Who Am I? Personal Identity versus Political Identity

Preliminary note: what has been exercising me lately is the question whether there is a deep common root to the political identitarianism of the Left and the Right, and if there is, what this root is. Nihilism, perhaps?

I wrote:

. . . my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup. For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person.

My right-wing identitarian sparring partner reasonably objects:

This is puzzling to me. If I 'identify' myself as a man, or a human being, I don't think I'm reducing myself to anything. I'm just stating an obvious fact about myself or, if you prefer, myself qua mammal or living organism or something of the kind. Is there some contradiction or tension between 'I am a human being' or 'I am an animal' and 'I am a person'?

Later on in his comments he says that "to defend an identitarian position in politics" it is not necessary to engage with the metaphysics of personhood. I am inclined to disagree.

No Escaping Metaphysics

As I see it, practical politics presupposes political philosophy which presupposes normative ethics which presupposes philosophical anthropology which is a discipline of special metaphysics. Philosophical anthropology, in turn, finds its place within general metaphysics. Rationally informed political action requires a theory of the human good that needs to be grounded in a theory of human nature which itself needs embedding in a comprehensive metaphysics. And if the political action is to be truly ameliorative, then the theory of human nature had better be correct. For example, the terrible scourge on humanity that Communism has proven to be flows from the Left's false understanding of human nature.

Concessions

But before getting in too deep, let me concede some points to my interlocutor. I concede that if he tells me he is a Caucasian male, then there is an innocuous sense of 'identify' according to which he has identified himself as Causasian and male, and that in so doing he needn't be 'reducing' himself to anything in any pejorative sense. He is simply giving me information about his sex and his ancestry. He is simply pointing out a couple of his attributes.

By the same token, he can identify himself as a citizen of this country or that, a member of this political party or that, an adherent of this religion or that, or an adherent of no religion at all. And so on for a long list of essential and accidental attributes: military veteran? blood type? Social Security number? Take larger and larger conjunctions of these attributes and you get closer and closer to zeroing in on the individuating identity of a particular human animal in society, that which distinguishes him from every other human animal.

Personalism and False Self-Identification

But what I am getting at is something different. Not WHAT I am objectively viewed in my animal and social features, but WHO I am as a person, as a unique conscious and self-conscious subject of experience and as a morally responsible free agent, as an I who can address a Thou and be addressed in turn by an I. (M. Buber) I am a subject for whom there is a world and not merely an object in the physical and social worlds.

The question concerns the 'true self,' WHO I am at the deepest level. Who am I? A mere token of a type? But that is all I would be if I were to identify myself in terms of my race. This is one example of what I am calling a false self-identification. A tribal black who identifies himself in his innermost ipseity as black has reduced himself to a mere token of a racial type, a mere instance of it, when being an interchangeable token cannot possibly be what makes him the unique person that he is. After all, there are many tokens of the type, black human being.

Not only does he reduce himself to a mere instance of one of his attributes, he reduces himself to a mere instance of one of his animal attributes. It is qua animal that he has a race, not qua person. But we are not mere animals; we are spiritual animals.

Such false self-identification is a form of spiritual self-degradation.

And the same goes for whites who seek their true identity in their racial 'identity.' That is a false self-identification because who I am as this unique individual cannot be reduced to being a repeatable and interchangeable token of a type. The reason, again, is that (i) there are indefinitely many tokens of the type, white human animal, but there is exactly one me, and (ii) a self-identification in terms of a bodily attribute pertains to my animality but not to my spirituality.

Suppose I address a black man or woman as a person. When I do that I am precisely not confronting an instance of black human animal with all the stereotypes that go with it. I am then attempting an I-Thou relation with the black man or woman and not an I-It relation with an instance of black human animal. I am showing respect for the person.

There are many types of false self-identification and I oppose them all. On the present occasion I come out against racial self-identification. You cannot be in your innermost ipseity (selfhood) white or black, and any such self-identification is false. Now what does this have to do with identity politics?

