own kind turn into hate rallies for the opposing kind. There is vilification, scapegoating, persecution, rioting, and even out-and-out killing. Pretty soon, the kinds find themselves in all out nostril-quantity war, with many innocent lives being lost.
So, what do you, the third-party observing alien, have say to these people?
Would you get them to go on celebrating their supposed differences in nostril-identity? Would you convince them they are justified in their suspicion and hatred of the “others”?
Or would you tell these “species” that they are not a separate species at all? Would you try to get them to see what they have in common? Would you maybe even dare to suggest that perhaps their differences are really only superficial, that from an outside perspective, they really don’t appear like differences at all? That they have pointlessly divided themselves along superficial lines and are, in fact, fighting over nothing, except stories they’ve constructed in their minds? That they have invented stories about one another, and those stories, not the biological differences, are what are causing the conflict?
I’m guessing you might, just maybe, tell them to grow the fuck up. To stop being such petty children, focusing on their supposed group identities and come around to the more adult view that we’re all in this cosmic shitstorm together and that we are better off by many orders of magnitude when we get over our supposed tribal differences and agree on some common round rules.
I’m also guessing that’s what a visiting alien species might tell us.
We humans love to tell identity stories. Look at the history of any armed conflict. It’s hard to find one that isn’t, in some way, based on an us-versus-them tale.
But it’s not just overt conflicts. It’s little microbeliefs that comprise one’s everyday thinking. We tell ourselves “those people” tales, all the time, about race, religion, gender, nationality, language, politics, you name it.
Members of two neighboring countries will tell a serious and heartfelt story about how “those people” separated by an imaginary line on a map are so different from them. Yet, to a member of a third country, their cultures appear identical, containing only superficial differences, and certainly none worth fighting over or creating “kind” distinctions. The two “peoples” are only viewed as two because a historical conflict ended where it did, meaning it became too costly to continue an armed conflict so a treaty was created and a border agreed upon. The “two” became so by a handshake to an agreed story.
Members of two cities in the same country, or even in the same province or state, love to tell “those people” stories about members of the other city. Yet, to an outsider or even someone living in a third city in the same country they may appear indistinguishable. They are “different” owing to the stories that get perpetuated about them.
You can see that these identity stories are superficial by how readily they can be dropped whenever something, usually a shared crisis, causes everyone to up-level their identity group. Suddenly, instead of Austinites slagging Houstonians, they become “proud Texans”. Suddenly, instead of Texans slagging Californians, they become “proud Americans”.
We’ve been in a process of growing the fuck up, as a species, for a few millennia now — getting over differences, identifying common concerns, expanding our concept of “us” from family to tribe, from tribe to village, from village to nation, etc.
My question is this: given that we can readily toss away identity groups that don’t serve us (and only serve to divide us in petty squabbles and even outright harm) can we just fast-forward to the stage in our growth where we drop the distinctions all together and regard each other simply as “humans”? (Maybe, if we’re feeling especially enlightened, might we even up-level our identity group to where our “us-concept” includes all of biological life, or even see ourselves as one with the universe itself?)
Or do we need an alien species to come along and point out this blatantly obvious fact to us?