Over here at Cameron's place and here at Marshall Art's blog I am involved in some interesting discussions that revolve, in the end, around the whole issue of identity. What does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to be me, as an individual? There are as many answers to these questions as there are questioners, I think, but I provide an answer, in different ways in different contexts, that end up in the same place - the vigorous assertion of identity by individuals is no substitute for the granting of identity by official organs. Indeed, in a very real sense best demonstrated most recently by the Bush Administration, it is important to realize that, failing the granting of identity, or having that identity removed by fiat or force of law renders an individual a non-entity, a non-person, holding no rights or privileges any legal organ of any state has any reason to recognize or respect.
I first realized the implications of this fundamental reality upon reading Richard Rubenstein's The Age of Triage. Rubenstein's fundamental interest is the Holocaust; his examination of the history of various ways in which states have removed legal identity from individuals and whole populations shows that, no matter how interesting or even convincing this or that theory of identity is, it means nothing if not backed up by official paperwork. From the Enclosure Laws in Britain to the de-humanization of the Jews in German-occupied and controlled Europe, no amount of philosophical or theological protest could escape the fact that states are capable of rendering human beings non-human, thus outside any concern, at will.
Of course, the history of chattel slavery in America shows the same conclusion. In the course of the most infamous Supreme Court decision in our nation's history, Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that, not only were slaves not citizens, free blacks were no more citizens of the United States than were slaves. The complainant had no standing to sue because, as a non-citizen (a legal non-person) no African-American had "any rights a white person need respect". From then until our contemporary situation in which the President can strip a US citizen of his or her citizenship, and whisk his or her away to an undisclosed location without recourse to courts, to lawyers, to any appeal to our constitution or even our sympathy, we must remember that the most important realistic aspect of our identity, whether we like it or not, is the one granted us by the state.
Should you doubt me, try an experiment. Travel to a country other than the United States, Canada, or Mexico. Romania, say, or Thailand. Toss you driver's license, your birth certificate, your credit cards, and your passport in an incinerator. Go about your business (having used your ATM card to get yourself some cash in the process before it, too, was destroyed) until accosted by local law enforcement, and asked for a form of identification. You respond that you have none, but that you are who you say you are, you are doing nothing wrong, and you wish to pass unmolested by the local gendarmerie. Should you emerge from prison long enough to contact a US consulate or embassy, I promise that by the time your identity is established, we would have passed through one or two Olympic cycles, at the very least.
This is the ultimate fault of any discussion of identity that fails to be aware of this rather important dimension - the legal one. This is the root problem of libertarianism/anarchism, of a kind of philosophical and theological monism that assumes psychological or biological monism, without reference to any larger community, including the legal one that actually grants us our identity in the way that matters most.
Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, while in a Gestapo prison awaiting execution for the part he played in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler, wrote a poem of the above title, and ended it with the line, "Whoever I am, I am thine, O Lord." This is a wonderful sentiment, yet there is something tragic about it as well. Bonhoeffer was recognizing that, living as a non-person in a basement cell, there was little recourse to any other identity. It may have given him spiritual comfort, but it did nothing to save his life.
