Shahrzad Sabet - 2018 ABS Conference, Atlanta, Georgia
The recent surge in tribalism across Western societies brings renewed salience to questions of identity. Notably, it exposes the longstanding tension between bounded social identities and affiliations, on the one hand, and universalist yearnings and commitments, on the other. I draw on the Bahá'í notion of the oneness of humankind to address the conceptual underpinnings of this debate in public discourse and political philosophy. I make the case that a genuinely unbounded primary identity (i.e., one based on our membership in a single human race) represents not just an expansion of scope from the national to the global, but a qualitative shift that permeates all identities, and serves to fundamentally protect and liberate our secondary affiliations from their otherwise inherent instabilities and contradictions.
