The Deep Identity of the South

 

Baggage Train watering at a Stream Canvas Print

                                                               Conrad Wise Chapman

The Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin lists three kinds of identity in his book Eurasian Mission – diffused, extreme, and deep.  The diffused identity is vague and unconscious so it contributes little to a person’s or a society’s way of viewing himself or itself or the world (Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism, Arktos, U.K., 2014, p. 116).  It resembles the mindset of Andrew Lytle’s ‘momentary man’, who is aware only of the concerns and pleasures of the present hour. \

The extreme identity ‘is an arbitrary and artificial creation of some rational formula that pretends to express and manifest the diffused identity in the intellectual realm.  Here the identity becomes an ideology, a conceptual framework, or a theory’ (Ibid.).  This should sound disturbingly familiar to Southerners, as it describes precisely the Yankee ideology of ‘Americanism’, of America as a proposition nation.  Accordingly, it equates ideological speculations with the essence of a people, which can only lead to the obscuring and/or disfiguring of the real identity of that people (Ibid.).
The deep identity, however, is different.  It is the true self:

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