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On The Identity Trap (2023), Yascha’s intellectual history wokeness (which he calls “the identity synthesis”) and defense of philosophical liberalism against this set of ideas.
Which is more important, the characteristics that we all share as human beings, or those that make us part of distinct identity groups? According to Yascha’s analysis, the ideology that currently dominates our academic institutions, media, and young people wrongly prioritizes the first of these. Whereas liberalism (in reaction to historical aristocracies and autocracies) has the ideal of treating everyone the same, the identity synthesis entails that we skew law and cultural advantages in favor of the oppressed, encouraging both oppressed groups to identify as members of their group and seek political solidarity with their fellow group members, and also encouraging the white majority to identify themselves not as merely human but as specifically white, so that they can then be aware of their privilege.
Is this really an accurate characterization of wokeness? Is wokeness invariably illiberal, or is it meant to address the failings of an overly simplistic conception of liberalism? Mark, Wes, and Dylan attempt to explore these questions with our guest.
Unlike most of those arguing against wokeness, Yascha he is fully willing to admit to the injustices of the past and the structural racism of the present, but he argues that these do not justify illiberal measures such as segregation (e.g. legislating minority-only spaces), censorship (and cancellation of those deemed guilty of cultural appropriation, microaggressions, and the like), and policies that treat people differently according to their race or other group identifications (e.g. favoring young minorities over elderly whites in handing out COVID vaccines).
Yascha is an intellectual historian, not a philosopher, and while he summarizes several philosophers, his primary interest is in seeing how their beliefs became over-simplified, made (often) more extreme, and disseminated. For instance, he characterizes Michel Foucault as pessimistic about grand narratives of progress: We may feel that we have all become more free as society has progressed, but the nature of power is such that any revolution contains the seeds of the next round of enslavement. The social order always polices itself, so society is invariably oppressive. This suspicion of the grand narrative of progress became simplified according to Yascha into a suspicion of the idea of objective truth. Moreover, while Foucault’s pessimism translated to an apparent fatalism about the efficacy of political activity, those influenced by Foucault have ignored that aspect and have instead thought about what political actions make sense in a climate where no real progress is possible. The result is a view of politics that is zero-sum and thoroughly relativistic, with various groups merely fighting for their place in the hierarchy instead of people of all groups trying to progress together toward mutual freedom and benefit.
Yascha also tells how thinkers like Derrick Bell that were suspicious of claims that civil rights legislation has successfully addressed racial disparities have influenced a generation that now believes that things are no better now for black people than they were generations ago, that racism is a permanent part of the human (or at least American) condition, and thus that supposed race-blind policies in fact just cement white power.
He characterizes the identity synthesis as adherence to seven fundamental claims:
- We should be very skeptical of anyone’s claims to objective truth.
- Discourse should be modified for political ends: Change words to change how people think.
- Strategically emphasize racial and other differences even while admitting that these are ultimately socially constructed.
- Be proudly pessimistic about claims that we have made social progress when it comes to equity.
- Distinguish people by identity group when designing legislation to avoid the continued oppression of historically oppressed groups.
- Intersectionality (the fact that one can be oppressed via multiple dimensions in ways that are not simply additive, e.g. bell hooks argued that black women have suffered harms beyond those due to their blackness or their womanhood) dictates that to fight effectively against one type of oppression requires that we fight against all of them.
- Per “standpoint epistemology” (see our Haraway episode), we can never really understand each other’s points of view, and so those who are not members of oppressed groups should always defer in judgment to the marginalized when it comes to policies and attitudes about oppression.
Whether or not one agrees with Yascha’s characterization of woke ideology or his claim that classical liberalism provides an unproblematic alternative to this set of views, there are a lot of interesting concepts at play here, with the added challenge of connecting academic philosophy to the way that ideas infiltrate our culture and politics. We’ve considered many of the figures the book mentions in isolation without necessarily trying to synthesize them to decide what practical political philosophy we should have in light of their insights.
Buy the book, or you can listen to Yascha explain more about the book as he’s interviewed by Coleman Hughes. For more about his reaction to the Israel-Gaza war (which he opens the discussion with), here’s a blog post he wrote on “the left’s silence about Hamas.”
Wes relates this to Allan Bloom’s critique and Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism.” Related recent critiques also include Frank Fukuyama on idenity and dignity and Richard Rorty’s response in Achieving Our Country to James Baldwin’s condemnation of America. Beyond these figures and Foucault, Bell, hooks, and Haraway, we’ve also covered white privilege, free speech, social construction, and the MLK vs. Malcolm X debate.
