Insanity of identity

The bombing of the Gaza strip by Israeli forces following the ‘surprise’ Hamas attack on Israel on 07 Oct., has made millions of people across the globe witness the persistent streaks of insanity of our civilized world of the 21st century.

Aren’t we all civilised people, disciplined by great religions in the world? Haven’t we, including those people who order the annihilation of innocent human beings, been brought up civilly from our early childhood by soaking us in religion? Haven’t we been taught to be fair, to be kind, to be merciful, to be generous, to be what not by our parents, elders and priests, who were themselves religious from head to toe? Didn’t our previous generations witness such eruptions of cruelty with consternation, resisted, and subsequently relegated them to history?

It is true that when TV makes us horrified audiences to this kind of carnage and genocide, when we see missiles blowing up buildings occupied by thousands of people, when we see scarred or bleeding bodies and the survivors frantically hugging the dead bodies of their beloved, we acutely realize the inhumanity deeply rooted in humans. We feel vexed, outraged, helpless, indignant, angry. What can we do? Either watch helplessly or resist this barbarity in whatever way we can- raise our voices, shout slogans,

cry foul, appeal for pity for the sake of those who are suffering and dying like flies. The problem is, how long are we to practice this familiar and repetitive model of ‘witnessing cruelty and resisting’, while thousands of innocent men, women and children are carpet-bombed? How many millions should be sacrificed before we finally resist sufficiently so as to end this insanity? Will the perpetrators listen?

Isn’t this an ideal moment to look at our toxic identities that are mere cultural constructs? Almost all instances of plain butchery of one group by another group of humans are triggered by the fake identities imposed on us by tradition and culture, and the two most tenacious labels we carry throughout our life are our fake identities of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘religion’. It is the feelings of ‘self’ and ‘other’ created and nurtured in us by the socially sanctioned imposition of an ethnicity and a religion that has poisoned all human minds and engendered cruelty.

The tragedy is that we are too steeped in both these fake identities to look at their catastrophic effects soberly. Isn’t this sense of ‘ethnicity’, which we are asked to be proud of, an elusive suit we wear which is a tragic byproduct of language. True, languages are different. However, are the speakers of different languages different? How? For example, think of a child born to ‘Sinhala’ parents, adopted by a ‘Tamil’ family and thinks of himself as a ‘Tamil’ to the core. Is he Sinhalese or Tamil? Or, a human who is carrying a fake identity thrust on him by tradition? How about religious identity? Aren’t we possessed by this identity which is only imposed on us purely by circumstances? Think of the previous instance. How about a child born to ‘Hindu’ parents being adopted by a ‘Muslim’ family?

It is clear that our religious identity is a pure construct of being programmed by a religion. Today, we all feel distraught about the senseless killing in Gaza, no matter whichever religion we identify ourselves with. We have morals acquired through socialization—education, family life, play, peer groups, work, and through many other social interactions. We condemn fraud, violence, slaughter of people (wrapped and sanitized by the term ‘war’), oppression, discrimination, etc. However, religion, which is universally revered as the most civilizing agent, only divides and sets one people against the other. Ethically, we, more or less, belong to the same community of people. However, tragically, different conditioning, rituals, ways of worship, narratives about saints etc. has estranged us so that we can forget our common ethics and annihilate one another, for no reason other than ‘religion’. It is time that we seriously think of separating ethics from religion and make a sober analysis of how we make use of the latter.

We constantly change our identities. A person may, within the course of a day, play many roles as father, son, husband, teacher, pedestrian, passenger, tax payer, customer, driver, patient, etc. All these different identities are short-term or mid-term and not very tenacious. However, the two long-term identities – ethnicity and religion, are tenacious, illusive and toxic. Unlike the other identities you assume depending on different circumstances you are in, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘religion’ are stubborn, alienating and unshakable for the very reason that they are illusive and programmed culturally.

Do we have to wait for genocide to cry foul? Shouldn’t we look more seriously at the most deep-rooted and seemingly fundamental concepts like ethnicity, race and religion that sour our relations and estrange us from one another?

Susantha Hewa