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

0:07 Seth: This is the Partially Examined Life, episode 328, part 2. We've been talking with Yascha Mounk about the Identity Trap. I was most curious about what the status of this book is as a form of rhetoric that in another interview you did with Coleman Hughes who's been on this show talking about social construction. You say this is not a polemic. But I definitely read it as a polemic. In fact you have at the end of the book, like, here's strategies how to respond when people attack you with the identity synthesis, like it's is a manual, you know, as if it were here's a manual for Christian apologists or something.

And when you have unbelievers, here's what to say in response to this. In response to this, like, how is this not a polemic? I mean you clearly have a political point that you want to make. It's not merely, merely an intellectual history. It's not merely an observation. You clearly, you know, feel strongly about the social thing that you're trying to put forward to the point of providing these. I know it's hard to stand up to your peers. I know if you're running a business and people raise these objections and want to cancel you like, well, we got to stand.

You know, it's a very practical advice that goes into at least the end of this book.

1:16 Yasha: I think it depends on what you mean by a polemic. Right. I think I'm at pains throughout the book to present both the subtle intellectual history behind these ideas and, you know, the stronger versions of the claims that people are making on behalf of the identity synthesis. But, you know, certainly I have come to the conclusion that these ideas are, as the title of the book suggests, a trap. They are a big mistake. That they help to explain why so many progressive institutions have failed to serve their important missions over the course of the last decade because of the internal meltdowns they've had, that they have encouraged pedagogical practices like, you know, encouraging young kids to see themselves primarily as racial beings, splitting them up in the first grade, in the second grade and third grade by the racial group.

That I think is going to precisely lead to more in group favoritism over the out group, more zero sum conflict between different groups. I've been concerned in my work for a very long time about the rise of far right populism, and I remain very worried about the fact that Donald Trump is running head to head with Joe Biden and polls for 2024. And I have an argument that the hold that these ideas now have over mainstream institutions is part of the explanation for that. So certainly I'm open about the fact in the book that while taking these ideas seriously, I want to offer a set of arguments against them.

And that includes both providing the philosophical grounding for how to oppose them and some of the practical advice on how to do that. So we talked earlier about the kind of main claims of Marxism or of the identity synthesis. Right. I do offer the basic counter arguments to each of those saying that yes, it's true that race and gender and sexual orientation of course matter in understanding our society, but we should avoid a monomaniacal prism for interpreting the world, whether that be class or whether that be identity categories, and recognize that all of those things matter.

But class matters as well as those things. But religion matters, that patriotism can matter, but individual actions and preferences matter. And we need to come to each situation and let the situation teach us how to interpret it, rather than looking at it with a pre baked prism. But number two, we will start to talk about this a little bit in part one of the conversation. It's absolutely true that we've never lived up to the universal values of the United States Constitution, for example, that for much of American history we've mistreated people in terrible and blatant ways.

But these universal principles have been part and parcel of what has allowed us to make tremendous progress. Those arguments by Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King are what allowed us to overcome slavery and later the racial segregation of Jim Crow. That within the gay rights movement, it is the wing of that movement that said, by what right are you excluding us from the social practice of marriage? Why does our love not count equally to that of others that won the argument, not the parts of the gay rights movement throughout the 80s and early 90s that were saying marriage is a terrible bourgeois institution and we should rip it up.

But today America is less racist than it was in 1950 or 1850. And denying that is actually offensive. Not offensive to great Americans living today, but offensive to the people in the past who suffered much worse injustices and that therefore the better way forward is for us to continue to try and live up to the values that have inspired our society for a long time. In that sense, liberalism, philosophical liberalism, is, as Mill said in one context, a progressive creed, one that wants to bring reality into closer alignment with our ideals. It is not complacent in claiming that we've already gotten there, but it needs to be based on the recognition that these principles have allowed us to make some progress.

That for all of the flaws of the United States or Britain or France or Germany today, these are some of the most tolerant and prosperous and just society that exist on the face of the earth today or that exist in the history of the world. And so then, yes, I offer some advice at the end of the book about how to argue against ideas that I think are ultimately wrongheaded in a principled way that claims a moral high ground and that allows people to be effective messengers of the beliefs I have without either falling into a reactionary trap and just starting to oppose anything that anybody might, however, and sincerely sort of co work or being needlessly provocative in ways that might increase the chances that they experience really negative consequences for speaking up.

So I don't know, you know, depending on a very broad definition of polemic, perhaps that qualifies as a polemic. But I think I want to distinguish the tone and the nature and the purpose of this book from Wokeism is terrible books, right?

6:02 Wes: Sure, yes, much different. Although I think you are too charitable to your opponents. But go ahead.

6:09 Yasha: Mark seems to think I'm not charitable enough.

6:11 Seth: Well, where's the room for pragmatism that you characterize repeatedly your opponent's position as the differences between people are more important than their similarities? I have never actually heard anyone say that. It's more that if you think that of course our similarities are more important than our differences. But that doesn't mean that the differences couldn't Be important in some contexts and useful. So you raise concerns, for instance, about minority specific or one group specific safe spaces of, you know, let's have the Asian student lounge.

Let's have. This would apply to like historically black colleges and things. Are you really arguing from a. Just based on this abstract principle of universalism that those sorts of efforts, those institutions, I'm not talking about mandating them or saying this is the way it must be because you know, black children can't learn unless they're in this environment. But that there cannot be some utility like this seems like a very empirical matter that the foundings of these colleges, they know how well they've been doing and whether, you know, that sort of association giving black students a chance to be just with other black students so they don't feel isolated.

