Identity
Thought for the Day – or perhaps I mean Provocative Cryptic Assertion via Adapted Quotation for the Day. Identity is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
I had this thought partly because of the ever-present dreary discussion of the Religion Question in US Politics (yawn). I’ve noticed that one ploy people resort to when anyone suggests that religion does not belong in the public sphere, is to conflate their religion with their ‘identity.’ It then occurred to me that that conflation, and confusion (because it is a confusion – religion is not ‘identity’), is what is going on – is the subtext, as it were – of the other side in the argument about Islamophobia we had a few days ago. (In many posts – Which Community?; More; What Liberals Can and Can’t Say; Stand Still, Dobbin; and Little Boxes, Little Boxes.) Not that I hadn’t realized it before, but it became a little clearer, a little more sharply into focus.
And it connects with something else I wanted to look at in the Mulholland post – which, again, may seem like more horse-walloping, but the ideas are Out There, so it’s better to get clear about what they are.
I think its a cop-out to argue that attacks on beliefs are different from attacks on inherited characteristics such as colour etc; the former acceptable under the rubric of ‘freedom of speech’, the latter unacceptable.
No. No, no, no. It’s not a cop-out at all, it’s of the very essence. It’s not a pretext or disguise for saying something else, it is the thing itself. (As a matter of fact, considered coldly, that sentence is a positively shocking thing for an academic – of all people! – to say. What in hell is their job if it’s not to ‘attack’ i.e. criticise and disagree with ‘beliefs’?) Beliefs are different from inherited characteristics, and the difference is one that makes disagreement (never mind ‘attacks’ – that’s just rhetoric) vital as well as possible. You can’t ‘argue’ with race or gender any more than you can with height or eye colour – or for that matter species. You can’t argue a dog into being a cat, now can you. (I know that, because I’ve tried.) But you can argue with beliefs, and you very often need to. It’s not just a matter of freedom of speech, either, it’s also freedom of thought. If you really think it’s taboo and somehow cruel and immoral to disagree with people’s beliefs, then you may well train yourself not to do so even in the privacy of your own mind.
And the ‘identity’ claim is one way to try to persuade or coerce us all to think exactly that. We all know it’s terribly wrong to mess with people’s ‘identity.’ We get told it all the time, for one thing. ‘Identity’ is one of the great cant-words of the day – one of those words that make one want to reach for one’s gun. (Which reminds me, someone actually said that on [I think] ‘Saturday Review’ a week or two ago. Exactly, I thought.) Just say your beliefs, your religion, are part of your ‘identity,’ and watch the atheists back off. Well – of course it depends how you define the silly word, whether that claim makes any sense or not. And people certainly do define it any old way that happens to be convenient – which is why I keep putting it in inverted commas: because it means so many things it doesn’t mean much of anything. But then…surely there is a choice that needs to be made. If we’re going to have expansive definitions of identity according to which it means whatever I do, think, believe, wear, eat, watch, listen to, like, dislike, sit on, put in my nose – then identity can’t function as a taboo or no-go area. Or if identity is going to function that way, then we need to stick to a very narrow definition of it, to cover what people are not what they become. To cover, in other words, things people can’t help rather than things that are chosen. To cover the physical, biological, genetic, and not the learned, acquired, added on. Otherwise, all of intellectual life will be full of taboos and unmentionables, and rational thought will come to a grinding halt. There are a lot of people who would like rational thought to come to a grinding halt, but we shouldn’t give them what they want. Rational thought requires the ability to consider and discuss cognitive matters on cognitive terms. Identity politics requires that people be allowed to draw magic circles around whatevery they decide to care about. The two are emphatically not compatible. I choose rational thought, thank you.
I have a lot more to say on this, but I’m going to do it piecemeal. That’s fair warning.
What I choose, or make up, actively and deliberately, is more important to me, is more ME, than what nature did (or even what people pumped into my head when I was helpless) because it resulted from a thought process. I guess if I wanted to tighten up the definition of identity it would’ve been the opposite of yours, scooping up these things instead…but in fact not so sure I want to even use the word any more.
But it’s still too hot in here to go get the dictionary. At least I share your distrust of the current crop of identity-invokers.
That’s a dang good point, KM. I’m the same way. Which is in fact exactly why I hate identity politics – it is all about what you’re born rather than what you become.
