Ep. 328: Guest Yascha Mounk Against Identity Politics (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 328 is something like, what role should demographic group identities play in ethics and policy? Or perhaps how do philosophical ideas become popular ideology? We read the Identity Trap, a new book by Yascha Mounk, about which we will be talking to the author himself. For more information about this book in the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer, aspiring ally to the much maligned group known as philosophers.

0:41 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, appealing to my identity in support of epistemic claims in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:48 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, opting out of the Twitter Panopticon in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:53 Mark: And our special guest. Introduce yourself.

0:56 Yasha: I'm Yascha Mounk, trying to convince you to have dangerous thoughts about identity in Chicago, Illinois, right now.

1:02 Dylan: Oh, you're close by.

We were just a couple hours from Madison.

1:05 Yasha: I've never been to Madison. It's one of the American cities I'm missing.

1:09 Dylan: Both Mark and I are in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:11 Mark: This is a little unusual for us, besides the fact that we don't cover authors reading themselves. You're a once a year. Well, we just had Tomasello on, but you're mostly a once a year sort of phenomenon. But I know Wes just jumped at this one, that this allies with a bunch of things that he brings up frequently. And Wesley, it certainly touches on a lot of the episodes we've had in the past. It's overall philosophical liberalism, you know, John Rawls on down, and you address a lot of individual thinkers like Derek Bell, like Michael Sandel that we've either discussed or Michael Sandel we had on the show.

Judith Butler we had on the show. So the fact that you're bringing all these folks together to talk about, as I put the opening question, how some pretty subtle thinkers that we always feel like, yeah, we should dive in, we'll find something good about them, even if it seems very strange and we maybe don't like the practical upshot of what comes out of it, we're going to find something interesting. Well, you acknowledge all that. Yes, these thinkers are interesting, but the way that their thought has played into this public ideology is overall destructive.

Do you want to say something to get us going here?

2:19 Yasha: Yeah. And I think, I mean, we're recording this within a week of the terrible terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas that killed over 1,200 civilians, Jews and Israelis, but also many People of other faiths and national origins. And it's been striking to see large parts of the academic left refuse to condemn it or in some cases outright celebrate it. And many of the kind of activist groups that have become very powerful over the course of the last 10 years, including chapters of Democratic Socialists of America and of Black Lives Matter, celebrated.

And I think that shows us that something in our thinking about identity has gone quite badly wrong. Those two phenomena, I think are actually quite related. So as somebody who is on the left and grew up on the left, I've been very struck for the last 10 years that what it means to be left wing, what the basic commitments of left are, have changed in a very significant way. I think there's a novel ideology focused on categories of identity, including race and gender and sexual orientation, that has become very influential in academia, taken over significant parts of the left, and even started to inspire the norms of mainstream institutions, including not just advocacy groups and nonprofits, but some corporations, some religious communities in the United States.

And I've been struck by the fact that there's been a lot of public debate about wokeness, a lot of it not very subtle and often very simplistic. But there isn't very much serious treatment of this either in academic political science, history, intellectual history, or philosophy. So what I set out to do in the Identity Trap in my new book is to actually analyze and understand these ideas, to explain what the intellectual roots of these ideas are, to see how they could go from being pretty marginal to society as a whole, to being very influential over the course of a decade, to examine the main applications of these ideas to big areas of our cultural, social and political life today, and areas like free speech and cultural appropriation.

Standpoint theory, standpoint epistemology, which is sort of alluded to in your introduction, the kinds of ways in which we.

4:36 Mark: Yeah, I should say Donna Haraway, we had an episode on too.

So, you know.

4:39 Yasha: And then finally I want to make the case for why the basic precepts of philosophical liberalism are much better able to take seriously the group based injustices that certainly continue to exist in our society. But we need to understand and. But without throwing the baby out of the bathwater, without embracing an ideology that ultimately is a trap. And the point of the metaphor of a trap is that a trap has a lure, it has something that draws you in. In this case, the promise that these ideas are the most radical, consistent, uncompromising way to fight against injustice. But it ends up being counterproductive, it ends up being productive for people who fall into it. And in this case it ends up being counterproductive for society as a whole.

5:19 Wes: I've made the argument similar arguments on this show, not just about the intellectual pedigree of these ideas, but about their potential destructiveness. And I think what happened in Israel is a good example of that. So I think despite many of the stated seemingly benign objective of identity politics in this form, it is actually quite new. I dated to about 10 years ago as well when Obama was elected for a second time. And I think in part it's the result of too much success and the idea that an African American was elected a second time and there was some talk of how much progress we had made and there was kind of colorblind discourse and then there was a big reaction against that.

