IDENTITY POLITICS: PART 2 - Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way

 

PART 2 in a series explaining "identity politics." (Part 1 is here, answering the question 'What is Identity Politics?'.) 

Now all-pervasive, identity politics judges you not by your ideas or thoughts or choices, but instead pre-judges you by the group or tribe in which you allegedly belong. You speak not as yourself, but "as a" member of this group. 

If this stinks, it's because it's an outgrowth of a dead idea called "determinism" ...

Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way

"'Identity politics' . . . sorts individuals into groups based on gender, race or sexual orientation, as if such characteristics actually decide one’s political interests...    
    "Public intellectuals push for ever-expanding and cross-cutting segmentation of society into group identities. Rarely mentioned, let alone taken seriously, is the notion that ideas and principles can, and should, unite individuals of all physical types and cultural backgrounds, for the sake of the individual’s life and happiness. The [idea of the] 'melting pot' is now an object of mockery."
          ~ Tom Bowden

Determinism as a school of thought says that human being beings lack free will and the ability to make choices. Hard determinists say we're "wired" to do and think things, about which we have no choice -- as if, in the words of novelist Anthony Burgess, we're all just some kind of "clockwork orange." Realising the idiocy therein, “soft determinists” advanced the view that the faculty of free will is merely "under severe influence from outside factors such as one’s background and environment.” The theorists of identity politics turn this into an iron law, arguing that your background and environment -- your race, class, ethnicity and gender -- fully determine everything about you, from your emotions, to our perceptions, to your politics. According to this recrudescence of tribalism, you are your group.

According to tribalism [explains philosopher Tara Smith], the source of reality, of truth of value is the group. Truth resides not in the logic of the group's beliefs – in the validity of their ideas -- but in their groupness. Treat our claims as worthy because we’re us. What makes us –our  group -- a group worthy of respect? Well, we were born with this skin pigmentation. Or of this hereditary lineage or with these physical organs.  In this geographic area, Serbia, Bosnia, south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Now, notice you do not control these things. They're accidental… But tribalism maintains that's what's important about you. These accidental characteristics that you happen to inherit.

    Which implies that  individual reasoning, that free will, that action, that these things are not significant. Tribalism elevates the accidental over the chosen; happenstance over decision; the collective over the individual; feeling over reason; “we want it” as opposed to “we can prove it that it's the right way to go.”

    Tribalism represents the attitude “our group, right or wrong,” rather than “our group's view should be adopted because evidence and reason demonstrate its logic.” And because tribalism rejects reason … , you get ahead not by creating things based on reason and trading with others to mutual benefit, but by beating others, wresting the quarry from their hands. So it's an us-versus-them mentality based on a zero-sum picture that requires combat you get by grabbing.

Note how this idea reduces politics to a straight-out game of pressure-group warfare – with the pressure group into which you belong not even chosen by you, but assigned to you by the "group" or tribe into which you are allegedly born. [Assigned by whom, you ask? Ah -- that's where the political power comes from. More on that shortly.]

“What it reduces us to is members of a larger group,” explains US lawyer Steve Simpson in a panel discussion with Dave Rubin and Flemming Rose – a group that essentially functions just as a tribe does. This is the consequence, he observes “of many decades, even centuries, of very bad philosophy.”

Part of it is collectivism, and I think that the best way to describe it in today’s world  is tribalism: that you are a member of a tribe, and you should say only what that tribe says. 

And if you look at the way tribes function, they always rigidly enforce tribal adherence—because the whole idea is that there is no such thing as the individual. There’s only a member of a group. And your role as an individual is just to give yourself over and to sacrifice your life for the good of the group. . . .

Note the elements Smith and Simpson both identify:

•     You have no reality as an individual: your only identity is your group;
•     You do not choose your group;
•     Adherence to group norms is rigidly enforced by the group;
•     The role of every individual is submission, to the group. 

Consider the musty stale odour that this all starts to emit, the sort of smell generally associated with tribalism, and we can see why Simpson and others refer to it this way. It’s not meant as a metaphor: in many ways the philosophies that led us here are as primitive as the tribal idea itself. Any individual worthy of the name would run a mile from such restrictions – it smacks of what is sometimes called the “crab-bucket mentality” – “a way of thinking best described by the phrase ‘if I can't have it, neither can you.’"

The [crab-bucket] metaphor is derived from a pattern of behaviour noted in crabs when they are trapped in a bucket. While any one crab could easily escape, its efforts will be undermined by others, ensuring the group's collective demise.

Tennis ace Chris Lewis, who now trains youngsters to climb the sport’s mountains he once conquered, observes that “there will always be those who give up on their quest to climb life's mountains, and instead choose to remain at the bottom of life's bucket — which would be fine, as long as they didn't then devote their destructive efforts, like the crabs, to pulling the climbers back down.”

This is the mentality of the followers of identity politics, concludes Tara Smith, a lowest-common denominator form of collectivism.

A species of collectivism that groups people together, not on the basis of their thinking, their chosen beliefs … but on the basis of given physical characteristics. Tribalism is collectivism whose basis rests in blood, body chemistry, genes, geography, unchosen physical characteristics. So it's pre-intellectual. It's the love child of collectivism and anti-intellectualism. Tribalism is non-cognitive collectivism.

CONTINUED IN PART 3: 'Tribal Politics is a Zero-Sum Conflict'

PART 2 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

Part 1 is here: 'What is Identity Politics?'