Human beings have a tendency to stop seeing the contingency of collective groupings. Throughout history, we have divided the first-person plural in various ways: those of us who belong to the same class, laugh at the same things, are united by fear, patriots, cosmopolites, revolutionaries, those who are civilized, fellow citizens, the people, those who share the same values or the same self-interest, those who are living at the same time, our side, our generation, those who share our cause, those who are from here, the same old gang, the victims of a tragedy or an injustice, those who are irritated or threatened, experts, men, those of us who are right or normal, orthodox or sane, those who trust or fear one another, and so on. All of humanity’s conquests have been preceded by an interrogation about these obvious groupings that generally conceal operations of exclusion. What would happen if we were not exactly the ones we are?
I am talking about the contingency of the “us” in all its various manifestations because it is not a question of subverting a stable value and transforming it into its contrary—as many are capable of doing, with unquestionable theoretical usefulness, from ideologies of suspicion to deconstruction. We are capable of showing, as Luhmann noted ironically, that “this is in fact that” and establishing with the same evidence a new category by inverting what had been dominant: heterodoxies, infrastructure, prisons, that which is concrete and the exception, proximity, the postcolonial, the deviation, and so on. The evidence that we snatched from the traditional “us” does not correspond to the others either. Contingency, in relation to the subject that concerns us, means that the category of “us” continues to be useful and truthful but is at the same time variable, contextual, and in need of revision.
The totality is now only thinkable as “polemic totality” (Röttgers 1983). In the face of categorical hegemonies such as the nation-state, Western civilization, or delimited spaces, the current multiplication of contexts (visible in phenomena such as interdependence, shared risks, and the intensification of mobility and communication) confers a vague fluidity on social reality. There is the creation of a complexity that affects what Luhmann (1981, 195) has called “primordial experiences of difference,” dualities such as close/far, mine/theirs, familiar/strange, friend/enemy. These experiences that oriented us now require redefinition, which particularly affects the distinction between us and them.
I will develop this idea with minor modifications to Kant’s well-known thinking about what we are (the ontology of the us), what we can know (the epistemology of the us), what we should do (the practices of the us), and what we have the right to expect (the convergence of the us). I will summarize the configurations of the us in eleven forms.
ONTOLOGY OF THE US
The Identity That Constitutes Us
Every time we reflexively examine the concept of the us, it seems less comprehensible and more contingent. This contingency of our identity is manifested on two planes, which we could call static and dynamic.
The subjugation of otherness is not an inescapable destiny; dealing with something unknown can be learned. Xenophobia is not an inevitable constriction of nature. Human beings are capable of breaking the tautological identity and putting into play the ability to have relationships, giving form to authenticity in expressions that can be recognized by others. Maturity, in the personal and social realm, could be understood as the realization of one’s own particularity, the discovery that our ways of understanding the world or acting upon it are contingent and, from some perspectives or for some people, strange and even ridiculous.
Derrida’s (1993) “spectrology” presented this contingency of the us in a very original fashion. In the face of triumphant identity, the presence of “ghosts,” in other words, of something that destabilizes our present, places in question the obviousness of the separations between us and them, alive and dead, present and absent. The ghost is what prevents the present—unity, identity—from closing in on itself; it is the sign of that opening, the place in which the nonpresent appears, the otherness that is housed in the present and questions its sovereignty. Within that instability, there is, according to Derrida, promise and hope regarding what can arrive without having been projected. It is not a question of the possibility, obviously uncertain and not guaranteed, of a realizable plenitude—as Bloch seems to think—but the impediment that a similar order presents itself as absolute, forming a whole, camouflaging that which does not fit, closing any openness to the question with its answers. This hope is not the overcoming of death and the triumph of life, but the experience of a life touched by death.
The Stories That We Are
The other aspect of the contingency of the us that I would like to address is rather dynamic. This is the question of how we have become what we are. Also from this temporal perspective, our “natural” tendency leads us to ignore the lack of historical necessity for the us that we have become. Contingency here means that our identity is not logical or nomological or intentional, but is instead the result of an exception or particularization. To say it bluntly: we are what we are because we did not manage to become what we hoped. This is what Paul Valéry was suggesting when he complained that it is impossible to do anything without everything becoming involved. The identities of subjects and the particularities of peoples are not due to a persistent will to become what they are. Identity is the result not of an action but of a history, in other words, of a process developed under conditions that behave haphazardly in the face of one’s own pretensions.
