‘I think therefore I am.’
Although not a direct quote from Descartes, this phrase captured the sentiment at the beginning of the modern Enlightenment, in which values of rationality, reason and truth were sought through intellectual inquiry, that challenged traditional orthodoxy.
In the current day, this sentiment has far receded from its original meaning. Instead, the public mindset is captured by identity politics and obsesses over multiple incarnations of it. Only earlier this month, H&M was forced to apologise and take down a jumper with the word ‘monkey’ after public backlash to adverts showing a black child wearing it. A common opener in a political discussion is ‘speaking as…’, or ‘from my experience…’, demonstrating that personal identity or subjective experience has overtaken grounded facts as the basis of authority in asserting political truths.
Identity politics is certainly displayed by all sections of the political spectrum. One only needs to recall the ill-tempered, emotional public discourse that surrounded the 2016 EU referendum. But what is identity politics? And doesn’t it broaden political discussion in a positive way?
Firstly, it’s necessary to distinguish identity politics from populist discourse. Identity politics is a method of political awareness, whereby individuals identify as members of a social group and base their opinions on the group’s interests or benefits. Identity politics is not new; it’s a different label given to a continuing trend since the modern period. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, as the nation state and commercial capitalism became entrenched, Enlightenment values of discovery and invention took root. Indeed, Locke argued that individuals should strive towards material gain, and favoured ideas of creativity, enterprise and industry.
This marked a cultural shift, erecting the psychological matrix of individual property, wealth and enterprise as the validation system for a person’s identity and political status. Identity was not based on received authority anymore, but rather the exertion of individual will into industry, which re-centred a person’s locus of identity onto their personal identity.
This trend can be called individual pragmatism, but it was eventually repeatedly challenged. Sartre helped to dismantle the Cartesian dichotomy by arguing that, ‘I am therefore I think’. Sartre therefore argued that the ego itself was an artificial construction created by an existential condition rather than a rational chain of reasoning.
Existentialism helped popularise the anti-realist conception of reality. Put simply, reality could not be directly experienced and instead was conceived through a socially and culturally constructed framework. This created ripples within the predominant trends of post-war radical thought. Knowledge of the world replaced the ability to conceive the world-in-itself, which dissolved notions of neutrality, impartiality and objectivity.
Truth has become literature, a collection of stories as ‘facts’ that interact with each other in a network; positivism as masculine subjectivity and the ego-projection of hierarchy and system; and empirical truth in itself part of an ‘experienced subjective reality’. Intellectual trends have therefore formed a fresco of post-modernist thought that favours ‘alternative perspectives’ on issues rather than objective facts.
If our post-modern condition of identity, cultural freedom and extreme scepticism informs our politics, what does it tell us about us?
What identity politics offers is indeed different perspectives on human nature – or ‘human reality’. Presenting the opportunity for citizens to be offended as a member of a social group, identity politics revives the politicisation of ‘ethics’. In ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, Freud argued that ethics is a therapeutic attempt towards love. This explains why identity politics expresses how they ‘feel’, how ‘hurt’ they are and how they feel ‘unsafe’. In Ernest Becker’s words, the post-war period offers the opportunity to create ‘therapeutic religions’ that speak directly to people’s concerns and insecurities which are resolved in identity politics. Identity politics is a crisis of meaning in the post-modern age, and a reassertion of its importance in a world clobbered with financial crises, terrorism and threats of global nuclear apocalypse.
While I might have sounded initially sceptical about identity politics, I remain convinced that it should be reckoned with due its presence in modern public debate. As part of an historical trend, originating in intellectual movements and socio-cultural change, this lends us greater understanding of identity politics and how it can be conceptualised, regardless of personal stance towards it.
My greatest fear? That we end up in another period of conservative backlash, one which succeeded the radicalism of the French Revolution of 1789, and the counter-cultural radicalism of the 1960s. And what was the problem? An exclusive circuit of intellectuals with an abstract world-view that envisioned utopian social change, ideas that were inaccessible to the conservative opinions of the majority within society.
