IDENTITY IN A MILLENNIAL AGE

Jon Van Til

Rutgers University Camden College, USA

Invited Presentation to the III International Budapest Workshop to Strengthen European Identity, 17 February 2007

Finding answers to the question “Who am I?” is a long-time human preoccupation. We Americans, a mongrel breed, often focus on our ethnic roots, defining our selves into an ever-changing mosaic of hyphenated identities of varying colors, creeds and national origins.

Hungarians as well, like other Europeans, also ask who they are, and seek to place their answers within the context of other important questions, such as those of social class, history, and national borders.

Milan Kundera observes that, because Europe contains both large and small nations, “cultural diversity is the great European value…maximum diversity in minimum space” (2007: 28). For the Hungarian, Kundera continues, Europe is the “median context” between the “large context” of the world and the “small context” of the nation. Europe, and even Central Europe, “is polycentric, and looks different seen from Warsaw, from Budapest, or from Zagreb” (2007: 32).

In our quest to understand the overlapping identities of our time, we may be assisted by the thought of such intellectuals as Kundera, Kenneth Gergen, Richard Sennett, and Walter Benn Michaels, Louis Wirth, and Elijah Anderson.

Gergen, a psychologist at Swarthmore College, writes of The Saturated Self that characterizes the lives so many of us lead. He sees a transition in modal identity from the Romantic vision to the Modernistic view to the Post-modern.

Gergen argues that the Romantic vision, with its focus on “moral feeling, loyalty, and inner joy” (1991: 19) peaked in the 19^th century, but continues today in certain intellectual corners of society. It was largely replaced, however, in the 20^th century, “by a modernist view of personality, in which reason and observation are the central ingredients of human functioning (1991: 19).” And, in our own age, there comes the Post-modern self, mutable (cf. Zurcher, 1977) and pliable, intensely engaged and quickly disengaged, “multiphrenic” and “vertiginous”, always in social construction.

Fed by travel (with its opportunities for instant connection and immediate disconnection), electronic communication (with its allure of “staying in touch”), and a globalized media of instantly accessible, though fleeting, images (think CNN), the postmodern self can find herself feeling more genuine four thousand miles from home than at the corner store, more genuine on line than with her spouse, more human in a temporary flat than in a family home.

The dilemma was dramatically cast by sociologist Louis Wirth, in his classic 1928 study of The Ghetto. Wirth described the choice faced by the “marginal man”, readied by education and training to leave the ghetto in which he was born, and take his place in a multi-cultural world:

The difficulty is that the Jew, as long as he remains in the ghetto, is of a separate caste, living in a world that is narrow, but warm with the flow of familiar life, full of sentiment, and with opportunity for self-expression within the limits of the group. But when he emerges from the ghetto he becomes human, which means he has contacts with the outer world, encounters friction and hostility, as well as familiarity and friendship…(1928: 267).

The dilemma Wirth defines can be seen to characterize members of many other ethno-national groups, whether they be denizens of the “jihad” or “McWorld” described by Benjamin Barber (1996), or white suburban Americans reveling in the racial “superiority” of their “purified identity” (Sennett, 1970), or Northern Irish Protestants (or Catholics) seeking to assure that only their kind will control the local governing unit or gain economic advantage (J. Van Til, in process), or angry residents of Budapest railing in the streets against the capture of governmental positions by persons not “truly” Hungarian.

To Michaels (2006), there is a problem with identity politics: it distracts from the basic issues of inequalities of wealth and income that confront us all in the global political economy. As a reviewer notes, Michaels “insists that fighting over race and gender is not an outgrowth of leftist egalitarianism but an alternative to it, a kind of progressives’ consolation prize, ‘at best a distraction and at worst an essentially reactionary position’” (Caldwell, 2006).

“Nothing beats an argument from personal experience,” Kundera (2007: 32) observes, so permit me to note that, in 1936, my parents first visited Budapest, entering from the North by foldboat on your beloved Duna. Later, my father would write in his first book, The Danube Flows Through Fascism, about this visit to “Europe’s loveliest city”: “Hungarian aristocrats have not found it necessary to use completely totalitarian fascism, which believes in the State, dictatorship, suppression of dissident groups, the Party, capitalism, hierarchy, militarism, nationalism, imperialism, and any means which may lead to the desired ends; and which opposes the Individual, democracy, parliamentarism, liberalism, progressivism, communism, pacifism, internationalism, unionism, civil rights, minority rights, and tolerance” (W. Van Til 1938: 234). The struggle over all those “isms” continued through the 20^th century in Hungary, and echoes of the struggle may still be heard in the streets of this capitol city. The Hungarian experience has much to teach Europeans, and other citizens of the world, about the perilous quest for identity, diversity, and civility in the modern world.

