Which Identity Matters Most? [A Monday Meander]

The discussion of values from Ivy League Seminar to Western Kansas Diner, Bristol Bay fishery to Cajun Church, San Diego to Philly is filled with hubris and bewilderment -- and some wisdom -- as vast as our geography. At bottom of it all is the most fundamental question: What is the greatest good?

The answers to this question take multiple forms and are expressed in action. Our hearts long for the good, for very goodness itself. And if you doubt that, wonder a bit about what it is you wish from everyone else. When a friend or stranger mistreats us, indignation betrays our innate awareness: “There is Good, and this is not it!”

And all through time we've tried to conceive of Goodness in transcendent and personal terms, and therein we have what is called theology: the search to see and know and describe for others what really matters most. Chesterton put it like this: “The human calling is to discover Reality and when we have found it, to share it with our friends.”

This lands us, again, trying to make sense of all we are debating, and a major piece of that is what we call DEI. This is the great push for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion on college campus, in corporate conglomerates, in legislative bodies – everywhere! It is a sort of incarnation of the greatest good. 

And there are myriad factors in such a discussion. Is it not good to care for people regardless of their differences from you? Isn't everyone a person, after all; and do not people have value in and of themselves regardless of various markers embedded in our life together? Doesn't this mean that we should be large of soul and spirit and do all we can to appreciate and enable diversity, equity, and inclusion?

The geography of this question is shaped by its parts, and the most fundamental part – you could even say the landscape itself -- is the human person: what does it mean to be a human person? We all have answers to this, most of which we know in our bones, and most of which have a great deal in common. As I wondered about the pieces of a DEI discussion between Christopher Rufo and Yascha Mounk I came to two questions:

• Values and way of life are inseparable. But how do we determine which values and way of life get to rule the day?
• Secondly, since identity is at the center, what identity matters most, is most defining? The hierarchy question arises and we might even ask, "To which identity do we bow?"

This last question will not leave my mind and it takes us, as do all questions of ultimate value, to fundamentals. Everyone is a fundamentalist, just as everyone who wants to build a good house is a foundationalist. And to the extent those fundamentals comport with reality, we will have a good life. The difficulty is recognizing them, living accordingly, allowing that we are all wrong in some respects, and we have to learn to live together all the same. Because that is also one of the fundamentals.

But the identity question remains a major issue of our time. How does one fundamentally define themselves? By race, gender, ethnicity, religion? By job, hobby, ideology, political party? What identity marker matters most? The sociologists and activists work hard on this and the results of academia on the question are a self-perpetuating (and bewildering) sea of ideas and ideology.

Not being an academic or an activists I stumbled into a question: "What if our most fundamental identity is our family identity?"

Immediately we face that great problem of ours and any time, the desperate need for solid and happy families as the core of society. But whether one's family is a picture from Currier and Ives or is broken without shape, the identity is still this: we are daughters or sons. And in time we become, in metaphor if not reality, fathers and mothers within and throughout the human family. Such a proposal suggests a core identity that shapes everything else. And when we say family is the fundamental, we say life is good, is to be loved and cherished, and is to be prolonged.

What's so wrong about that? I wish to live that way, though faultily for that also goes with being human. But if I am first a son, my identity is tied in to the greatest fundamental -- the union of male and female and the ensuing life it gives -- and all else is defined therefrom.

Such is the nature of my wondering on this happy Monday morning. Perhaps it may help a son or daughter somewhere who, like everyone, needs a foundation.