You know, this seems to be the kind of thing that on principle you're just against across the board.

7:30 Yasha: I just don't think that's a fair reading of a book. And in fact, I make that point about HBCUs, historically Black colleges and universities. So I'm a liberal and that means that I have to believe in freedom of association and that I joyfully believe in freedom of association. So when adults make a choice to spend most of their time within a particular identity group, that is one of the freedoms that they should have in a liberal society. And I have no particular bone to pick with that. And certainly in a country like the United States, it's part of the beauty of a country rather than something that I worry about.

But some amount of citizens will choose to spend most of their time with a co religionist, but with people who have a similar cultural origin, with people who perhaps speak a language other than English, with the more comfortable in certainly that they continue to honor the kind of cultural, national traditions from which they stem. I think all of that is part of what makes up the social fabric of America today. And I have no concerns about that. I do think, and I argue this in my last book, the Great Experiment, but we need also to encourage real communication between those groups that when society as in Lebanon becomes really divided into different groups and people don't have an opportunity to communicate with each other, that's bad.

So in that book I end up with a metaphor where I say the melting pot is wrong headed. The salad bowl is also wrongheaded because it sort of assumes too much lack of communication. The right metaphor is what I call the public park because that's a platform in the sense that all of us can go to a public park after this conversation, say, we don't want to talk to anybody else. We just stay among ourselves to continue this conversation, to hash this out for another five hours beyond the patience even of your very loyal listeners. But hopefully some people in that park are going to communicate with each other.

Hopefully some kids are going to start playing catch with each other across boundaries of groups, perhaps some people barbecuing and swap some food. Right? And that also is an important part of what a thriving, diverse democracy would look like. So at the broadest level of what my social ideal is, of the kind of society we should aim for. But let's get back to the practice that I do critique. I tell the story of a woman called Kila Posey in the book who is an African American educator in the suburbs of Atlanta who asked the principal of her school whether she could request a particular teacher for her daughter.

The principal said, yes, of course, it's a public school, by the way, she sends him a name and then the principal says, oh, well, you know, isn't there another teacher you might choose? And she keeps demurring until Kila Posey says, what's going on here? You know, he said, I could choose a teacher for my daughter. Why can't I choose that teacher? And the principal says, well, that's not the black class. And you might think that's a sort of old fashioned story of racial discrimination and segregation in the south, but no. The principal herself is a black woman who has bought into very influential new pedagogical ideals about how to raise children.

But actually a black kid has to be in a classroom with lots of other black kids, and otherwise her identity development is not going to be the right one. And so Kila Posey was outraged by this because she said, who's the principal to tell my daughter who her friends are supposed to be? Right. She told me about watching the inauguration of Kamala Harris with her two daughters and them saying, I'm going to be vice president one day, perhaps I'm going to be president one day. And her saying, look, these kids are going to go out in the world and they're going to have opportunities and they're going to be comfortable with everybody in the room, who's the principal to tell me and my daughter which classroom is a better fit for them?

And this is part of a broader trend, right? Lots and lots of elite private schools around country now have teachers coming into third grade classrooms, second grade classrooms, first grade classrooms, and telling kids to go into a black classroom, into an Asian American classroom, into a Latino classroom and into a white classroom. And I worry more about the white kids than the non white kids. Not because it might be uncomfortable. I mean it's fine to be uncomfortable as part of your education, but precisely because of a kind of in group favoritism, outgroup discrimination mechanisms we've been talking about.

Right. The goal here is to get kids to see themselves as racial beings to, as Bank Street School in the Upper west side of Manhattan says, get them to own the European heritage. And the idea is that they're going to become great anti racist activists. There's not great studies on this specifically, but I just think that everything we know about social psychology and everything we know about history makes it much more likely that these kids are going to end up as racist rather than anti racist. And so the question is not should 16 year olds be allowed to join a school club that's based around identity?

The question is not historically black colleges and universities that have arisen at a time when African Americans couldn't go to Harvard or the local state school or many community college where they're excluded from them. And that arose as a way of making sure that they can get a high quality education. Should they now close their doors? That's not the question. The question is what kind of ideals should motivate the institutional practices of key institutions in our societies? Should universities assign roommates to first year students randomly or with an eye to finding matches that are unusual, to getting people to interact in this very close way with people who are from different walks of life in order to deepen mutual understanding, in order to, on the basis of 75 years of research in social psychology, harness the power of intergroup contact to reduce mutual prejudices?

Or should they allow students to choose roommates who they already know, who are likely to be part of the same identity group? Should they, as many universities now do, encourage them to go live in dorms that is racially segregated? So yes, freedom of association, 100%. Certainly HBCUs, given their specific history in the United States, more power to them. But there's a real question about what are the institutional practices that mainstream institutions engage in and what message are we sending the next generation of people in the United States and in Britain and Europe and in Japan and Australia and around the world and there I do have deep concerns about the impact of this ideology.

13:14 Seth: I mean, I thought liberalism, as Rawls put it, is supposed to be independent of. I'm not going to impose ideals on you. I am going to allow voluntary association. I am going to. Now the problem of that is, of course, are we talking strictly about what the government's role is versus culture more widely? But the tack that you've taken in this book, and I think rightly so, we have this in our mill on free speech episode that it's. So much of what you're talking about is about the culture more widely and not just, you know, government policy. And what a particular school administrator decides to do is sort of in between.

