'Identity' is indeed an insidious lie but not really a new one. It is an old psychological narcissism in a new set of clothes. The leftist Progressive mentality has always needed to find 'victims' so that it can feel better about itself by vicariously (and speciously) 'being on their side'. It's always been a middle class intelligentsia thing and dates all the way from the mid-19th century. First it was 'the poor' then it was anyone who was not white and now it's an ever-expanding - almost desperate - search for new 'victims' to champion. Yes it is immensely harmful to our social fabric. TS Eliot nailed it decades ago: "They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them....... because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
'Identity' isn't just a 'progressive' thing though, is it? I see this right across the political spectrum. Even in this post, characterizing the 'Squad' as far left? That can only come from the author using identity as a cudgel, strangely enough. As a non-American, I find that pretty bizarre. That part of the media controlled by the right certainly make a great deal of use of identity as a weapon. It's bad all around, but not new.
Great point...you also see right-leaning groups now searching for victimization. Everyone is in a race to be the persecuted, including the right. Christian groups, conservatives on colleges, white men being "reverse" discriminated against, etc. I even agree that some of those groups may have experienced degrees of discrimination, but the difference is today everyone wants to make it a contest of who is the most discriminated.
I think of many of the posts regarding youth mental health and wonder if this kind of active searching for disempowerment will spread as we all seek disempower ourselves on the altar of victimhood. If being more oppressed is now basically a tool to gain political power it stands to reason that we will all want to be focused on our victimhood, if only for the power.
It is learned behavior. Over the decade it appears that many have learned that to the victim go the spoils. People have learned that victimhood is now the pathway to cultural virtue and success. So there they go. Really a stunning turnabout from the idea of self-agency providing a pathway to personal satisfaction and success.
Exactly. It is more obvious to people (like myself to) not born here. The right identifies as "pro-life",Christian, white, pro-gun and free expressions as long as it is theirs. It bans books that are the expression of the "other".
Did you read the entire article? The right is not pushing the concepts the article describes, the left is. The article makes the point that identity groups, people that share points of view, are a fact of life. The danger is the leftist ideology that claims it is impossible for people in different groups to understand each other.
Identity groups on the right are reacting to the mutilation of young girls bodies by gender ideologues, the misery visited on poor black communities by defunding police... a very different thing. Perhaps I misunderstood your comment?
The reason we can't understand each other is because we decided we didn't need to. The Enlightenment abandoned any idea that "right" and "wrong" are collectively determined. Locke's state is value-neutral, a rational response to the European wars of religion in his day. Mill's Harm Principle supercharged this, but a value neutral state was always an illusion, and we have reached the end of the charade. Because if collective moral codes are intrinsically illegitimate, there are no moral codes. The postmodernists were simply the first to relize that this left only the will to power. (C.S. Lewis warned us about this in Abolition of Man, but we didn't listen.) Liberation from all collective moral constraints just means the powerful get to enforce their will on everyone else with impunity.
This is what makes solving our current dilemma so hard: we must abandon a core part of our civic and social plumbing: the Enlightenment. The commitment to value neutrality is killing us. We will either re-adopt a social standard of "right" and "wrong" defined by some objective means, or we will continue our descent into an authoritarian plutocracy which loudly preaches our liberation while it enslaves us.
Since everyone faces a unique collection of privileges and oppressions, the logical conclusion of intersectionality is individuality. The postmodernists will get there... if they don't kill us all first.
"It must suggest a better path forward, one grounded in the most noble principles of the liberal tradition"
I agree, but it must be Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas' tradition, not Locke and Mill's. Theirs is a dead end.
Surely the style of identity politics talked about here is anything but value-neutral.
One of my biggest concerns with this identity politics is its tendency to silence other views and its focus on groups rather than wider humanity. Seems to me like Enlightenment values are the antidote not the problem.
That's my point. Postmodernism (Nietzsche forward) assumes that there are no objective values (no Tao, in Lewis' terminology in AbOfMan) so postmodernists can create their own value system. Wokeness is that system. It asserts a collective moral code, the precise thing the Enlightenment rejected. And it's not accidental that said moral code works mostly for the benefit of the highly educated, professional-managerial class.
Locke's philosophy seeded its own destruction. We thought secular liberalism was stable. For the last 3 centuries though, we're been running on 1700 years of shared cultural inertia. That's gone now, and we're reaping the whirlwind.
You are an admirer of C.S. Lewis! So am I. I read all four books in the Abolition of Man Series:
Out Of The Silent Planet
Perelandra
The Abolition of Man Essay, and..
That Hideous Strength.
I recommend reading all four, in that sequence (Abolition of Man was meant to be a sort of Appendix to or Prescript-Addendum to That Hideous Strength.). When I reread Perelandra and Out of the Silent Planet last year and then read AoM and THS for the first time, twice, last year, I got a broad sense that much of this stuff was already in practice in Britain in the 1940's. All of the classic epistemology-destroying, morality-destroying aspects of Identity Politics were evident even then, before all this Black and Trans and Queer stuff became popularized. Many attribute this stuff to the French authors like Derrida and Foucault, Marcuse, etc, but the foundational system had already been laid out in the British elites like H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, etc. You are absolutely right! The Enlightenment is the problem. So many people talk about "defending the values of the Enlightenment" but the the Enlightenment was the Counter Revolution, for it brought in a purely material, random, entropic, and empiricist view of the universe. When you're an entirely empiricist, going purely by sense perception, and not some deeper insight into a Tao that is universal and real and objective, independent of one's senses, you can create your own morality. Or destroy morality completely until you are left with the Will To Power. This attitude is laid out in H.G. Wells Man In The Moon, where space is portrayed as devoid of meaning and cold. Out of the Silent Planet was written as an antidote to H.G. Wells' cold vision and proposed instead a living universe, filled with light and love and meaning. In place of H.G. Wells' vision of a cold, uncaring Universe, C.S. Lewis posits his view of Space as "Deep Heaven."