Connection with Identity Politics

First of all, what is identity politics? Logically prior question: What is politics? Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere. Human flourishing is not possible apart from social interaction and when that interaction is public, as opposed to private, we are in the political sphere. Such interaction is both cooperative and conflictual. So perhaps we can say that politics aims at maximizing cooperation and minimizing conflict within a given society for the benefit of all involved.

Identity politics, however, is not concerned primarily with the promotion of the common human good within the public sphere but with the empowering of particular factions within it. An oppressed group will seek power to alleviate its oppression. Think of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA in the '50s and '60s. The identity politics of that movement was understandable and probably necessary for blacks to make the progress they did. Blacks exhorted each other to stand tall and take pride in being black. Some of us are old enough to remember the "Black is beautiful" bumper stickers of that era.

Before long the Civil Rights movement turned into a hustle with race-hustlers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton leading the pack. Long story short, the instrumentally necessary identity politics of the Civil Rights movement came to displace politics in its proper sense which has to aim at comity and the common good and not at the appeasing of aggrieved parties. No surprise, then, at the rise of white resistance to the excesses and absurdities of Affirmative Action with its reverse discrimination, minority set-asides, and race-norming.

But tribalism is tribalism whether black or white. Our only hope is to get beyond tribalism. (I am not sanguine that we can get beyond it.) But when I pointed this out to my interlocutor and some of his fellow travellers some years ago in these pages, I was shocked, SHOCKED (well, not really) to find them disagreeing with me. They apparently think that whites need their own tribalism, their own White Pride, their own consciousness-raising.

This makes no ultimate sense to me. (It makes some proximate and pro tempore sense as a reactive gesture of self-defense.) How can you take legitimate pride in what is merely an element of your facticity (in Sartre's Being and Nothingness sense of 'facticity.') You had to be born somewhere, to some pair of parents or other, of some race or other, of some sex, and so on. You're stuck with that. If you need to feel pride, feel pride in what you have done with your facticity, with what you have made of yourself, with the free accomplishments of yourself as a person, as an individual.

Common Human Good?

I wrote, "Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere." But can we agree on what the common human good is? Not if we are identity-political in our approach. Can we even agree that there is such a thing as the common human good? Not if we are identity-political.

If who I am at the deepest level of the self is a white man, if my race is constitutive of my very innermost ipseity, then I have nothing fundamentally in common with blacks. But then conflict can be avoided only by racial segregation.

It is worth noting that one could be a white-identitarian without being a white-supremacist. One could hold that one's innermost identity as a person is racially constituted without holding that white identity is any better than black identity.

I hope it is becoming clear that we cannot avoid in these discussions what my sparring partner calls "heavy-duty metaphysics." Whether you affirm or deny a common human good, you are doing metaphysics. And if metaphysics gets in, theology is sure to follow. Justin Dean Lee in his review of Mark Lilla writes,

. . . any serious — that is, internally coherent — movement away from identity politics and toward a robust discourse of the common good requires that we reintroduce metaphysics into our politics. This entails granting theology a privileged place in the public square at a time when most of the left and the far right are loath to grant it any place at all.

Nihilism as the Common Root of Left and Right Identity Politics

Rod Dreher:

So, to recap: Justin Dean Lee rightly says we cannot have a politics of the common good without substantive agreement on what the Good is, or how it might be known. Liberalism, in both its classical and progressivist forms, is agnostic on that question, or at most assumes things (“all men are created equal”) that cannot be sustained absent a shared commitment to a metaphysical ideal. Last week in Paris, talking about these things with Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher said that he sees no exit for the French, because they have concluded as a society that there is no realm beyond the material. Most Americans would deny that they believe this, but that’s not the way we live, not even Christians. It is true that we Americans are not as far gone into atheism as the French are, so we still have time to recover. But to recover, you first have to recognize the problem. You first have to recognize that the way you are living as a Christian is not going to survive the prolonged encounter with liquid modernity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Spencer are both atheists who have found a strong source of belief in their respective races. Spencer, a Nietzschean, has said that Christianity is a religion of the weak. They have drawn the line between good and evil not down the middle of every human heart, as that great Christian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, but between their race and the Other. There is immense power in that kind of tribalism, and it lies in large part because it denies the fallenness of one’s own people. Where in contemporary American Christianity can we find the resources to resist falling prey to the malign power of racialism, in all its versions?