Yes. Even at a public school, are they acting purely as an agent of the state or are they acting as somebody who has knowledge of an experience in education and sees what works and what's not? And that, that particular example, I mean, this sort of strikes me as a little bit of selective outrage or you know, I picked because obviously that is a bad example. You know, this person had seemingly. I'd kind of would. Before just questioning the principle behind this administrator's action, I would want to delve into like, well, what is it about? Are there studies or are there even informal, from working with black students for X years.

And we've found that actually if you group them together, that they tend to have a better experience, that they tend to get better grades. Like, is there actually anything empirical motivating this suggestion or is it merely a top down ideological divorce from all the facts? A bunch of bullshit.

14:52 Yasha: I think I'm starting to regret coming here for a second hour, but there's a very deep research about how group dynamics work, right? When you go to somebody like Henri Tajfel, the most influential writer in social psychology in the last 75 years, in key ways, he asked himself, what is it that makes groups tick, right? Like, how is it that groups end up so powerfully motivating? A lot of violence, cleansing, genocide, the most extreme forms of injustice in human history have often been motivated by those kinds of in groups. And so to get to that question, what he did was to try and boil it down and say, all right, I'm going to create a group that's so silly but so devoid of meaning.

But people don't engage in this in group favoritism, in the discrimination against the out group. And then I'm going to add features to it bit by bit in order to show what's going to happen as a result. And so he had a bunch of kids from a school in Bristol in England come in and he showed them these plots with 150 dots. And he said, have a guess how many dots are on the sheet of paper. And then he randomly assigned them to a group of overestimators and a group of underestimators. And he had those two groups play distribution games. And it turned out that the group of overestimators started to discriminate in this distribution game against a group of underestimators and vice versa.

So he failed in his experiment because it's impossible to prime people to think of themselves as members in a particular group without activating this kind of in group, out group mechanism. And he then replicated that by asking people if they prefer the paintings of Klimt or of Kandinsky. Others replicated it by having. And I tried this in a classroom of mine and it worked, sadly, asking kids whether they think that a hot dog is a sandwich or not. And it turns out that once you've had the debate for a while and you haven't taken a vote and you see them with each other, the kids who think that a hot dog is a sandwich start to discriminate in this context against kids who think that a hot dog is not a sandwich.

So we have a lot of evidence about when you tell people your most salient identity is this, then, yes, it is going to inspire this mechanism to try and fight for the interests of the in group over that of the out group. And on the other side, we have a very rich tradition in social psychology about intergroup contact, which shows that if you facilitate contact between members of groups but have prejudices against each other, that can potentially help them have more positive opinions of each other. And this has been tried with white and black Americans.

It's been tried with Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. It's been tried with Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. It's been tried in hundreds of different contexts. But what those experiments showed is that there's four conditions that ideally would be fulfilled for that positive effect to take place. Some of it might take place, if not all of A4 conditions. Conditions are really there, but the more they are there, the better this works. And that's number one, that in the situation you're treated as equals out in the world there might be inequalities between you, but in the situation you're treated as equals.

Number two, that you have a goal that you're sharing, that you're fighting for something similar in that situation, that you're encouraged to cooperate. Number three, that the situation calls for all members of that particular set to cooperate with each other. Number four, that there's a message from outside authorities and institutions that if you cooperate, that you're supposed to get along, that you're not supposed to be in conflict. So what's a great example of that? A sports team. I'm not much of a jock, but sports teams are a great example of how you fulfill those kinds of conditions and that has really positive consequences.

What's a bad example of that? Well, a college campus where on the first day, like Coleman Hughes told me when I was on his podcast, you're told, go to these different groups. And someone like Coleman, by the way, then has to say, well, my dad is African American, my mom is Puerto Rican, which group do I go to? I have to actually choose between my identities in this really uncomfortable way. A college campus where you have anonymous hotlines to report microaggressions. So the message is that, you know, when you're in conversation with people different from you, they might mean harm for you.

They might say these things that are deeply traumatizing. Even if they don't mean to, they're doing great harm to you. Report it to us and we're going to investigate. That's not encouraging people to get along, that's sending the message from institutions, but you're not going to get along. So look, I don't think that there's a clean way to study this and perhaps social psychologists will come up with that. I would love for them to go and follow groups of 6 year olds that do or don't get split up into these affinity groups. I think it's not an easy line of research to pursue right now given the atmosphere at universities, but I really hope that people are going to do that.

Absolutely. But is this just bullshit or is it based in a reading of 75 years of research in social psychology, which leads us to have pretty strong priors about how it works out when you split kids up into different groups and tell them this is how you should think of your most fundamental identity. No, I think it's based on a lot of research and a lot of priors that we rightly have about how the world is working out. One thing that's interesting is that again, I don't want to make light of very serious injustices we have in our society, including on things like race.

But when you see in polls that right now Americans understanding of the state of race relations in the states is worse than it has been in 30 or 40 years, I think something is amiss, right? I don't think it's true, despite polarization of our politics and so on, that America is a more racist country today than it was 30 or 40 years ago. Just as it's crazy to say that America is a more homophobic country today when within the lifetime of everybody on this call, Ellen DeGeneres had to leave her sitcom because she publicly acknowledged having a girlfriend.

20:56 Wes: And I think it's an odd argument to make in light of the fact that segregation traditionally was thought to be actually oppressive. And it's not like people don't have opportunities to be around their particular identity group. In fact, society is quite segregated. And some of these institutions are one of the few opportunities people have to interact with other people from all walks of life. And I think the point that Mark makes is that when we have these political conversations, they often revolve around anecdotal evidence. And Mark and I, I think, have very different news feeds because things that seem prevalent to me do not seem necessarily prevalent to Mark.

