I became acquainted with the Observatory of Identity Ideologies in 2023. It had been created in 2021 under the name of Observatory of Decolonialism, quickly abandoned. But what is it about? asked me an old lecture classmate, with whom I had “done May 68”, according to the expression used by veterans who have “done the Chemin des Dames”. I would like to answer him in a few lines. What are these “identity ideologies” against which we are trying to alert public opinion and those who govern us? How can we define them? How can we trace their genesis? And why did the small group of academics that we are decide to fight them?
An ideology, for a naive person like me, who hasn't opened a philosophy book since high school, is a representation of the world. An identity ideology is a representation of the world through the prism of an identity. Ethnic identity, sexual identity, physical identity, cultural identity, religious identity, it doesn't matter. Identitarianism is the opposite of universalism. It consists of locking the other, or even locking oneself, into an "identity" that, most often, has not been chosen. It consists of defining people, not according to their human qualities, but only according to the appearance of one characteristic among others; it is, before to see a human being in front of you, a person of our species (our neighbor in short), to see a black person or a white person, a man or a woman, a German or a Spaniard, a Christian or a Muslim, a fat person or a thin person.
What we have seen over the last ten years is the emergence of an empathetic identitarianism that claims to be benevolent. Of course, the people we meet have, for example, more or less black or more or less white skin: is this what can be used to know them? Whether or not they have a sense of humor, whether they prefer instrumental or vocal music, whether they speak several languages or just one, whether they are more interested in birds or flowers, whether they are vegetarians or carnivores? This false benevolence, by privileging a visible characteristic and ignoring the composite richness that makes a human being, reduces the latter to a sample in a cohort. This is identitarianism. It is the segregation of the individual in a category, it is the attribution of a label thanks to which we believe we can identify him.
"Deconstructive thinking," says François Rastier, "favors the essentialization of differences to create all kinds of "communities," based on sexual, dietary, religious practices, etc. Consumerist pop culture further reinforces these communitarianisms to constitute its commercial targets: every product, every social network, every video game assigns you to a "community."[1].
Where do identity ideologies come from? Let's dig a little into recent history, draw on the work of historians. There's no need to look far: the myth of the superior race, the Nazis certainly didn't create it, but they developed it to a point that is hard to imagine. In The Aryan Myth[2], Léon Poliakov describes how the Nazis seized upon Nordic mythologies to forge part of their ideology, placing an imaginary "race" above all others, denying all individualism in order to consider belonging to a supposed ethnic group as the primary purpose of human existence on earth, and rejecting the membership of Jews and Blacks in the human race. This unacceptable denial of the humanity of Jews has recently returned to the forefront: it is an "anti-speciesist" tenor of the so-called left who has come in turn, almost 100 years after Hitler, to reject the membership of Jews in the human race.[3]. He is a disgrace to the human race, but we do not deny him this belonging. We fought against the death penalty, precisely because the most abject criminal still belongs to the human race.
If the monstrosity of the Holocaust remains a unique phenomenon in the history of humanity, identitarianism is responsible for many other crimes: the situation of the outcasts in India, that of the Uighurs in China and the Rohingyas in Burma bear witness to the consequences of the rejection of the other when their humanity is denied and their belonging to a community takes precedence over their individuality. Communitarianism puts the individual behind the community, whether ethnic or otherwise; it leads some to identify themselves first according to the color of their skin, their religion, their gender, their sexual orientation, before identifying themselves as belonging to the human race. Universalism in no way denies otherness and does not seek to impose uniformity. Of course, humans also recognize themselves as German or Spanish, men or women, Catholic or Muslim, etc. Every human being belongs to various communities of education, language, nationality, religion, profession and many others, but being human transcends them all – or should transcend them, in respect of all cultures and all these individual affiliations.
We will find benign, by comparison, the identitarianism that we see in the West, in Europe as well as in the United States. If identitarianism draws its roots from the racist and anti-Semitic ideology of the extreme right, it is clear that it has found imitators in an uninhibited "left", which does not hesitate to essentialize belonging to a sex or an ethnic group, to break the universalism stemming from the Enlightenment in order to divide individuals. I will give just one example of what we are fighting: Columbia University in New York, one of the oldest in the United States, has decided that graduation celebrations could be separated according to ethnic origin, sexual origin, or even according to the income level of students.[4]. This "is to provide a more intimate setting [for] students who self-identify in different ways and to allow members of each community to become more aware of the identity and community experiences that have influenced their student life."
It is to combat this that I decided to join this working group that is the Observatory of Identity Ideologies. I belong to other groups: a scientific research team at Inserm, a learned society dedicated to information and expertise in the field of cancer, a working group on scientific integrity, several editorial boards of scientific journals: each of my memberships has its specificities, none of them allows me to be defined or to be labeled. I also have a family, I have political and social convictions, I have personal commitments, old and recent friendships, a taste for literature, for music, for painting. I even have a sexual orientation and a certain age, but I reject the label of the white-heterosexual-man-over-fifty!
I belong first and foremost to the community of human beings.