[. . .]

Only a strong Christianity can counter this nihilistic tribal religion. But this we do not have today.

The New Right: More Combative, Less Conservative

Culturally, the Left won; so what's to conserve? The Old Right, bow-tied and bespectacled, gentlemanly and erudite, has proven impotent to slow down, let alone stop, the Left's long march through the institutions and their subversion of them. Assembled in their well-appointed 'cucksheds,' the likes of George F. Will fiddle with ideas while the Republic burns. Enter the New Right which, as David Azzerad puts it,

. . . is anchored in the realization that the conservative project in America today is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary one. We lost. They won. Painful as it is to admit, we no longer feel at home in our own country. In this progressive theocracy in which all must worship at the altar of Wokeness, conservatism, if one can still even call it that, is more about overthrowing than conserving. Burke’s edifying exhortation—“Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna”—must be altered to suit the times: Sparta was your inheritance, now reclaim her.

As such, this new Right has a decidedly unconservative temperament. It is spirited, manly, and combative. We fight with the same intensity, resolve, and clarity of purpose with which the Left fights. And we fight not to stem our losses, but to win. As Pat Buchanan once wrote, we “want to engage the Left on every front; to defund it; to drive it back into the redoubts whence it emerged decades ago. We want to return to their places of honor the republican beliefs, cultural norms and moral values we were raised with.”

This new Right understands not just ideas, but power. The Left’s ideological hegemony is not principally the result of better ideas, but of its long march through the institutions. We understand the need to build new institutions—in particular those with the power to shape public opinion—and to reconquer lost ones or, at the very least, defund them. The universities, in particular, must be brought to heel.

Absolutely. Defunding the leftist seminaries is a job each of us can do right now. Every day brings news of a new outrage and an additional reason to divest the institutions of the Higher Enstupidation. For example, the cancellation of Mike Adams, and that of Flannery O'Connor by Loyola University Maryland.

The Catholic Universities are among the worst of the leftist seminaries. They are neither Catholic nor universities.

Addendum (7/31): "Every day brings news of a new outrage . . . ." A bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Just this morning I learned that a dean at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell was fired for stating in an e-mail that "black lives matter, but also, everyone's life matters."

On Transcending Tribalism

Jonathan Haidt:

Humans are tribal, but tribalism can be transcended. It exists in tension with our extraordinary ability to develop bonds with other human beings. Romeo and Juliet fell in love. French, British and German soldiers came out of their trenches in World War I to exchange food, cigarettes and Christmas greetings.

The key, as Cicero observed, is proximity, and a great deal of modern research backs him up. Students are more likely to become friends with the student whose dorm room is one door away than with the student whose room is four doors away. People who have at least one friend from the other political party are less likely to hate the supporters of that party.

But tragically, Americans are losing their proximity to those on the other side and are spending more time in politically purified settings. [. . .]

Haidt is right that tribalism can be transcended, at least to some extent, and that proximity and interaction can facilitate the transcending. But he is far more optimistic that I am.

What Haidt ignores is that there is no comity without commonality, as I like to put it. You and I can live and work together in harmony only within a common space of shared values and assumptions and recognized facts. But that common space is shrinking.