And it's not that there wasn't some form of this in the past. So for instance, political correctness and the culture war around that, Allan Bloom's Closing of the American mind. But it was much different. And it was much different in the sense that you saw very little of the influence of say Foucault and the idea that discourse is not just influencing the way we think in such a way that it perpetuates unjust power relations in society, but that it actually constructs our identities from the ground up so that the way we view ourselves. So for instance, the idea that whiteness is predicated upon having some self concept that's related to a group that is inferior or that gender roles are socially constructed in such a way that the very habits and character traits of women kind of enact unjust power relations.

I don't think the phrase social construction even occurs in Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. It wasn't really on the radar and the Foucault I think it only these ideas will only be seriously become influential in the 70s. They're around I think a bit before that. So what happened in 2013 and subsequently I think was a big sea change in the way we talk about these things. And it was shocking to me in the sense that the social media mainlined a lot of these academic ideas. So they'd been around in academia for quite a while and they suddenly became quite popular.

And any 9 year old can talk about how gender is socially constructed or uses these ideas and treats them as if they are common sense. And I actually think in many ways they're just, they're not even coherent. But coming back to what happened in Israel, you know, I tie all this to we didn't some episodes on ORWELL not just 1984 and authoritarianism, but the way in which nationalism as defined by Orwell in his Notes on Nationalism, one

8:16 Yasha: of his best and most under read essays, right.

8:19 Wes: Nationalism is just Orwell's word for identity politics. I think people try to give very benign definitions of identity politics as being interested in one's group. And Orwell makes that distinction in his essay between what he calls patriotism, when you're concerned with a kind of form of life, when you're concerned with the ways of one's particular identity group or identity unit, as Orwell calls it, and then nationalism, in which there's an interest not just in the preservation of the group and its culture, however you want to put it, but in the superiority of that group to others.

And he defines nationalism broadly. Right. So you can be a pacifist nationalist, you can be a nationalist on political grounds, you can be a nationalist on behalf of others, you could be a nationalist on behalf of the marginalized. And in that case, the sense of superiority is moral superiority. You feel superior to other groups, not based on typical nationalist discourse around belonging to a certain country and oh, aren't we great? And don't we have such a great culture? But just here are some victims. I identify with them and their suffering gives them a certain moral status that's superior.

And that moral status accrues to me by virtue of my sympathetic relationship to that group. And then any behavior towards the oppressor group becomes legitimated. So that when there's a horrible attack on Israel, you have people running around with patches that have hang gliders on them and just really openly celebrating the attacks on college campuses or saying resistance by any means possible is legitimate. So this rhetoric, which might seem like rhetoric, and it's fashionable on college campuses, and of course it's appealing to young people, but it has nefarious real world consequences.

10:12 Yasha: The way I think about that essay by Orwell, which is beautiful, is that the choice of a term nationalism is a little strange and it's misleading because it makes you think about American nationalism, Italian nationalism, I guess I think of it as a form of in group bias, right? And what he describes, the amazing ability of people to pledge themselves to a cause, sometimes one that's connected to a group into which they're born, but sometimes, you know, by a form of ideological affinity. People choose their cause and then they just become incapable of seeing its own flaws, incapable of having any kind of empathy for potential victims of that cause.

And one of the strange things about the ideology we're talking about today is that I think the business of sustaining a tolerant society, especially a very diverse society, is to keep in check in certain ways our in group biases, to harness for good the way that we might be proud of a particular group we're part of that we might have affection towards people who share the same religious faith or the same national origin, or the same culture, all of which is great. That's one of the things that makes America great. But we also need to make sure.

But we continue to have solidarity with each other beyond that. But we emphasize to people that they're not wholly defined and wholly consumed by those sub national identities, because otherwise we're not going to be able to sustain a nation in which we treat each other peacefully and have things like a welfare state that helps people and so on. Right. One of the strange things about this new left ideology is that it glorifies all of the worst instincts of nationalism that would be seen as a right wing political force if it was at the level of Americans matter more than anybody else.

And I can only truly understand an American. And that is the basis for my in group bias. But once you go down a little bit and say you feel that way about your particular ethnic group, about your particular religious group, about your particular group of national origin, then we are celebrating that as a great form of progress. And while I think that all of those forms of identity can be useful and productive in certain kinds of contexts, they all potentially lead us to the form of nationalism that Orwell talks about, to a form of in group bias that Orwell talks about.

It becomes really destructive.

12:22 Wes: I think, though, it's also outgroup bias. And this is part of what makes Orwell's notes on nationalism so interesting is that you can be a nationalist on behalf of an out group or some other group. So it's not just people within a group thinking about their oppression and so on and so forth and feeling maybe some sense of moral superiority and victimhood. But I think a lot of this revolves around the way, say, for instance, academics of any race or identity group relate to other identity groups they consider marginalized. So we can make those identifications without actually belonging to the group.