The Enlightenment was the Anti-Renaissance. The Renaissance consisted of thinkers like Nicholas of Cusa, Kepler, Leibnitz, Colbert, and all the thinkers that based their ideas on Platonic Science of the Music of the Spheres. You should check out Matt Ehret and Cynthia Chung of Canadian Patriot Press and Rising Tide Foundation. They talk alot about the contrast between the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. The Enlightenment was designed to bring in the Venetian Oligarchical ideas of cold, uncaring science from people like Paolo Sarpi, Newton, etc. Lyndon LaRouche Jr also weighed in on many of these topics, favoring instead a social science of Physical Economy, based on the ideas of Hamilton, List, Colbert, and Leibnitz to uplift Humanity toward greater social justice.
If a small group of humans could be assembled that was able to be interested in the distinction between knowledge and belief, perhaps they could come up with a plan to clean up this increasingly dangerous gong show we've built around us.
That's Plato's philosopher kings. Unfortunately, they need power to perform the cleanup and deep virtue to perform it in our collective self-interest instead of their own. Do you see anyone today that you would trust with that kind of power?
One of the people currently waging this fight on a small scale is Chris Rufo at U of S. Florida. I'm sure there are others. But they are, for now, drops in an ocean.
Some possible pushback on unqualified admiration for Chris Rufo's fight, specifically regarding his role in the transformation of the New College of Florida?
While I have some disagreements with parts of Moynihan's take, one overall theme resonates. At heart, conservatism is about respecting "what's there," and moving slowly when seeking to improve it. In contrast with aiming to hastily bring about enormous change, based almost entirely on ideology rather than pragmatics. Taking the latter approach far too frequently triggers the Law of Unexpected Consequences.
As he notes, "There may be some version of a competent transformation of New College. But to be done well, it would have to be slower, doing limited harm to existing stakeholders, maintaining enough stability to manage the change without damaging the reputation of the institution."
I would say this is simply a rehash of the current establishment / populist civil war going on in conservatism right now, but Moynihan is a progressive, so I'm unclear why anyone who values conservatism would put much stock in what he says. He may be right, but as a devoted partisan, he will, at best, have blind spots and at worst, simply lie to benefit his own side.
The view that conservatism should respect institutions as they are and change them slowly is certainly valid. That's very Burkean and I get it. However when institutions are actively engaged in evil, more dramatic action is called for. That's what I mean about this being a conservative civil war. The Establishment side is exemplified by George Will's "standing athwart history yelling stop" or your formulation which seems to be "slow down even though you're going in the right direction". The populist position is that these institutions have been very recently corrupted and must be restored to their proper form and function just as suddenly.
Given 50 years consistent power to gradually transform these institutions, I MIGHT agree with you. But we don't have that. Instead we have a limited window where the democratic process has granted us (and that's key -- voters granted to us) oversight of the university system of a large state. Will Rufo et al make mistakes? Absolutely! have they? Almost certainly! But even their mistakes are better than the other side's successes. Every year most universities are corrupting more minds, dividing our society, and making it harder for people to life full and happy lives. Why would you allow that to continue any longer than necessary? As C.S. Lewis says, "when you're on the wrong road, the most progressive man is the one who turns around first."
Aristotle and Plato both believed fostering virtue was the most important calling of all legislators. In this vein, a true conservatism of the Burke variety isn't afraid to define "good" (virtue) and seeks policies to make it more likely people will achieve it and less likely that they will fail. That is what "promoting the common good" means. If you eschew using the power we have when we have it to secure what we believe is good, what is your solution?
I would suggest the polar opposite of that: rediscover classical philosophy and the liberal arts. Particularly STEM majors need an understanding of ethics and philosophy. If we're training the next Robert Oppenheimer, I want him to have read Plato and Aristotle on virtue and Aquinas on war theory.
This is, BTW, exactly what Chris Rufo is attempting at S. Florida.
Standpoint theory: “I don’t understand your experiences and I am in no position to evaluate your demands. But since I recognize that you are more oppressed than me, I will endeavor to be a good ally and support what you ask for.”
Truly that is an illustration of “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. One simple example will suffice: the defund the police movement. By attempting to reduce the number of blacks in the penal system, the movement created much higher crime rates (and victim rates) in the very community they were ostensibly trying to protect. That is, indeed, a trap.
The defund the police movement is also another great example of a small group claiming to be representatives of an oppressed minority group even when most of the members of that group disagree with the movement.
I recently posted on my FB page a heartbreaking appeal of the oppressed Armenians who have been forced last week to abandon their homes in Arzakh in the most brutal way and after a long and painful blockade by Azerbaidzhan. No, nobody in the West put Armenian flags on their cars, windows and FB avatars for some mysterious reason.
Do you know where the first comments to that soul crushing appeal came from? They came from the oppressed Ukranians, and they were not about understanding, comforting or supporting. No. They were blaming and destructive. It was heartbreaking.
Many oppressed - alas - have no sympathy or understanding for other oppressed.
I am a Soviet immigrant in the US and I have witnessed many ethnic conflicts and interactions of oppressed between each other. Here is what I learnt. The understanding of one another comes from a deep humanitarian sense and a larger soul, not from shared experience of oppression.
