Identity vs. Culture

José de Madrazo y Agudo, The Death of Viriatus (1807), one of the Lusitanian leaders who resisted Roman expansion into the Iberian Peninsula.

2,058 words

Spanish version here

In the present state of confusion, promoted by the tribe that dominates the mass media, the people ignore the differences in the meaning of these two words, and they are frequently used as synonyms, when in fact they can be — and are — opposites.

Of course, cultural Marxism does not help, and has added to the prevailing terminological confusion its own transvaluation of all values, giving the word “identity” a meaning that is antithetical to the original one by inventing a concept of “identity politics” based on “self-perception” that is totally alien to the real world.

Since the time of ancient Greece, philosophy has defined the totality of being as a composite of two parts: the essence of being, or that which makes it one thing and not another; and the accessory, or those things that complement it but which could be in a different way without affecting the core of its being.

The essence is the inherent, the fundamental, the axis; that base which, no matter how much we may want to, can never be modified. In other words: that which cannot be changed. (Logically, therefore, the essence or identity is anything but voluntary.)

On the contrary, the accessory is the contingent, the secondary, the set of additions; those accidents that are like the layers of an onion that can be removed without affecting its essence. In other words: the modifiable. The accessory can be modified by our own will, in some cases, or by external pressure in others.

Aristotle called these two modes of being “substance” and “accident.” What the Greek philosopher intuited was corroborated many centuries later by biological science, with the discovery of the dual nature of living beings: on the one hand, the genetic (what we could also call identity/soul), and on the other, the environmental (culture/circumstances).

This is the same as what the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset said when he affirmed: “I am I and my circumstance.” Or, as geneticists later put it later: the final product of what we are is made up of our DNA (the essence or soul, insofar as it is the pure being prior to any state or external influence) and our environment (which can only make minor changes within the probabilistic margins that the above allows). Thanks to various studies carried out with twin siblings reared together or apart, it has been possible to quantify the heritability of different mental aptitudes such as intelligence, or physical, such as height, establishing that around 70-80% of what we are is determined by genetics, with the environment influencing only 20-30% at any given time.[1]

With this distinction, biology also taught us something else fundamental, and that is that we are not pure individuals created out of nothing, no matter how much liberal spiritualist and religious superstitions prefer to believe in more or less random incarnations and reincarnations within any group of living beings. No, our identity is not purely individual, but shared. We are not isolated entities; we are the product of an inheritance. We are not an original book, but an adulterated copy of the genetic book of those ancestors who preceded us and with whom we share almost all of our DNA. The material from which we are made, except for some mutations, was already present in our parents, and theirs in theirs.

We are part of a whole. We are not interchangeable beings, like Lego blocks, born at random into an individual body, a family, an ethnic group, a race, or a species, such that we could have been born into any other and remain essentially the same. On the contrary, all these things are part of us, and we participate in the characteristics of all of them; they engender our essence, form our DNA, and determine our capacities and the way we respond to external stimuli; we innately share the mentality and psychic peculiarities common to our concentric circles of Identity. And the closer the circle, the more we generally resemble our peers.

National subject

Making this distinction between Identity and culture is crucial when it comes to understanding what a Nation is (or, in other words, discerning which national subject is worthy of [and should have] its own State), and which type of nationalism is valid and which is merely confused and diverted towards irrelevant aspects of being. Any nationalism focused on the multiple accidents that define a human group at a given historical moment must be relegated to oblivion, since it could never hold true indefinitely for the successive generations of the same people throughout their history, inasmuch as changes in secondary aspects are not only frequent, but inevitable. Above all, besides being necessarily a perishable nationalism — with an expiration date — it would only make sense to base the concept of Nation on that which has the greatest impact on society, and which is therefore capable of causing the greatest conflicts and internal tensions if not taken into consideration.

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Only after understanding what the difference between the accessory and the essential is can one understand what the true national subject is, and take the next step towards a nationalism based on it.

So, what are the contingent and secondary aspects on which a nationalism can be based? All those that are susceptible to change; that is: we can change our beliefs, we can convert to another religion, we can speak and think in another language, we can change our party — our political ideology, our soccer team, our age, our profession, our social class, our place of residence, our passport nationality, our accent, and our customs. In short, we can change our culture. Therefore, none of that defines us. It is all secondary. If something is susceptible to change, it is because it is not part of our essence. We can change all those things and still be the same person; and with biological groups, the same thing happens.

