The Identity Trap

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book responds to wokeness and highlights potential problems with it. It also dissects the identity politics of this latest decade and how it has evolved from French postmodernism.

🎨 Impressions

Gonna have to read more about Orientalism and especially Edward Said to understand more about this. Will update this section when finished. Might be a good goal for 2025.

Can one accept the underlying narrative of post-modernism without signing on to the theories building on to it? Maybe postmodernism is a good theory that do not work in practice?

✍️ My Top Quotes

• All four of my grandparents were sent to prison for their communist beliefs during the 1920s or 1930s. All four decided to stay in Central Europe after most of their family members were murdered in the Holocaust because they were convinced that new, leftist governments would make the world a better place—managing to overcome the prejudices and tribal hatreds that had, during their lifetimes, twice set the world aflame.

• “Of the 139 members and candidates of the Central Committee who were elected at the 17th Congress,” which had taken place in 1934, Nikita Khrushchev announced, “98 persons, i.e. 70 percent, were arrested and shot.”

• Lyotard wrote in a line that was to prove highly influential, “I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives.”

• When I interviewed him in the fall of 2021, half a century after their famous debate, Chomsky remained astonished by Foucault and the wider postmodernist position he represents: “I had never met such an amoral—not immoral, amoral—person in my life.”

• Key “postmodern” theorists like Michel Foucault were steeped in communist ideas. But the core of their philosophy consisted of a rejection of all “grand narratives,” including Marxism.

• Orientalism was an enormous success. It has sold hundreds of thousands of copies since its first publication, been cited almost eighty thousand times, and influenced academics in fields from literary studies to anthropology, launching Said as one of the most famous and fashionable public intellectuals in (ironically) the Western world.

• Postcolonial scholars like Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak sought to speak to the challenges facing former colonies from Asia to Africa without embracing the long-standing Western traditions they distrusted. Postmodernism, with its attack on supposedly universal truths, provided them with a key tool for doing so.

• “Racism,” he contended, is not “a holdover from slavery that the nation both wants to cure and is capable of curing.” Rather, it is “an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.”

• This idea became a central component of critical race theory. According to Bell, for example, “a neutral perspective does not, and cannot, exist.”

• In other countries, the belief in the political power of verbal redescription has even led to calls to change fundamental aspects of a language’s grammar. In Germany, for example, activists have long militated against the language’s traditional use of the generic masculine to refer to groups of people comprising both men and women (for example, by replacing Studenten with Studierende). More recently, they have even begun to insist on using a so-called gender star in writing—as well as a short pause, to be deployed before the ending of every gendered noun, in verbal communication—to render ordinary language more inclusive of people who are nonbinary.

• Writers and orators from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama were up-front in their criticisms of America’s shortcomings. But they also insisted that the country’s founding principles could, if only they were fully put into practice, guide America toward a better future. The rejection of this hard-won optimism is a key theme of the identity synthesis.

• In the years before his premature death of leukemia, in 2003, Edward Said became very critical of the way in which the identity synthesis was starting to transform intellectual life in the United States. Identity, he said at one point, is “as boring a subject as one can imagine.”

• “Marginality and homelessness are not, in my opinion, to be gloried in; they are to be brought to an end, so that more, and not fewer, people can enjoy the benefits of what has for centuries been denied the victims of race, class, or gender.”

• Gradually, the triple influence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory gave rise to an “identity synthesis.” This new ideology was defined by seven major themes: a rejection of the existence of objective truth; the use of a form of discourse analysis for explicitly political ends; an embrace of strategic essentialism; a deep pessimism about the possibility of overcoming racism or other forms of bigotry; a preference for public policies that explicitly distinguish between citizens on the basis of the group to which they belong; an embrace of intersectionality as a strategy for political organizing; and a deep skepticism about the ability of members of different groups to communicate with each other.

• The share of New York Times articles using the term “racist,” for example, increased by an astonishing 700 percent in the eight years between 2011 and 2019, according to an analysis by Zach Goldberg, a doctoral student in political science at Georgia State University. Over the same time period, uses of the word “racist” in The Washington Post increased even more quickly, by 1,000 percent.[]*

• At American colleges, incoming students are twice as likely to say that they are liberal as to say that they are conservative. Faculty are even more likely to lean left than their students: professors are six times more likely to say that they are liberal than to say that they are conservative. Administrators have a still clearer political slant: they are twelve times more likely to call themselves liberal than they are to call themselves conservative.

• Or, to quote the anthropologist Roy D’Andrade: “Isn’t it odd that the true enemy of society turns out to be that guy in the office down the hall?”

• “If you’re a white person in America, social justice educator Robin DiAngelo has a message for you: You’re a racist, pure and simple.”

• The effect of DiAngelo’s book was to mainstream a non-falsifiable theory: All white people are racist. And if you disagree, that merely proves how racist you are.

• As Joseph Stein, who wrote the musical’s book, recalls, “I got there just during the rehearsal period and the Japanese producer asked me, ‘Do they understand this show in America?’ And I said, ‘Yes, of course, we wrote it for America. Why do you ask?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s so Japanese.’ ”

• Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, a character in a play by the ancient Roman playwright Terence famously said: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”

• Today, philosophers debate such questions as the difference between “true belief” (when our beliefs happen to be true because we get lucky) and genuine “knowledge” (when our beliefs are both true and justified in the right ways).