Thoughtful applied philosophy. The ideas examined are deep and pervasive. Their flaws need to be acknowledged. One simple idea is seldom recognized and should be called out when it appears: there is no intrinsic nobility in being a member of an oppressed group. George Floyd was beatified for dying but he was no more noble for that. He was oppressed by racism, to some extent, by lack of education, by drug addiction, by a horrible health history that was not noted in the trials of the men who were present at his death. He was noble in that he was a human being and that state of being should probably have protected him more than it did. But his experience of oppression contained both interior and exterior aspects. Had he not struggled blindly (and under the influence of powerful drugs) he likely would not have been taken to the ground by the officers. Had he submitted to what were in the beginning lawful orders, he might have been able to more effectively communicated that he was in medical distress. His behavior didn't earn him a death sentence but it certainly contributed to his death and that death has ruined the lives of four officers as well as distorting the thinking of millions of Americans who haven't looked closely to what happened.
I haven't had time to read this entire post, but I do have some comments about the origins in Critical Theory. I was in grad school in English just before Theory began its rule. The approach of the time was New Criticism, close reading of a work, which turned out to be spectacularly useful when I switched to law school and during my legal career. It was perfect for analyzing case law. I rather lost track of what was happening in English lit criticism.
Fast forward maybe 15 years. The discussion of Critical Theory came up in my writing group so I started trying to learn more about it. Michel Foucault was mildly readable, Derrida less so, and criticism by lesser mortals was totally unreadable. There was even a website where you could put in ordinary thoughts and have it translated into impenetrable jargon that sounded just like many published articles. It was hysterical. "I think my dog needs to lose more weight" became paragraphs of gobbledygook.
Fast forward another 13 years. After I retired I was able to audit courses at the University as part of a senior program. I started going to fairly advanced English classes, a lot of them. NOT ONE professor would put up with Critical Theory talk; we were all back to close reading.
That it was abandoned by the very discipline that went hole hog for it 30 years earlier appears to have had no effect on "lay" use of it to divide the country. I don't know that it was abandoned in other humanities or social science disciplines, but I suspect a lot of people who actually wanted to teach students something decided to bag it.
Oh, good. I'm not a racist. :) The shift from celebrating diversity to demonizing those who arrived in this country on one boat versus another has always felt clumsy. As a woman, for example, I continue to resent 'minority status' — an identity trap — which infers that I am somehow less than. In fact, I celebrate the fact that I can bear children and have a career. Our commonality as humans is that we all have experiences. When we find others who share our experiences, we have a community — rather, communities (since every individual is a composite of many life experiences.) Society as a sea of experiences, not colors. We've walked backwards by grossly elevating race as one's opening identity. It diminishes and marginalizes.
Ha, this is all why Haidt’s choice of After Babel is perfect. I’ve said many times before that it’s like we are all shouting at each other yet we don’t understand a thing the others are saying. This does connect dots of some social and cultural phenomena I have spent some brain cells on. There is something called the Ladder of Inference that has been around a long time that captures this very thing. There are the concrete facts (the car was red and it hit the fence) and then there are are building levels of subjective stuff that builds to a person’s meaning making conclusion (the driver was drunk). So we’ve known about the subjective differences for a good while. It’s only lately that it’s taken on the color of someone seeing it differently as a psychological mortal threat to a person’s existential self. You must affirm what I say because it’s the sum of who I am and to not do that is trying to erase me from existence. Which of course is used for justification of all kinds of things: censorship, racism in the name of anti-racism, etc. That is some serious psychological dysfunction or would have been considered so in the not too distant past. Which of course is Jon Haidt’s incredibly interesting work.
The idea of only being able to be listened to if we have had lived experience of something is extremely limiting. Often our observation with no investment makes for greater objectivity and better judgement because we have no dog in the race, so to speak.
The fragmentation of society is worsening because in today’s attention seeking world, everyone wants to feel special.
It’s no longer niche enough to be (for example) a white teenage girl. One has to have some extra - ‘trans’, ‘ADHD’ etc. And as we seek community in an ever shrinking pool, it becomes a game of ‘Guess Who’ and solidarity requires someone with more detailed specifics than a new smartphone.
Thanks Jon for highlighting Yascha's important work - will most definitely add it to my reading list (and congratulations on completing your book !)
My husband and I just published a post yesterday, which provides a response to the final question raised by Yascha, a possible path forward, grounded not just in liberal principles, but more foundationally in what makes us human - The 3Rs of Unmachining: Guideposts for an Age of Technological Upheaval" https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/the-3rs-of-unmachining-guideposts
"No human being can perceive the truth about another human being perfectly. But if we prioritize knowing each other in our relationships, this truth has a chance of growing, in that we can start to see each other not ideologically, or abstractly, or for profit or use, but closer to who we actually are....
Often, as we lament the state of our world, our instinct is to look to something in the past, whether some former stage of our civilization, or how we imagined people once were and might again become. While we’re sympathetic to this instinct, we’re not confident that this is the place to begin. For example, people can have quite different ideas about what aspect of our society we need to protect or restore—just spend enough time with a mixed group of religious people, or secular people, and that becomes clear.
Which means that if we start the course correction on the basis of a group-based “distinctive”, then we will find ourselves strengthened within our group, at the expense of becoming more disconnected from those who don’t share our distinctives.
We are not arguing for some kind of veiled ecumenism. Rather, what we are suggesting is that, in the shared struggle against the destructive side of technology, we need to give emphasis to what is foundational for all of us.
The first two signposts—Recognize and Remove—open the path of Return to that foundation, which is relationships. Many things apart from relationships matter in life, of course, but our view is that unless we prioritize our marriages, families, and the wider spheres of our human connections—unless we make this the alpha and omega of our efforts—nothing else will work—not religion, not philosophy, not nature, not even technocracy. It will all flounder, because it will either miss or misuse something more basic than all of these things: we are embodied relational creatures who thrive only when we are known and loved."
