Who Do You Think You Are? Identity in the Twenty-First Century
by Joshua Bowman, Public Discourse:
[…] Today Credit Scores, Not Ancestry, Determine Our Fate.
Today, the loss of ancestral knowledge is no longer a handicap to rising to a position of influence in society. The sexual revolution, battles over LGBT rights, and the increasing use of third-party reproduction increasingly distance us from the biological roots of our identity.
Divorce and remarriage were once unusual but are now commonplace. Further attenuating the ties of ancestry, courts have decided that birth certificates must now display the names not of a child’s biological parents but of whoever wishes to be legally recognized as the parent. In the past, our names were generally transmitted along with our genes; future genealogists will now find many more dead ends. “Blended families” are increasingly normal, with complicated lines of consanguinity to match. It is perfectly legal for a woman to become the surrogate mother of a child who will be legally recognized as her nephew.
Yet, even as our culture has embraced radical individualism, the government, banks, employers, schools, and many other corporate entities are not so flexible. In the founding era, before industrialization and centralization of power shaped our society, a man like Alexander Hamilton could step off a ship in New York harbor as a complete unknown and make a name for himself by relying only on his personal brilliance and natural talents. This idealistic state of affairs could not last. Faced with increasingly mobile populations, nineteenth-century governments began to require much more detailed forms of identification. These have expanded exponentially and now form a web of information on every man, woman, and child.
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