From these considerations, we can understand the justification for continuously revising our past and rewriting history without accepting that it is treated as an object or given over to the illusion of the definitive. The historic investigation goes hand in hand with the changes of identity of the subjects that carry it out, in such a way that our own identity and other people’s is once again defined according to these modifications. We rewrite our history and that of other people because the presentation of identity—ours and theirs—is a function of our history, through which we obtain our identity. The histories we tell have to be open to change because they change the open stories that we are.
From this perspective, we can also understand the conditions that make our affective identification with an “us” bearable and legitimate. Patriotism is by its very nature unstable. Patriotism is stretched across time, which is why it tends to include a reconsideration of its own history. But this duration is labile. The problem of patriotism is always its detautologization (Fuchs 1991), its transformation in specific circumstances. A patriot is in the same place to the extent that he or she moves, thus adapting to the temporalization of a society that is becoming more complex. In this way, the artificiality of the construction of any us with which we can identify becomes obvious.
We need a good deal of liberal consciousness to know how to become part of a community that is ours, with which we can identify or defend its right to freely control its destiny and, at the same time, be conscious of the artificiality of its construction, its nonnecessity, its involvement with other people’s destiny.
One need not be especially critical or skeptical to know that the perception we have of things is not always correct. In the case of immigration, a phenomenon that configures the identity of locals and newcomers, there are two confusions that need to be cleared up before we can respond adequately to the question about who we are: we tend to believe that immigration presents a serious economic problem for host societies and that the influence goes in only one direction, that “they” only influence “us,” both of which are at the heart of some concerns. What if in this matter it were also true that things are not what they seem?
Judging by particular discourses, some of them very electorally successful, we are subjected to a massive wave of immigration. On this matter, as with so many others, there are few numbers and a lot of specters. One of them refers to the cost of immigration, in other words, the increase in social expenses and the unemployment it provokes. It is important to confront this prejudice rather than resting all arguments on humanitarian reasons. Economic arguments do not have the prestige of moral reasons, but we should not scorn them when it comes to establishing what our duties for justice are. It could be that xenophobia, in addition to being ethically unjustifiable, is also economically ruinous.
Can we affirm that immigrants are responsible for the increase in unemployment? Polls reveal that the majority of people think so. Economists, on the other hand, are in relative agreement—something that is, by the way, unusual—that this is not the case (Chojnicki and Rago 2012). Immigration has very little impact on the unemployment rate of locals. It gives the impression that the weight of immigration on public debate is inversely proportional to its economic impact, which is relatively neutral.
A similar prejudice refers to the supposed burden that immigrants represent for public finances. Our system of social protection is ascendant, in other words, it implies a transfer from younger to older people, particularly pensioners. The two areas of social protection that essentially assist older people—health care and pensions—now represent around 80 percent of social costs, while immigrants are grouped in the ages of greatest activity. The fact that immigrants increase certain social expenses is more than compensated by the reality that they are generally in an age group that pays more than they receive from the redistribution system. We must remember that immigrants also contribute to the financing of social protection through their contributions. In a pure accounting sense, we could evaluate their net contribution (the difference between contributions and benefits), which would allow us to question the eventual benefits of a reduction in immigration, as is sometimes defended. Of course, less immigration means lower social costs, but it also and especially means fewer contributions. In any case, a tightening of immigration policies will not help resolve our problem of budgetary deficits.
There are other clichés found in the emotions provoked by immigration and in many of the dominant discourses that prevent us from seeing part of reality. For example, the image of immigrants as a powerful threat in the face of our supposedly fragile identity. We are always told, either with fear or in celebration of new diversity, about the influence that immigrants have on the identity and the culture that takes them in, but we barely examine the influence that goes in the opposite direction. The question that is always raised is whether immigration, paired with low birth rates, will make European societies lose their identity when their cities, some people insist, seem increasingly like cities in Africa or Asia. The ideological xenophobia that fears “ethnic replacement” and the loss of the European identity and the liberal attitude that, with the best of intentions, defends the “integration” of new arrivals both see immigration as a phenomenon that acts upon the host country, but they barely reflect on the influence that immigration has on the countries and cultures of origin. What if we influence them as much as they influence us? Why not think about the fact that immigration, far from weakening our identity, is a way of spreading our values throughout the world?
We are prevented from understanding all the complexity and nuances of immigration because we still maintain a static conception of cultures and societies. “Integration” and “replacement” are the two terms that try to explain the relationship between cultures that collide with each other in a single direction. Conservatives and liberals tend to think that cultural differences are perpetuated through generations and would allow affected populations to reproduce independently from one another. They do not keep in mind the bidirectionality of their influences and the phenomena of mixing, the exogamy that tends to increase with the passing of time. Classifying people as local or foreign ends up cutting an arbitrary line through a continuum where there are not two populations but one, made up of people who present a large number of possible combinations in terms of origins. Given the dynamism and porousness of current societies, belonging to a single group is going to increasingly be the exception rather than the rule.