Oh me, Oh my! And I had just started to read Marshall Rosenberg's "Nonviolent Communication". And Jon comes back to life. Observation, Feeling, Needs, Request. This type of interchange has been successful for eons. It is not related to any particular religion. It really is the basic humanity that says we all are different but our Communication and Feeling make us able to appreciate one another. Back to the book!
It might have had something to do with the Maiden revolution that the CIA staged in the Ukraine in 2014, to depose their lawfully elected president and intiate the genocide against the ethnic Russians in the Dombas.
This is thought-provoking, but I want to press a bit on the discussion of experiential vs. propositional knowledge. There is evidently reason to suppose that one can draw *some* reasonable conclusions about the experiences and situations of sex workers without having to engage in the practice, and this can be generalised to all sorts of professions. However, at the risk of stating the painfully obvious, there is a difference between *some* and *all*. There may be situations where people with certain professional backgrounds are in a unique position to contribute to a debate. More importantly, there is a qualitative difference between a profession and a cultural, ethnic, religious or national identity. Therefore, a much broader and deeper argument is required to challenge identity politics.
Also, regarding the argument that standpoint theory is "wrong" because there is not a single, shared experience common to all x, for any identity x. I don't see why standpoint theory cannot adopt a "family resemblance" view of shared experience. The claim that women all share a common experience can be read in a non-essentialist way. Otherwise, your argument against standpoint theory would be an argument against the idea of shared experiences in general, and that would be philosophically unbecoming.
Great breakdown on how the Identity Synthesis is destroying our way to communicate with each other and work with each other and I agree with ALL of it.
However, that being said, I feel that any discussion of Race in America is incomplete absent any discussion of what has taken place in Housing and Real Estate in America after 2008. You had said that the racial polarization has taken off really in 2014 and I noticed that too. You had also talked about Propositional Knowledge too and what I am going to talk about next comes from Propositional Knowledge. Namely, that, even though I am a White guy, there are certain facts on the ground that one can objectively point to where the situation for Blacks in America got a lot worse during the Obama years, creating fertile ground for the kind of anger that made many susceptible to the Identity Trap that you described.
First, after the 2008 Housing Crash, many houses got foreclosed. Many who worked in IT and well-paid service jobs went back to live with their parents, who had bought homes long ago when it was cheap and "low hanging fruit." Both Bush Jr right before he left office, in the Fall of 2008, AND Obama, right after he came in in 2009, bailed out too big to fail banks and created a rewards system for even more rampant real estate speculation. This rested on the foundation of Bill Clinton's Repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999, allowing for the speculation bubble of real estate that led to the 2008 crash in the first place.
When the economy "improved" in the 2010-11 time period, young millennial tech workers started moving back to the cities. But now they were renters, rather than owners. This created a vacancy shortage in cities, leading to a massive rise in rents. Apartments began to be "flipped" and it soon became "cool" and "hip" to move into Inner cities in coastal cities, where a lot of Blacks happened to live. Places like Harlem, Brooklyn, etc. Gentrification took off. Black grandmothers in Bed Stuy who owned their own buildings were pressured by draconian enforcement of infractions, to sell their homes to real estate speculators who, in turn, remodeled them into Hipster apartments at double and triple the rents. Blacks were meanwhile being forced to move further and further from the cities they grew up in, to far flung suburbs. These suburbs had now become "Exurbs." Formerly created by "White Flight" in the 60's-70's., these Exurbs were now largely abandoned and run down by the massive foreclosures that happened in 2008. Thus, they were now poorer areas that were cheaper to live in. Ferguson, Missouri, where the Michael Brown thing happened, was one of these "Exurbs."
I have to say a bit about me: I had grown up in a neighborhood in San Diego, CA, that was still largely White in 1980. Then, it became more progressively Black in the 1990's-2000's. But then after 2010 it became Hipster and Gay, and started gentrifying. I lived in a complex with mostly Gays that I knew. Then, the old woman who owned it sold the complex, and the new owner came in and flipped it. Kicked everybody out, remodeled it, and doubled the rent. I was forced to move, for a while, to a low income, mostly Black, community where I felt unwelcome and got nasty stares. Yet at the same time, having been gentrified out myself, I could appreciate the fact that, if Blacks have 1/16 of the income and assets that Whites do, on average (as some studies showed), it does not take being Black to understand that they are going to be at a severe disadvantage in a housing and rental market where the prices are just going through the roof. And it just takes some leaps of logic and rationality to deduce that, if Blacks were denied homeownership back in the days when property was "low hanging fruit"-back in the 1940's to 1960's, when all that discrimination and redlining was going on...
They are not going to be able to get into Homeownership now because housing rates have gotten aboard a flying saucer and taken off to the Andromeda Galaxy. It's just Mathematics.
Thus, I feel that unless we do something about the housing issue, and the rents, it's going to be a lot harder to push back against the Identity scams. If people are housed and financially stable, they are going to be a lot less susceptible to the Identity arguments. Whites can also benefit from a massive effort to uplift Blacks out of poverty and into homeownership as well because it will create more customers and money tends to spread around. We just have to adopt a Win-Win approach to reparations and poverty reduction, rather than a Win-Lose.
I say this not to disagree with your article, but to inform readers and commenters who are seeing this board.
'Identity' is indeed an insidious lie but not really a new one. It is an old psychological narcissism in a new set of clothes. The leftist Progressive mentality has always needed to find 'victims' so that it can feel better about itself by vicariously (and speciously) 'being on their side'. It's always been a middle class intelligentsia thing and dates all the way from the mid-19th century. First it was 'the poor' then it was anyone who was not white and now it's an ever-expanding - almost desperate - search for new 'victims' to champion. Yes it is immensely harmful to our social fabric. TS Eliot nailed it decades ago: "They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them....... because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
'Identity' isn't just a 'progressive' thing though, is it? I see this right across the political spectrum. Even in this post, characterizing the 'Squad' as far left? That can only come from the author using identity as a cudgel, strangely enough. As a non-American, I find that pretty bizarre. That part of the media controlled by the right certainly make a great deal of use of identity as a weapon. It's bad all around, but not new.
