Rushing through the Seattle airport after a relaxing holiday in Anacortes, Washington, I decided to grab a couple of titles from the airport bookstore for the redeye flight back home to Tampa. Natan Sharansky’s latest, “Defending Identity” jumped off the shelf. Having met Sharansky in Israel and devoured his “Fear No Evil” and “The Case for Democracy,” I knew his latest would be a must read for any freedom lover. On the way to the checkout I spotted a paperback with a thought provoking title, “Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America,” by Cullen Murphy. If it weren’t interesting it might at least induce sleep in an uncomfortable airline seat.
After settling in for the transcontinental flight ahead, I eagerly launched into “Defending Identity.” Four hours later I sat back and simply marveled at how Sharansky’s decade in a Soviet gulag inspired such moral authority and clarity of thought. This work is on the same high level with conservative “must reads” like Friedman’s “Free to Choose,” Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” Goldwater’s “Conscience of the Conservative,” and Sowell’s “Basic Economics.”
Sharansky opines that each citizen’s strong personal “identity” (i.e., his or her sense of the value of history, of tradition, of community, not to mention his or her race, creed, color, sex, religion, national origin, etc.) is an essential ingredient for a free society, not something to fear or attempt to eradicate in a “post-identity” worldview. Sharansky clearly lays out the recent historical causes for the current infatuation of liberal Western leaders, academics and elites with “post-identity” concepts, such as post-modernism, post-nationalism and multiculturalism as based upon the false assumption that strong identities cause conflict and war. Stripping people of identity will supposedly guarantee peace. Sharansky shows that these post-identity concepts are essentially a reprise of a Marxist ideal of an emasculated populace, stripped of all identity. Such a populace will be a more tempting target for aggressors—making conflict more, not less, likely.
In a world where identity is seen as a source of conflict, nothing is worth fighting for. In such a world we will find ourselves unable to condemn, much less confront, the onslaught of the real threats to democracy, such as radical Islam and other totalitarian regimes (e.g., Russia v. Georgia) that exhibit strong identities that inspire their followers. In other words, the West not only needs to find something worth living for, but dying for, if we will survive, and quit trying to appease aggressors by confronting their ideologies.