Entitlement, identity & objective truth

A doubter's lament

Chris Johns

Three anecdotes, all trivial in their own way. But how trivial?

1. I wandered into an art gallery the other day where an exhibition revolved around the idea that gender is a social construct. Gender, according to the artists, has no connection to biology or any kind of physical process.

2. The following day, I happened to be chatting to a gynaecologist who told me about some of the courses that his employer had recently insisted he attend. One was a sort of re-education session, during which he was informed that he was no longer allowed to the use the word ‘woman’ during any doctor-patient interactions or communications. The only acceptable words are ‘pregnant people’ or ‘pregnant person’.

3. Josh Barro’s recent substack narrates a story from Berkeley University in California. A college football game was interrupted by a pitch invasion. Protestors were calling for the reinstatement of a suspended Berkeley professor of colonial studies. Multiple investigations have determined that she stalked and harassed professor Joshua Clover of the University of Davis, also in California. The protestors feel so strongly about all of this that they are threatening to go on hunger strike. They are not protesting about the professor that has done the stalking. It’s worth quoting at length from Barro’s article:

Del Valle has become a cause célèbre despite having admitted to key aspects of the charges that led to her suspension, including that she keyed Clover’s car; sat outside his apartment and slid threatening notes under [his] door… spray painted “here lives a pervert” in the hallway outside his apartment… Extensive reports by KQED and the Chronicle of Higher Education … make clear that she was (and is) convinced that Clover, whom she barely knew before these incidents began, had hacked her electronic devices and was using the information he gleaned about her thoughts and actions in order to post coded messages about her on Twitter.¹ Frustrated that police and Berkeley administrators did not take her delusional hacking claims seriously, she pursued a direct harassment campaign against her UC colleague, which she continued in violation of orders to stop contacting him. Again, del Valle admits these facts.

The protestors have not contested the facts. Rather, they make several accusations against the investigating Berkeley authorities. They believe the suspension of del Valle is both sexist and racist.

Supporters of del Valle have said that while they find the facts of the case make for ‘uncomfortable reading’, those facts, for her cheerleaders, are irrelevant.

For the supporters, the only salient facts are that a member of a historically oppressed group (a member of two historically oppressed groups in fact) is up against a member of a group that that has, historically, been the oppressor (in fact, a member of two oppressor groups, male and white).

Objective reality, the facts of the case, the actual behaviour of the two individuals, matters for nothing when considering the oppressed versus the oppressor.

To quote Barro again:

Obsession with structural factors has led people on the identity-obsessed left to discard the idea that people are individual moral actors with responsibility for their actions. Instead, they rely on a moral framework that looks solely at a person’s or group’s position within a hierarchy of oppression, awarding culpability in any conflict to the person who ranks as less oppressed, regardless of actually existing evidence about who did what and why.

Barro goes on to argue that all facts, when reframed in an oppressor versus oppressed context, can (and are) turned on their head, usually by the hard left. All racism is white supremacy, so the only racists are white. Oppression against LGBTQ+ in parts of Africa and the Middle East is solely the result of past White, usually British, colonial oppression. Israelis are white colonialists. And so on. The only frame of reference, says Barro, is the one of “systems of oppression”. Oppressed people can never do wrong. Guilt cannot be experienced by the oppressed.

A question of Identity

One very important belief that arises from all this is that identity trumps everything. Whatever anyone thinks about my three relatively trivial stories, most of us can discern that questions of identity have taken over our public squares. We all have our own anecdotal and trivial stories. We can all see what has happened to our employers, universities and governments. And neighbours.

Books about identity politics have been been written in quantities sufficient to fill a rather large library. One such is ‘The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time’ by Yascha Mounk, a professor at Johns Hopkins university.

Mounk describes (and criticises) an “identity synthesis” that claims understanding of the world can only happen when we frame everything in terms of race, gender and sexual orientation. Liberal democracies, according to this synthesis, serve only to obscure white privilege and the related ways the oppressor still dominates the oppressed. People who argue in this way wish to remake the state and society such that are laws and behavioural norms are determined solely by which identity group we belong to.

Going down this path quickly results in a rejection of many of the cherished beliefs of liberals - free speech is an immediate casualty. It’s all a bit anti-Enlightenment.

Mounk also notes a Manichean feature of the new way of thinking, one that categorises all of humanity into one of two boxes, one good, the other bad: non-whites and whites. Whites are responsible for most of the world’s ills, non-whites are their victims; indeed, are defined by their victimhood. Few people who subscribe to this way of thinking were that bothered, for example, by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because the victims were (and are) white. The non-whiteness of Gazans is a completely different matter.

Sub-divisions of humanity flow from - are connected to - these basic distinctions. Settlers and non-settlers, colonialists and colonised, etc. Finally, notes Mounk, all forms of oppression are, in these new theories, connected and, therefore, must be eliminated at the same time.

Mounk asserts that all of these ideological building blocks have been combined to ‘discount the suffering of Jewish civilians’

According to the global left, Jews are white, Israel is a European settler colony repeating the crimes once committed by Americans and Australians. Since Palestinians are people of colour who have suffered settler colonialism, they are incapable of being racist and are justified in inflicting any amount of suffering on their oppressors. And if you want to be a good feminist or environmentalist - or merely an artist or academic in good standing with the juste milieu - it is your duty to sign an open letter.

