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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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You're trying to assign value based on identity only to realize that the whole concept of identity is incoherent.

Is it really, or is it just the way it's practiced here in the west? In much of the rest of the world, it's taken for granted and assumed. When LGBT organizers took to the streets in Russia and were banned, much to the collective butthurt of those in the west, it only became an issue here because the wrong identity was the losing side of an issue. Identity is just coalition politics.

I have always felt that Paul Graham captured the modern concept of identity quite well. I can understand calling it incoherent, meaning confusing, in how people argue about it, often holding incompatible or contradictory views. That people try to game social status around the concept of identity does not really speak to the usefulness of identity as a concept when reasoning about the world for any given individual.

Is it really, or is it just the way it's practiced here in the west?

Yes it is. The entire concept of identity as it is popularly described and understood amongst secular progressive types is a load of functionally incoherent nonsense. Not only that, it actively degrades the individual's ability to read and understand social dynamics.

I would even go so far as to contend that; if people were to start approaching identity as a simple political/religious affiliation and not something that has anything to do with the "lived experience" or "intrinsic qualities of" the identified, that this would represent a substantial improvement over the current status quo.

That doesn't really disagree with my statement, I think. Certainly the way it's practiced by American progressives, I agree it's incoherent and a lot of nonsense. But that's a far cry from saying identity itself is bs. And granting as much, it's what human beings do regardless, so I'd say it's better off figuring how how to channel and deal with it than overcome it.

I do not think that it is "a far cry" at all. I think that this is one of the places where the "leviathan-shaped hole" in the discourse is most manifest. There are effectively two mutually exclusive and contradictory concepts of "identity" that currently exist in the same space. That within the identifier and that of the identified. Assuming the goal is to understand, we'd be better off tabooing "identity" entirely.

Assuming the goal is to understand, we'd be better off tabooing "identity" entirely.

I think the practical hope for something like this leaves so much to be desired that it's not even worth spending any political capital over it. We could already count the number of problems that lack otherwise realistic political and economic solutions, but for the fact that people can't find any common agreement or consensus to identify their own self-interest with the importance of the issue at hand. And I think torpedoing things like Christianity or Nationalism doesn't help a civil society in the long run.

People have an identity, whether they want to admit it or not. Societies carry a national identity, the ones that don't, don't exist. There's no such thing as an individual without a history, lineage, common language, ethnicity, whatever else have you. It's a fantasy to believe otherwise. What does lacking an identity leave you with that's superior to a person who has one?

People have an identity, whether they want to admit it or not. Societies carry a national identity, There's no such thing as an individual without a history, lineage, common language, ethnicity, whatever else have you.

Yes, and this is precisely why the liberal fetish for emancipation is so destructive. Having rejected all deeper connections they are left with nothing but the superficial, and thus find themselves embracing social atomization.

The alternative, of course, being subjection to those of higher status they are connected to. Aside from "be the patriarch in the patriarchy", there's no good solution.

Would it be accurate to say that one of the things that makes it incoherent is that they think Identity is intrinsic, not chosen?

I think a good chunk of the incoherency comes from trying to have it both ways.

IE wanting to treat chosen qualities as intrinsic and intrinsic qualities as chosen. Contrast the whole trans-women in sports debate with a senescent white male threatening to take away Mee-Maw's black card if she doesn't vote for him.

Sooner or later something has to give.

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