In 1954 my family of origin ventured to Europe, though we would have hoped as well to visit its component nations—and most especially Czechoslovakia (which no longer exists as then) and Hungary. We did visit France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy. Any my then 9-year-old brother Roy raised a number of questions about the strange cultures he confronted. Of the Italians, he asked: “How long have these people been in business?” He also asked: “Why don’t they build more bathrooms instead of so many churches? (quoted in W. Van Til, 1996: 254)” Such are the ways in which we learn who we are, and how we differ from those of other backgrounds.

At age 15, I returned home, having learned the lesson Wirth and Sennett would teach me in graduate school: “People are People”, and wrote my first journal article under that title (J. Van Til, 1955).

Now, in a new millennium, we face choices that are, increasingly not “either-or”, but rather “both and”. Answers to such dilemma are often both local and global, both liberal and conservative, and both traditional and transformational.

Kundera (2007: 35) sees post-modern identity through the eyes of Gombrowicz’ Ferdydurke:

(N)ow the moment arrived when he suddenly began to feel History moving beneath his feet, like a rolling sidewalk; the status quo was in motion! All at once, being comfortable with the status quo was the same thing as being comfortable with History on the move! Which meant that a person could be both progressive and conformist, conservative and a rebel, at the same time!

Thus we see, in our times, religious adherents who are also non-theists, liberals who are also libertarian, and a plethora of aspiring neo-conservatives, neo-liberals and, even, neo-socialists.

The question presents itself: How does one learn to be a nationalist who is also a globalist? A localist who is also a universalist? A participant who can both advocate and appreciate?

One such school of life, sociologist Elijah Anderson teaches us, may be found in “cosmopolitan canopies”, which Anderson defines “public spaces within cities (that) offer a respite from… wariness (of those who seem different), settings where a diversity of people can feel comfortable enough to relax their guard.”

Anderson describes everyday life within the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, where as visitors

stroll up and down the aisles, stopping at various shops and kiosks, they experience other people, and they generally seem to trust what (and whom) they see… When taking a seat at a lunch counter, people feel they have something of a license to speak with others, and others a license to speak to them. The author, an African American, was tapped on the shoulder by a total stranger, a “red-faced” Irishman, asking about the score of a basketball game – not something that would occur out on the street. What is so striking about sitting at a lunch counter in the Reading Terminal is that in this setting, a white man with white supremacist friends is able to have a frank conversation with a black stranger. In these settings people engage in folk ethnography and formulate or find evidence for their folk theories about others with whom they share the public space. Philadelphia holds numerous other examples of spaces under the canopy such as fitness centers, waiting rooms, multiplex theaters, indoor malls, and sporting venues.

Under the cosmopolitan canopy,

People can engage in practical and expressive folk ethnography as they “people watch.” They can eavesdrop and collect stories that they might relate to friends. They can interact with complete strangers, expressing themselves through face and eye work – smiles and frowns punctuated by a critical commentary of grunts and groans and outright talk. In time, their accumulating observations feed both prejudices and truths, affected by their own identities, about the others they encounter here” (Anderson, 2004).

Budapest, of course, has built, been graced by, and enjoyed cosmopolitan canopies for hundreds of years: The Central Market; Angelika and the Tranzit Arts Café and dozens of other coffee houses; benches along the Danube. It is in these spaces that the citizens of this great country express their identities—as Hungarians, Europeans, and citizens of the world.

I conclude by paraphrasing Louis Wirth to the issue at hand:

The difficulty is that the Hungarian, as long as s/he accepts only a national identity, is of a separate caste, living in a world that is narrow, but warm with the flow of familiar life, full of sentiment, and with opportunity for self-expression within the limits of the group. But when s/he also sees her/himself as a European and a global citizen, s/he becomes human, which means s/he has contacts with the outer world, encounters friction and hostility, as well as familiarity and friendship….

May we all value our own, but also reach out to the other—for it is in the multiplicity of our identities that we become fully human.

REFERENCES

Anderson, Elijah. “The Cosmopolitan Canopy” http://www.aapss.org/uploads/QR_anderson.pdf read on 28 July 2005).

Barber, Benjamin. Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Ballantine, 1996.

Caldwell, Christopher. “Affirmative Distraction”. The New York Times, Section 7, p. 1, December 24, 2006.

Gergen, Kenneth. The Saturated Self. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

Kundera, Milan. “Die Weltliteratur”. The New Yorker, 28-35, January 8, 2007.

Michaels, Walter Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Holt, 2006.

Sennett, Richard. The Uses of Disorder. New York: Knopf, 1970.

Van Til, Jon. “People are People.” Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 33, No. 1, 12-17. July, 1955.

Van Til, Jon. Moving Beyond Conflict and Peace in the North West of Ireland. Derry, Northern Ireland: Guildhall Press, 2007 forthcoming.

Van Til, William. The Danube Flows Through Fascism. New York: Scribners, 1938.

Van Til, William. My Way of Looking at It. San Francisco: Caddo Gap Press, 1996.

Wirth, Louis. The Ghetto. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928.

Zurcher, Louis A. The Mutable Self. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1977.

02/07