Great point...you also see right-leaning groups now searching for victimization. Everyone is in a race to be the persecuted, including the right. Christian groups, conservatives on colleges, white men being "reverse" discriminated against, etc. I even agree that some of those groups may have experienced degrees of discrimination, but the difference is today everyone wants to make it a contest of who is the most discriminated.
I think of many of the posts regarding youth mental health and wonder if this kind of active searching for disempowerment will spread as we all seek disempower ourselves on the altar of victimhood. If being more oppressed is now basically a tool to gain political power it stands to reason that we will all want to be focused on our victimhood, if only for the power.
It is learned behavior. Over the decade it appears that many have learned that to the victim go the spoils. People have learned that victimhood is now the pathway to cultural virtue and success. So there they go. Really a stunning turnabout from the idea of self-agency providing a pathway to personal satisfaction and success.
Exactly. It is more obvious to people (like myself to) not born here. The right identifies as "pro-life",Christian, white, pro-gun and free expressions as long as it is theirs. It bans books that are the expression of the "other".
Did you read the entire article? The right is not pushing the concepts the article describes, the left is. The article makes the point that identity groups, people that share points of view, are a fact of life. The danger is the leftist ideology that claims it is impossible for people in different groups to understand each other.
Identity groups on the right are reacting to the mutilation of young girls bodies by gender ideologues, the misery visited on poor black communities by defunding police... a very different thing. Perhaps I misunderstood your comment?
Sorry, but I'm not responding to someone who lacks the courage to use their own name.
The reason we can't understand each other is because we decided we didn't need to. The Enlightenment abandoned any idea that "right" and "wrong" are collectively determined. Locke's state is value-neutral, a rational response to the European wars of religion in his day. Mill's Harm Principle supercharged this, but a value neutral state was always an illusion, and we have reached the end of the charade. Because if collective moral codes are intrinsically illegitimate, there are no moral codes. The postmodernists were simply the first to relize that this left only the will to power. (C.S. Lewis warned us about this in Abolition of Man, but we didn't listen.) Liberation from all collective moral constraints just means the powerful get to enforce their will on everyone else with impunity.
This is what makes solving our current dilemma so hard: we must abandon a core part of our civic and social plumbing: the Enlightenment. The commitment to value neutrality is killing us. We will either re-adopt a social standard of "right" and "wrong" defined by some objective means, or we will continue our descent into an authoritarian plutocracy which loudly preaches our liberation while it enslaves us.
Since everyone faces a unique collection of privileges and oppressions, the logical conclusion of intersectionality is individuality. The postmodernists will get there... if they don't kill us all first.
"It must suggest a better path forward, one grounded in the most noble principles of the liberal tradition"
I agree, but it must be Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas' tradition, not Locke and Mill's. Theirs is a dead end.
Surely the style of identity politics talked about here is anything but value-neutral.
One of my biggest concerns with this identity politics is its tendency to silence other views and its focus on groups rather than wider humanity. Seems to me like Enlightenment values are the antidote not the problem.
That's my point. Postmodernism (Nietzsche forward) assumes that there are no objective values (no Tao, in Lewis' terminology in AbOfMan) so postmodernists can create their own value system. Wokeness is that system. It asserts a collective moral code, the precise thing the Enlightenment rejected. And it's not accidental that said moral code works mostly for the benefit of the highly educated, professional-managerial class.
Locke's philosophy seeded its own destruction. We thought secular liberalism was stable. For the last 3 centuries though, we're been running on 1700 years of shared cultural inertia. That's gone now, and we're reaping the whirlwind.
You are an admirer of C.S. Lewis! So am I. I read all four books in the Abolition of Man Series:
Out Of The Silent Planet
Perelandra
The Abolition of Man Essay, and..
That Hideous Strength.
I recommend reading all four, in that sequence (Abolition of Man was meant to be a sort of Appendix to or Prescript-Addendum to That Hideous Strength.). When I reread Perelandra and Out of the Silent Planet last year and then read AoM and THS for the first time, twice, last year, I got a broad sense that much of this stuff was already in practice in Britain in the 1940's. All of the classic epistemology-destroying, morality-destroying aspects of Identity Politics were evident even then, before all this Black and Trans and Queer stuff became popularized. Many attribute this stuff to the French authors like Derrida and Foucault, Marcuse, etc, but the foundational system had already been laid out in the British elites like H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, etc. You are absolutely right! The Enlightenment is the problem. So many people talk about "defending the values of the Enlightenment" but the the Enlightenment was the Counter Revolution, for it brought in a purely material, random, entropic, and empiricist view of the universe. When you're an entirely empiricist, going purely by sense perception, and not some deeper insight into a Tao that is universal and real and objective, independent of one's senses, you can create your own morality. Or destroy morality completely until you are left with the Will To Power. This attitude is laid out in H.G. Wells Man In The Moon, where space is portrayed as devoid of meaning and cold. Out of the Silent Planet was written as an antidote to H.G. Wells' cold vision and proposed instead a living universe, filled with light and love and meaning. In place of H.G. Wells' vision of a cold, uncaring Universe, C.S. Lewis posits his view of Space as "Deep Heaven."