Sorry to hear it’s still hot in there – I’ve been rejoicing all day at how much cooler it is after yesterday. Yesterday was foul – smelly and dirty as well as way too hot. This morning the air smelled of trees again – more than it did Sunday in fact: I hung out the window and sniffed and sniffed and sniffed.
It’s good to have OB’s commitment not to identify herself as either atheist, humanist, or secularist. That way, we will know that she is not a scoundrel.
Ophelia has it spot-on: “it is the thing itself.” The tactic of including beliefs (especially religious) among those characteristics which are immune from attack as if they were as inborn as skin colour is probably engaged upon in many cases with a great deal of genuine innocence. But the innocence doesn’t make it any less false. This is the point at which to recall Dawkins’ “Viruses of the Mind;” the world is full of passionately-held religious belief systems, all opposed to each other and, by a remarkable coincidence, almost universally identical to those held by the parent generation of the holders. In that sense, belief is inherited, making its holders certain it is as much a part of them as their skin colour. What we have here is a failure to perceive the subtle differences between heredity and brainwashing. And what about those who decide to abandon their parents’ belief system and move to that belonging to someone else’s parents? Is belief system #2 intrinsically less unassailable because it is held for different reasons?
“Rational thought requires the ability to consider and discuss cognitive matters on cognitive terms.”
No, or yes but…er, or not exactly. Rational thought encompasses the recognition of norms other than the cognitive, and the recognition of a normative component in cognitive matters, as well as, the fact that norms, virtually by definition, fail.
As I’ve said before, “identity”, the “who” of human beings, the invocative, is a normative/symbolic construct, which does not physically exist, which is why it is precarious, vulnerable. (It certainly can not be reduced to choices without consequences.) The need to justify oneself in the armoring of “identity”, whether defensively or innovatively, is well-nigh universal and is due not just to the heartache and thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, but to its intrinsic exposure to otherness: the relation to the other is the condition of the possibility of “identity”. So criticism of “identity”, insofar as it amounts to a blindness to otherness, is precisely to the point. But equally, a reduction of rationality to the cognitive and its reification, its identification solely with the conditions of cognition, is such a piece of identitarian thinking and, ultimately, (he prophesizes), self-defeating,- or self-vindicating in the worst kind of way. A rationality that ceases to attempt to understand the mess of irrationality in the world forsakes its own claim to “universality”.
Stewart:
Mimetic learning- in what sense should a Darwinian object to this?
Well, I suppose I’m with Dawkins again on this; we haven’t evolved such an extraordinary (comparatively speaking) brain merely in order to be enslaved by some of its characteristics that developed for reasons unconnected to religion. The cycle is perpetuated wherever an adult has chosen not to examine the real reasons he/she holds certain beliefs and passes them down to children when they are at an age that renders them vulnerable to the same kind of uncritical acceptance. To answer the question more directly in the light of the above, there’s a world of difference between accepting a useful way of teaching/learning something and accepting all ideas passed on in that way. No matter how vulnerable most of us may be as children to ideas emanating from authority figures, it shouldn’t stop us as adults from looking dispassionately at the nature of those ideas. To continue “to draw magic circles” around them into adulthood indicates the existence of a fear that these ideas, so cherished precisely because they date back to a point of development preceding one’s ability to view them critically, might not withstand too much excavation in the vicinity of their foundations.
JH,
“Rational thought encompasses the recognition of norms other than the cognitive,”
That’s more fuzzy language, I’m afraid. What do you mean by ‘recognition,’ for instance? Recognition that such norms exist? Or ‘recognition’ that they are valid or binding or useful? Recognition can cover a lot of ground.
“A rationality that ceases to attempt to understand the mess of irrationality in the world forsakes its own claim to “universality”.”
No doubt, but that’s the very reverse of what I’m trying to do, so I’m not sure what your point is.