And those kinds of differences in the information we're exposed to are very, very hard to arbitrate. But I can say, not just from what I've seen in the news, but personally, there's a very pernicious effect to this stuff. So, for instance, I have a friend, I'm associated with Psychoanalytic Institute, and I have. I know someone there who was quite happy in their training to become a psychoanalyst. And then the anti racism thing just suddenly took over that school and had a profound effect. And now she thinks that she was deluded to be happy with her psychoanalytic studies because psychoanalysis is too white.

There are too many. The people who've written about psychoanalysis, including Freud, are too white. The school is too white. Unfortunately, the country is too white because it's a majority white population. And I don't know how someone expects to escape that. And so she was on her way probably to being faculty at this school, and now she's discouraged from doing that. So I think that kind of thing is tragic. Where people come to view their relationship not just to others, but to say to culture in terms of their identity, where they want to rule out certain ideas or certain modes of engagement with the world or certain intellectual activities because those activities are too representative of another group conceived of as oppressive.

When culture and intellectual activity should be a place where people come together to commune at the level of ideas. And that's important because that's a regulatory mechanism in society that does lots of things like. So, for instance, sets the boundaries of discourse, not just, you know, determines ultimately political policy, but determines how, you know, if you're concerned about discourse and whether discourse can be oppressive to people, it's not enough to appeal to offense or the thing the Latest thing that's written in Salon, the person or slate, the person who's supposed to be representative of some identity group, which they are absolutely not.

There needs to be an intelligent regulatory mechanism in society in which people are participating together and not just speaking within their bubbles in order to affirm one identity or another.

24:11 Seth: Let me just clarify. I wasn't asking is what you're saying, Yascha. Bullshit. I was saying in this particular case, this is when we get to things of public policy. I don't want to oversimplify because I think being in touch with. I'm not myself, but I know people who are managers of public agencies and trying to figure out how to make people get along. And I've certainly been an employer and things like that. So I think it's enormously difficult and almost feel like principles are tools that one might use, you know. But I'm very pragmatic when it comes to what actually works.

Right. So Yascha, I mean, I think you're being very reasonable in terms of it is desirable for people to have relations with folks that are different from them. And you know, that is absolutely something we should encourage. I also want to think it might be. So again, I'm asking is in that particular case of the principal, who is recommending this thing? It actually makes a lot of difference to me. Is the black class an all black class or is it nearly a majority black class? So if you have a mostly white school that has 5% black, do you try to put those black kids together in at least one of their classes?

Maybe it's only their homeroom class, maybe it's not the all day class. So that they don't feel like I'm the one black person in the whole class. Because they probably know there's a lot of anecdotal experience about what it's like to be the one black person and how being in having at least some other people that look similar to you even though it's not. Or maybe this ends up being the majority black class, but there's still white kids in it as opposed to the actually segregated. Right. My kids were actually in a Spanish language immersion school in their grade school years.

And part of it was okay for the white kids. It is a really effective way to teach them Spanish, to like teach them their social studies classes in Spanish and stuff. But it was also very much for the Hispanic kids that maybe were raised in these because there was, you know, it was sort of shown that if those kids are thrown into a you can only speak English at school, then they just don't attain the sort of literacy that they should. So that having this thing as a, you know, as soon as they leave the classroom, they're surrounded by English everywhere.

But we're going to have this one little space where they're around their compatriots. Not solely their compatriots, they're still the white kids trying to learn Spanish with them. But you know that this was something that again, I just want to see the research. And as a parent who had kids in that, I was skeptical as we were doing it. Like, I'm not even sure that this is the best way. Like my kids are learning spelling slower. They've now graduated from high school and they came out wonderful and they know multiple languages. And so it actually worked out very well.

But I would be very hesitant to cite either a principle of yes, we want to emphasize racial differences, or we want to mow those over as much as possible. I would want to just say what actually works in the specific circumstance, in the specific institution that I'm trying to regulate.

27:16 Wes: This isn't just hard to arbitrate at the level of anecdotal evidence. And what our news feeds are, those studies are often debated and new studies come out that are contradictory. And so you have to be careful about decisions made based on those studies. And these are very political, charged decisions. A school administrator doesn't have the right to segregate classrooms. Whatever just came out. And you know, Education Weekly, the, the latest thing that she saw in Education Weekly against the wishes of a parent or if they're going to do that, maybe they can start your own school and be explicit about that. So children, you know, we're talking about freedom of association. You've got to be very careful before you make those decisions for children. They're not making those decisions for themselves. Unlike a person who decides to go to a historically black college.

28:08 Yasha: What's the issue here is that the parent of a child who happens to be an educator herself had a strong view as to which right class was in part based on the friendships that her daughter had with people in that class. Right. And the principal came in and said, no, I have an idea about the right race of the friends that your daughter is supposed to have and that's not going to be facilitated in this class. So I think the burden of proof is on the other side. In this particular context, at least more broadly, what there is is very good evidence by people like Frank Dobbin, progressive left leaning sociologist at Harvard University, who studied the effect of diversity trainings.

And what he's found is, first of all, that the diversity trainings at American corporations in the current form are either ineffective or counterproductive in the great majority. And secondly, that this is particularly bad for diversity trainings that emphasize difference rather than similarity. So I think that Wes is right that there's all kinds of studies and you can try and hug it one way or another. But I think at least in the area of diversity trainings, we have pretty convincing evidence by very serious scholars that actually this tends to backfire in its current form and at the very best, the outcome neutral.