Take any 'hot button' issue, Second Amendment rights, for example. What do I have in common with the anti-gunner who favors confiscation of all civilian firearms, or only slightly less radically, wants to ban all hand guns or semi-automatic weapons? To me it is evident that my right to life grounds a right to self-defense, and with it a right to acquire the appropriate means of self-defense. If you deny this, then we have no common ground, at least not on this topic. On this topic, we would then be at loggerheads. If you then work politically or extra-politically to violate what here in the States are called Second Amendment rights, then you become my enemy. And the consequences of enmity can become unpleasant in the extreme. Push can come to shove, and shove to shoot.

In a situation like this, proximity and interaction only exacerbate the problem. Even the calm interaction of scholarly argument and counter-argument does no good. No matter how carefully and rigorously I argue my position, I will not succeed in convincing the opponent, with only a few exceptions. This is a fact of experience over a wide range of controversial topics, and not just in politics. The only good thing that comes of the dialectical interaction is a clarification and deeper understanding of one's position and what it entails. If you think, say, that semi-automatic weapons ought to be banned for civilian use, then you and I will never find common ground. But I will perfect my understanding of my position and its presuppositions and better understand what I reject in yours.

After we have clarified, but not resolved, our differences, anger at the intransigence of the other is the likely upshot if we continue to interact in close proximity whether in the same academic department, the same church, the same club, the same neighborhood, the same family . . . . This is why there are schisms and splits and factions and wars and all manner of contention.

Anger at the intransigence of the other can then lead on to the thought that there must be something morally defective, and perhaps also intellectually defective, about the opponent if he holds, say, that a pre-natal human is just a clump of cells. One advances — if that is the word — to the view that the opponent is morally censurable for holding the position he holds, that he is being willfully morally obtuse and deserves moral condemnation. And then the word 'evil' may slip in and the word 'lie': "The bastard is not just wrong; he is an evil son-of-a-bitch for promoting the lie that an unborn child is just a clump of cells, or a disposable part of woman's body like a wart." The arguably false statements of the other get treated as lies and therefore as statements at the back of which in an intent to deceive. And from there it ramps up to 'Hillary is Satan' and 'Trump is Hitler.'

One possible cure for this unproductive warfare is mutual, voluntary, segregation via a return to federalism. I develop the thought in A Case for Voluntary Segregation. I say 'possible' because I am not sure the federalist route is sufficient. Secession and partition are other options, not to mention the one no sane person could want: full-on hot civil war. We are already beyond cold civil war, what with the Left's violent Stalinist erasure of monuments and memorials (and not just that).

So while Haidt is right that proximity and interaction can promote mutual understanding and mitigate hostility, that is true only up to a point and works only within a common space of shared assumptions, values, and recognized facts. (His examples, by the way, were poorly chosen: Romeo and Juliet were young Italians; the French, German, and British soldiers were Europeans.) Absent the common space, the opposite is true: proximity and interaction are precisely what must be avoided to preserve peace.

The Problem and Three Main Solutions

The problem is how to transcend tribalism. I count three main solutions, the Liberal, the Alt Right, and the Sane (which is of course my view!)

There is first what I take to be Haidt's rather silly liberal solution, namely, that what will bring us together is proximity and interaction. He assumes that if we all come together and get to know each other we will overcome tribalism. This borders on utopian nonsense. It is precisely because of proximity and interaction that many decide to self-segregate. The more I know about certain individuals and groups the less I want to have to do with them. The Marxist thugs of Black Lives Matter, for example. By the way, 'thug' is not code for 'nigger.' 'Thug' means thug. Look it up. The Antifa fascists are another example. The anti-white White Fragility racists. I could go on.

At the other extreme we find the 'alties' and neo-reactionaries. They have a sound insight, namely, that there are unassimilable elements and that they must be kept out. For example, Sharia-supporting Muslims are unassimilable into the U. S. because their values are antithetical to ours, perhaps not all of their values, but enough to make for huge problems.