OB:
No, it’s not just fuzzy language, unfortunately. (I actually typed that one cleanly and lucidly, in contrast to my usual practice.) The basic point goes back to Kant, over against empiricism. Kant attempted to specify the process,- or, more correctly, the formal and material conditions,- by which we can form *judgments* with the objective form by which they can claim objective validity, (which means here not that they are empirically true, but that they are capable of being true or false.) The upshot is that such cognitive judgements or validity claims must be something for which we can be, (and be held to be), responsible, which is to say, that they have an ineluctably normative component. (I think that this is a point you are constantly trying to make, with your tub-thumping, but constantly make in a short-circuited way.) This follows from a recognition of the fundamentally *discursive* nature of knowledge, (and, more than that, of rationality in general.) (Which is what classical empiricism badly and disablingly failed to recognize.) As concommitances to this, it follows that a) some things will not rise to the level of cognitive claims, since they are prediscursive, b) there are other forms of rational judgment than the cognitive, (since, after all, cognitives claims are a distinct form of judgment), and c) what concerns us in cognitive judgments is not just the actuality of the external world, but also the potentiality that arises from but exceeds it, with what we are to *do* with our judgments, since that is part of what we are putatively responsible for. (Though potentiality and actuality are actually latinate versions of Aristotelian terms , whereas Kant talked of all this in terms of “necessity”, thereby possibly conflating and confusing the causality of empirical laws with the obligatory bindingness of norms.) So it simply won’t do to just point to the external world and say that that is the truth, since 1) that is not how our claims actually work and 2) that is an evasion of the responsibility ingredient in them. (That is the point behind our claims concerning only phenomena and not things-in-themselves: only such a distinction allows for the differentiated referential structure involved in raising our claims.) So my basic claim is that rationality, including the rationality of cognitive claims, involves a normative “infrastructure” that is not reducible to the cognitive. On the other hand, the effort to reduce all rationality to the cognitive and deny its dependency (or, more properly, its interdepemndency or cross-implication) with normative claims that can not be cognitively established, would be a rough definition of “positivism”.
As for the recognition of norms, I did precisely say that norms virtually by definition, fail, – since I’m not devoid of realism,-, which is because they are counterfactual in nature. But disputes over rationality or what is allowable under it or on its terms unavoidably involve interpretations and decisions about norms, as well as, facts. And norms can not be enforced as facts, but must involve an appeal to the other. It is because of our condition of language, which affords us not just the categorical means of our cognitive identifications, but also the relation to the other, that we are necessarily entrapped in this situation.
The claim cited below by the Tory toff Peter Culbertson that secularism itself a distinctive world-view is, in fact, correct, but just not at all for the presumably rancid and otiose reasons he would ground it on.
Finally, it simply won’t do to be always denouncing the fuzzy, in the name of your own perfect clarity of mind. In fact, the world, as it actually is, is fuzzy, which is to see it clearly. It is a matter of honesty. To claim to be always able to see through the fog is just not to see the fog one is in.
JH
But I didn’t say it was ‘just’ fuzzy language. I said it was fuzzy language. There’s a big difference. And you didn’t answer my question. I still don’t know in what sense you mean ‘recognition.’
Thanks for telling us what is correct, but since you don’t back that assertion up with anything, I choose not to take your word for it.
“Finally, it simply won’t do to be always denouncing the fuzzy, in the name of your own perfect clarity of mind.”
Is that what I’m doing? Have I ever said that? No, but what I have said, often, is that you have a very bad habit of disagreeing with what no one has said. You’ve just done it again more than once. “It is a matter of honesty” indeed – that from you! You who translate everything I say and then tell me how wrong everything I didn’t say is. I’m not saying the world isn’t fuzzy. I’ve told you (again more than once) that I know what ambiguity is. But the fact that ambiguity exists is not a good reason to make one’s language as vague, fuzzy, woolly, sloppy, not ambiguous but multibiguous, and capable of infinite possible interpretations, as one possibly can. I don’t denounce ‘the fuzzy,’ you berk, I criticize fuzzy language. You on the other hand seem to have a crush on it. Thus your replies are boringly incomprehensible. (Well, that’s one reason.)
I laughed as I read the comments on Harding. Yes, she is vapid, insipid, and banal. And, yes, she is published. And, yes, she is praised (by some).
But, she is hardly the worst of the lot. Try Donna Harraway on for size. She’s more than a hoot, she’s bizarre. She’s an example of what Susan Haack calls “preposterism” in current academia — the notion that any idea, so long as it’s “new” or “radical” ushers in a new “paradigm” for an entire field of study (overnight, no less), at least until the next Great Banality is published.