Guest post: The assumptions Harris is making
Originally a comment by Anna Y on A really big blind spot here.
Peak meta indeed, since Harris isn’t even paying much attention to things coming out of his mouth in the course of this discussion itself. I think Klein is (maybe intentionally, to avoid pushing Harris’ buttons) missing a really low hanging fruit in what Harris says to defend his position.
I want to break down his points and emphasize the assumptions he is making, thereby demonstrating precisely what that fruit is:
“Well, what I mean by identity politics is that you are reasoning on the basis of skin color, or religion, or gender, or some particular trait, which you have by accident, which you can’t change — YOU FELL INTO THAT BIN THROUGH NO PROCESS OF REASONING ON YOUR OWN, YOU COULDN’T BE CONVINCED TO BE WHITE OR BLACK”
— in other words, you are white or black because YOU reasoned your way into it: it’s something in YOUR mind, rather than something in the minds of all (or almost all) of the people around you who treat you differently based on whether THEY think you are black or white.
” — AND TO REASON FROM THAT PLACE AS THOUGH, because you’re you, BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE SKIN COLOR YOU HAVE, CERTAIN THINGS ARE TRUE and very likely incommunicable to other people who don’t share your identity. […] PEOPLE HAVE THESE VARIOUS STORIES OF VICTIMOLOGY THAT IF YOU DO ARITHMETIC ONE WAY, ONE GROUP TRUMPS ANOTHER.”
— translation: your skin color is in your head the same way mine is in mine, and we can both come up with stories of how that’s been bad for us. That is LITERALLY his point here. Rather than focusing on ALL the reasons why it is an outrageous thing to think and say, I’ll take the most generous possible perspective: this alone demonstrates that Harris, just like faaaaar too many people on both the left and the right, is failing to understand something that should be glaringly obvious but apparently isn’t: whatever your “inside identity” is (i.e. what YOU think of yourself and how YOU identify) is completely irrelevant to other people because THEY can’t read YOUR thoughts. It is OTHER PEOPLE who look at you and “identify” you as “white” or “black” (or male, or female) and TREAT YOU ACCORDINGLY. This basic fact doesn’t sit right with a lot of people, especially a lot of Americans, because individualism is sort of an unofficial national religion here, and, as a corollary, the most popular collective delusion is that of being able to control how other people perceive and treat you. But, as a matter of actual fact, any given individual has NO control and very little ability to influence how other people see or treat them. This is actually a terrifying thought — it’s been a source of terror and despair for me personally for many years — so it’s understandable that Harris, among others, wouldn’t want to seriously entertain it. The problem is, however, that wishing something were true doesn’t make it so, as I’m sure Harris would agree (in a different context). He also happens to have been extremely lucky to randomly receive traits that are viewed favorably by people around him (his complaints about how unpopular being a white male is these days notwithstanding), and, given his favorable view of himself, he seems to much prefer to take credit for somehow earning that baseline favorable treatment from others (which is, again, understandable, especially given the alternative).
A side point about things being “incommunicable” to other people: I personally find that literally anything can be incommunicable if the people I try to communicate it to don’t want to hear it. I’ve gone to quite embarrassing lengths to try to get around such unwillingness of people to be communicated to, and found that this is very much a subset of the larger problem of being unable to control and having little influence over how other people treat you. So when Harris says certain things are incommunicable to other people who don’t share your identity, he may be unwittingly sharing how often he’s found people to be so frustrated with trying to communicate something to him (that he wasn’t interested in taking on board) that they basically threw up their hands in frustration and quit (though, again, to be fair, the pain and frustration of trying to communicate vitally important [to you] information to an unreceptive audience is so common among certain groups that the refusal to be drawn into yet another pointless session has become a common collective stance at this point).
So after having just said what he said, he turns around and says:
“This strikes me as a moral and political and intellectual dead end because THE THINGS THAT ARE REALLY TRUE, THE THINGS THAT WILL REALLY MOVE THE DIAL WITH RESPECT TO HUMAN WELLBEING — I view my career as being totally committed to amplifying good ideas and criticizing bad ideas, insofar as they relate to the most important swings of human wellbeing. My concern is, how can the future be better than the past? HOW CAN WE GET TO A WORLD WHERE WE CANCEL THE WORST EFFECTS OF BAD LUCK, GIVEN THAT SOME PEOPLE ARE HUGELY LUCKY AND SOME PEOPLE AREN’T? How can we cancel this, with respect to wealth and health and everything else? How can we get to a world where the maximum number of people thrive?”
— and it doesn’t appear to break his irony meter. Because, apparently, cancelling the worst effects of bad luck has NOTHING whatsoever to do with, oh, I don’t know, maybe not treating black people worse because they are black or female people worse because they are female — clearly this must be because being being black or female (or gay, or just fill in the blank, because it varies from place to place) is just a matter of some individuals being convinced that they are black or female or whatever, and if they just quit thinking that, everybody else will instantaneously go blind and deaf and amnesiac and just start treating them exactly the way they treat a white male. So yes, Harris has totally committed his career to amplifying good ideas and criticizing bad ideas, insofar as they relate to the wellbeing of people like Harris, who are SO incredibly rational that they KNOW their skin and cranium are actually transparent, forcing others to judge them by the contents of their character (unless those others are too irrational because of their commitment to identity politics, and obviously you can’t have a truly rational conversation with them).
