A meme circles social networks, which brilliantly summarizes one consequence of the pseudo-leftist, actually deeply capitalist individualist worldview adopted by a majority of the western intelectual establishment:
Let me first admit that the statement is mainly correct. This is what typically happens to a newborn, and for many people also how their lives go (although the meme neglects growing numbers of those who follow its message and cast off their religious or ethnic group identities). I can even accept that national and religious identities are fictional in some sense (although in that sense all identities are fictional).
At the surface, the view in the meme is pacifist and altruist, as it aims to dismiss what is generally accepted as the source of all the conflicts in the world in the past century or more: nationalism and religious fanatism. By dismissing group identities, it may be taken to restrict identities to the individual level, thus making the humanity the only group of people that is real.
I argue that on a deeper look, its extreme individualism and universalism are logically untennable and pragmatically alienating and inhibiting for any action. Arbitrary medium size group identities cutting across social classes and ideological views present an optimal stage for the realization and harmonization of interests of social groups.
Let me begin by pointing out that the meme does not reject all group identities, but only those based on nation and religion. Group identities that it implicitly justifies are those based on ideology. Every (prominent) aspect of an identity, every ideological belief, defines a group identity of all the people who share it. Someone who believes that animals should not be killed for food or industrially grown because they have consciousness, and because this industry destroys the environment, shares an identity with all the people holding the same view.
What would the world look like if only this kind of group identities existed? One possibility is that identities be formed based on very particular prominent ideas, yielding numerous group identities based on causes such as veganism, feminism, LGBTQIA-activism, climate-justice, racial justice, reproductive rights, animal rights. In such a fragmentized reality, no group could make a real impact on its own.
Another is that group identities be based on the destribution of power, as the ultimate ground of shared interests. This puts everyone who is victim to power in one group, with one group identity, leaving the powerfull a relatively small group, forced to make compromises - i.e. to accept stricter limits of power.
I will not discuss the question why the former option obtains rather than the latter: the answer is obvious. Rather, I want to point out a weakness that both suffer from. All such group identities involve extremely large numbers of individuals dispersed around the globe, heterogeneous in most other respects: with different cultures, systems of values, languages, geographic and social peculiarities. They require enormous effort, finances and infrastructure to be organized and coordinated. And finances and infrastructure are largely in the hands of one group - which naturally makes sure to share them only to the degree that its greedy apetites do not suffer.
National or religious grouping is a mechanism which has developped exactly to provide limited social domains within which the distribution of power is regulated based on principles which are shared by the group members and present the main defining property of the group.
This is not to deny that nationalism and religious fanatism have been involved in all the modern wars. But nationalism and religious fanatism are tools which the group bearing power in one nation or religion uses to subjugate the rest of the community and expand its power across its boundaries. The locus of evil is not the nation or religious group - it is the greed for power and the lack of empathy.
Nations, in particular smaller ones, as limited domains of shared basic ethical principles and social mechanisms are a precondition for the control of power, but also for the nourishing of empathy. It is in the human nature to feel more empathy for a concrete or at least vividly imagineable person in our surrounding than for a remote abstract individual somewhere in the world, i.e. for a limited number of people sharing our system of values and social concepts than for an enormous group including people very different from us.
Nations, in particular smaller ones, are also domains in which all social roles are represented in natural proportions, yet in numbers that enable communication and successful tuning of the balance between them and their relations. Crucially, nations force the powerful into the same identity with the powerless, putting them within the reach of each other's empathy.
Rather than destroying manageable social domains of representative samples, which the meme above aims at - we should concentrate our effort on keeping them, and focus on recovering the balance of power and healthy doses of empathy within them.