The success of e pluribus unum depends on the nature of the pluribus. A viable and vibrant One cannot be made out of just any Many. (Cute formulation, eh?) The members of the manifold must be unifiable under some umbrella of common values, assumptions, and recognized facts. One proposition nation cannot be made out of many tribes of immigrants unless the many tribes of immigrants accept OUR values, American values, and our propositions. The tribalism is overcome or at least mitigated by acceptance of a unifying set of American values and ideas.

The alt-rightists, however, do not really offer a solution to the problem of transcending tribalism since their 'solution' is to embrace an opposing tribalism. They are right about the reality of race, as against the foolish notion that race is a social construct, but they push this realism in an ugly and extreme direction when they construe American identity as white identity, where this excludes Jews. American identity is rooted in a set of ideas and values. It must be granted, however, that not all racial and ethnic groups are equally able to assimilate and implement these ideas and values. Immigration policy must favor those that are.

The sane way is the middle way. To liberals we ought to concede that diversity is a value, but at the same time insist that it is a value that has to be kept in check by the opposing value of unity. Muslims who refuse to accept our values must not be allowed to immigrate. They have no right to immigrate, but we have every right to select those who will benefit us. That is just common sense. The good sort of diversity is not enhanced by the presence of terror-prone fanatics. Immigration must be to the benefit of the host country.

What we need, then, to mitigate tribal hostility is not more proximity and interaction, but less; fewer 'conversations' not more; less government, more toleration, voluntary segregation, a return to federalism, a total stoppage of illegal immigration, and a reform of current immigration law.

Will any of this happen? Trump has taken steps in the right direction. Flawed as he is, he is all we have, and best we have who is ready, willing, able, and electable. You know what you have to do come November.

The Dissident Right

Here:

The dissident right is, to some degree, a reaction to the shift on the Right, among the Buckleyites mostly, to embrace the blank slate and egalitarianism. This was mostly due to the infestation of neoconservatives and libertarians. The neocons brought with them that old Marxist belief that society can be willed into any shape you like, regardless of the people in it. Libertarians, like Marxists, simply refuse to accept the reality of the human condition. As a result, the mainstream Right implicitly embraced the blank slate.

Paul Gottfried versus NeoCon Mythology

Here:

Professor Gottfried goes on to examine several examples of these purges, correcting the errors of those who have distorted the record. For example, many have claimed that Buckley’s 1965 denunciation of the John Birch Society was because the Birchers were guilty of anti-Semitism. This is simply slander. Whatever their other errors may have been, it wasn’t anti-Semitism that led Buckley to denounce the JBS, but rather their opposition to LBJ’s escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

As we know, both Williamson and Jonah Goldberg belong to the “Never Trump” cult that National Review created in late 2015, and the anti-Trump fury of “the socially and professionally acceptable Right” illustrates how jealously they regard their status as Gnostic archons of the movement, with the authority to banish anyone they dislike. Trump won the GOP nomination despite the opposition of the National Review crowd and, while they predicted (and openly planned for the aftermath of) his defeat in November 2016, somehow Trump won again. We’ve had to endure the butthurt whining of the Never-Trumpers ever since.

How do we explain this? A major factor is the vanity and careerist ambitions of the intelligentsia. Those whom Ace of Spades has dubbed “the Cruise Ship Wing of fake conservatism” (a reference to the travel-with-pundits deals sold to subscribers of National Review and the Weekly Standard) are careful to protect their “respectable” reputations, and they cannot enhance their reputations by admitting they were wrong.

That's right. The bow-tied boys have an inordinate concern with 'respectability' and the perquisites of high status. They want to be liked and accepted and taken seriously. They don't seem to realize that leftists will always loathe them no matter how many concessions they make.

