Guest post: A stupid and evil bug of the human brain
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The course is taught from an Ethnic Studies perspective.
And why is “Identity” the first item in the list? Why is it on the list at all?
Once you rule out the trivial meanings of “identity” (i.e. x=x, people are whatever they happen to be etc.), what’s left is practically synonymous with “ingroup vs. outgroup” or “us vs. them” thinking, the very things the old “Left” was trying to get away from. I’m under no illusion that “who I am” has not to a significant degree been shaped by growing up Norwegian, white, male (in the biological sex sense, not the “gender identity” sense) etc. But that’s a stupid and evil bug of the human brain, not a feature to be embraced, let alone something to define myself by.
Despite attempts by people like Yascha Mounk to salvage some positive meaning of “groupishness” and even nationalism, I don’t think there’s any baby in that bathwater. It’s all cancer and no healthy tissue. Even Mounk admits that the tendency to favor the ingroup can, under the wrong circumstances, lead to extraordinary levels of cruelty and indifference towards to those deemed “other”. Unless one is prepared to argue that, say, the Germans of the Nazi era just happened to be born worse than others on average, it seems to follow that the only thing that prevents most People of Identity from going down the same genocidal route, is that those wrong circumstances simply haven’t arisen. Yet.
We’re all familiar with the “ticking time bomb” metaphor. A better metaphor in my opinion would be the landmine. A time bomb is set to go off at a pre-determined time regardless of the environment. A landmine, on the other hand, will only go off if exposed to certain external influences. Some may have the dumb luck to live out their whole lives without ever having their triggering mechanisms activated, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. The world is full of people prepared to attack and vilify others, go out of their way to destroy their lives, even resort to violence, for bad reasons. If the only reason it hasn’t happened to you yet is that the right (i.e. wrong) kind of bad reasons simply haven’t presented themselves yet, we’re always going to have a reason to worry about you. Group identity may not be the only such bad reason (E.g. I don’t think Donald Trump identifies with anyone other than Donald Trump), but it’s a major one.
I wonder though, how does the beleaguered, Othered outgroup leverage their own “groupishness” (whether thrust upon them, or chosen, or both) in such a way that they don’t in turn become just another potentially oppressive ingroup? It would seem that some degree of groupishness might be useful for reasons of defencive solidarity, or collective action to obtain justice. It’s a fine line.
I think we just have to accept that “groupishness” has its dark side. I don’t see how we could have any level of social cohesion in the first place without it.
The best we can probably do is expand what Peter Singer called “the circle of altruism”–those whose interests we value.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanding_Circle)
See also: the work of Frans de Waal
Yeah, I don’t think “identity” is all bad. We all are part of some group, whether ingroup or outgroup. If you love hiking, you may join a hiking group, which gives you an identity. But you don’t wrap your entire personality around that; you might also be someone who joined a book club because you like reading, and a food club because you like fine cuisine.
I don’t think you can avoid ‘ingroup’ in a social species, but it doesn’t have to be bad. While all those groups I named do exclude people – those who don’t like hiking, or reading, or fine cuisine – but there isn’t a sense of oppression or otherness so much as a gathering of likeness and the ‘others’ aren’t interested. If they were, they could join.
The problem comes when you wrap yourself up in your group. When you force others to give a fuck about your group. When you look at your group as special and everyone else as banalities. When you see your group as right while everyone else is wrong. When you see other groups as enemies.
It can be important to have tribal groups that recognize enemies; that would have had a definite evolutionary adaptation. But to extend that into the modern world, it becomes a problem. Now that we are a global society, we need to get over ourselves, and realize we are one small part of a large and growing species (I wish it were otherwise, population being such a problem). We need to quit trying to be ‘special’, except perhaps in our own groups where we are all friends and we don’t need enemies to enjoy whatever it is we do together. We really aren’t all special snowflakes, and if we all are than no one is.
One cannot damn simply ‘groupishness’. One simply has to recognise it as central to an understanding of human societies and history, and recognise that it can be both good and bad. It will always be with us, however ‘global’ are society is supposed to be. The American Revolution would not have occurred without it, nor, for example, in the UK would protections for workers, and decent wages for them, have come about without the long struggle of the British labour movement (though now, of course, both protections and decent wages are being taken away by powerful groups whose lackeys are the Tories).
Once again, I think it’s important to distinguish between the trivial meaning of “identity” (x=x) and the tribalist, “this defines me as a person” meaning. I believe (?) it was Robin DiAngelo who made a distinction between “black person” and “person who happens to be black”. Her point was that black people should actively embrace the former, whereas I think the only legitimate form of “identity” (if that’s what you insist on calling it) is the “happens to be” kind. One point where I fully agree with Mounk is that the idea of “strategic essentialism” is a major part of what got us into this mess in the first place. Indeed most of the supposed benefits of organizing around group identities seem to boil down to the idea that it can empower marginalized people to fight back against injustices that are in themselves the product of other people’s groupishness. It’s a bit like arguing that it’s a good thing that everyone has easy access to guns so they can protect themselves from the dangers that arise because everyone has easy access to guns. Neither Aung San Suu Kyi’s attitude towards the Rohingyas, nor, for that matter, the behavior of any of the parties in the never-ending conflict between Israelians and Palestinians, suggest to me that doubling down on tribal identities makes oppressed groups any less likely to turn oppressive themselves when the occasion arises. Quite the contrary, in fact.
It’s certainly possible, although it has not been demonstrated to my satisfaction, that human cooperation in general depends on splitting humanity into ingroup and outgroup, us and them. But if so, that’s a problem in itself. Mind you, I’m pretty much a full-fledged misanthrope at this point. Given how many former “friends” and “allies” have already drunk the cool-aid (because it’s the right “progressive”, “leftist”, “feminist”, or even “skeptical” thing to do), I have come to see humans in general as dangerous landmines only waiting for the right set of impossibly shitty reasons to start blowing other people’s legs off. As I have stated many times, I strongly suspect that the fatal flaw of any system is human brain wiring, and as long as we (no, I’m not making an exception for myself!) remain a stupid, poorly evolved mammalian species (to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens) even the best human society that could possibly exist ultimately differs from Nazi Germany only in how much worse than nothing it is. While I thought Mounk’s The Great Experiment made some compelling points about the obstacles facing multi-ethnic democracies (largely because of the human inclination towards groupishness), his vision of a thriving multi-ethnic society (in which people remain attached to specific tribes, but embedded within a larger shared identity as “Americans”, “French”, “Germans” etc.) only made me want to vomit. It may very well be true that every other practically attainable society is even worse, but if so I’ll settle for Mercury.