This topic touches a concept we've been tossing around at work of "Identity"
The general gist is that everybody possesses multiple "identities", and that those identities have some personal hierarchy, and that there is also essentially a cut line above which are identities one is willing to die for, and below not.
So, as example one may identify by their gender, region, profession, nationality, family status, race, ethnicity, hobbies, music likes, etc, etc.
The culture one lives in shapes a general "norm" in any given community. Our theory is that in the modern information age those "norms" are evolving far more rapidly than in the past, and there are going to be far more individuals within a community who adopt a family and hierarchy of identifies that are outside that norm.
For example, a third generation French citizen living in Paris may come to prioritize their Algerian heritage above their French citizenship.
Or a British citizen who feels strongly against the UK's policy toward Afghanistan may come to prioritize his support for those who he or she feels his country wrongly oppresses.
Over the past several years the establishment writes such events off as some sort of mental disorder, and say that someone has been "radicalized." This is a natural tendency of governments to write off such individuals as being either somehow crazy or corrupted by some powerful external force. We think it is much more a simple fact that people have free will, and are free thinking and in an age where they are exposed to so much more information have a broader range of choices that they will naturally make.
So, these men may well be British nationals, but it would be an interesting conversation to dig into how they identify, how they prioritize those identities, and how their identifies evolved to the ones that bring them to their current situation.
Just something to consider.
Bob
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Originally Posted by Bob's World
. But I have to add that the concept of "multiple identites" isn't something that one can comfortably confine to the "information age" (whatever that is, sounds like a fuzzy concept to me). What the present age does do, IMO, is increase the number of competing systems of normalisation outsdie to those one normally finds within a given system of normalisation (or culutre, or discipliniary practie or knowledge/power /regime of truth, take your pick). But one also has to counter-ballance that argument with the pervasive role of a particular political ideology (liberalism) in creating a morally relativistic and anti-patriotic (in the sense of relatvising the relationship between citizen and state) climate which permits rival normative ecosystems the ability to flourish and undermine pre-existing societal norms. The division between traitor and patriot has become so blurred as to make treason actually acctractive, if not nonsensicle (for instance). Foucualt and Bordiue have some better (i,.e., more cohenrent) stuff to say on the matter this was just my hash up.
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