And they're predicated on emotions that seem perfectly altruistic but have some a nefarious underside to them. And this is, you know, related to Nietzsche's critique on morality. In other words, you describe a trap. Part of the trap is pity. Pity can seem like empathy, when in fact it's something else.

13:22 Yasha: I just wanted to go back for a moment to what you were saying about 2013 and Barack Obama and sort of what the moment is when this became appealing. And then what distinguishes it from earlier forms of left wing thought? You know, Kimberlé Crenshaw, part of the ideology is something called critical race theory. And critical race theory is an interesting set of ideas that started to arise in American law schools in the 1970s and 1980s as worth taking seriously as an intellectual tradition. But in our debate today, the way we talk about that subject is just really unhelpful.

So on the right, some people call critical race theory, wanting to teach kids about the history of slavery in the United States and being aware of the persistence of structural racism in the United States. But as a result, on much of the left, in the mainstream, we've come to think of critical race theory, if you read the New York Times or listen to msnbc, as just wanting to think critically about the role that race plays in society and what could be wrong with that. And actually, when you go to the founders of critical race theory, you recognize how explicitly this is in opposition, not just to the mainstream political tradition of African Americans in the United States, but specifically to people like the civil rights leaders and Barack Obama.

So Kimberlé Crenshaw has this really interesting paper reflecting on the 20th anniversary of critical race theory in the early 2010s, and she precisely says, look, with Obama now in office, we have no public influence because Obama's philosophy is fundamentally at odds with the core tenets of critical race theory. And you go back to somebody like Derek Bell, really widely acknowledged as the founder of a traditional. He says he wants to overcome what he calls the defunct racial equality ideology of the civil rights movement. So I think one way of thinking about the difference, the shift that's happened on the left, is the mainstreaming of certain conceptions that are rooted in postmodern thought and deconstructionism and so on.

But I think another way of thinking about it is that, you know, for most of American history, the dominant black political tradition has been that rooted in people like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King and then arguably Barack Obama. People who are very, very conscious of the deep injustices of their day, who are willing to call out their compatriots for the ways in which African Americans were treated in incredibly unjust ways. But who then insisted that we live up to the universal promises of the American founding, who said, you're hypocritical, as Frederick Douglass said, to say that all Americans are born equal and celebrate that as a lovely sentiment while people are still enslaved.

But the Answer is for you to live up to that standard, to actually treat African Americans as equals. That's what you should fight for. And the tradition that we're talking about when it comes to race, but also when it comes to other issues like gender and sexual orientation and so on, explicitly rejects that universalism and says no, the way to create a better society is to make how people are treated by the state and how we treat each other more explicitly depend on the kind of identity groups to which they belong. That's not completely unprecedented, but it always used to be the non mainstream tradition.

And it's become, in a strange way, the activist mainstream, the mainstream of parts of the left and something that has more hold of the mainstream institutions than it has had in previous periods of American history.

16:39 Dylan: So I think the account is really interesting, but I think that part of what I'd like to get into a little bit is both the history of the account and the way in which it's born out of a criticism of liberal democracy and liberal democratic philosophy that isn't handled well. And the way, you know, one way I would put your book, Yasha, is a version of saying, well, look, liberal democratic philosophy is capable of handling this kind of criticism in the right way for the sake of society. And then there are a whole bunch of reasons why you would prefer it, okay?

17:16 Wes: And you summarize some of them.

17:18 Dylan: And I don't think that that has changed, you know, in the past 500 years, since the sort of birth of liberal democratic philosophy, more or less, right? It's dealing with the same kinds of problems this in group out, group business, this question of hierarchy. You have a great paragraph in there regarding the fact that liberal democratic philosophy is really a way to deal with hierarchy and claims of authority that are tribal, effectively tribal in way or another. And it seems to me that the way you guys have been summarizing its characterization of identity politics is basically saying, look, it's tribal.

It's tribal in the way in which it's always been problematic. In the same way white supremacy is problematic, it's problematic in those ways. It ends up being that the question of authority is fundamentally not adjudicable by the community as a whole. It's always has special claims. That way of thinking about governance, that way of thinking about intergroup relations involves there always being special claims that have explicit political authority within the group. And that's the problem. And to me, part of what we should get into. There's a really nice detailed sort of genealogy of this happening on the left that you present through Foucault and through critical race theory and so forth.

But part of it is really the way in which that fundamentally skepticism. When I was doing political philosophy as an Undergrad in the 80s, I read a lot of Foucault, I read a lot of Richard Rorty, I read a lot of Derrida and one of my senior papers, I was big into Rorty, who I loved, I really loved reading Rorty, and I still do, was I wrote a whole paper where I was saying, in the end, what is it for? What is he for? And reading this reminded me of that experience which amounted to the challenge with skepticism is that it doesn't tell you what it's aiming towards.

