Splittas
Robyn Blumner, the CEO of the Center for Inquiry and the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, has a much discussed editorial in the current Free Inquiry about a split that she describes as between identitarians and humanists. It starts with a couple of definitions, or a definition and an affirmation.
Identitarian: A person or ideology that espouses that group identity is the most important thing about a person, and that justice and power must be viewed primarily on the basis of group identity rather than individual merit. (Source: Urban Dictionary)
“The Affirmations of Humanism”: We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity and strive to work together for the common good of humanity. (Paul Kurtz, Free Inquiry, Spring 1987)
I think the Urban Dictionary is a less than ideal source of definitions if you’re trying to be fair to the side you oppose. For a start I think “identitarian” is a pejorative more than it is a standard noun, and for a continue I think the Urban Dictionary’s definition is not all that careful. Also, of course, the UD is not and doesn’t claim to be any kind of scholarly source.
I think I’d define “identitarian” as someone preoccupied with identity politics, but I would not go on to claim that identity politics=”group identity is the most important thing about a person.” I think that’s quite wrong (and I suppose that’s why I think Blumner should have looked for a better source). People who practice or perform or promote identity politics are aware that various identities are more or less favored, and they think life would be fairer if the most basic, comes-with-birth type identities didn’t have to overcome a Less Favored status. One doesn’t at all have to make that politics the most central thing in her life, let alone thinking a disfavored identity is the most important thing about a person. I’m a feminist, for example, and that’s an important thing about me, especially now when it’s all being thrown on the bonfire, but it’s not the most important. I think that’s true of most people.
So, in short, the editorial about identity politics v humanism starts with a non-scholarly definition of idpol from a famously non-scholarly source, and proceeds from there. The well is a tad murky from the outset. The dice are loaded.
And Kurtz’s affirmation sounds nice but it too has that ignoring the realities problem. It’s all very well to talk about transcending “divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity,” but the trouble is that some people – most people in fact – can’t transcend them, because everyone else remains fully aware of them. Jews in Nazi Germany couldn’t “transcend” their pesky Jewishness; you do the math.
It’s true that people can get very bogged down in the identity stuff, and it can be tedious or clogging or beside the point or all those, but still, we’re not free to “transcend” our identities in the eyes of everyone else.
Blumner says we need to work together particularly now, so this split is a bad thing.
The division has to do with a fundamental precept of humanism, that enriching human individuality and celebrating the individual is the basis upon which humanism is built. Humanism valorizes the individual—and with good reason; we are each the hero of our own story. Not only is one’s individual sovereignty more essential to the humanist project than one’s group affiliation, but fighting for individual freedom—which includes freedom of conscience, speech, and inquiry—is part of the writ-large agenda of humanism. It unleashes creativity and grants us the breathing space to be agents in our own lives.
It’s too Ayn Randian for my taste. In particular, “one’s individual sovereignty [is] more essential to the humanist project than one’s group affiliation” comes across as ruthlessly Me First. Yes, it’s good for people to have lots of freedom and independence, but it’s also good for people to take heed of others, and give up some freedoms in order to live and work with others. The freedom to have a rave on your front lawn at 3 a.m. isn’t a freedom worth protecting. The freedom to destroy the planet isn’t a freedom worth having.
My goodness, Ophelia, I’ve never seen you pull a punch like that. Admittedly, it’s a soft target.
I think the author’s thesis, that humanism is about individualism, isn’t true. Humanism seeks to benefit more humans than are benefited now. Improving the condition of human groups is also a tenet of humanism. Benefitting whole groups can improve the lot of many individuals in those groups.
The subject deserves a better writer, but at least Blumner addressed this:
The individual has more weight, in humanism, than the individual’s group. I don’t think that necessarily means Me First (she is, after all, calling for people to work together.)
The appeal to individual rights and liberties underlies group efforts towards equality.
And Kurtz said “we attempt to.” That word “attempt” is important. The Nazis, an identitarian bunch if ever there was one, didn’t make that attempt.
While I obviously can’t say whether the UD definition describes the prevailing usage of identitarian, the principle it describes is at least a recognizable feature of those “studies” descended from Critical Theory, which critique (read: are actively hostile to) the concept of individualism.
James @ 1 – Sure you have! I do it all the time. It’s called litotes, think.
We are a social species. In the context of a close relative, “One chimpanzee is no chimpanzee.”
Well she sure as hell wasn’t wearing a blindfold when white men got to have everything our way, keeping everyone else out of most things so they could monopolize access unopposed. Not exactly “equal treatment” and we’re still not out of that regime either. Trying to rebalance the scales is going to be complicated. And the sword? That’s what all the fighting is about.
