Pinker on Identity Politics

Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker was interviewed recently by Adam Rubenstein of the Weekly Standard and had some interesting things to say on a couple of topics. The interview touches on Pinker's views on identity politics, ideological intolerance in the modern university, humanism and a few others.

Here's the opening exchange between Rubenstein and Pinker on the matter of identity politics:

Adam Rubenstein: If “reason” is to be “the currency of our discourse,” what’s the future of identity politics? Is identity politics based in reason? Your new book touches on the issue, but cursorily. Could you provide more of an explanation of identity politics, where it comes from, where it’s going, and how we should think about it?

Steven Pinker: Identity politics is the syndrome in which people’s beliefs and interests are assumed to be determined by their membership in groups, particularly their sex, race, sexual orientation, and disability status. Its signature is the tic of preceding a statement with “As a,” as if that bore on the cogency of what was to follow. Identity politics originated with the fact that members of certain groups really were disadvantaged by their group membership, which forged them into a coalition with common interests: Jews really did have a reason to form the Anti-Defamation League.

Pinker touches on something in this that has been a pet peeve of mine for many years. It's annoying to hear people say something like, "As a gay man I believe X is true", or "As a woman I believe Y is true". The implication is that were one not gay or a woman they wouldn't believe X or Y, or the implication may be that the individual has several identities but only when speaking from the gay or female identity do they believe X or Y. This is nonsensical. If a proposition is true it's true regardless of one's "identity".

Let X stand for "gays should be allowed to marry". If X is true everyone should think it true regardless of whether they're gay or not. For someone to say, "as a gay man, I think gays should be allowed to marry" implies that were he not gay he might not think this, which is at best self-defeating since it excuses non-gays from believing that gays should be allowed to marry.

Anyway, Pinker continues:

But when it spreads beyond the target of combatting discrimination and oppression, it [identity politics] is an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values, including, ironically, the pursuit of justice for oppressed groups. For one thing, reason depends on there being an objective reality and universal standards of logic. As Chekhov said, there is no national multiplication table, and there is no racial or LGBT one either.

This isn’t just a matter of keeping our science and politics in touch with reality; it gives force to the very movements for moral improvement that originally inspired identity politics. The slave trade and the Holocaust are not group-bonding myths; they objectively happened, and their evil is something that all people, regardless of their race, gender, or sexual orientation, must acknowledge and work to prevent in the future.

Even the aspect of identity politics with a grain of justification—that a man cannot truly experience what it is like to be a woman, or a white person an African American—can subvert the cause of equality and harmony if it is taken too far, because it undermines one of the greatest epiphanies of the Enlightenment: that people are equipped with a capacity for sympathetic imagination, which allows them to appreciate the suffering of sentient beings unlike them. In this regard nothing could be more asinine than outrage against “cultural appropriation”—as if it’s a bad thing, rather than a good thing, for a white writer to try to convey the experiences of a black person, or vice versa.

Here again Pinker touches on an irritant in our common life. When others say that because you are not like them (in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.) therefore you can't understand what it's like to be them they're building a wall between themselves and you.

Such walls short-circuit sympathy and isolate us from each other. They Balkanize us into different us/them groups in which sympathy for, and empathy with, outsiders diminishes and resentments and hostility are fostered.

Identity politics is based partly on the postmodern notion that truth is perspectival, that because different identity groups have different perspectives on the world therefore they have different truths.

This can't be correct, though. Southern slave-owners had a different perspective than did their slaves on the morality of slavery, but slavery is objectively wrong regardless of the perspective one has on it.

The Jewish victims of the Holocaust had a different perspective on the morality of the Final Solution than did the Nazis, but regardless of those different perspectives genocide is a moral abomination.

Pinker concludes his thoughts on the folly of identity politics with this: "Any hopes for human improvement are better served by encouraging a recognition of universal human interests than by pitting group against group in zero-sum competition."

In other words, we'd do far better as a society to emphasize those things which make us alike rather than stressing those things which make us different. I often find myself in disagreement with Pinker, but with what he has said on this topic I couldn't agree more.