And I think that that's the fulcrum there is. The way you present liberal democratic philosophy

is it presents a.

For a what are we going for? And there has to be a little bit more unearthing of the way in which it would deal with skepticism. Because one way I would put the criticism is that there is a skeptical reaction that is being taken as a fundamental claim about the nature of the world when that skeptical reaction isn't that

it doesn't stand up to that level,

even if it has something legitimate to say.

19:51 Yasha: That's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think the intellectual history of this is to a significant degree an attempt to harness a appealing, if exaggerated skepticism towards the claims of liberal democracy.

20:09 Dylan: Exactly.

20:10 Yasha: To a more political, practical end. Right. So it's really striking how little intellectual history has been done in this phenomenon. I mean, I think anybody who's sort of in academia or something knows that something important has happened over the last 10 years and nobody's done the damn intellectual history except for a few far right polemicists who tend to claim that this is a form of cultural Marxism, which ends up just not making sense for two reasons. First, that Marxism is essentially about economic class. And so the claim that you can take economic considerations out of Marxism and stuff in these identity terms and get something meaningful is a little bit like saying, but to take the bat out of baseball, there's just not very much left that intellectual history doesn't actually give you the themes that social justice politics revolves around today.

And so I sort of set out to write a new intellectual history of this, building on, obviously some thoughts, but other people had as well. And for me, really, the starting point is Michel Foucault. And it is, as you're saying, his skepticism. It is his rejection of grand narratives, including both Marxism and liberalism and liberal Democracy. Most of his work is trying to show that the claims of the liberal democratic institutions of his day in post war France to have figured out ways to treat in a more humane ways, the marginalized in society, the mentally ill, the incarcerated, sexual minorities, turn out to be wrong.

You know, as he says, we punish differently, we punish better perhaps than we did in the past, but we don't punish anymore any less cruelly than we once did.

21:42 Dylan: And there's a parallel criticism of science too, right? I mean, the whole criticism of modern science and the way in which it gets things wrong or it leads to ethical mistakes or ethical cruelties, it's a directly parallel problem about the illegitimacy, so undermining, saying there's something fundamentally wrong in the conceptual foundations of liberal democracy or modern natural science because of X, because it leads to the horrors of institutionalized psychology in the 1800s and 1900s, because it leads to X, Y and Z. And I do think that part of it is.

You characterize it as. There's something. There are lots of fair criticisms. And I think that this is one of the challenges of these ideas is we have to have a way of talking about what exactly is the strength, how is liberal democratic philosophy robust to these kinds of criticisms that's going to make it be able to self change. Right. Because the criticism. I was just saying, well, you failed. Right. You've missed something really important to the way in which people interact or look, you had a chance and you screwed up. That's the kind of criticism that's going on.

Yeah.

22:59 Yasha: So we're talking a little bit between the intellectual history and the kind of substantive philosophical response.

23:03 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, sure. We could keep with the intellectual history.

23:06 Yasha: Then let's get back to what I think is a really important question, which is what is the liberal response? And I think that question about whether our society has failed or not is at the emotional center of this debate. I think if you conclude, as people like Derrick Bell have, that America in 2000 is as racist as it was in 1950 or 1850, if you believe, as some gay rights activist groups now do, that America is as homophobic in 2023 as it was in the year 2000 or the year 1950, then you're going to be very tempted by the remedy, which is say, well, all of these ideas are terrible.

Throw them all out of a window, throw them on the ash heap of history, and let's start. So I think one of the reasons why I think that idea is a trap is a mistake is that that is A wrong representation of a world. But for all of the real problems we have today, we have made significant progress on important dimensions, including both race and tolerance for sexual minorities. But in terms of the history, there's this weird tension here in the skepticism, which is that Foucault starts sort of as a universal solvent, right, as you're saying, not just particular institutions of his day, but the very concepts of universal truth, of neutral rules, even the concept of stable identity categories, right?

Foucault, in our terms, is a homosexual, a man who has sex with men. But he doesn't like that label because he thinks it's too essentializing, it's too simplifying to a variety of sexual experience. And he has a concept of power which makes it very hard to imagine how you might make political progress, because he doesn't think of it as being top down, but rather something that inheres in discourses. And we are exercising power right now through this conversation, and any attempt to disrupt this discourse is just going to lead to a new discourse that's going to be just as constraining and in some ways just as unjust.

So the interesting sort of dialectic here, if I can choose that word, is the response to that by subsequent thinkers who are deeply shaped by Foucault, who are deeply attracted to his propensity as a universal solvent, as somebody who allows skepticism about society, but who, for purposes of their own, need to have a more substantive vision. And the first step in this is these postcolonial thinkers in countries that are newly independent or fighting for independence, who are saying we don't want to buy into liberalism and Marxism because those were used to justify colonial rule.