In What Sense are We Equal? Equality, Natural Rights, and Propositionism

Michael Anton (Publius Decius Mus), in a review of Thomas G. West, The Political Theory of the American Founding speaks of an "error,"

. . . from a certain quarter of the contemporary Right, which holds that any appeal to equal natural rights amounts to “propositionism”—as in, the “proposition that all men are created equal”—which in turn inevitably leads to the twin evils of statist leveling and the explicit or tacit denial that there is anything distinct[ive] about the American nation. In this telling, “all men are created equal” is dangerous nonsense that means “all men are exactly the same.” Among other dismal policies we are allegedly compelled to enact if we recognize the existence of equal natural rights are redistribution, racial quotas, and open borders.

Refuting this is easy, and well-trodden, ground.

[. . .]

West does so, in perhaps the clearest articulation of natural human equality penned since the founding itself. The idea is elegantly simple: all men are by nature equally free and independent. Nature has not—as she has, for example, in the case of certain social insects— delineated some members of the human species as natural rulers and others as natural workers or slaves. (If you doubt this, ask yourself why—unlike in the case of, say, bees—workers and rulers are not clearly delineated in ways that both groups acknowledge and accept. Why is it that no man—even of the meanest capacities—ever consents to slavery, which can be maintained only with frequent recourse to the lash?) No man may therefore justly rule any other without that other’s consent. And no man may injure any other or infringe on his rights, except in the just defense of his own rights. The existence of equal natural rights requires an equally natural and obligatory duty of all men to respect the identical rights of others.

I find this articulation of human equality far from clear. What bothers me is the sudden inferential move in the passage quoted from the factual to the normative. I agree arguendo that it is a fact about human beings that

1) No man ever consents to slavery

but I don't see how we can validly infer from (1) the normative claim that

2) No man may justly rule any other without that other's consent.

I maintain that slavery is a grave moral evil and a violation of a basic human right, one possessed by all humans and possessed by all equally. My point, however, is that the moral impermissibility of slavery does not immediately follow from the fact, if it is a fact, that no human ever consents to be enslaved. If I don't consent to your enslaving me, how does that make it morally wrong for you to enslave me?

The problem is that the notion of a natural right is less than perspicuous. Part of what it means to say that a right is natural is that it is not conventional. We don't have rights to life, liberty, and property because some body of men has decided to grant them to us. We have them inherently or intrinsically. We don't get them from the State; we have them whether or not any state exists to secure them as a good state must, or to deprive us of them as a bad state will.

Rights are logically antecedent to contingent social and political arrangements, and thus logically antecedent to the positive law (the law enacted by a legislature). One can express this by saying that rights are not conventional but natural. But then 'natural' just means 'not conventional.'

Suppose our rights as individual persons come not from nature but from God. Then their non-conventionality would be secured. Now it would be good if we could proceed in political philosophy without bringing God into it. But then we face the problem of explaining how norms could be ingredient in nature.

Perhaps someone can explain to me how my right not to be enslaved could be grounded in my being an animal in the material world. How could any of my rights as an individual person be grounded in my being an animal in nature? I am open for instruction.

One could just insist that rights and norms are grounded in nature herself. But that would be metaphysical bluster and not an explanation.

To put it another way, I would like someone to explain how 'natural right' is not a contradictio in adiecto, provided, of course, that by a natural right we mean more than a non-conventional right, but a right that is non-conventional and somehow ingredient in or grounded in nature.

And let's never forget the obvious: as natural beings, as part of the fauna of the space-time system, we are manifestly not equal either as individuals or as groups.

So I say that if you want to uphold intrinsic and unalienable rights, rights that do not have their origin in human decisions and conventions, and if you want to uphold rights for all humans regardless of their empirical strengths and weaknesses, and the same rights for all, then you must move beyond nature to nature's God who is the source of the personhood of each one of us human animals, and the ground of equality of persons. No God, no equality of persons and no equality of rights.

It seems clear that something like this is what the second paragraph of the Declaration means with its talk of men being CREATED equal and being ENDOWED by their CREATOR with certain unalienable rights. The rights come from above (God) and not from below (nature).

