Keep your identity large

In his essay, “Keep your identity small”, Paul Graham famously advises:

If people can’t think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

The premise is that when something becomes part of our identity, it’s hard to be objective about it, and ultimately this leads to unproductive disagreements such as arguing over politics or religion. If you keep your identity small, the surface area of biases decreases and thus you can be more rational. Furthermore, this lets you be more tolerant, as you no longer have those identity-driven prejudices against people who disagree with you because they have different identities (the out-group).

When I first read this, it resonated and I tried to follow the motto. However, I recently read research that made me re-think this. On “Blueprint” Nicholas Christakis talks about how societies that are individualistic tend to be more tolerant. The explanation is that people in individualistic societies are exposed to more diversity of identities, which makes it harder to form an in-group/out-group distinction, and therefore makes it easier to find common ground with people who disagree with them.

For example, think of the Democrat and Republican who sit next to each other in church. They might disagree on a lot of issues, but they share their faith and therefore are more likely to tolerate each other. If you follow the “Keep your identity small” motto, you minimize the likelihood of finding common ground.

You might counter by saying that people with small identities find common ground in rationality. This is true if we all follow the dictum. In that case, the Democrat and Republican in the above example would neither identify with a political party nor a church. We can assume that were they to meet each other, they would engage in objective dialogue and find the truth every time they disagreed on an issue like the characters of a platonic discourse.

However, if only one of the two was following the “keep your identity small” advice, the result would be a more polarized society where you have people with strong identities who can’t understand people with weak ones and vice-versa. In the end, “having a small identity” turns out to be your identity. Everyone else is your outgroup. If you live in the US, this should sound familiar.

So, what are we to do? The implication to me is that perhaps the way to increase tolerance is not by minimizing identity, but by maximizing it. The more things you identify with, the more unique your identity is, the more diverse your society, the smaller the in-group, the weaker the anti-out-group bias, the more tolerant your society as a whole is. Part of me is skeptical of this proposition. What good is a tolerant society where individuals have a bunch of irrational beliefs due to their identities? It’s a good question. But it assumes that having an identity makes you irrational, which is something I would challenge. What makes you irrational is not having an identity, but having a narrow one.

A large identity gives you a plethora of viewpoints from which to consider an issue, from which to argue a point, and from which to draw a conclusion. Furthermore, the larger your identity, the more common ground you might find with people who disagree with you and therefore the more likely you will be to influence their beliefs. Without that common ground, even if you find enlightenment, it would be hard for you to spread it. With that common ground, you’re most likely to find each other, listen to each other, and influence each other.