And by the way, Karl Marx has an astoundingly parallel justification of colonial rule to be one in liberal thinkers like John Stuart Mill that is often criticized. So they don't want to go down that route for understandable reasons. But they say, hey, we need to be able to do politics. We can't just be apolitical in the sense that they read Foucault as being. And so they start to repoliticize that tradition. And that's where the sort of hostility to liberal democracy stays in, where the skepticism goes out the window slowly. And the first step in this is Edward Said's Orientalism, which I think is quite convincing in the way in which it describes the west coming up with a sort of simplified conception of the east, of a so called Orient, and that allowing colonial rule, justifying many of those actions.

But Said, look, I am based on the Foucaultian notion of a discourse, that's my biggest influence. But the point is not just to criticize the discourse, the point is to invert it in order to redistribute political power, in order to allow the colonized to fight back against the colonizers. And that becomes the model for a lot of our contemporary politics, in which, recognizably, what it is to be a feminist might in part be to celebrate or critique or render problematic the Barbie movie. And then the next step, you have Gayatri Spivak, the literary theorists saying, look, the postmodernist, post structuralist critiques of essentialist notions of identity are right.

You know, perhaps there isn't anything essential to what it is to be a homosexual, what it is to be a woman. But for practical political purposes, I need to be able to speak on behalf of what she calls the subaltern, the most oppressed in places like India. You know, Foucault says that the proletariat can speak for themselves. Perhaps that's true of, you know, white men and France who have a right to vote, who had a good education, and perhaps they can speak for themselves. The people I'm most concerned about who may not be able to be putting dinner on their table tonight, they can't speak for themselves.

Somebody has to speak for them. And so we have to engage in what she calls strategic essentialism. Even though these critiques of essentialist notions of identity are philosophically right, for practical political purposes, we have to act as though these are helpful categories because that's what's going to allow us to have resistance. And that, again, inspires a lot of our contemporary practices. Today, when you go to an activist space, people are going to say, of course, race is a social construct. This is what brown and black people demand.

This is what bipoc want. This is how we should defer to Latinx people. So you have the simultaneous recognition of the falsity of these essentialist categories, but then you turn around and actually act as though they were right. So, very briefly, I think what's interesting is that I don't buy Foucault's skepticism. Ultimately, I think there's mistakes in it, but it's a very appealing set of ideas and one that can continue to be useful in certain respects. But what happens as these ideas work themselves out is that the most appealing parts of that skepticism start to go out of the window.

28:17 Mark: I've been concerned in reading this about Straw Manning, and I, I understand we're talking about popular Ideology. So. And you research specifically here online is where I found somebody saying this. So I know you're not giving straw man versions of these things. At the same time, I'm brought to mind our very early episode on New Atheism where the new Atheists. Yeah, I sort of. I'm on board with the political program. They're arguing against irrationality and intolerance that would lead to. But those are not serious philosophical positions. What's good about what your book does, as opposed to those core New Atheism books, is that you actually draw the lines between the actual thinkers, between Foucault and the oversimplified version and even point out how, yeah, these thinkers, they disavow the popular versions.

So just since you brought a Foucault, one of the points that's not super stressed but is in your account of the identity Synthesis is the suspicion of objective truth. And I wonder, right, Foucault is arguing against grand narratives and that includes Marxism, that includes liberalism as giving a picture of oh, we're just constantly progressing toward more freedom. You know, this picture that was in Kant, it was in Hegel in some way. And I think, you know, it's entirely appropriate to be suspicious of grand narratives. But I don't see. And again, we're not reading any direct Foucault to see like where.

Like where that would actually play into suspicion about objective truth such that this could be operationalized in policy. Oh, I'm just stating alternative facts, you know, that kind of thing. Such that there could really be doubt about will this policy work or not? And someone actually responding. Well, from my perspective, like, I just don't see if we say that one of the objectionable things about the identity synthesis is being dubious about objective truth. Is that really something that is seriously put forward by people in a way that it has to be countered?

It seems like it is built into language itself. Back to Aristotle, right. That you believe in the principle of non contradiction. One cannot really, even if you say, per Haraway's Standpoint theory, a particular program, right. People are. Can be overly confident about their knowledge of the truth. We should have practical skepticism. But to extend that to a total skepticism about the very possibility of objective truth seems something that we should is not even worth fighting against. It's such a stupid view.

30:54 Wes: But I think that's a very influential view. And I wouldn't use the word skepticism, which I think is focused on the idea that even though there is a truth, we have a problematic relation chip to it. And we may not ever be able to find it fully. We may make progress towards the truth, but we're always falling short. And relativism, the idea that there is no such thing, and it, I think historically it has, it's had enormous influence. That's why Plato is so interested in arguing about it. That's why Aristotle wants to write a chapter on non contradiction.

