Identity theft is not actually identity theft
Thursday, July 11th, 2024. By B. Kumaravadivelu
Excerpts-2 from Chapter 1:
I never thought that by stealing my ID cards or my passwords, one could steal my identity. Let’s be clear: the cards stacked up in my wallet and my passwords floating in cyberspace are not my identity markers; they are my identification markers. It is true, thieves can steal my identification; but they cannot steal my identity. Sadly, the mix up between these two closely related words — identity and identification — is quite common among the public, in the government, in the industry, in the media, and elsewhere.
What my ID cards do is to identify me in terms of my name, number, affiliation, etc. What they do not do is to reveal the core of my identity, the essence of my being. The criminals who steal my cards may deplete my bank balance, forge my driver license, misuse my Social Security number, and do other illegal activities. But they can never ever steal the religion I follow, the culture I practice, the languages I speak, the knowledge I possess, the values I cherish, the hopes I nurture, the fears I hide, the struggles I wage, the pain I endure, or the pleasures I enjoy. These are some of the things that constitute my identity. And, that is true of your identity as well.
My identity, and yours, cannot be miniaturized and plasticized into a 3⅜″ × 2⅛″ card with a coded magnetic strip. My ID cards cannot be used or abused to strip me of that which makes me, me. Clearly, the use of the term identity in the ubiquitous phrase identity theft is a misleading simplification. Let’s not be fooled by this common mistake. It trivializes the concept of identity which is by any measure deep and dense.
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Identity continues to be, as the Australian sociologist Anthony Elliott laments, “one of the most vexing and vexed topics in the social sciences and humanities.” Vexing or not, we must try to grasp the meaning of identity. The meaning of our identity. So that we can have a sense of being alive. So that we can know who we are.
WHO ACTUALLY ARE WE?
We cannot even begin to address that perennial and puzzling question without a clear understanding of our sense of Self. That’s why the concept of Self has captured the imagination of saints and sages down the ages. The Greek philosophers who laid the foundation for Western civilization thought it fit to
inscribe the maxim Know Thyself at the entry of the sacred Temple of Apollo
at Delphi. They had the wisdom to see an invisible and inviolable connection
between our microcosmic Self and the macrocosmic forces above and beyond
us. Similarly, ancient Indian scriptures such as the Bhagavad Gita stressed the
connection between the Supreme Being and individual Self. As the Indian
philosopher-President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan explained: “The seers see
the Supreme in the self, and not in images.”
Self-identity is commonly associated with the question who am I? The question
is so simple. And yet, so profound. It requires a considerable degree of critical self-reflection on our part to explore it, analyze it, understand it. Pause here for a moment if you will. Ask yourself the question: who am I? If you think about the question seriously, you will find that it masks the complex nature of your identity. However hard you think, you may not be able to come up with a true and complete profile of your Self. You might even conclude that the question itself is not pertinent. Or that it is too vague or too elusive to make sense. If you do, you are in good company.
The celebrated American psychologist Erik H. Erikson, for instance, registers
“a certain impatience” with people who equate the term identity with the question who am I? “Nobody asks this question,” he admonishes, “except in a morbid state or a creative self-confrontation.” According to him, the pertinent question would be “what do I want to make of myself and what do I have to work with?” Similarly, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor tells us that the question who am I? “can’t necessarily be answered by giving name and genealogy. What does answer this question for us is an understanding of what is of crucial importance to us.”
What do I want to make of myself? What do I have to work with? What is crucially important to me?
Each of us will answer these questions differently. And, we will also answer them differently at different stages in our life.
If we are serious about seeking answers to these questions, we must first understand the concept of identity.
The term identity stems from the Latin root idem, meaning the same. Broadly speaking, our identity entails membership in one or more categories such as nation, ethnicity, race, religion, class, profession, or gender. Each of these categories relates us in some way to other members of the same category because people in a particular category are generally expected to share some characteristics in common. Being a white American Christian female, for instance, connects a person with shared aspects of whiteness, Americanness, Christianness, and femaleness — however we choose to define them.
We inherit some identities (for example, ethnic identity), acquire some (for example, professional identity), and some others are ascribed to us (for example, Asian American). Some of the identity markers are so common that we all use them as convenient short-hand labels to position ourselves in the practice of everyday life. Our identity labels also create certain expectations in others, certain stereotypes about others, using which they measure us up, though superficially. The moment I am introduced as a professor, people may automatically and stereotypically associate me with who they think an academic is, such as, someone who is a loony left, or someone who gives long and boring lectures, or someone who writes unreadable prose with babble of jargons.
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Much has been written about identity and continues to be written. Variously. In various times. By various people. That is largely because the concept of identity itself varies from time to time. One way of understanding it is to look at it through the prism of the sociological narratives about self-identity associated with three broad periods of time in human history — premodern (a period prior to mid-seventeenth century), modern (roughly from mid-seventeenth to late twentieth century), and postmodern (roughly from the late twentieth century onward).
A brief note on the philosophical systems of premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism, as prevailed in Western intellectual thought, is helpful in order to put the formation and re-formation of an individual’s self-identity in proper historical perspective.
… The chapter continues …
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