This man is a hateful, bigoted far-right idiot. Why would you give him a platform?
While I don’t agree with his thesis, he’s not any of those four things. His last projects were on the rise of Trumpism. This is someone Wes has followed for a while, and there’s more pushback in part two. Given that we’ve spent many episodes directly on Bell, hooks, Foucault, Haraway, et al, I’m not sure why we’d rule out having on someone who’s supposedly read all those folks and wants to argue against their “synthesis” in the name of Rawls, Orwell, and Mill.
But I did have mixed feelings about featuring him: https://marklinsenmayer.substack.com/p/what-im-working-on-da4
The more accurate description would be “vapid, reactionary centrist concern troll.” At first I thought this was well below PEL’s usual standards and a real waste of a guest spot, but then I realized how clever it is to slip this episode in right after the discussion of bullshit as a rhetorical mode, since this sort of anti-“cancel culture”/”identity politics” left-bashing stuff is one of the most prominent sources of bullshit in public discourse nowadays, and Mounk is an excellent exemplar of its practitioners.
His academic temperament and political background (not to mention his wonderfully mellifluous accent) may make him a little more credible or interesting than most other replacement-level polemicists on this topic, but ultimately the result is the same sort of obfuscation – laying the blame for the many varied ills of modern political discourse at the feet of the left while ignoring the reality that the vast, vast majority of “cancellations” and censorship currently comes from the right. ‘Sure, I’m aware of and opposed to that threat too,’ Mounk seems to (correctly) assert, ‘but the left should still be entitled to police itself, especially in light of the influence it has on society on these topics.’
To which I would say: bullshit! (A statement made without regard for empirical truth!) Mounk repeatedly asserts that we are a less racist, less homophobic society than we were 20-30 years ago, but racially-motivated hate crimes have skyrocketed in the past decade and there are states where it is, quite newly and suddenly, effectively illegal to be openly gay as a public employee. ‘Yes,’ Mounk says, ‘and that’s why we should fight back against anyone who wants to sow division between in-groups and out-groups.’ Okay, but who actually bears more responsibility for the current state of things – Michel Foucault or Donald Trump? Kimberle Crenshaw or Tucker Carlson? Ibram X. Kendi or Elon “X” Musk? And the issue isn’t just one of priorities or rhetorical balance – it’s that this sort of tut-tutting provides very real cover for that actually existing authoritarianism. I felt that this review nicely summed up the problem with this particular perspective: https://newrepublic.com/article/175779/yascha-mounks-woke-straw-man.
I was glad to hear some more pushback in Part Two and appreciate Mark’s blog post detailing his ambivalence about this episode, but I still feel like there could have been more on these obvious practical points. Hopefully the gloves come off in Part Three (I’m especially looking forward to Seth’s take) and this nonsense can really be put to rest.
And just to add, I thought the discussion of the Israel-Gaza situation at the top of this episode was particularly bleak. I had to relisten several times to figure out the point Wes was trying to make and still hope I am misunderstanding, but apparently he thinks that the Hamas attacks (which to be clear were disgusting and despicable) were precipitated in some part by the supportive attitudes among some proportion of American college students and political activists?
Even giving all possible benefits of the doubt for the fact that this episode was recorded much closer in time to those attacks, this is an especially nonsensical take and frankly more than a little gross, in effect diminishing the horror of those attacks to fit his preexisting political ax to grind. In light of the overtly genocidal response by the Israeli military and government, behind which Western political leaders have unanimously lined up, and the fact that essentially the only actual consequences for speech have fallen on those same American college students, political activists, and others speaking out for Palestinian lives (https://theintercept.com/2023/10/27/palestine-israel-free-speech-retaliation-senate/), it should be deeply, deeply embarrassing.
It does helpfully illustrate, though, how this is just the same moral panic that’s been going on for something like 70 years now: “these darn kids have insufficient respect for our institutions!” Of course, a key feature of moral panics is that once one buys into one, it slowly (or not-so-slowly) develops into a totalizing and unfalsifiable worldview. Even after the 8000 and counting Palestinian civilian deaths; the numerous grotesque, utterly dehumanizing statements by those with *actual power* over whether more Palestinians live or die; and the aforementioned attempts to chill even the most anodyne pro-Palestinian speech, Mounk is still tweeting mostly about American college students. Humiliating.