And then to me, when these empirical questions are either still being investigated or unclear, I think going back to the basic mechanisms of how human psychology works is a helpful way of figuring out what our priors should be. And there I think the evidence is just very, very clear. But I want to go a little bit to a couple of other things. When we talked earlier about standpoint theory, a little bit, and we were making, I think, the right point about why the strongest versions of standpoint theory, which have now been popularized, are wrong as a matter of philosophy.

Why, for example, we have to distinguish between experiential knowledge and propositional knowledge. The fact that I may never know exactly what it is like to soak in the shoes of somebody who. Of a woman who's afraid of taking the subway because she might get sexually harassed. Right. But I do think that we can understand the propositional upshot of that, which is that I don't want to live in a society in which my female friends have to think twice about using the subway. And I don't, even if I don't entirely know what it feels like to be on the subway car being worried about this or having that experience, I can very easily understand that that is a genuine injustice in our society today and one that we should beyond that,

30:27 Seth: that, like literature, actually allows us to get the feeling, you know, so it's

30:32 Wes: imperfect, but not just literature, but our empathy and imagination. I know what it's like to be in a situation where I thought I was going to be mugged, for instance. I know what it's like to have a boss come on to me at work. Maybe it's less typical for men, but in any cases, the idea that there's this enormous gulf. I think we're much better at bridging experiences with others than is often claimed.

30:56 Yasha: The key point is that how we build a more solidaristic society is not to say I can't understand you and therefore you defer. And by the way, if people, most people are not going to defer in that kind of way, right? And if they claim to defer, they're going to pick the person they're already agreeing with, so they're super progressive, then they're going to say, yes, Ayanna Pressley, she's the true voice of black people. And the more moderate, they're going to say, jim Clyburn, he's the true voice of black people. Right? So actually, the demand to defer only leads to a really unpleasant argument by authority where you're pointing at somebody in that group and say, that's the true spokesperson, rather than just acknowledging that this is born of your own preferences.

But if a part of the solution is literature, part of the solution is communication, part of the solution is empathy, then that leads us to the next question, which is about cultural appropriation. And I do think that there is now this broad nervousness about cultural appropriation, including, once again, institutional practices that I think are deeply damaging. And you can dismiss any one of them as an extreme case, but in the sum, they are deeply disquieting. I teach cultural appropriation as part of the courses I teach. And the students usually come in very inclined to believe that anything that might be described as cultural appropriation is an injustice, is something that should be avoided.

And I've had experience now two or three times where the student says, well, could I tell a personal story about this? And I say, sure, of course. And so I'll tell you one of them. A student of mine named Selina who was interning in the art museum of an Ivy League university during the pandemic, and people couldn't go to the collection to see the artwork, so they were encouraging the interns to recreate parts of the artwork and then post it on the museum website. And so she has a mother who's a Chinese immigrant, did a self portrait with her mother, recreating a self portrait in the collection that comments on beauty standards and so on.

And she sent this in. Director of the museum emailed her, saying, this is beautiful. Thank you so much. It'll go up on the website in a few days. And then she got an email from the Asian American curator at the museum saying, you committed a terrible form of cultural appropriation. How dare you. This is something you should really be ashamed of. And she said, I don't understand. There must be a mistake. My mom is Chinese. I think of myself as Asian American. But her dad, I believe her dad is Latino. And the curator said, well, you're not Asian enough, so you don't count as somebody who should be able to do this right now.

I know that. One response to this is. This is clearly the curator misapplying even.

33:27 Mark: Right.

33:28 Seth: It's going too far to say that maybe that there's something.

33:31 Yasha: I don't think it is.

No, no.

33:32 Mark: But I don't think.

33:32 Yasha: Right.

33:33 Seth: I'm saying this is the question of. Of whether it is the principle that she's operating off of that's faulty or whether it's her application of the principle as faulty. But clearly it's faulty. Like these cases that you pick up. We're all supposed to, as readers, empathize with them. And if I, you know, I'm trying to nitpick about the teacher or whatever, that's me just trying to say, okay, even in your extreme case. But the question is, are these extreme cases or is it, you know, as you say, this is generally applicable. This is getting at the root of some, you know, massive social problem.

34:03 Yasha: The problem concept of cultural appropriation is exactly the inverse, which is that it's a very, very broad term and concept that is applied to some cases that indeed are unjust, but misdescribes what is unjust about them or how to fix them. So let's go to a core case of cultural appropriation, the one that's cited most often for understandable reasons by the defenders of the idea that it's a coherent concept and we should worry about things that might be described as cultural appropriation, which is that of white musicians in the 50s and 60s having big careers in the United States, in part by being inspired by, sometimes by outright stealing, the songs of black musicians who were not able to have mainstream careers in the same way.

So what is the wrong making feature of this? What explains the injustice of the situation? I don't think it's the fact that there was white jazz saxophonists running around somewhere in the United States. It's the fact that black musicians at the time were not able to travel freely across the American south, that they were banned from many concert venues, that many radio stations would not play their music, that many record labels would not sign them. Right. It's a straightforward fact of racial discrimination. So I don't think that the term of cultural appropriation actually helps to pick out what was wrong about those cases.

And that matters because it misdirects us in terms of where the solution lies. The solution would not have lied in white musicians abstaining from being inspired by this music. That's the kind of exchange in the diverse society, but I think can actually be helpful. The solution should have lied, and some extent did, in overcoming those forms of discrimination and making sure that those black musicians were able to have careers they deserved on the basis of their talent, that were able to reach mainstream audiences, that were able to be played on radio stations and all of that.