Examining the phenomenon of immigration in all its complexity is the best way of disposing of particular topics. Behind existing preconceptions, we tend to find a reality that has not been fully understood.
The Limits of Community
The archetypal contrast made by Tönnies (1960 [1887]) between community and society—which has its own dualisms: organism versus artifact, comprehension versus contract—presents a typical antinomy of politics in the modern age, at least since the complaints in the Romantic period. Continuing this approach, the Husserlian concept of “lifeworld” has been, since 1926, the counterpoint that opposes social turbulence. The suggestion it exerts is probably due to the fact that its mere mention illuminates an area of familiarity and trustworthiness, a protective core. It symbolizes the opposite of everything that is complex and strange in the social structure, promising a balanced world in the midst of the confusion of the social system. In the face of the contractual artifice, the community is the place where we find images of the emphatic us, the connections and original identifications.
But it is not possible to close Pandora’s box and imagine a simpler configuration of the world. Modern societies do not owe their strength to identifying determinants, but to resistance in the face of the hypostasis of a lost familiarity as well as the definitive determination of the social arena. If a society wants to remain free, it must reject all totalizing unity between the representative and those represented.
In the heart of all constitutional order, of any democratic coexistence, there is an inconsistent us, a ripping and a contradiction, that continuously redefines in a provisional manner the standing of inclusion and exclusion. That is why politics cannot be monopolized by institutional realities, by the organization of society, and by ritualized statehood. Politics is instead a place in which a society acts upon itself and renews the appearance of its common public space. Society has not emerged from the collapse of a community; there is no originating division or first unification or innocence lost in collective life or an initial institution. This does not mean that the us does not exist at all, but that it is an unstable size, an open and mutable reality, taken by human beings at the design of destiny and situated in the area of what we do with our freedom.
The Familiar and Unfamiliar
The us also has an epistemological dimension: we are the ones who know something in the face of those who do not know, those who understand something that others do not understand, to whom certain things are familiar and others strange, or we have a specific ability that differentiates us. The epistemological providence of the us has been formed in many diverse ways, and its flip side is the unfamiliar, the inexpert, or the ridiculous.
Human communities have always resisted recognizing their contingency, as if that recognition exposed them to a mortal storm. All cultural systems rebel again their own contingency by producing instruments that confirm their identity. Hymns, celebrations, genealogies, and rights are all rituals that compensate for an absent necessity and provide some ways of thinking removed from all arbitrariness, by virtue of which some practices are granted support and normality. Another prominent measure for this interior strengthening is the distance from the others, whose otherness is frequently sheathed in an incompressible unfamiliarity. To make their form of life itself appear natural, they marginalize other forms of life, sometimes even pushing it toward monstrousness. This alienation is sometimes almost inoffensive, as is revealed in what we consider ridiculous, in the realm of the laughable. Perhaps that explains the abundance of jokes that come from the fragmentation of the world, such as intercultural misunderstandings or tribal scorn (there is no country or locality that has not created a geographic imaginary—generally, the immediate neighbor—that functions as the space where the ridiculous occurs).
In this sense, the epistemological usefulness of comical situations stems from the knowledge of our own relativity: the experience that something that is taken to be valid is not valid at all times or in all contexts. Funny things always imply some relativizing of prevailing criteria, a small subversion; the measure of what is correct is not absolutely stable, but culturally and historically variable. This can be seen in the example of the person who attends the burial of someone in a neighboring town and asks: is the tradition here to cry in the house of the deceased or do we wait until we get to the cemetery? So the instrument to exclude and make ridiculous, placed at the service of self-relativization, is also very useful when it comes to managing one’s own contingency. Any grouping is always threatened by the possibility of looking ridiculous from a particular perspective.
Experts and Novices
The us of the experts is an epistemological us from which power and exclusion have always been configured. The elites remind us of it when it is time for big decisions, but daily experience does too (“only to be opened by an expert,” “consult your pharmacist,” and so on). Expert authority is invoked to legitimize, which tends to mean that it undermines or excludes those who are supposedly not experts.
We thus have a substantial problem, which is the social reintegration of science when we know that there are too many important matters at play to leave them exclusively in the hands of specialists. In our collective experiments, the division of labor where the figure of the expert is the mediator between the production of knowledge and society does not work.
New information and communication technologies have transformed our lives into a type of “consecration of the amateur,” a society of hobbyists, a democratization of competencies (Flichy 2010). Without needing authorization or instructions, the new image of the citizen is that of an amateur who informs him- or herself, openly expresses opinions, and develops new forms of commitment; that is why he or she distrusts experts as much as representatives.