This is why it is either stupid or highly uncharitable when neo-reactionary conservatives read the plain words of the Declaration as meaning that all humans are empirically equal as animals in nature. It can't mean that for the simple reason that no one in his right mind, and certainly not the great men of the Founding, could believe that all humans are empirically equal either actually or potentially.

Suppose there is no God. Then talk of equal rights is empty. We may continue to talk in those vacuous terms, somehow hiding the vacuity from ourselves, but then we would be 'running on fumes.' People may continue to believe in equal rights, but their belief would be groundless.

The trouble with the view I am recommending is that it requires a lot of heavy-duty metaphysics of God and Man. This metaphysics is widely contested and certainly not obvious. But the same goes for the naturalism that denies God and puts man back among the animals. It too is widely and very reasonably contested and certainly not obvious.

Welcome to the doxastic-epistemic side of the human predicament.

Now I would like you to surf on over to Malcolm Pollack's place and read this and the posts immediately subsequent to it, i. e., scroll up.

P. S. I didn't get around to propositionism/propositionalism. This discussion of Paul Gottfried will have to do for now.

The Left Eats Its Own: Andrew Sullivan

Despite 'credentials' that ought to endear him to the Left, Mr. Sullivan has learned the hard way that he still has too much good sense to count as one of them:

As for objective reality, I was at an event earlier this week — not on a campus — when I made what I thought was the commonplace observation that Jim Crow laws no longer exist. Uncomprehending stares came back at me. What planet was I on? Not only does Jim Crow still exist, but slavery itself never went away! When I questioned this assertion by an African-American woman, I was told it was “not my place” to question her reality. After all, I’m white.

The reason I can't take Sully all that seriously is that, while he sees through the insane lies of the Left, he refuses to do the one thing necessary to combat them effectively in the present constellation of circumstances, namely, support Donald Trump and his administration. Sullivan's deranged hatred of the man blinds him to Trump's political usefulness in beating back the destructive Left.

Look: I don’t doubt the good intentions of the new identity politics — to expand the opportunities for people previously excluded. I favor a politics that never discriminates against someone for immutable characteristics — and tries to make sure that as many people as possible feel they have access to our liberal democracy. But what we have now is far more than the liberal project of integrating minorities. It comes close to an attack on the liberal project itself. Marxism with a patina of liberalism on top is still Marxism — and it’s as hostile to the idea of a free society as white nationalism is. So if you wonder why our discourse is now so freighted with fear, why so many choose silence as the path of least resistance, or why the core concepts of a liberal society — the individual’s uniqueness, the primacy of reason, the protection of due process, an objective truth — are so besieged, this is one of the reasons.

Although Sullivan goes too far when he implies that it is never justifiable to discriminate against a person on the basis of immutable characteristics, see below, I basically agree with his little speech. I agree with his four core concepts.

In particular, I oppose the tribalism of those who see others as mere tokens of racial/ethnic/sexual types and who identify themselves in the same way. Tribalism could be defined as precisely this reduction of a person to a mere token or instance of a racial/ethnic/sexual type, whether the person is oneself or another. It is a refusal to countenance the potential if not actual uniqueness of the individual. The Left is tribal in this sense but so is the Alt-Right. What they have in common is the reduction of individual identity, personal identity, to group identity. My brand of conservatism resists this reduction and attempts to navigate a via media between the identity-political extremes.

I have found it difficult to get these ideas across to my open-minded and good-natured alt-right interlocutors.

They will tell me that, as a matter of fact, people identify tribally. I agree. My point, however, is that such identification is not conducive to social harmony and that we ought to at least try to transcend our tribalism.

The claim that such-and-such ought to be done cannot be refuted by the fact that it is not done. The propositions that people ought not sexually molest children, ought not drive drunk, ought not embezzle, etc. cannot be refuted by invoking the fact that they do. The same goes for institutions. The existence of an institution does not morally justify its existence.