Although I don’t disagree (see Donnagal Young’s review) Ido feel it’s contributing to a discourse that gets too far away from what was said by x, and what could be reasonably attributed to them. He’s on the one hand reacting to, and trying to escape the orbit of melted types like Pluckrose and Lindsay, who have produced pseudo academic propaganda influential in his space. Parachuting into an academic topic, looking for reasons to justify his baked forum ideology is an invitation for a bad reading that confirms priors; but I do think he deserves credit for trying his best to disentangle where some popular ideas came from despite not quite getting how much of the out there bullshit is built upon motivated misreading. For example he’s persisted in repeating the dumbest possible interpretation of standpoint theory years after it was pointed out to him that insight from positionality is an achieved perspective. And like many reactionaries he’s taken an apocalyptic perspective when there are less extreme interpretations like e.g. that it takes time for ideas to move through the zeitgeist and it is not in fact a new and dangerous ideology looking to replace liberalism but just normal progressive ideas he finds distasteful –
In which we arrive at his other hand which is a defense of (a mythical) mid 20th century liberalism. The kind of liberalism that selectively quotes MLK Jr., idealizes JS Mill into a defender of self correcting mechanism of discourse, etc One of the reasons adherents to this ideology think wokeness is a form of intellectual imperialism is because they also think they are the only game in town. The generally more accurate picture is that wokeness is a reaction to its pretense of universalism. And even a little bit of reading suggest that his preferred form of liberalism is both a recent construction and one of many strands of liberalism that extend back to its foundations ie none of this is a recent phenomena.
It’s easier to see in the prior discourse about political correctness outright racist assumptions e.g. on the very first page of Kindly Inquisitors Jonathan Rauch chose scientific racist Phillipe Rushton as exemplar to prove that THEY hate science. He doesn’t mention that in his piece for Mounk’s persuasion ( https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-danger-of-politicizing-science ) or the many other examples that might have seemed like line dancing in 1990 that today seem obvious defenses of white supremacy posing as universal “liberal science”.
More recent political science and psychology suggest that science denial is instrumental. The obvious objection to the discussion of hate speech and hate crimes above is that there is a confusion between a longitudinal trend and year to year increases. A certain kind of liberal centrist may point to the longitudinal trend to imply that racism is over, whereas some progressives ignore the former and point to the latter to discount progress. I’m not looking to argue about what counts as progress but I do think it’s important to point out how science is weaponized, not excluding Mounk’s online magazine where there is a conspicuous silence characteristic of a specific kind of enlightened centrist posture towards neutral universalism
In other words, Bob, capable of independent thought rather than forced groupthink. Sure, keep intimidating and isolating those who can detect nuance and conflicting fact patterns and see the humanity in all, and hammer everyone into bitter, small, close minded bigots like yourself. You’ll get what you have, violence, intellectual poverty and mindless obedience to the cause du jour.
I found this discussion informative and respectful. As someone with minimal philosophical training, I appreciate hearing those who know more engaging their different viewpoints. It’s a route to learning. For what it’s worth, I’ve thought that about most episodes of this show, even those where hosts hold a viewpoint with which I strongly disagree.
Howdy Gents: I’m not thinking about identity politics so much as the underlying issues around socially constructed concepts and categories. As I understand it, this is a question of epistemology and if one holds to the view that there are natural kinds and objective truth you’ll end up holding the social constructionists to epistemic standards that they have already rejected in favor of a different view. That will lead to a lot of misunderstanding and you’ll end up talking past each other in discussions of the issue.
It might help to think of constructivism as a kind of neoKantian view. Suppose, unlike Kant himself, that the categories of the mind are NOT innate or universal but rather determined by the thought categories we inherit from our cultural context as we acquire language. Since culture and language evolves and differs from place to place and time to time, the categories of the mind are not as fixed as Kant held. Also, unlike Kant himself, this view does not make any attempts to go beyond the phenomenal realm in order to make claims about metaphysical realities. What you are left with, then, is truth-making practices within human limits, within the phenomenal or empirical realities that we can know. From this point of view, all knowledge is humanly constructed and we can never have access to objective reality or “the way things really are” independently of the human mind.
This doesn’t devolve into a sophomoric version of relativism wherein we can all have our own private epistemology, as some might fear, because our shared phenomenal or empirical reality still does not bend to our wishes and whims. We can still have standards of truth but we accept these limits and so the focus of our epistemologies does shift to the subjective mind and to human conventions. We can accept natural taxonomies like species but not as something that captures the essence of things so much as useful ways to categorize observable phenomena. The idea here is that we are always implicated in truth making and that truth itself is provisional (the best we can do right now) and plural (there is more than one way to be truthful about things).
Lovely episode guys. Lots of push back below but I very much appreciate hearing this perspective, as a left wing person. Most of the arguments below are the same strawman arguments you hear everywhere; what was presented in the episode was better constructed arguments on both sides. Thank you.