• The first core claim of standpoint theory runs into trouble because it is extremely hard to identify meaningful experiences that all members of a socially relevant group share.

• But of late, Juno Mac and Molly Smith have put forward strong arguments against the Nordic model. Based on their own experiences as sex workers, they claim that these laws are likely to do significant harm. Where sex work is outlawed, potential clients have a strong reason to solicit prostitutes in hidden or remote places. They are also in a stronger negotiating position because the fear of being punished drives down the number of potential customers. Due to these mechanisms, which most feminists had overlooked, the Nordic model, according to this argument, puts sex workers at greater risk of harm.

• Trying to find some primordially authentic culture can be like peeling an onion. The textiles most people think of as traditional West African cloths are known as Java prints; they arrived in the 19th century with the Javanese batiks sold, and often milled, by the Dutch. The traditional garb of Herero women in Namibia derives from the attire of 19th-century German missionaries, though it is still unmistakably Herero, not least because the fabrics used have a distinctly un-Lutheran range of colors.

• Whether located in the beige cubicles of Washington, D.C., or the gleaming open-floor offices of Silicon Valley, the people who are sufficiently powerful to serve as censors would quickly supplant the interests of society with their own concerns. As political scientists and organizational sociologists have shown again and again, people who are in charge of influential social institutions tend to guard their power jealously. Similarly, the bureaucrats who would run the (fictitious) Federal Censor’s Bureau, or the executives who might be in charge of Facebook’s (equally fictitious) Speech Facilitation Committee, would likely want to ensure that they can continue to do their jobs.

• Free speech acts as a safety valve that helps to alert all of us when something in our society has gone well and truly awry. So when certain positions or policies are put beyond reproach, the prospect for social progress diminishes. Those who believe that building more housing would bring down rent and increase economic opportunity can no longer make their arguments to their fellow citizens.

• Rauch points out, cancellation “is about shaping the information battlefield, not seeking truth; and its intent—or at least its predictable outcome—is to coerce conformity.”

• Only one country radically deviated from this plan: the United States. In its preliminary recommendations, the key committee advising the Centers for Disease Control proposed putting eighty-seven million “essential workers”—a broad category that would include bankers and film crews—ahead of the elderly.

• When Tamika Mallory, one of the founders of the Women’s March, was criticized for calling the proudly anti-Semitic (as well as homophobic and misogynistic) Louis Farrakhan “the greatest of all time,” for example, she defended herself by telling The New York Times that “white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy.”

• But the denial of biological sex is wrongheaded. Both scientists and medical professionals, for example, know that biological sex is a key determinant of important human attributes, from the prevalence of heart disease to the ability to become pregnant.

• And in the case of the identity synthesis, such an analysis reveals three foundational claims. 1. The key to understanding the world is to examine it through the prism of group identities like race, gender, and sexual orientation.[]*

• Supposedly universal values and neutral rules merely serve to obscure the ways in which privileged groups dominate those that are marginalized.

• To build a just world, we must adopt norms and laws that explicitly make the way the state treats each citizen—and how citizens treat each other—depend on the identity group to which they belong.

• Advocates of the identity synthesis have long thought of philosophical liberals as their main adversaries. To evaluate the identity synthesis and its attack on liberalism, it makes sense to boil this tradition down to its main claims. Such a “rational reconstruction” would focus on three propositions. First, the key to understanding the world is to examine it through the prism of group identities like race, gender, and sexual orientation. Second, supposedly universal values and neutral rules merely serve to obscure the ways in which privileged groups dominate those that are marginalized. And third, to build a just world, we must adopt norms and laws that explicitly make the way the state treats each citizen—and how citizens treat each other—depend on the identity group to which they belong.

• The story of humanity is an annal of cruelty and injustice.

• The identity synthesis presents itself as a progressive ideology that tries to remake the world in a radical fashion. But this radical paint job fails to obscure its deep pessimism or the poverty of its ambitions. At the heart of its vision stands an acceptance of the enduring importance of dubious categories like race. It tries to sell people on a future in which people will forever be defined by the identity groups to which they belong; in which different communities will always be mired in zero-sum competition; and in which the way we treat each other will forever depend on our respective skin colors and sexual proclivities.

• “I want my two sons to understand that responsible citizenship in a diverse democracy is not principally about noticing what’s bad; it’s about constructing what’s good.”

• A few weeks before the 2022 midterms, Barack Obama warned that “sometimes people just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells. They want some acknowledgment that life is messy and that all of us, at any given moment, can say things the wrong way.”

• “In the 1960s, left-wing radicals wanted to overthrow capitalism. We ended up with Whole Foods,” David Brooks notes in The New York Times.

• According to one recent study, for example, the great majority of Americans, including most Republicans, believe that “it’s important that every American student learn about slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation”; “Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks should be taught as examples of Americans who fought for equality”; and “America is better today because women, immigrants, and Black Americans have made progress towards equality.”