People like Protagoras and the Sophists were very fond of that idea. And we come up in very influential people like Latour, for instance, the idea that atoms are socially constructed. And postmodernism, there's the text and nothing outside the text. And Lacan is a big influence here, where the belief in a reality is a component of ideology. And here, Yasha, here's where I kind of differ from you a bit because I think Marx, in a way, the identity synthesis does include Marx by way of critical theory and one of the overlaps. So I think there's a fusion in fact of critical theory which has its pedigree in Marx and Foucault.

And the critical overlap there is the concept of ideology and the concept of ideology, the critique there is that certain power relationships are maintained by a class, with the power representing the power relations as natural or as in the interest of all. Right, So a members of the bourgeoisie might represent class related. Well, this is just natural and it's based on human nature and it's inevitable. And there's a component of Marxism which says, well, we have to fight against that by a consciousness raising process whereby we reveal that in fact the ideological claims that are supposed to represent reality and nature are in fact false.

Or maybe there is no such thing as reality. Maybe there are just power relations and reality is defined by power relations. And to change things we have to change those power relations by way of discourse. So in Foucault, Foucault is also rendering an ideological critique. Nietzsche is influential here as well, right, because he's also talking about ideology. The ideology is the ideology of the. Of the weak representing morality as being in the interests of all, when it really isn't only in the interests of the weak. And the strong get contaminated by that idea and hobbled by that idea.

But in any case, Foucault's critique is a critique of ideology. But in this case it's more nefarious in the sense that it's quote unquote structural. Again, it was constructed. So discourse does something, it constructs. What does it construct? It constructs identities. So it's not even just a matter of brainwashing say, the proletariat into thinking something, it becomes very deeply embedded. And then you see some of the remedies are in fact, quite similar. Conscious raising, in the case of critical theory and in the case of contemporary identity politics or the identity identity synthesis, the remedy is supposed to be that we reconstruct, we do things differently with regard to discourse, by regulating discourse from on high.

And I wanted to say one more thing. So I think against Mark, I think there is a strong relativist strain in all this and denial of objective reality because, you know, at least in some quarters, because there's an overemphasis on the ideological critique where some ideology represents something as being real that's not real and maybe nothing is real. So that's the idea. I completely accept the tension between, say, contemporary Marxists and identity politics. I know many Marxists and socialists, including libertarian socialists à la Orwell, who hate identity politics from the standpoint of socialism because they're focused on class relations and they think identity politics is a distraction because it can be used by the bourgeoisie, right?

Can be used by privileged people to say, well, I'm oppressed as well. I know I'm the vice president of this corporation, but I belong to a certain oppressed identity group, therefore I'm oppressed. It becomes a fig leaf. So the socialist critique, that identity politics itself becomes an ideology that props up the power relations, props up the power of the bourgeoisie, but the wedge for

35:35 Dylan: something like denying objective reality or that kind of thing that comes in when you say that individual sub groups of whatever sort have special access to the way things are, Right? So if you have special access, then you're at least toeing up to the notion that there isn't something objective for us all to talk about, right? In particular, if that special access trumps your way of interacting. So you can grant that there's something like one's personal experience that doesn't have exactly the same access that somebody else's does. But if you go as far as saying that that special access, whether it be, especially if it becomes my group because my group is defined by my racial or sexual orientation or my national identity, any of those things that grant me my class status, grant me special access to the way things are, and therefore that then infuses my role in the power dynamic, then that becomes something like denying an objective reality because not everybody has access to it.

And this is. I'm getting to what the response is, honestly, for liberal democracy.

36:48 Mark: This relation, I think Dylan was getting it between relativism and skepticism, that relativism as a sort of a metaphysical position doesn't make any sense, right? But if you say skepticism is so prevalent that we can't know, right. We have these standpoints that don't. Then it becomes, as a practical matter, we have to treat the truth as relative. It can't literally be that the truth is multiple things. But if we can't know, then, well, the best we could do is to say we have different versions of the truth. And that is what the ontology of reality becomes is this fragmented thing.

37:22 Yasha: There's sort of three main issues on the table right now, right? The first is relationship between these ideas and different kind of ideological critiques like Marxism. The second is about the extent to which the identity synthesis does or does not amount to a form of general relativism or skepticism or, you know, and then the third is sort of what is the liberal response? Right? So let me, let me try to speak to each of these in turn. So I think what's actually happening is that liberalism has been the dominant ideology in one way or another for a little less than 100 years.