The Enlightenment was the Anti-Renaissance. The Renaissance consisted of thinkers like Nicholas of Cusa, Kepler, Leibnitz, Colbert, and all the thinkers that based their ideas on Platonic Science of the Music of the Spheres. You should check out Matt Ehret and Cynthia Chung of Canadian Patriot Press and Rising Tide Foundation. They talk alot about the contrast between the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. The Enlightenment was designed to bring in the Venetian Oligarchical ideas of cold, uncaring science from people like Paolo Sarpi, Newton, etc. Lyndon LaRouche Jr also weighed in on many of these topics, favoring instead a social science of Physical Economy, based on the ideas of Hamilton, List, Colbert, and Leibnitz to uplift Humanity toward greater social justice.
If a small group of humans could be assembled that was able to be interested in the distinction between knowledge and belief, perhaps they could come up with a plan to clean up this increasingly dangerous gong show we've built around us.
That's Plato's philosopher kings. Unfortunately, they need power to perform the cleanup and deep virtue to perform it in our collective self-interest instead of their own. Do you see anyone today that you would trust with that kind of power?
One of the people currently waging this fight on a small scale is Chris Rufo at U of S. Florida. I'm sure there are others. But they are, for now, drops in an ocean.
Some possible pushback on unqualified admiration for Chris Rufo's fight, specifically regarding his role in the transformation of the New College of Florida?
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/new-college-is-a-warning-about-the
While I have some disagreements with parts of Moynihan's take, one overall theme resonates. At heart, conservatism is about respecting "what's there," and moving slowly when seeking to improve it. In contrast with aiming to hastily bring about enormous change, based almost entirely on ideology rather than pragmatics. Taking the latter approach far too frequently triggers the Law of Unexpected Consequences.
As he notes, "There may be some version of a competent transformation of New College. But to be done well, it would have to be slower, doing limited harm to existing stakeholders, maintaining enough stability to manage the change without damaging the reputation of the institution."
I would say this is simply a rehash of the current establishment / populist civil war going on in conservatism right now, but Moynihan is a progressive, so I'm unclear why anyone who values conservatism would put much stock in what he says. He may be right, but as a devoted partisan, he will, at best, have blind spots and at worst, simply lie to benefit his own side.
The view that conservatism should respect institutions as they are and change them slowly is certainly valid. That's very Burkean and I get it. However when institutions are actively engaged in evil, more dramatic action is called for. That's what I mean about this being a conservative civil war. The Establishment side is exemplified by George Will's "standing athwart history yelling stop" or your formulation which seems to be "slow down even though you're going in the right direction". The populist position is that these institutions have been very recently corrupted and must be restored to their proper form and function just as suddenly.
Given 50 years consistent power to gradually transform these institutions, I MIGHT agree with you. But we don't have that. Instead we have a limited window where the democratic process has granted us (and that's key -- voters granted to us) oversight of the university system of a large state. Will Rufo et al make mistakes? Absolutely! have they? Almost certainly! But even their mistakes are better than the other side's successes. Every year most universities are corrupting more minds, dividing our society, and making it harder for people to life full and happy lives. Why would you allow that to continue any longer than necessary? As C.S. Lewis says, "when you're on the wrong road, the most progressive man is the one who turns around first."
Aristotle and Plato both believed fostering virtue was the most important calling of all legislators. In this vein, a true conservatism of the Burke variety isn't afraid to define "good" (virtue) and seeks policies to make it more likely people will achieve it and less likely that they will fail. That is what "promoting the common good" means. If you eschew using the power we have when we have it to secure what we believe is good, what is your solution?
Perhaps other than STEM programs, we should go full Pol Pot on US universities.
I would suggest the polar opposite of that: rediscover classical philosophy and the liberal arts. Particularly STEM majors need an understanding of ethics and philosophy. If we're training the next Robert Oppenheimer, I want him to have read Plato and Aristotle on virtue and Aquinas on war theory.
This is, BTW, exactly what Chris Rufo is attempting at S. Florida.
Yet more background on the "counter-revolution" that Rufo and others are attempting ...
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/right-wing-culture-warriors-want
I know of a few people that seem reasonably trustworthy, myself included! :)
To de-risk power, I'd recommend a methodology. Acquiring power, that is more tricky.
Standpoint theory: “I don’t understand your experiences and I am in no position to evaluate your demands. But since I recognize that you are more oppressed than me, I will endeavor to be a good ally and support what you ask for.”
Truly that is an illustration of “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. One simple example will suffice: the defund the police movement. By attempting to reduce the number of blacks in the penal system, the movement created much higher crime rates (and victim rates) in the very community they were ostensibly trying to protect. That is, indeed, a trap.
The defund the police movement is also another great example of a small group claiming to be representatives of an oppressed minority group even when most of the members of that group disagree with the movement.
I recently posted on my FB page a heartbreaking appeal of the oppressed Armenians who have been forced last week to abandon their homes in Arzakh in the most brutal way and after a long and painful blockade by Azerbaidzhan. No, nobody in the West put Armenian flags on their cars, windows and FB avatars for some mysterious reason.
Do you know where the first comments to that soul crushing appeal came from? They came from the oppressed Ukranians, and they were not about understanding, comforting or supporting. No. They were blaming and destructive. It was heartbreaking.
Many oppressed - alas - have no sympathy or understanding for other oppressed.
I am a Soviet immigrant in the US and I have witnessed many ethnic conflicts and interactions of oppressed between each other. Here is what I learnt. The understanding of one another comes from a deep humanitarian sense and a larger soul, not from shared experience of oppression.
"The understanding of one another comes from a deep humanitarian sense and a larger soul, not from shared experience of oppression."
Exactly so. Well said.
I agree!