In a knowledge society, the states are no longer faced with an unformed mass of novices but with distributed intelligence, a more demanding citizenry, and a humanity of observers, which includes a large number of international organisms that not only evaluate them, but frequently have more and better expert knowledge than the states. To put it clearly, the person who is in charge is no longer the one who knows the most. In any case, and also for epistemological reasons, it is important for science not to discredit urges or irritations that come from the “outside” as ignorance or hysteria. It may be that the experts are not the ones who know the most either and that, when it comes to epistemological questions, it is better for there to be greater flexibility on the border that divides the experts from the masses.
THE PRACTICE OF THE US
Our Common Goods
In the first place, a complex society, in which there is profound and irreversible pluralism, does not allow a substantialist definition of the common good. The subordination of all individual selfishness to a “group good” is something that is not produced in an intuitive or automatic fashion. It could be said that this ambiguity is constitutive of our societies and that politics consists precisely in articulating this space of discussion, since it is not guarded by any indisputable authority, protecting itself in that way from any attempt at monopolization. No one has an interpretative monopoly about the common good at their disposal, nor can they dependably represent everyone. In the last instance, it is a principle that limits more than it justifies, when it begins by preventing anyone from appropriating the general interest, universality. It exercises, in a manner of speaking, the function of having all of society in view without allowing anyone to take it over. Every concrete determination of the common good inevitably implies some type of inclusion and exclusion (the us does not in fact generally coincide with the everyone). It is important to recognize this fact precisely so we can appraise it.
The identification of the beneficiary us is especially difficult in spaces that are fluid, transnational, that are neither isolated nor enclosed with indisputable limits for state or communitarian enclaves. There are always others who can argue about the negative effects of our common good (the requirement for external justification), and there continues to be more and more internal plurality in new social units, which makes it more difficult to achieve consensus (internal differentiation). What is common is not an indisputable size, but is always contextualized and elastic, just like the limits of those we consider one of us.
Who Is Our Neighbor?
The term “complicity” has become part of the common language. It always used to indicate conspiracy, collaboration, intrigue, or cover-ups of a crime. Now it is a more innocent word that refers to a kind camaraderie. This slippage may, however, denounce the connection that exists between solidarity and conspiracy, that the us is infrequently constituted against others, friends are friends because they have common enemies, and there is no coalition without exclusion.
Something similar may happen with the current exaltation of proximity, which has the undeniable prestige of its moral and religious resonance—responsibilities toward others or the value of closeness. But in an age of interdependence, the banishing of distances, and communicative instantaneousness, proximity leaves open the question of whether it is not too little, a type of complicity with those who are similar at the expense of those who are different and distant, but with whom, nevertheless, we have increased interactions and, therefore, increased responsibilities.
But proximity is full of artifice. We should remember that proximity is not simply something given, but a social construction and is often reduced to an impression of proximity produced by actors who successfully carry out their rapprochement strategies. That is why it is not unusual for there to be experts and businesses specialized in producing those strategies. The uses and rituals of proximity make us sometimes confuse proximity with notoriety and visibility, with the suggestion of proximity constructed by means of communication. There is a proximity “effect” that is pure staging, media construction, false closeness, especially after the moment in which it can be produced without the effective corporal presence through the means of communication.
On the other hand, proximity is not a physical reality or an unquestioned dimension, especially with our virtualized and media spaces, without territorial determinism, in a globalized world with growing mobility. Many social battles are carried out around the attempt for proximity and its definition. Proximity has become the central ideology by which multiple actors work on their own legitimation. But what is, strictly speaking, closest? How does one define closeness and distance? Those who work in favor of proximity should not forget that, in the new configuration of social spaces, proximity does not mean the suppression of distance. There are close things that are far and proximities that are very distant.
If, from the spatial point of view, the category of proximity is questionable, something similar is taking place from a temporal perspective. Could it not be that this preference for proximity is part of a fixation on the present that establishes a coalition of the living in the face of the rights of future generations? Are we not then facing a temporal version of the privilege that some people want to realize in space, a type of temporal colonialism? In both cases, there is a complicity of the us at the expense of a third party: if, in the exclusivism of spaces, it was the one from outside, in temporal imperialism it is the one who comes later who bears the expenses of our preference. The externalization of the impacts of the present onto a future that does not concern us is converted into true irresponsibility. We enjoy a type of impunity in the temporal zone of the future where we can recklessly deplete other people’s time or expropriate other people’s future. Those of us who live in the present are “squatters” on their future. We are performing what Alexander Kluge has called “the assault of the present on the rest of time.” The more we live for our present, the less capable we will be of understanding and respecting the “nows” of other people.