And so a lot of the responses, a lot of the radical political traditions we see at the moment, including Marxism and the Identity Synthesis, and many traditions on the right share core features because they are built around an attack on liberalism. And so I certainly think that in the rational reconstruction of the identity Synthesis that I offer in the third part of the book, that ends up being quite similar to what a simplified version of Marxism might be. So here's a very simple version of Marxism. Obviously it's simplifying, but for the purpose of the conversation, number one, the key dimension for understanding the world is social class.

To understand how we're interacting today, to understand big political events, to understand the French Revolution, what you really need to look at is social class, right? Number two, the kind of universal values, neutral rules that liberal societies claim to be guided by, everything from the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the United States Constitution is really just an attempt to pull the wool over your eyes. They're not as they appear. The real purpose is to perpetuate class domination. Number three. Therefore the right solution is for the proletariat to rise up, overthrow capitalism, bit of a black box, little bit of wishy washy stuff, and suddenly we had communism and universal class and we're all living in solidarity with each other as brethren.

I think the identity Synthesis can be boiled down to three claims that are very similar. Number one, the key way to understanding the world is identity categories like race, gender and social orientation. And to understand this conversation and to understand recent American history, or to understand big historical events, what you really need to look at is those identity categories. Number two, the American Constitution, all of these nice universal values around the world, that's just an attempt to pull the wool over your eyes. They really try to perpetuate forms of racial and sexual and other discrimination.

That is their true purpose. And therefore, number three, here comes in an interesting difference. We need to rip up those ideas, rip up those values, rip up those documents. You know, so far, so good, but similar to Marxism. But the universal promise has interestingly gone away. There isn't an image of a universal class or universal race at the end of this process. In fact, the thing that is most provocative to many members of this tradition is thinkers like Karen and Barbara Fields who say, if race has done such damage in American history, perhaps the solution is just like, abandon it as a category of analytical thought and aim for a society in which race structures as little as possible.

They say, no, no, no, no. How we should live should actually explicitly depend on the kind of group of which you are a part. That's going to be the only reason, the only way to overcome this. So basically, structurally, this is Marxism without universal promise. But the fact that I think this is a case of convergent evolution, the fact that they end up with structurally similar claims does not mean that they have the same origins. And so I buy that there's some influence of ideological critique. I don't think that that gives you the main themes of our social justice politics today.

Whereas going through postmodernism, post colonialism, then critical race theory does give you the main themes and can explain a lot more, and those are the thinkers that end up being cited and so on. The second question here is about what is the role of sort of deep relativism about truth in Foucault and later in the tradition? I would say that Foucault does have a pretty deep skepticism about that, right? I mean, he thinks that there's no such thing as mental illness, right? That our categorization of some people as schizophrenic is merely an attempt to exercise control and power.

And he becomes very active in, you know, trying to free people from mental institutions and so on. Some of it is for the good, but. But really on the assumption that there's no such thing as mental illness. I think there are certain ways, and Foucault certainly overshoots. This part of the tradition is then influenced by post structuralists like Derrida, who go much further than Foucault. So Foucault's standing here is subtle. The other thing, though, I would say, is that the way in which the skepticism ends up influencing this tradition is selective, right?

So I think they don't have the absolute position. They end up saying all of the claims that people within liberal democracy make, ideological claims that are wrongheaded. So Mari Matsuda, one key critical race theorist, says that we have to reject legal claims of neutrality, objectivity, colorblindness, and meritocracy. So you see how she sort of starts off with a general there's no such thing as neutrality, there's no such thing as objectivity, but really the target ends up being colorblindness and meritocracy. Richard Delgado and other influential legal theorists who wrote the widely cited introduction to Critical Race Theory, say liberal democracy and racial subordination go hand in hand, right?

So he starts to redefine at least one tradition that makes claims to something like universal validity as actually just being cover for that form of racial subordination. And then there's decolonial theorists like Charles Sandoval, who says that the core of decolonial theory consists of a disavowal of Western rationality. Now she says Western rationality, not rationality as a whole. But again, it is a sort of quite deep going rejection of those ideas. But what's interesting is that rather than being a deeply skeptical tradition in the place of this, as these ideas play out, you then end up getting these very simplistic claims about truth, right?

So they get reinfused with ideas that absolutely are claims to truth. You get people like the politician Ayanna Pressley, who's a representative in the House from Massachusetts, saying, I don't want any more black politicians who are not a black voice. I don't want any more brown politicians who are not a brown voice. I don't want any more queer politicians who are not a queer voice, right? So in a weird way, the rejection of one way of thinking about truth and rationality as allowing us to have interpersonal communication then ends up with a vast truth claim in the background of there is such a thing as a black voice and we can determine what a black voice is, and black politicians are either right or wrong in voicing that black voice.

