Conclusions

Così fan tutti offers more insight into role playing. Guglielmo and Ferrando assume disguises, once again for purposes of seduction. When they succeed, they reappear as their original themselves only to "discover" that they have been betrayed by their mistresses. They reveal themselves to have been the Albanian suitors and the two couples, suitably chastened, are reconciled. Guglielmo and Ferrando are back in their original dress, but Mozart will not let them return to their original voices. Role playing changes people, seemingly along the lines that Hegel would soon suggest. The role provides an alternative vantage point – a reflective self, as it were – through which the empirical or social self can be interrogated. In his autobiography, Goethe repeatedly adopts disguises and even dreams to disappear into other versions of himself.⁶⁸ Hegel emphasizes cognition at the expense of emotion, but role playing, like good acting, requires putting oneself into the spirit as well as the mind of the person being portrayed. This involves emotional commitment, not just reflection. The gap they both open between the stage and other self has the potential to create a new person, and hence the inability to return to the "home" key. This change has the potential to drive further experimentation and change.

In Marriage of Figaro, Cherubino not only disguises himself in pursuit of a sexual conquest, he crosses the gender divide by dressing as a woman. His deception is made more amusing by the audience’s knowledge that his role is sung by a soprano. Science fiction picks up on this theme and explores crossovers that are still impossible in today's world. People readily assume the bodies of other people, genders and species. Even more interesting for probing identity are novels that create multiple versions of the same person, as do Jack Vance's To Live Forever, John Varley's Ophiuchi Hotline and Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon. None of them go very far in examining the consequences of such doubling. In Altered Carbon, Takeshi Kovacs, in his new ninja "sleeve" or body, meets himself, in the sleeve of the former lover of the police sergeant with whom he has now teamed up. The two selves have no idea how to relate to one another and begin to argue about their father and his effect on their lives, conducting a kind of Bakhtinian dialogue. They must decide which one of them can survive after they perform their required tasks because the same person is not allowed to exist in more than one form at any given time. Unable to find any logical way to resolve this problem they agree to leave the decision to chance.⁶⁹ As Locke long ago had realized, thought experiments that switch bodies or produce multiple ones have the potential to explore cognitive and affective components of identity.⁷⁰

Role playing prompts several additional observations. Earlier, I noted the different outlooks of philosophers and social theorists living in countries with a strong society and weak state and those from lands with strong states and weak societies. Intellectuals who welcome role playing, like Smith, Hume and Mill, invariably reside in strong societies, and those who oppose it live, or grew up, in strong states. Different takes on role playing also reflect different points of entry into the problem of identity. When the starting point is the individual, as it is with the empirical and liberal English thinkers from Hobbes and Locke on, a robust civil society is the stage on which actors learn roles and perform them as part of the process of becoming themselves. Those accustomed to strong states tend to view civil society in a more negative light because of its assumed propensity to free people from necessary and beneficial restraints. Alternatively, they vehemently reject civil society and its roles because they are thought to force people into confining and alienating roles and identities.

A few thinkers from strong states, Nietzsche, most notably, adopt an individual perspective and theorize routes for people to free themselves from the double binds of state and society. Most, however, maintain a state or society oriented perspective, as arguably does Rousseau, for whom people can only regain their humanity through their integration in a just society that brings out the general will. German idealists, and Hegel and Marx, develop variants of this solution. The emergence of the self is a defining feature of modernity, but one that has taken diverse forms. This variety cannot be understood independently of the social and political conditions in which thought about the self arose. Most social scientists respond favorably to arguments that explain behavioral diversity in terms of structural attributes of societies. We should, however, also consider the opposite possibility: that the emergence of different intellectual traditions were an important part of the explanation for different structures, like weak and strong societies and states.

Modernity is invariably described as a Western innovation that spread to the rest of the world as part of the on-going process of globalization. This perspective ignores the extent to which modernization was perceived as a foreign import in much of the West. It was rarely seen as indigenous, and less so the further east in Europe one travels. Even where modernization was recognized as at least in part a local development, as say in France, it was regarded by many as something foisted upon society by urban elites or foreigners in one’s midst. Anti-Semitism was a long-standing European social disease but one that dramatically intensified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as modernity’s opponents portrayed the Jews as its perpetrators and beneficiaries. From Germany east, modernity was generally considered an alien “Western” import. Central, Southern and Eastern Europeans accordingly displayed the same generic responses to modernity that would later become evident elsewhere in the world. Some people attempted to maintained traditional life-styles and identities, and groups like the Roma and Amish still do in Europe and the United States. Others embraced modernity, welcoming it, at least initially, as a form of political, economic and psychological liberation. Still others proclaimed the superiority of local culture but nevertheless sought to adopt those features of modernity that would enhance economic and military power. In the West, as elsewhere, responses to modernity have been diverse and fluid as have their implications for identity