But the realization that the destiny of various generations is as intermingled as the spaces of globalization calls into question our occupation of the future. If the responsibility for the future has turned into an acute problem, it is because there has been an increase in the number of future scenarios we must keep in mind during present-day decision-making and planning sessions. There is no legitimate us if we do not weigh issues of justice when examining the things that are conveyed from one generation to the next. These transfers include legacies and memories, but also expectations and possibilities that are handed over to future generations, in terms of physical, environmental, human, technological, and institutional capital.
Generational interdependence demands a new type of social contract. In accordance with the new realities of spatial and temporal interconnectedness, it no longer makes sense to understand the social contract in an exclusivist or contemporaneous sense. In other words, it cannot be limited to the us of one specific community or to those who are currently alive. The model of social contract that only regulates obligations between contemporaries must be expanded to include future subjects with whom we find ourselves in complete asymmetry. Questions of intergenerational justice are not resolved with a logic of reciprocity, but with an ethics of transmission.
THE CONVERGENCE OF THE US
The Reiteration of the Question About Us
Every examination about the responsibilities that connect us links back to the question about who we are. Human beings have responded to this question in various ways throughout history, and our answers have become inflexible because of changes in social conditions, technological possibilities, and the consciousness we have of ourselves. The great advances of humanity have come from the iteration of that question and from acting accordingly once we discovered that we are more than we thought, that there are exclusions in every social order. Who can be one of us or stop counting as one of us?
In the space of globalization, with porous and multiple identities, with complex interactions, where contamination and interdependence rule, when everything is transferred and there is no protective core, the “us” is characterized by great indetermination. In a space of communal good and evil, any delimitation that is too rigid between us and them is inappropriate. We should think of ourselves in a potentially universal manner. At the same time, we must construct new systems of responsibility that are operative and reflect complexity in an interdependent world.
The nation-state has been a formidable response to this question about who we are. We have become nationals of our country, with interests that clearly contrast with the interests of foreigners, others affected by the same problems, inhabitants of the same space bound by fixed borders, represented according to criteria of democratic legitimacy, with identical rights and responsibilities, in a particular realm of decision-making and solidarity. This framework has clearly been inadequate for some time now. The nation-state, while it forms policy for the us, is overwhelmed by global poverty, the obligation to protect others, the pressing need for common goods, the complexity of global agreements on climatic or financial matters. Globalization has produced an authentic national justice that is out of balance. It is not necessarily the same as the neoliberal jungle, but represents the demand to present rights and responsibilities in a new context.
The largest part of our reciprocal obligations are neither explained nor managed within state frameworks. Justice and injustice are ever more conditioned by global structures and require actions on that level. Poverty, for example, is explained not only by local causes but by factors of a global order. Something analogous occurred with the responsibility of military protection and intervention, which are increased in a more interdependent world. The revision of the us that is secured by state sovereignty implies overcoming mere juxtaposition or indifferent coexistence. The universalization of human rights, the slow ascent of the principle of universal jurisdiction, and the reinforcement of international integration are indicators that point in the direction of a transnational humanism, of humanity as the us that is constituted as a reference point in an interdependent world. From this point of view, we are, increasingly, transnationals.
The Construction of Universality
Universality, humanism, and cosmopolitism should be thought of as constructions and not as acquisitions, as horizons that are pursued, and not as identifications that are monopolized. The problem is often not that we do not want to be universal, but that we believe we can become universal immediately, saving ourselves the effort of constructing it. We humans tend to identify our particularity with the universal too easily. There is no worse particularity than the one that does not recognize itself as such. Therefore, for example, during the First World War, Max Weber demanded support for the German Empire in the name of Kultur, while Émile Durkheim asked for the same for France in the name of Civilisation. In both cases, there was an attempt at totality, a totalizing us that believed it represented universality perfectly. However, there is no construction of universality where there is no recognition of the particularity of each of us, the unique headquarters where the tension toward universality can be activated.
Inclusion becomes an essential key to the treatment of global problems. A true global politics should begin by unmasking illegitimate representations of the us of humanity, the institutional appropriations that are not sufficiently inclusive. How many global institutions represent some people better than others or have hardened into democratically unjustifiable asymmetries? A “politics of humanity” could be defined in this respect as the project of restoring the balance between those who decide and those who suffer. The legitimacy of any us—of any demarcation or differentiation of interests—depends on placing ourselves on that line of tension. It is not necessary for us to be all (which is not possible or good), but we should always question whether we are everyone who is here and whether everyone who is here is us.