I recently found myself visiting Belfast on a school trip, primarily a historically educational excursion that I recommend to any who find themselves with the unlikely opportunity to experience the same event exactly as it has already happened. A more preferable and physically possible option is to simply visit Belfast of one's own accord, but I digress. As enjoyable as the trip was, seeing the horribly deprived working-class areas of the city, each segregated by religion and political opinion, reawakened a thought I've harboured for some time. Collective identity is one of the main detriments to our entire species.
"What is collective identity?" I pretend you ask. To be as basic as I can, collective identity is the process of identifying large numbers of people based upon certain similarities shared between those people. To quote Wikipedia (where would we be without it?), a broad definition of the term collective identity is "the shared sense of “we-ness.” Collective identity is conceptualized as individuals’ identifications of, identifications with, or attachment to certain groups". For example, referring to all Protestants as a collective whole, or all those who have a certain political opinion or all people who enjoy eating sugar-encrusted cucumber. It's not quite stereotyping, although the two are often intertwined. It's not about labeling these collective wholes with stereotypes, it is the act of treating all those who have ever been in the group as equally responsible for what it does.
The most common form of collective identity by far is that of countries. How many times has one heard one speak of Germany or America or China as though it were a single person responsible for every action they have ever performed? These countries have each existed for a very long time, their governments have changed repeatedly and generations have lived and died in these countries countless times. And yet we continue to speak of countries as though they have remained forever inhabited by the same individuals. Let me be more specific; let me address one of the worst and most well known examples of collective identification: the conflict between Ireland and the United Kingdom.
Irish society is and always has been built upon hatred of Britain. Our culture glorifies some of the most reprehensible figures in Irish history simply because they opposed Britain. The reasoning behind so much of distrust and contempt towards Britain is always justified by something to the effect of "the British killed my grandfather!" or "The British oppressed us for 800 years!" Even the more moderate Irish who oppose minor incidences, such as David Norris' suggestion to rejoin the United Kingdom, do so on the same basis. For anyone who shares these views even slightly, ask yourselves: who exactly are you angry with? Say a British soldier killed a distant relative of yours. It's very true that many British soldiers killed many Irish people. What is also true is that those soldiers are dead. Oliver Cromwell and all those who committed genocide under his command have been dead for hundreds of years. How can one possible make a logical connection between the atrocities of individuals long dead and the entirety of the United Kingdom? Furthermore, it's not as if every single person in Britain contributed to the murder of Irish citizens even at the time of the actual atrocities. The vast majority had nothing to do with it, and the people of Britain today sure as hell don't either.
The point I'm trying to make here is that guilt is not hereditary, nor is it shared with those who happen to live in the same place, or those who have the same religion. I merely use the United Kingdom as a single example, because there are so many more. Israel versus Palestine, India versus Pakistan, the United States versus all those other countries the US government has attacked in the past, one can go on indefinitely. They all justify their ongoing conflicts and discriminatory dispositions with the sins of those either long dead or irrelevant. The entire practice is bathed in ignorance and stupidity and even the most logical and intelligent among us fall victim to such collective identification. If one really wishes to bring justice to those responsible for atrocities, then punish those who are actually responsible. It is an unfortunate reality that many propagators of injustice have died without due punishment. This is unfortunate, but there is nothing that can be done to rectify it. Do not lay the blame upon their ancestors, for they are separate beings and always will be.
This too works in the other direction. A good deed is not passed by blood, nor is its ownership shared by those around it. Judge people as individuals and not as the similarities they have with with others. Believe me when I say that if everyone thought as logically as this, war would pretty much cease to exist.
But then that would be too easy, wouldn't it?
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