Thoughtful applied philosophy. The ideas examined are deep and pervasive. Their flaws need to be acknowledged. One simple idea is seldom recognized and should be called out when it appears: there is no intrinsic nobility in being a member of an oppressed group. George Floyd was beatified for dying but he was no more noble for that. He was oppressed by racism, to some extent, by lack of education, by drug addiction, by a horrible health history that was not noted in the trials of the men who were present at his death. He was noble in that he was a human being and that state of being should probably have protected him more than it did. But his experience of oppression contained both interior and exterior aspects. Had he not struggled blindly (and under the influence of powerful drugs) he likely would not have been taken to the ground by the officers. Had he submitted to what were in the beginning lawful orders, he might have been able to more effectively communicated that he was in medical distress. His behavior didn't earn him a death sentence but it certainly contributed to his death and that death has ruined the lives of four officers as well as distorting the thinking of millions of Americans who haven't looked closely to what happened.
I haven't had time to read this entire post, but I do have some comments about the origins in Critical Theory. I was in grad school in English just before Theory began its rule. The approach of the time was New Criticism, close reading of a work, which turned out to be spectacularly useful when I switched to law school and during my legal career. It was perfect for analyzing case law. I rather lost track of what was happening in English lit criticism.
Fast forward maybe 15 years. The discussion of Critical Theory came up in my writing group so I started trying to learn more about it. Michel Foucault was mildly readable, Derrida less so, and criticism by lesser mortals was totally unreadable. There was even a website where you could put in ordinary thoughts and have it translated into impenetrable jargon that sounded just like many published articles. It was hysterical. "I think my dog needs to lose more weight" became paragraphs of gobbledygook.
Fast forward another 13 years. After I retired I was able to audit courses at the University as part of a senior program. I started going to fairly advanced English classes, a lot of them. NOT ONE professor would put up with Critical Theory talk; we were all back to close reading.
That it was abandoned by the very discipline that went hole hog for it 30 years earlier appears to have had no effect on "lay" use of it to divide the country. I don't know that it was abandoned in other humanities or social science disciplines, but I suspect a lot of people who actually wanted to teach students something decided to bag it.
Oh, good. I'm not a racist. :) The shift from celebrating diversity to demonizing those who arrived in this country on one boat versus another has always felt clumsy. As a woman, for example, I continue to resent 'minority status' — an identity trap — which infers that I am somehow less than. In fact, I celebrate the fact that I can bear children and have a career. Our commonality as humans is that we all have experiences. When we find others who share our experiences, we have a community — rather, communities (since every individual is a composite of many life experiences.) Society as a sea of experiences, not colors. We've walked backwards by grossly elevating race as one's opening identity. It diminishes and marginalizes.
And we are all part of the human race. The racial distinctions are false part of the 'divide and rule' policy of those who wish to rule.
https://alphaandomegacloud.wordpress.com/2022/09/25/r-is-for-race/
Ha, this is all why Haidt’s choice of After Babel is perfect. I’ve said many times before that it’s like we are all shouting at each other yet we don’t understand a thing the others are saying. This does connect dots of some social and cultural phenomena I have spent some brain cells on. There is something called the Ladder of Inference that has been around a long time that captures this very thing. There are the concrete facts (the car was red and it hit the fence) and then there are are building levels of subjective stuff that builds to a person’s meaning making conclusion (the driver was drunk). So we’ve known about the subjective differences for a good while. It’s only lately that it’s taken on the color of someone seeing it differently as a psychological mortal threat to a person’s existential self. You must affirm what I say because it’s the sum of who I am and to not do that is trying to erase me from existence. Which of course is used for justification of all kinds of things: censorship, racism in the name of anti-racism, etc. That is some serious psychological dysfunction or would have been considered so in the not too distant past. Which of course is Jon Haidt’s incredibly interesting work.
The idea of only being able to be listened to if we have had lived experience of something is extremely limiting. Often our observation with no investment makes for greater objectivity and better judgement because we have no dog in the race, so to speak.
The fragmentation of society is worsening because in today’s attention seeking world, everyone wants to feel special.
It’s no longer niche enough to be (for example) a white teenage girl. One has to have some extra - ‘trans’, ‘ADHD’ etc. And as we seek community in an ever shrinking pool, it becomes a game of ‘Guess Who’ and solidarity requires someone with more detailed specifics than a new smartphone.
Thanks Jon for highlighting Yascha's important work - will most definitely add it to my reading list (and congratulations on completing your book !)
My husband and I just published a post yesterday, which provides a response to the final question raised by Yascha, a possible path forward, grounded not just in liberal principles, but more foundationally in what makes us human - The 3Rs of Unmachining: Guideposts for an Age of Technological Upheaval" https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/the-3rs-of-unmachining-guideposts
"No human being can perceive the truth about another human being perfectly. But if we prioritize knowing each other in our relationships, this truth has a chance of growing, in that we can start to see each other not ideologically, or abstractly, or for profit or use, but closer to who we actually are....
Often, as we lament the state of our world, our instinct is to look to something in the past, whether some former stage of our civilization, or how we imagined people once were and might again become. While we’re sympathetic to this instinct, we’re not confident that this is the place to begin. For example, people can have quite different ideas about what aspect of our society we need to protect or restore—just spend enough time with a mixed group of religious people, or secular people, and that becomes clear.
Which means that if we start the course correction on the basis of a group-based “distinctive”, then we will find ourselves strengthened within our group, at the expense of becoming more disconnected from those who don’t share our distinctives.
We are not arguing for some kind of veiled ecumenism. Rather, what we are suggesting is that, in the shared struggle against the destructive side of technology, we need to give emphasis to what is foundational for all of us.
The first two signposts—Recognize and Remove—open the path of Return to that foundation, which is relationships. Many things apart from relationships matter in life, of course, but our view is that unless we prioritize our marriages, families, and the wider spheres of our human connections—unless we make this the alpha and omega of our efforts—nothing else will work—not religion, not philosophy, not nature, not even technocracy. It will all flounder, because it will either miss or misuse something more basic than all of these things: we are embodied relational creatures who thrive only when we are known and loved."
