Is identity a matter of fate or of choice? I take the question from this article by Kenan Malik in the current issue of Prospect magazine, on Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence. Sen's view is that it's a matter of choice:
"There are two issues here," he says when I meet him at King's College, Cambridge, where he was master until returning to Harvard two years ago. "First, the recognition that identities are robustly plural and the importance of one identity need not obliterate another. And second, that a person has to make choices about what relative importance to attach, in a particular context, to their divergent loyalties and identities. The individual belongs to many different groups and it's up to him or her to decide which of those groups he or she would like to give priority to." We are multitudes and we can choose among our multitudes.Now, while I find myself broadly sympathetic to what Sen says here, it seems to me to need two kinds of qualification. First, it is surely the case that perceiving identity as a matter of choice is subject, at least to some extent, to cultural variation. Second, even where choice 'among our multitudes' applies with greatest force in cultural terms, the choice isn't totally unconstrained. There are aspects of any person's identity which she can take or leave, and this is part of the explanation for personal change over time. But there are other aspects - and these will be different for different people - which they either cannot change at all or only change at great cost and pain to themselves.
This doesn't invalidate the point that there are, overall, choices to be made. But it does mean that 'fate' also affects identity. I may be able to choose what place or weight to assign to different commitments, allegiances, and so on, in the broad pattern of my life. But that some of them are absolutely central and very weighty may just be a given for me, in consequence of who I already am; and some of this may not be due to earlier choices. Isn't that why one mode of oppressing people is to deny them some central aspect of their identity? If choice were everything, they could just choose to renounce what has been denied to them. But mostly they can't. They feel it as an assault on who they are, and not just - abstractly - as a restriction of their range of choices.