The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity
Published in 2018 by Liveright, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity is Appiah's most accessible book and his most direct engagement with contemporary identity politics. Across five chapters, he examines the five major categories through which modern people understand themselves and each other: creed (religion), country (nation), color (race), class, and culture. In each case, he demonstrates that the category is more complex, more contested, and more fluid than either its defenders or its critics typically acknowledge. The 'lies' in the title are not malicious deceptions but simplifications — the inevitable shortcuts identity categories impose on complex realities. The book argues that these simplifications are simultaneously useful and dangerous: useful because they enable solidarity and shared action, dangerous because they become rigid, exclusionary, and blind to the actual complexity of the people they purport to describe. In the AI age, the book's framework illuminates why professional identity — a category not explicitly in Appiah's five — is being destabilized with particular force.
In the AI Story
The book emerged from Appiah's 2016 BBC Reith Lectures, titled 'Mistaken Identities.' It represents his most direct intervention in the contemporary politics of identity — a careful effort to honor the genuine importance of identity categories while exposing their structural limitations.
Appiah's argument develops historically and philosophically. The categories of race, nation, and religion — treated by many as natural kinds — are shown to be products of specific historical processes, shaped by specific interests, and subject to ongoing revision. This does not make them unreal or unimportant. It makes them human constructions with human histories and human stakes.
The central move is to distinguish between the importance of identity categories and the accuracy of the claims typically made about them. Race matters politically even though it does not exist biologically in the way the category implies. National identity matters psychologically even though the nation is an imagined community in Benedict Anderson's sense. The categories are real in their effects; their metaphysical status is more complicated.
For the AI discourse, the book's framework applies with particular force to professional identity, which is not explicitly among Appiah's five categories but functions as a primary identity for many contemporary adults. The software engineer who identifies with her capability is relying on a simplification — a lie that binds — that ties her sense of self to a specific set of skills that are now being performed by machines. When the binding is tight, the disruption is existential. See Identity Under Reconstruction.
Origin
Published by Liveright in 2018, based on Appiah's 2016 BBC Reith Lectures titled 'Mistaken Identities.' The book received wide attention in both academic and popular contexts.
Key Ideas
Five categories. Creed, country, color, class, culture — the five major identity categories through which modern people understand themselves.
Simplifications, not lies. Identity categories are inevitable shortcuts that are useful and dangerous in the same gesture.
Real in their effects. The categories are human constructions with human histories, but their constructedness does not make them unimportant.
The binding problem. When identity is tightly bound to specific categories, destabilization of those categories produces existential crisis.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Appiah, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (2018)
- Appiah, BBC Reith Lectures 'Mistaken Identities' (2016)
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983)
- Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (2005)