The assortment of atrocities, genocide, and man-made human misery of the last 150 years has an astonishingly consistent origin. It is not difficult to come up with a partial list of such occurrences, such as the Taiping rebellion, the Trail of Tears, both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor, the rape of Nanking, the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, the Rwandan genocide, and the Khmer Rouge killing fields. What each of these has in common is that they can trace their origins to the destructive results of identity politics. Even in situations where it is convenient to blame war and the resulting human disasters on religious belief, it is not the belief itself that matters, but the use of it to identify discrete, conflicting groups that is crucial.
It is easy to separate human beings into identifiable groups based upon racial traits, religious beliefs, political affiliations, cultural practices etc. and use these resulting groups to define the targets of mankind's more primitive and destructive instincts. This phenomenon is the result of a very basic and unjustified inversion of priorities. Simply stated, the great number of wars, persecutions, atrocities and genocide result from attitudes that we attach to subdivisions of humanity rather than to humanity itself. It seems to be rather curious that a person's dignity and basic rights do not arise from the fact of being human, but rather from being a particular type of human. There would seem to be little compelling argument in favor of the proposition that an individual person's significance, right to existence and pursuit of meaning is not assumed by the mere fact of being human, or even what that person does or does not do, but rather is a consequence of the groups to which such person is perceived to belong. Human life would seem to be much simpler, less prone to conflict and the horrors to which human ingenuity may subject it if that's simple inversion of priorities were corrected, i.e. that the fact of being human takes precedence over any subsequent categorization into discrete groups, and were to be given precedence in determining how humans treat each other.
It does not seem to be a prerequisite that humans love each other as humans in order to avoid the undeniable atrocities related to identity politics. What is determinative, and apparently not innate, is that individual human beings assume that other human beings are entitled to respect, without reference to how people identify themselves or others. Love is an emotion with its own objects and influences. Respect is more a matter of volition; we can choose how we treat each other. It would seem to be more intuitive to respect the humanity of a transgendered person, or someone with particular religious beliefs, or background without first trying to determine if such respect is either required or prohibited by taxonomy. This would seem to be especially obvious in light of the fact that whatever groups one may belong to is frequently a matter of chance. Furthermore, the number of ways that humanity may be divided is practically endless. An individual person may be a member of any number of groups that are simultaneously favored, disfavored, privileged and despised. It is difficult to imagine how such a circumstance will not result in chaos and eventual resort to violence.
It may have been reasonable in the past, when resources were scarce, and starvation, privation and poverty were the natural state of mankind, that conflict would be inevitable, and that categorizing potential rivals into easily identifiable groups had some merit. There may have been a distinct advantage belonging to a particular team. It would now seem however that humankind has reached the point that it is reasonable to question the underlying assumptions. Is there any point to discriminating between one's own group and the other when the only perceived benefit is the exercise of power or persecution? Or is it the case that humanity has advanced to the point where being part of one group in existential struggle against others is a vestigial delusion and unnecessary? Has humanity progressed to the point where the mere fact of being human is something extraordinary and to be cherished?
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