And so when it comes to cultural appropriation, sure, the case of Selena is extreme in certain respects, but you're always going to, as part of this concept, have a need to say who owns which cultural artifact. And that always implies question of who belongs to this group sufficiently, sufficiently purely a member of this group that they get to partake in this cultural artifact. And so I think the reason why it's not going too far or it's not just somebody, not Ray Smarten is applying this in the wrong way. The problem is that it's making us ask the wrong question, which is, what's Salina's racial status such that she is or is not allowed to engage with his artwork in a particular way.

I just think that's the wrong question to ask. And this is something that is having broad effects. When you talk to people in publishing and in the music industry and other places. There is now a very, very deep set of prohibitions applied in informal ways, but that are very powerful, that make people worry about what kind of characters they can put in the novel, how they engage in other cultures. And that problem becomes bigger the more an industry lives by committee. Right? So the more you need to design off of lots of people, as you do in Hollywood, for example, in order to get something done, the more people know not to even go close to that line.

And that matters precisely because I think both forms of cultural exchange are actually what allows the kind of empathy and mutual understanding which is going to build the political solidarity we need for us to create a better society.

37:18 Dylan: This, I think, is getting back to the real problem or challenge here in that the sort of philosophical observation and critique sort of going awry and becoming this kind of essentialism, and then that. Then informing and being the main vector for decision making. Again, to me, it gets down to this sort of. This tribalism. But this part about cultural appropriation, again, starts to point to, you know, who has the authority to decide whether X, Y or Z is legitimate or ought to be included. And using that as the fulcrum for making political or other judgments.

And I think Yascha, focusing, you point out, focusing on the right question of justice. So if we say that one of the core Problems here is why is this unjust? And saying that the reason it's unjust is if the reason it's unjust is because it was cultural appropriation is a misreading. And saying that the reason it's unjust is because someone was discriminated against unfairly. You made me think of just another example in Hollywood. Right. The reading of why Bruce Lee was not cast into Kung Fu instead of David Carradine is because Bruce Lee was actually Asian and they didn't want to cast an Asian guy, even in a Kung Fu movie, as the star.

Right. And so they cast David Carradine there. So I think you're right. The reason there, the account of the injustice then becomes one about people equally partaking in the fruits of society. For instance, people partaking in the fruits of power, having equal access to power,

39:08 Yasha: or at least a conduit to it.

39:10 Dylan: Right. And the terms under which power can be redistributed and the reasons why you would make that account for power being redistributed. To me, that's where I keep coming back to for the challenge of these. The adjudication is not possible except by some special predispensation. Right. And this is the way in which the Foucault thing, where everything's all about power ends up being a skepticism that there's something true about that.

39:40 Yasha: There's something true about that analysis.

39:43 Dylan: But to then have it become completely just leave it there.

39:47 Wes: Right.

39:48 Dylan: Means that because you can't act on it that way unless you just have everything become completely tactical, everything then becomes whatever you have in power. So there's a Thrasymachus argument, whoever's the stronger is the most powerful.

40:01 Yasha: That doesn't provide you any guidance other

40:03 Dylan: than I'm going to figure out tactically what group I'm part of so that my group can win all the time.

40:09 Yasha: Yeah. And so I think to get out of that, we need norms that discourage that form of zero sum conflict. The clearest example in the case of cultural appropriation of the distinction you're pointing out to me is a. A frat party held at Baylor University recorded the Cinco de Drinko party. And you had kids showing up in ponchos and sombreros on one hand. Others turned up in construction vests and maids outfits. Now that whole thing is offensive. The question is, can the concept of cultural appropriation point out what is offensive about it? And I don't think it can, because whatever exactly you believe about the situation, clearly the maids outfits and the construction vests were as Offensive as the ponchos and the sombreros.

And yet those were not a form of cultural appropriation because a maid's outfit is not part of Latino culture. And so here I think it's much clearer to say, well, what was wrong about this? Was the intention to insult and denigrate Latino students, the implicit suggestion that somehow all they're good for is menial labor or however exactly you want to formulate the nature of the injustice that is much more straightforward and can cover both maid's outfit and if worn in this mocking intent for sombrero. Now, more broadly, I think the question is how do we adopt principles of a highest level of society, but also social norms more broadly that avoid us from getting into that zero sum conflict where you're trying to say, well, is this student allowed to do that kind of behavior?

We're going to be outraged by this form of supposed cultural appropriation, but not by that form of supposed cultural appropriation. And then the members of a second group are going to feel, well, hang on a second, what about me? To bring it full circle to something where we're talking about at the very beginning of a conversation. I have no need for my university president, much as I respect him, to tell me his opinion about the Middle east conflict. I don't care. But if the university president speaks out on every damn thing going on in the world and makes university statements about everything and then suddenly remains silent about this, right then I do think, hang on a second.

Why this selective silence on this particular issue? And I think the solution to this is to adopt in advance, not after a difficult event has happened, something like the Kalven report that University of Chicago adopted, which is saying, we're not going to take an institutional position as a university because that's what's going to allow real academic freedom in our community. Because that way people don't feel silence, and we don't feel that the university is embracing a position that might disagree with, with or whatever.

Right?

But I think that is a broader question. But it's an example of a broader question about how do we build a society in which we're discouraging the kind of zero sum conflict between groups that's always going to be destructive, where people are always going to feel, hey, why is it that the letter addressing, quote, unquote, my injustice, the thing that happened to my group, is worded more easily than the one that addresses. That's always going to provoke conflict. A, because universities will fail to be even handed, and B, even if they try to be even handed, People won't feel that they're even handed, so they should get out of a damn game.