Although in the course of our lives, individuals and peoples can change what we believe or our external qualities, we cannot change what we are. What is important — what we are — is precisely that which cannot be changed and which is not subjected to our own or anyone else’s choices. We cannot change our DNA, we cannot change our race, nor can we change our species or relatives. For better or worse, whether we like it or not the concentric circles of identity (individual, family, clan, ethnicity, race, species, and the rest of the taxonomic categories — hominines, hominids, simians, primates, mammals, etc.), each add an intrinsic part of our being.

It is therefore the latter, identity, that is the basis of any coherent and authentic nationalism.

Identity über alles

Culture is nothing more than a product of Identity, insofar as it is partially the external or formal manifestation of the latter, to which must be added a series of diverse circumstantial and random factors. Genetics is what determines the idiosyncrasy of human groups, and this is what creates languages, religions, and so on, and not the other way around. It is not languages — nor religions, nor States — that create peoples. It is the biological group, the genetic soul, that creates all these things, according to the most innate worldview that it imprints in its members through DNA.

All these external forms of culture are easily exportable, and it has often happened that some peoples have imposed theirs on others. But imposing our culture on a very different people does not make that people become part of ours.

Even if a people exports its entire culture, as many empires have done in their colonies, the two races remain distinct and never disappear. Those who have adopted that foreign culture transform it again into something different, more in accordance with their own mentality.[2] These differences obviously do not only refer to their mentality and values, but also to the collective performance of each. It is enough to study the cases of the former colonies, witnessing the abysmal difference in the degree of economic and cultural development and so on between those with white (such as Argentina and the United States) or yellow (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea) populations, and those with a higher percentage of Amerindians (such as the central third of America) or Arabs (North Africa), as well as those with black populations (sub-Saharan Africa). All of them have been colonies, but only those of certain races have prospered.

On the other hand, peoples who have been dominated by others of the same race could adopt without difficulty the culture imposed on them by the conquerors, as if it had always been theirs. For example, after the conquest of Hispania by the Roman conquerors (which cost Rome two long centuries of constant fierce struggle, of which Numantia is only one example), the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula finally adopted the Roman culture without effort and gave the Empire figures such as Seneca, Lucan, Martial, Quintilian, and three of its most prominent emperors. The Romans exported their culture, and it was easily adopted throughout Europe because the identity of all white peoples was perfectly compatible with the Romans’ white culture and civilization – which had in turn been based on another preceding white culture, the Greek. And, of course, no one in Spain or any former European province of the Roman Empire would today think of blaming the Romans — or the current Italians — for any shortcomings of their own, as the less intellectually developed races pathetically do against the Spanish, French, and other European peoples.[3]

Conclusion

Why is it so important for nationalism to be based on that which cannot be changed? Because when there is something that poses a dysfunctional problem of coexistence (let us think that a State consists of a national home where an entire people live together), if that thing is something that can be changed, then the problem has a solution. It is enough to have the will to solve it. On the other hand, if it is not something that we can modify, no matter how hard we try (quotas, “positive” discrimination, privileges of all kinds, tyrannical laws, etc.), the problem can never be solved. Then it is no longer a question of will, nor of commitment, nor of laws. When something immutable causes friction between two “population groups,” the only possible solution is separation, not living together in the same territory. There must be a divorce in this forced marriage into which the elites have forced us.

This is where the political implication of the conceptual differentiation between identity and culture begins, which is nothing more than the extrapolation to the collective sphere of what the nature versus nurture dichotomy means for individuals.

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Notes

[1] The most famous of these are the Minnesota twin studies.

[2] See, for example, the language of black Americans (Ebonics), their music (rap, jazz, etc.), their religion (Santería), or the masses of black churches, where the parishioners shout, clap their hands, and sing at the top of their lungs. Likewise, their crime rates and other sociological indicators are more similar to those of purely black countries in Africa than to those of the white populations which they live among. This is the confirmation of the same genetic phenomenon that makes adopted children more physically and psychically similar to their biological family than to their adoptive one.

[3] These peoples try to shift the blame for their own sociological deficiencies and underdevelopment onto third parties, despite the fact that about 80% of the gold extracted by Spain in the Americas remained in that continent (the part that did not correspond to the “quinto real”), not to mention that with today’s technology, Mexico and Peru[3] produce by themselves each year a similar amount to all that Spain extracted from the Americas between 1503 to 1660 (specifically, about 185,000 kilograms). Unlike the European countries, many South American states are today among the world’s leading gold producers, although this does not seem to be enough to lift these largely mestizo or Amerindian countries, such as Peru, out of underdevelopment, and the same can be said about the production of silver and many other precious resources that their privileged soil provides them with (such as Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves).

In any case, this is still less than the 230,000 kilograms of gold that the Romans extracted from northwest Hispania alone between the first and third century AD.