Social Identity and the Oneness of Humankind: Reconciling the Universal with the Particular

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.

  • Shahrzad Sabet

    Shahrzad Sabet is a Fellow at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge and Co-Director of the Center on Modernity in Transition. Her research and training span political science, philosophy, economics, and psychology. Her current book project explores how a reimagined universalism can resolve the social and philosophical tensions around collective identity. She has held positions at Princeton University, the University of Maryland, and Harvard University, where she received her PhD. Her work has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.

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42nd Annual Conference

1,400

The views expressed in this recording are those of the presenter and do not necessarily represent the views of the Association for Bahá’í Studies, nor the authoritative explications of Bahá’í writings.