I’m torn between how reasonable this sounds as a reading of Harris, and how bat-shit insane it requires him to be. That sound, it’s the principle of charity screaming.
I believe you have misread that portion of Sam’s statement. Note the wording here:
“…some particular trait [e.g. skin colour], which you have by accident, which you can’t change – you fell into that bin through NO process of reasoning of your own, you [could NOT] be convinced to be white or black…”
I believe you have overlooked the negative, or perhaps read those two single negatives in seperate clauses as a double negative in a single clause. Thus your characterisation of his passage beginning with “translation: your skin color is in your head the same way mine is in mine…” is an inaccurate statement as to his personal position on the matter, even if the points you make against that mistaken position are sound.
. Holms: you are right, I saw that when re-reading after I hit post. I absolutely should not have said that he claimed that “you are white or black because YOU reasoned your way into it” because he in fact said that “you fell into that bin through NO process of reasoning on your own” (emphasis, again, mine). However, right after the comma, he proceeds to say that “you couldn’t be convinced to be white or black”, which can be interpreted both ways: that he thinks you can’t be convinced to be white or black because you are what you are by accident, but now that you’ve accepted that as your “identity” (and are now stubbornly and unreasonably engaging in identity politics, whereas a reasonable rational person should be “convincible” otherwise), or that he thinks that being white or black is, in fact, an objective reality and obviously not something that should be amenable to “convincing”. I can’t claim to read his mind regarding which interpretation he meant there. Again, however, the next clause only makes sense if you accept the first reading:
“and to reason from that place as though, because you’re you, because you have the skin color you have, certain things are true and very likely incommunicable to other people who don’t share your identity” — he clearly places no credence in the idea that because you have the skin color you have, certain things are true (etc). He is (intentionally or not) obfuscating the KINDS of things he means here: you could be claiming that because you have the skin color you have, the Earth is flat, which would be both counterfactual and unsupported by the premise (how would your skin color affect the topology of a planet), or you could be claiming that because you have the skin color you have, people treat you not only differently, but markedly worse, and it’s incommunicable because you can’t possibly remember and relate every single instance of being mistreated due to your skin color (something you’ve experienced throughout your life in a variety of contexts), especially not to an adversarial audience like Harris, who is just waiting to jump on every instance you bring up and “whitesplain” it as having some alternative interpretation (which just happens to be, conveniently, either your fault or your imagination/paranoia). That’s why after the D&D reference he jumps to “these various stories of victimology that if you do arithmetic one way, one group trumps another. Another way it gets reversed” — he really is saying that the “identity” here is all in your head, and he doesn’t want to hear your sob story of having it worse because you are “fill in your identity here” — because he can reverse it and show you how, really, he had it worse all along because of his identity, and, really, this whole victimology competition is tiresome, so can’t we just skip it and talk like reasonable people instead?
So, yes, I really mangled making that point (despite feeling that it still stands, with the same source material).
Jeff: I hear you, I really do. I’m actually pretty conflicted about Harris specifically: I rarely watch videos of speeches or listen to podcasts, preferring to read transcripts, but a couple of years ago I did watch a video of Harris having a debate on stage, and my visceral reaction to him seems to be very much the opposite of how Ophelia here sees him — I actually found him really charismatic and engaging, (also attractive, which I know shouldn’t sway my opinion of him as a speaker OR thinker, but I also know that it does — I like him and I’d like to defend him, I just can’t see how, at least here). But I also kind of disagree that my reading of Harris here requires him to be batshit insane (or, rather, I feel that if that’s batshit insane, literally everyone is). He has a blind spot about both what “identity politics” means and about whether he has the kind of “identity” that would cause him to engage in motivated reasoning. Fine, but I know exactly one person IRL who does not (while everyone else I heard talking about the subject seems to share the same blind spot), I know I’ve had similarly large blind spots in the past (though not that one specifically), which I argued with the same conviction that it was my opponents, and not myself, who were engaging in motivated reasoning. Hell, you know what, I bet you personally have crossed the road or gotten into a vehicle today, possibly walked up or down some stairs, and probably took a shower or bath without giving these activities due consideration as the things most likely to kill or cripple you, while also engaging in some form of security precautions to guard yourself against other, much more statistically unlikely dangers, like, I don’t know, locking your doors, or shielding the keypad as you enter your pin, or not going out after dark/venturing into spotty neighborhoods. My point is, every single one of us (myself included) lives with all kinds of delusions, which, if examined as closely as I just examined Harris’ might seem equally batshit insane, and which we don’t even notice — and, arguably, we must continue to do so or find life intolerably terrifying. So I guess what I’m saying is: Harris is disappointingly biased, and I’m very disappointed indeed (though it’s not like I’ve JUST learned of this and JUST became disappointed in him now), but to me, his bias seems so common that I often feel like the crazy one when other people whip it out and I feel like slamming my head against the wall and howling in frustration (and really, that would be a pretty insane reaction if I actually did it instead of just picturing it).