But that's true when it comes to public policy as well, right? Do we really think, first of all, that if we adopt various forms of race sensitive public policies we haven't talked about that much in this conversation though, which are now a key feature of American politics? A, do we really naively think that the groups that have always been marginalized and that are less numerous in society are miraculously always going to win these fights in ways that allow us to remedy injustice? No, I think that's really naive to think based on how group and power politics works in politics.

But B, do we want to encourage that? Do we want to make what kind of relief restaurants get in the middle of a pandemic or who gets vaccines in the middle of COVID depend on whichever group manages to win out in a power struggle? Do we think that's going to be conducive to a society in which we're able to keep the peace and be tolerant and have goodwill towards each other, or do we adopt more universal principles that avoid that kind of zero sum competition between identity blocks? And I think the answer is very clear, that the latter course of action is much more likely to sustain the goodwill and the solidarity and the civic friendship we need to.

44:36 Mark: To.

44:37 Yasha: To build a fairer society.

44:38 Seth: As sort of my closing against the pragmatism that I was just expressing the last time I spoke here, which is that I would like, and I will refer folks to, on the cultural appropriation, you had a nice debate with C. Thi Nguyen, who's been on my podcast a couple of times, will be on pel eventually. Where his response was, was very pragmatic, was yes, I admit to you, Yascha, that our current cultural practices, an amalgam of past practices and so to try to freeze culture in place makes no sense. But yet if in some particular circumstances, some, you know, particular, like Native Americans, if they, they were so abused in the past that if some particular Native American group says please don't use the headdress for this, then we should definitely see that as not something we should use as a Halloween costume, you know, that there are, there are plenty of practical exceptions where you can, just as being a decent person, say, you know, so in other words, you could let cultural appropriation feed in as one of the principles.

And I think you then responded to make the point that it's too hard in any particular case to determine when the pragmatist should yield so that it's better to just say, you know what, cultural appropriation is not a thing. And all again, to give the response that you gave to it that you know, that any objection that somebody makes to a cultural appropriation, if it is not for some independent moral reason objectionable, then it's fine and you should just ignore the people. I'm sorry you feel that way, but this is the way culture works. We combine things and you should stop being so high handed about it.

To bring in then one other thing that we did not address here but that, you know, we've talked about on this podcast before, freedom of speech. Wes has come down in the past as more, you know, a free speech absolutist.

46:30 Wes: I think that I wouldn't describe myself that way, but anyway, go ahead.

46:33 Seth: Yes. And in Yascha, I'd say, you know, in your book you take a very similar position to what Wes has, which is to say, of course, there are exceptions to free speech in the, you know, the yelling fire in a crowded theater. And so if saying racist things is a way of provoking people, then it's not actually speech anymore, it's an action. But merely to say, well, let's, in a given circumstance we should clear up obviously racist speech. Obviously, again, the pragmatists would say based on whatever forum you're trying to moderate or you're thinking of moderating, pursue whatever policy is actually going to further the discourse in that forum.

And your response to that, I think from the principled point of view is that sounds okay in the abstract, but as a matter of policy, you are putting, as you say in your book, the choice of what speech to censor in the hands of the powerful already, you know, if you put it in the hands of government, who's going to be in charge of the government next year? It's sort of one of these overall, don't put too much power in the government just because you like the government now sort of arguments. So this is a way of just saying pragmatism sounds. And I could probably come up with several other forums where this sounds great in the abstract, but that we actually do need the principle that except in extraordinary circumstances, except if you could show clear and present danger, free speech all the way, allowing adoption of others, cultural practices all the way, et cetera.

48:01 Yasha: The one distinction that is important in both of those cases is between things that I would recognize as legitimate and perhaps important considerations for individuals in terms of how they should act versus the social norms or the actual course of laws we should adopt governing those practices. Certainly there's all kinds of speech that I wouldn't personally engage in because I find it to be offensive. That's different from saying I should empower the government or the state to punish people for engaging in those kind of speech because that requires me to trust that the government in a systematic way is going to be on the side of a right and the good.

Which I think, especially if you take the injustices of American history seriously, you have not very much reason to assume in a similar ish way, I would say, when it comes to cultural appropriation, I can certainly foresee circumstances in which some group expresses clearly enough that they would be offended by me engaging with some particular cultural product or artifact. For me to say, all right, well, my goal in life is not to go around offending people or to make them upset, so I'm just not going to do it. I think there is all of those questions, but who speaks on behalf of those?

And perhaps Native Americans are slightly special case because they are constituted politically and have certain forms of representation that most identity groups in the world do not. But perhaps I can say, all right, if I really get the feeling of this group, it's just like would be terribly offended by me wearing a piece of item of clothing from that group. And I say, all right, fine, I have other things that I can wear. That's very different from saying the norm of cultural appropriation and that concept is a helpful one in terms of how it's going to structure the cultural life of our nation.

And the fact that lots and lots of artists are self censoring, are telling themselves, well, I can't do that. I can't have this kind of character in my novel. I can't engage with this traditional style in my paintings. I can't have plot points in my movies that engage with this group, because that would be a form of cultural appropriation. I think we can recognize that that's really, really damaging to our ability to inspire mutual empathy, to create new cultural products, to seize on what's best about this country, which is the great variety of people from all over the world that are inevitably butting up against each other, creating new things by virtue of that encounter.

