A Conflict of Identity

I have recently been reading Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and a large theme in the book is the ability of someone to have an identity, and to what extent that identity is influenced by those around us. In the book, Nafisi explains that the totalitarian regime of Iran controls so much of the lives of her students and the people she knows that they struggle to form their own identity separate from how they are defined by the government and the world they have created. On page 76, Nafisi writes:

Implicit in almost all their descriptions was the way they saw themselves in the context of an outside reality that prevented them from defining themselves clearly and separately… my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had.

To what extent is our identity based on others in the first place? Psychology has many different answers to this question in the form of different theories, like Erik Erickson’s theory of development and James Marcia’s Identity Statuses (and of course many others). However, the many different parts of a person’s identity (social, political, sexual, religious, vocation identities) each depend on different factors, and some do depend on different people. I think, at least in some ways, other people do help define almost all areas of your identity. However, I think the difference in developing your identity with other people around you, and developing your identity in a country where your actions are controlled by someone else, is the freedom to choose. I have the ability to choose who I know and speak with, what I learn, read, and how I act (up to a certain extreme), but the girls in Nafisi’s Iran do not have that choice. Their every public action is controlled by what other people think they should be, so they cannot act out things the way they want to, and they cannot discover themselves through their decisions. So they are caught in this in-between place where they know what they are not, but do not know what they are. They are caught in this prison, this conflict of identity, and I really do not know how they will escape it. It is a tragedy that people are caught in this kind of situation, and that once they are caught it is very hard to escape.
What do you think?

Smear Your Competition?

I follow Culture Clash (a blog written by a multicultural Canadian-American), and the other day I was reading her post about the recent election and specifically the ad campaigns that occurred before election day. I started to write a comment, but I liked the topic so much I wanted to dedicate more time to it.

I too have gotten sick of the attack ads during this campaign season. As Stephanie mentioned, Wesleyan University recently published a study showing that ads based on personal characteristics of political components have increased by 6 percent since the 2008 election. I am not surprised, it seems to get worse with every election. In comparison, other countries have a distinct abhorrence to smear ads and the inevitable lies and slander that go along with them. In the recent England elections, two judges ordered a re-election for a seat of Parliament in northern England because the winning representative was found to have publicized false statements about his opponent. The statements that the liberal democrat courted Muslim militants who had advocated violence against the Labour Party candidate seem all too familiar. I would say that there have been even worse campaigns in the United States, and they will inevitably grow worse next election. Politifact (a non-partisan group that checks facts during elections) found in a recent study that most of the ads during this campaign season where barley true. They twisted facts wherever possible, and outright lied on occasion, but the damage has been done.

These ads do only sully the run-up to the election though, a lot more is at stake. This competitive and utterly poisonous atmosphere can continue after the elections, making bi-partisanship near impossible. I think the question here is what do we do to stop the vicious cycle? I think publicizing things like Frank Luntz's recent study about campaign ads would be a good start. He found that talking straight and not trivializing the issues makes the best campaign ad, not smearing your competition. Perhaps these negative campaign ads do help the party publishing them by a few percentage points, but I think the trade-off for American democracy is much worse. It worries me that here, in what we hope is the most democratic nation in the world, people are continuing to fall back on dirty campaigns rather than speaking about the issues that matter. They should be talking about the real things that people should election them for, not the trivial false statements that are taking up more and more of our time and money each year. We need to consider our combative ideas when it is election time for not only the benefit of the next two years but for the future of American democracy.

What do you think?