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all-encompassing question of which person, which side of the difference,
should legitimately exist at all.
Just as individuals involved in such a conflict struggle over who they are
rather than specifically what they want, larger groups view conflict as a form
of struggle for legitimacy between collective personality types. Instead of a
neighborhood, class, or ethnic group pressing for specific gains, it tries to
find an "identity."
It
then uses this identity as a moral weapon: because
the group has a collective self, it therefore deserves fulfillment; because the
members of the group feel close, feel as one, their claims upon society are
legitimate, no matter what the substance of the claims, or the means of their
realization. An extreme example of this pattern is to be found in ethnic–
terrorist groups. The fact of having discovered a common self legitimates
the means of terror to preserve that end; and this is equally true at the
opposite end of the political spectrum in Falangist or other modern Fascist
groups. If.one moves from these political extremes to more ordinary forms
of conflict, the same process is at work. The locality asserts the integrity of its
demands against a central planning organization not on the grounds that
the actual practices of the central bureaucracy are unjust but rather on the
grounds that the solidarity of the neighborhood will be destroyed.
It
is no
accident that local politics conducted on this basis of identity-as-legitimacy
so often becomes self-defeating. At the same time as the neighborhood
fights the outside world for threatening its solidarity, within itself it con–
ducts continual tests of who really belongs, who really expresses the sense
and the interests of the collective whole, and this testing leads to fragmenta–
tion, intramural struggles over who is an authentic member of the group,
and so on. Powerlessness comes from the very attempts to define a collective
identity instead of defining the common interests of a diverse group of
people. This latter idea was I believe what Marx meant by a class out for
itself, an idea
Gemeinschaft
obliterates.
What makes
Gemeinschaft
pernicious is that this desire to share one's
feelings with others like oneself feels so close to the ideal of fraternity. It
would be unreal to deny the general human need for fraternity, but what
has happened today is that the concrete experience of fraternity has become
perverted by the assumptions about personality which rule our culture . Fra–
ternity should be a condition of common action, and its psychological re–
wards ought to come from pursuing action together. Today, fraternity is re–
garded instead as a state of being-one in which finding out who we are be–
comes of overwhelming concern. And the very process of defining who we
are, like the process of defining a single me, is troubled because conflict, di–
versity, and complexity are not part of the process of self-definition. When
conditions of external or internal conflict face the group, unity of impulse