One (at least) of my trivial anecdotes, above, related to facts and how they don’t matter. There are both old and new elements to this. Politicians and bar-stool bores have always made stuff up and always lied. When caught, they often deny, bluster, deflect and project. But if they are properly caught, they are doomed, at least politically and/or socially. There are, sometimes at least, negative consequences if you are caught lying. If there is enough evidence about the lie, the denials and bluster dry up and the perpetrator shuffles off to GB News. Think Boris Johnson.

All that looks very old fashioned to the Berkeley protestors. Truth can only be discerned through a lens that is defined in terms of race, gender and sexual orientation. If Boris Johnson had not been a white male, the facts of his lying would have been irrelevant. Indeed, because he is a white male he has always been guilty. Of oppression - the lying is trumped by his other sins. If, instead, he was one of the oppressed, his lying to Parliament (and other transgressions) would not have mattered.

The fact that many Jewish people are genetically identical to Palestinians is not relevant. One group is deemed to be White, the other is not. Oppressed and oppressor.

Reality

The Berkeley protestors believe that objective truth - reality - does not exist or, if it does, is always trumped by matters of identity. Plenty of other people share this belief. Writers such as Barro and Mounk (and many others) think that this new way of thinking about the world dominates Universities (where it emerged, mostly from humanities departments) and increasing swathes of corporate and government life.

I think about all this in terms of astrology. Some (all?) of us have always sought simplified explanations of our behaviour. We have a base need for simplified explanations of our existence. Astrology fills that need. Astrology’s simplicities and stupidities have been subject to much analysis. One recent example is an episode of ‘The Orville’, a truly wonderful series for us Trekkies, where a recently discovered ‘civilisation’ imprisons, in harsh concentration camps, people whose only crime is to have been born under a bad sign. It’s a great story about our tribal tendencies and atavistic need to ‘other’ groups, often for ludicrous reasons. But it is what we do. Think of all human history.

We are a very good at meeting our needs, particularly when it comes to devices that appear to give our lives meaning. We can create those devices out of thin air. Sometimes in much more sophisticated ways than the astrologer. Think philosophy. Think religion. Nature abhors a vacuum, apparently. We abhor the notion that things are complicated and uncertain. We make up simple stories to get around complexity and doubt. Think economic models.

Many corporations send their executives on away-day courses that employ some expensive consultants who engage in pseudo-scientific Myers-Briggs style psychological ‘analysis’. The suits are placed into various behavioural and personality categories, based on the musings of two people who, over a hundred years ago, sat around their kitchen table and came up with a variant on the astrological star chart. All without any formal psychological training. I have been on one of those courses, decades ago, and immediately concluded that there is no difference between these faux psychological tests and astrology. They do exactly the same thing, with equally meaningless conclusions. As amazing as the gullibility of the firms that pay people to construct star-charts for their executives was the reactions of the corporate chieftains so analysed. They both loved it and believed it. At least one scientist calls the whole thing ‘neurobollox"‘.

All of the new identity politics is a variation on this theme. All that stuff noticed by Barro and Mounk is, in my view, just one step up from astrology and its offshoots.

While I think Barro and Mounk have identified disturbing ideas that permeate a lot of fashionable and influential thinking, I don’t think they have provided a ‘theory of everything’. Not everyone takes sides in any of the current conflicts around the world because of the ravings of a few looney-toon sociology professors. Nevertheless, Barro and Mounk are on to something very important.

There are plenty of people who acknowledge complexity and don’t take sides. There are plenty of people who take sides because of reasons, well-grounded in objective truth or not, that have nothing to do with race, gender or sexual preferences. But too many people clearly do. We all need to examine our reasoning.

The beliefs of a few unimportant identity focussed academics - several of whom have popularised their ideas to make a fast buck - have leaked out into the mainstream. But there are one or two of us left who acknowledge complexity, embrace the chaos of the universe and existence, who resist the ways in which others try to categorise us. We resist tribalism and ‘othering’. But we are under fire.

There are a few of us left that believe, while sometimes difficult to discern, there is such a thing as objective truth. Facts and data matter.

We need to resist all this identity-based ‘reasoning’. And we haven’t done a good job. We flabby centrist liberals have conceded too much ground to those who would falsely categorise us.

Everything is connected to everything else. One connection between the new astrologers and our politics is that we can see the yin to the Trumpist yang. Donald Trump provides dog whistles to white working class males precisely because they really are demonised. I wonder if all those professors labouring away in obscure American (and now other) universities realise how much they are responsible for the rise of the populist right. Nigel Farage & co have are on to something when they tell their supporters that ‘they are coming for you, your lifestyle and your values’.

Of course, Authoritarianism is not the answer, nor is there anything of merit in the manifestos of Trump, Farage, Orban, Le Pen or Fico. But we flabby liberals have vacated the centre ground to the new hard-left astrologers and their populist, far-fight, creations.

Time to get to work.