I agree with you that the tradition becomes politically influential at the point at which it gets rid of some of that skepticism. And that's something that some of the more sophisticated theorists understood and warned about. So Spivak, who comes up with the idea of strategic essentialism, starts to fret and worry later in her life. But her concept had become what she calls the union ticket for a much more vulgar form of essentialism. And she ends up in a nice quip sort of saying, you know, I really worry about the humorlessness of the identity politics at American universities, this union ticket notion.

44:52 Dylan: You know, you just. I just want to point out that a lot of this language ends up being loyalty language, right? Ends up being. It's a kind of partisanship that is, broadly speaking, that the way in which you end up having to. You fall back into this tribalism is like, what is the test that you are a member of the group and that you can speak for the group because you have to come up with rules for it, right? And you talk about this a little bit. There's just deep problems in a criticism of a really strong identity politics, one that. Where you make claims that, well, only people that are members of the group can speak for the group, is it becomes a problem of, well, who counts as a member of the group?

And then it very quickly becomes what is the loyalty test for that? That you are the authentic member. It's exactly the kind of problem that has plagued politics and political institutions and the development forever. And I do think that the liberal democratic structure, in response to this, in response to trying to deal with. Have the right kinds of institutions and right kinds of objectives so as to deal with myriad components that do not promote a single right way of thinking just for them, but do promote a kind of objective that they have to be part of.

You know, this goes back to Spinoza. That response ends up being very popular. So I liked your intellectual history because it made me think a little bit like, well, we've seen this before.

46:27 Wes: So I want to, I want to address about that before, before I do that, I want to make a crash because I think I. I was trying to reference Latour when it came to deny, you know, think saying atoms are socially constructed and all that. And I think like Latour or Ricoeur, I was getting. I mixed two names, Ricoeur and Latour. So Latour is the. Is the guy. But in any case, in. In case people are confused and I. And also because if I don't correct that, I'm going to hear about that. I'm going to hear that for another decade. I still get emails about how Camus didn't die in a motor motorcycle accident. In fact, we should take down that episode and just edit that out before I stop.

47:06 Mark: No, you say in that Episode two minutes later, you correct yourself. But yet we still get people that throw down their device and email us right before finishing the episode.

47:18 Yasha: I mean, that's a sign of how loyal your listeners are and how engaged they are. You should be pleased every time you get that.

47:23 Wes: I want to say something about, about standpoint theory because this is something I've thought about a lot and written about a bit. And Mark and I had a debate which kind of addressed this a little bit. We're having a debate about the concept of representation. This I thought was very insightful. When someone says, we don't want to hear just from black people, we want to hear legitimate black voices. I think this is always where it inevitably breaks down. But I don't think that the people who deploy these concepts realizes it breaks down because if you were to ask them, well, how do we determine who the authentic black voices are and who aren't, which black voices are authentic and which black voices are not authentic?

I think their go to response to that always implicates the concept of identity. Well, you have to listen to this group. You have to listen to that group or you have to listen to this person. I don't think they're very self aware about the fact that the argument itself contradictory in the sense that one always reaches a point, at risk of circularity where you have to appeal to independent standards to figure out which voices authentically represent their identity and which voices don't. And once you appeal to independent standards, it's no longer a matter of deference to a group.

Anyone can have that conversation. Anyone can have a conversation about. Because it's. Now we're talking about objective reality. We can't just appeal and say, okay, well let's, let's appeal to what black people say about who the authentic voices are and who aren't. Anyone of any race can have that conversation because again, what arbitrates that? Objective reality arbitrates that. And, and I. That points to the fact that any definition, any definition of a group, and this goes not just for human beings, but for biological species, they're always normative.

And I don't, I'm not as sympathetic to critiques of essentialism because at a species level or when you talk about things at a group level or at the level of universals, I don't think you can avoid essentialism any more than you can avoid talk about objective truth. It's meaningful to talk about women and there's a reality about what it is to be a woman. And that's complicated. But you don't defeat it by saying, oh well, look at this woman who doesn't meet all the essentialist criteria. Philosophers have much more subtle accounts of this, whereas essentialism applies at a species level.

But individuals are not always true to type. A three legged tiger doesn't prove that tigers aren't essentially four legged creatures at the level of a species because that's what evolutionarily they were designed to be regardless of what happens at an individual level. And that's a teleological concept which is ultimately, ultimately a normative concept. But in any case, this becomes a conversation that anyone can have. You can't arbitrate the authentic authenticity of voices by appealing to identity when that's supposed to be the criterion.

50:22 Mark: I think we've reached the midpoint of the conversation. People who are supporters probably it's already in your feed part two. If you're not, go to partselectlife.com support and you will not have to wait until next week. We have a lot all have a lot to say. So thanks so much. We'll get back to you. So long.