Oh me, Oh my! And I had just started to read Marshall Rosenberg's "Nonviolent Communication". And Jon comes back to life. Observation, Feeling, Needs, Request. This type of interchange has been successful for eons. It is not related to any particular religion. It really is the basic humanity that says we all are different but our Communication and Feeling make us able to appreciate one another. Back to the book!
Thank you. Very well-written and wise.
It might have had something to do with the Maiden revolution that the CIA staged in the Ukraine in 2014, to depose their lawfully elected president and intiate the genocide against the ethnic Russians in the Dombas.
Some background on that time in 2014 ...
https://bitterwinter.org/myth-of-the-american-coups-in-ukraine-2-2014/
I think Scott Ritter has a better take at youtube.com/watch?v=l6y3l9xLBRs .
It reads like CIA propaganda to me.
This is thought-provoking, but I want to press a bit on the discussion of experiential vs. propositional knowledge. There is evidently reason to suppose that one can draw *some* reasonable conclusions about the experiences and situations of sex workers without having to engage in the practice, and this can be generalised to all sorts of professions. However, at the risk of stating the painfully obvious, there is a difference between *some* and *all*. There may be situations where people with certain professional backgrounds are in a unique position to contribute to a debate. More importantly, there is a qualitative difference between a profession and a cultural, ethnic, religious or national identity. Therefore, a much broader and deeper argument is required to challenge identity politics.
Also, regarding the argument that standpoint theory is "wrong" because there is not a single, shared experience common to all x, for any identity x. I don't see why standpoint theory cannot adopt a "family resemblance" view of shared experience. The claim that women all share a common experience can be read in a non-essentialist way. Otherwise, your argument against standpoint theory would be an argument against the idea of shared experiences in general, and that would be philosophically unbecoming.
Great breakdown on how the Identity Synthesis is destroying our way to communicate with each other and work with each other and I agree with ALL of it.
However, that being said, I feel that any discussion of Race in America is incomplete absent any discussion of what has taken place in Housing and Real Estate in America after 2008. You had said that the racial polarization has taken off really in 2014 and I noticed that too. You had also talked about Propositional Knowledge too and what I am going to talk about next comes from Propositional Knowledge. Namely, that, even though I am a White guy, there are certain facts on the ground that one can objectively point to where the situation for Blacks in America got a lot worse during the Obama years, creating fertile ground for the kind of anger that made many susceptible to the Identity Trap that you described.
First, after the 2008 Housing Crash, many houses got foreclosed. Many who worked in IT and well-paid service jobs went back to live with their parents, who had bought homes long ago when it was cheap and "low hanging fruit." Both Bush Jr right before he left office, in the Fall of 2008, AND Obama, right after he came in in 2009, bailed out too big to fail banks and created a rewards system for even more rampant real estate speculation. This rested on the foundation of Bill Clinton's Repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999, allowing for the speculation bubble of real estate that led to the 2008 crash in the first place.
When the economy "improved" in the 2010-11 time period, young millennial tech workers started moving back to the cities. But now they were renters, rather than owners. This created a vacancy shortage in cities, leading to a massive rise in rents. Apartments began to be "flipped" and it soon became "cool" and "hip" to move into Inner cities in coastal cities, where a lot of Blacks happened to live. Places like Harlem, Brooklyn, etc. Gentrification took off. Black grandmothers in Bed Stuy who owned their own buildings were pressured by draconian enforcement of infractions, to sell their homes to real estate speculators who, in turn, remodeled them into Hipster apartments at double and triple the rents. Blacks were meanwhile being forced to move further and further from the cities they grew up in, to far flung suburbs. These suburbs had now become "Exurbs." Formerly created by "White Flight" in the 60's-70's., these Exurbs were now largely abandoned and run down by the massive foreclosures that happened in 2008. Thus, they were now poorer areas that were cheaper to live in. Ferguson, Missouri, where the Michael Brown thing happened, was one of these "Exurbs."
I have to say a bit about me: I had grown up in a neighborhood in San Diego, CA, that was still largely White in 1980. Then, it became more progressively Black in the 1990's-2000's. But then after 2010 it became Hipster and Gay, and started gentrifying. I lived in a complex with mostly Gays that I knew. Then, the old woman who owned it sold the complex, and the new owner came in and flipped it. Kicked everybody out, remodeled it, and doubled the rent. I was forced to move, for a while, to a low income, mostly Black, community where I felt unwelcome and got nasty stares. Yet at the same time, having been gentrified out myself, I could appreciate the fact that, if Blacks have 1/16 of the income and assets that Whites do, on average (as some studies showed), it does not take being Black to understand that they are going to be at a severe disadvantage in a housing and rental market where the prices are just going through the roof. And it just takes some leaps of logic and rationality to deduce that, if Blacks were denied homeownership back in the days when property was "low hanging fruit"-back in the 1940's to 1960's, when all that discrimination and redlining was going on...
They are not going to be able to get into Homeownership now because housing rates have gotten aboard a flying saucer and taken off to the Andromeda Galaxy. It's just Mathematics.
Thus, I feel that unless we do something about the housing issue, and the rents, it's going to be a lot harder to push back against the Identity scams. If people are housed and financially stable, they are going to be a lot less susceptible to the Identity arguments. Whites can also benefit from a massive effort to uplift Blacks out of poverty and into homeownership as well because it will create more customers and money tends to spread around. We just have to adopt a Win-Win approach to reparations and poverty reduction, rather than a Win-Lose.
I say this not to disagree with your article, but to inform readers and commenters who are seeing this board.