Lady M @ 3 – Well I know she said all that, I read the piece. But I don’t think it’s very well or precisely argued. It’s more of a collection of tropes than anything else. It’s vague, and general, and the language is lifeless.
Cross-posted with not Bruce. Yes that too. It’s the left (that’s what “identitarians” means, mostly) that doles out benefits unequally? Powerful rich white men have always shared their goodies with everyone?
Ha.
I don’t know what, if anything, Blumner said during the Deep Rifts, but this rhetoric about humanists vs. identitarians sounds a lot like the kind of thing we heard back then. “Who cares if this movement is dominated by white males, and women and minorities say they’ve been driven out or turned off by harassment? We shouldn’t be trying to diversify skepticism, it should just be all about your beliefs, not this obsession on identity! Let’s get back to the important things, like Michael Shermer interviewing Ben Radford about why girl brains like pink !”
So yeah, I think some caution is warranted here.
Yes, it is quite reminiscent of the Deep Rifts and Dawkins’s role and all of that. I’ve been and gone and deep rifted myself since then, and I maybe have a slightly better sense of what irritated Dawkins and others about Team Social Justice or whatever we were supposed to be…but not so much better that I think this is a very good editorial about it.
I think part of the problem simply comes from the name, “identitarian”. Women, people of color, Jews, homosexuals and the disabled don’t “identify” as belonging to these categories; they simply are them, and then have additional meaning (generally negative) foisted upon that basic fact by the system at large. Compare with trans- and non-binarism, which are entirely about self-identification (to the point that even many trans individuals will dance back and forth across the line when it suits them–I remember Ophelia doing a piece ways back about transwomen who shed their trans identity when needing to gain the usual advantages that come from presenting as male).
Good point.
It wasn’t a brilliant editorial, but Blumner did address a few important points, including ideological purity and free speech. She criticized the AHA rescinding the Humanist of the Year award given to Dawkins, and I respect that a lot. It’s going in the right direction, even if it isn’t there yet.
I agree it’s an important point to distinguish personally-ascribed identity from objective and observable characteristics.
If talk of “identity politics” or “identitarians” (I prefer “People of Identity”) is a stumbling block to many, fine, we don’t have to call it that. I do think there is a real problem, though. As I have said many times, I think there has always been a tension on the “Left” (whatever that means these days?) between a mindset that said “we’re all the same on the inside”, emphasized equal treatment as well as universal rights, and sought to get away from boxes and labels on the one hand, and a mindset that said “it’s ok to be different”, emphasized diversity as well as tolerance, and sought to legitimize the unique interests and perspectives of marginalized groups on the other. As previously mentioned, I think both mindsets come in both healthy* and pathological versions, so from that perspective “identity politics”, or “wokism”, or “alt-leftism” can be seen as the pathological version of the second mindset that has now won.
I think Freemage gets it exactly right. People are what they are regardless of labels. I believe it was Nick Cohen who once pointed out that women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals etc. are often (wrongly) accused of demanding special treatment, when in fact what they are objecting to is precisely the fact that they’re getting special treatment. Apart from certain special cases where different treatment makes sense on purely “technical” grounds (women’s sports being an obvious example), the goal should be to make things like sex, ethnicity, disabilities etc. as close to irrelevant as they can be with respect to how people are treated. Words like “identity”, “community”, “culture” etc. are too often just shorthand for
As someone pointed out a while ago there is a way to spin the battle to cure cancer as a genocidal project. After all the end-goal of these scientists is a world without cancer-patients exactly the same way Hitler’s end-goal was a world without Jews!!! Never mind that the former endeavor is all about saving rather than killing actual, living people by making “cancer patients” an extinct “identity”. As we have seen, all this hyperbolic rhetoric about feminists promoting “violence” towards or even “murder” of trans people boils down to this kind of word-magic and language games, and this is where this whole obsession with “identities” and “communities” leads us.
*The example I always give is: Are certain jobs seen as “women’s work” because they’re considered low-status (the first mindset), or ar they considered low-status because they’re seen as “women’s work” (the second mindset)? I’m pretty sure the answer is some combination of both.
Sackbut @ 13 – criticizing the AHA’s treatment of Dawkins was a given: they work together, she’s the Executive Director of his foundation. She’s been his bulldog all along. That part is not so much a step as standard operating procedure.
She’s right about some of it, sure. Since I never stop talking about the ways trans idenniny has swallowed people’s brains, I naturally agree that Bespoke Idenniny is bad and stupid. But I’ve seen several people hailing her editorial as a work of genius, and I don’t think it is.