50:21 Dylan: I was just going to just reiterate that I think that the form of the criticism that you make, Yascha, that the real challenge with the concepts in identity synthesis or in cultural appropriation, that sort of cloud of ideas, is that they don't inform the decisions that need to be made about justice and about community interaction in a helpful way. They mis point to the problem and then are pernicious in that because they set the terms of the problem in the wrong way, then we actually get all kinds of bad effects of it. And I think that's right on. And I think that it's really, really helpful to point to that there are in fact robust ways in which we can be discussing about the harms of the very things that the categories of identity politics are meant to solve in ways that are actually more powerful.

51:17 Yasha: I think that's really helpful.

51:19 Wes: I might be less of a free speech absolutist than Mark realizes because I value freedom of discussion, as John Stuart Mill puts it. I think there are a lot of insights on liberty that I embrace and I. That I think bear more exposition from, from what I can tell. And one of those is just that social coercion in speech and society is ubiquitous. We are all censoring ourselves all the time. We're not saying exactly what we think and every emotion that comes into our head. We wouldn't have any friends or spouses if that were the case. And a teacher can't walk into a classroom wearing a swastika.

They're going to be canceled. So cancellation culture, and that subject is actually quite complicated. And the role that free speech plays in it is quite complicated. And part of it involves where we set the boundaries of discourse and whether those boundaries are legitimate. And I think they're set in two ways. One of them is just emergent. It's the same way that language emerges. It's practice. It's not defined by any individual, it's not defined by any group. And in fact, groups don't get to decide what's offensive. A group can't just come out and say the word dog is offensive and it becomes offensive.

It doesn't matter if they've been convinced of that by some political organization. And they adamantly claim that some appeal to conscience, some reasonable appeal to the conscience of the society has to be made. And there you get another important way in which the boundaries of discourse are regulated, which is at a reflective level. But the reflective level has to be freer than the day to day social level. So I call these context of inquiry versus context of offense. If at work or in social situations people are offended by talking about, quote unquote, biological sex as anti trans, which from what I've seen, that's quite common now you can't even use the phrase biological sex.

I am going to out of in that what I call a context of offense, which is basically just the social context. I'M going to adhere to that because I don't want to offend people. And I'm not there in that context to have a big political debate with people. But in other, you know, with other friends, I might do things differently, but at the level, in the context of inquiry, I have to be quite. We as a society have to be quite free to argue about things like biological sex and the relationship between sex and gender. And the university is a place for that.

So that's a. It's one context where freer discussion is very, very important. And it's important because unless the boundaries of discourse can be set intelligently and they have to be set at the level, you know, again, in the context of inquiry, they can go just as badly for marginalized groups as they can. Well, so at some different political phase in a society, if the visceral reaction of one group or another is what defines what the boundaries of discourse are, it could be actually detrimental to marginalized groups. One final thing I want to say, Yascha, I was very pleased when you contacted us to come on.

Not just because this was about one of my, you know, I've followed your stuff for a long time. Identity politics is also something that's very important to me. But it was a pleasure being contacted by someone who's writing. I've been reading for a very long time. And thanks a lot for coming on. I enjoyed your book.

54:59 Yasha: Thank you, guys. I love this podcast. I mean, I think, you know, I'm on book tour at the moment. I've repeated my arguments, you know, 74 times and lots of, lots of conversations were great. But this is definitely one of the most far. Just examinations of all the issues that come from it. And I enjoyed every moment of it. In closing, let me just say that what I try to do in the book is to show people that it can be genuinely concerned about injustices that obviously do continue to structure our society. But not just, but nevertheless, you can hold on to some basic liberal notions about how to govern that society, but that in fact, both at the philosophical level and at the historical and empirical level, the evidence is strongly that those liberal notions are the most promising route to sustain and build just society, in which people are going to treat each other fairly and equally.

So I think this is a really important philosophical debate. One thing I don't like is this idea, and I think, Mark, you're sort of referencing that earlier, this idea of not too far ism, right? But like, oh, you know, these people who hold these ideas are well intentioned and Great. And, you know, perhaps they're a little bit young and they go a little bit too far in what we want to do. And haven't we all gone too far in what we fought as 19 year olds? And I think all of that is true. I went too far in what I believe as a 19 year old, a lot of the stuff I believe was certainly wrong, but really this is a more fundamental debate.

It's not a debate about whether we're going a little bit too far in certain ways. It is a debate about whether we're going in the right direction. And I think that the core ideas of the identity synthesis are leading us astray from the kind of society that's going to sustain tolerant, diverse democracies like the United States.

56:38 Wes: All right.

56:39 Seth: I'm predicting that Wes and Dylan and I, and probably Seth, who actually did read this book but had Internet problems and just couldn't join us, that perhaps we'll record a part 3. So folks can get that if they become supporters, partially, they would. Like folks, should check out Yasha's podcast, the Good Fight. Do you have anything else besides the book, of course, that you want to plug immediately?

57:02 Yasha: I run a magazine called Persuasion, which defends philosophically liberal view of a world in times when those are under attack in certain ways from the left, as I've argued, but also obviously from the far right and the populist right. So that's@ persuasion.communities very nice.

57:17 Seth: And folks can follow us at partiallyexaminedlife.com find links there to our Twitter, to our Facebook, Instagram, Email us@pel partially examinedlife.com to suggest topics. Next time we're talking about Soren Kierkegaard's the Concept of Irony. So please come back. Good night, everybody.

57:35 Wes: Good night. Good night.

57:36 Yasha: Good night.