Guest post: The Identity Trap
Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Objectively terrible.
There is a new book out that has received extremely favourable reviews from people I respect: The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas & Power in Our Time, by Yascha Mounk, professor of the Practice of International Affairs at John Hopkins University, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
It arrived yesterday, and I have been skimming it. It is very well and fairly written, shows how the ideas you find in Critical Race Theory, for example, derive from thinkers like Foucault & Deleuze, and addresses the arguments (and fights) over transgender people, among many other things.
What I like about Mounk is that he takes arguments, from whatever side, seriously, and addresses them in a responsible and critical manner. He shows also how readily what were originally philosophical positions, the historical reasons for which he clarifies in the course of criticising them, have been reduced to slapstick ideological slogans, such as we see on the internet and in politics, particularly in the USA, Canada, & Britain, and how this derives from the nature of the original philosophical positions (though I never thought, after reading Foucault many years ago, that his ideas could be taken seriously, even though some of his insights are worth consideration. His Les Mots et les Choses is merely a parody of the Hegelian idea of history that replaces Hegel’s rational progression with a studiedly irrational progression, as Foucault plucks ‘epistemes’ out of thin air and pretends that they determine the course of each new age.) (Not that I have much time for Hegel’s idea of history, either.)
Mounck rightly pleads for universalism & humanism. and demonstrates how identity politics actively damages progress towards equality.
Wonderful book, probably the best writing on “the thing that shall not ever be labeled” I’m aware of. Mounk is just generally a great writer and thinker.
Thanks, I have bought the Kindle version and look forward to reading it. Blood Knight: Watch out for those spell checkers, they have an issue with names from time to time.
Well bollocks… Should’ve just gone with Yascha…
I can also recommend this book. I am about halfway through it, after which I will pass it to my son. It is the best explanation I have encountered of how we got to where we are now, in terms of the demands for limitation of speech, resegregation, destruction of non-profit organizations, mandatory worship at the church of woke, etc. Mounk does an incredible job creating a text that will stand the test of time. It should be required reading at universities, and likely will be once this fever passes.
Mine is supposed to arrive today. I’m looking forward to it.
There is an excellent review by Fintan O’Toole of what appears to be a very good book by the American philosopher Susan Neiman – ‘Left Is Not Woke’ (Polity, 154 pp., $25.00) – in the NYRB. The book addresses the same issues as Mounk’s.