Bjarte,
Is there a legitimate concern underlying Blumner’s piece? Sure. But so what?
You say “we don’t have to call it that,” but my objection at least is less about the specific term identitarian, and more about the entire description.
It’s strawmanning. I don’t believe that any of the people Blumner is describing would agree with her description of their views. Any time when you’re trying to establish an “us vs. them” dichotomy and you haven’t even accurately characterized the “them,” you’re not off to a good start, at least if your goal is to advance the discussion as opposed to just ranting at your enemies and rallying the troops on “your” side.
And hey, I enjoy a good rant myself, and don’t feel obliged to be scrupulously fair every single time I’m characterizing other people’s views if it’s tangential to my point. But I think Blumner’s editorial fails on that level, too. It’s an utterly bog-standard screed against cancel culture, with all the failings typical to that genre (lack of specificity, reliance on anecdotes and dodgy “data” like that NYT poll), and nothing I found insightful or even particularly well-written.
Also, there’s a poor fit between “I want to mischaracterize the views of another group of people” and “those people should be our allies and we should be working together.” If you’re so angry or contemptuous of another group that you can’t be bothered to describe their views fairly, then don’t complain that they don’t want to join or remain on your team.
That’s another reason why I’m reminded of the Deep Rifts, because that tactic was employed there, too. How many times did we read something along the lines of: “there are two groups of skeptics now. Those who believe in healthy human sexuality, and hysterical feminist harpies who want to put men in jail for inviting a woman to coffee. It’s such a shame, because those people are our natural allies who should be joining with us to make fun of psychics!”
That. That’s what I’ve been trying to say. It’s very generic, and not particularly well written, yet I’ve been seeing people hailing it as brilliant.
Screechy Monkey #16
I guess I should have made it clear that I wasn’t specifically commenting on Blumner’s piece, since I haven’t read it. I was merely making the point that there is a meaningful difference to be made between “identity politics” and a general concern for social justice, even if people on the other side of the deep rift like to conflate both. I’m not sympathetic to the Dawkins side:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2021/the-hot-cauldron-of-public-debate/#comment-2903113
I hadn’t realized that Blumner was head of Dawkins’ foundation. That does color things.
I agree the editorial is not brilliant. I agree it’s a bog-standard screed against cancel culture.
Am I mistaken that even a bog-standard screed is rare coming from people on the left side of the political spectrum? Most of the leftish people I know are much more likely to claim that cancel culture doesn’t exist. If they agree it exists, they only think of examples of conservative cancellation of liberals.
I see so much pro gender identity ideology crap coming from atheist and secularist outlets, that I found it pleasant to see something like this from a CFI director. CFI has not been swallowed, they still publish Ophelia’s writing and occasionally others, and they have not, to my notice, published anything significantly promoting gender identity ideology. But it still pops up in Morning Heresy, and Paul Fidalgo (for whom I have enormous respect other than the trans ideology issues) is set to take the reins at Free Inquiry, if I remember correctly, so I was perhaps relieved to see this kind of statement. But Americans United, American Atheists, Secular Coalition for America, and Freedom From Religion Foundation all seem to have been swallowed much more completely.
Of course this last bit has nothing to do with the quality of the editorial itself, it only speaks to my reaction to the editorial. Perhaps other people have had similar reactions, and mistook “extremely welcome” for “extremely good”.
Sackbut,
I guess we can quibble over who actually qualifies as left-of-center (and I have no idea where Blumner claims to be), but “I’m a liberal but I think cancel culture is out of control” is a pretty well-established market niche. (I’m not implying that anyone is being insincere about that view, I’m just saying that it’s not a combination that is incompatible with making a nice living as a pundit.) Off the top of my head, among others: Bill Maher, Bari Weiss, Jesse Singal, Katie Herzog, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Sam Harris, Mike Pesca. Then you have the ones who started that way but no longer claim to be left, like James Lindsay and Dave Rubin.
I’m not sure CFI the institution is left of center, though I don’t think it’s Republican or pro-Republicans, let alone Trump. Centrist? Apolitical/noncommittal? Libertarian-leaning? Some or all of that maybe [but not the Republican parts]. Classical liberal perhaps. Some of the more lefty people I knew who worked for them have left, but then so have some of the more righty ones (DJ Grothe for instance). But then what is the left anyway? I don’t know any more – I don’t think there’s anything the slightest bit left-wing about trans dogma, but the left is all over it like a cheap suit.