The claim that people ought to do A could, however, be refuted if it could be shown that people, or some group of people, cannot do A. Ought implies can. I cannot reasonably demand of blacks, say, that they think and act less tribally if they are simply incapable of so thinking and acting.

So my interlocutors' point might be that urging people to be less tribal is empty preaching that unreasonably demands that people do what they cannot do. To which my response will be that many blacks and Hispanics and women — who can be thought of as a 'tribe' in an extended sense of the term — do transcend their tribal identities. For example, while Hispanics would naturally like there to be more Hispanics in the USA, many of them are able to appreciate that illegal immigration ought not be tolerated.

You might say that for Hispanics like these, their self-identification as a rational animal, zoon logikon, in Aristotle's sense, trumps their self-identification as Hispanic.

There are higher and lower, noble and base, modes of self-identification. Philosopher versus cocksman, say. You can guess my view: self-identification in terms of race, ethnicity, and sex is toward the base end of the scale.

Do I deny that I am a white male? Not at all. What's more, those attributes are essential to me. To speak with the philosophers: I am a white male in every possible world in which I exist. I cannot be an animal at all unless I have some immutable characteristics. (And to think of them as socially constructed is the height of leftist lunacy.) Then why is it base to identify in terms of these characteristics? Because there are higher modes of self-identification.

What makes them higher or better? They are less divisive and more conducive to social harmony. We are social animals and we benefit from cooperation. While competition is good in that it breeds excellence, conflict and enmity are bad. If we can learn to see one another as unique individuals, as persons, as rational beings rather than as interchangeable tokes of racial/ethnic/sexual types, then we are more likely to achieve more mutually beneficial social interactions.

The higher self-identifications are also more reflective of our status as free moral agents. I didn't choose my race or sex, but I did choose and continue to choose to develop myself as an individual, to actualize my potential for self-individuation. My progress along that line of self-development is something I can be proud of. By contrast there is something faintly absurd and morally dubious about black pride, white pride, gay pride, and the like. You're proud to be white? Why? You had no say in the matter. Nancy Pelosi is apparently ashamed to be white. That is equally mistaken.

Am I saying that race doesn't matter? No. Race does matter, but it matters less than leftists and alt-rightists think and more than some old-time (sane) liberals and conservatives like Dennis Prager think. (See Dennis Prager on Liberalism, Leftism, and Race.) Certain racial and ethnic groups are better equipped to appreciate, i.e., both understand and value, the points I have been making. Part of it has to do with intelligence. Asians and Jews, as groups, are more intelligent than blacks and Hispanics as groups. That is just a fact, and there are no racist facts. (A fact about race is not a racist fact.) What's true cannot be racist or sexist.

I spoke above of the uniqueness of the individual. I know that sounds like vacuous sermonizing and utter bullshit to many ears. But to adequately discuss it we would have to enter metaphysics. Some other time. But please note that ameliorative politics must be grounded in political theory which rests on normative ethics which presuppose philosophical anthropology which leads us back to metaphysics.

I should stop now. I have given my alt-right sparring partners enough to punch back at. Have at it, boys. Comments crisp and concise are best. People don't read long comments. Many short, good; one long, bad.

Addendum: Is it ever morally justifiable to discriminate against a person on the basis of an immutable characteristic?

Of course it is. I flunked my Army pre-induction physical. The Army discriminated against me because I hear out of only one ear. Southern Pacific Railroad did the same when, following in the footsteps of my quondam hero, Jack Kerouac, I tried to get a job as a switchman. Examples are easily multiplied. Want to join the Army? There are age restrictions. You can't be over 40. Should every combat role in the mlitary be open to females? Obviously not.

You would have to be as willfully stupid as Nancy Pelosi to think that all discrimination is unjust.

‘Diversity’ is Not a Dirty Word

Contrary to what some alt-righties of my acquaintance seem to think, 'diversity' is not a dirty word. To quote from my old entry, Diversity and Divisiveness:

Liberals emphasize the value of diversity, and with some justification. Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive marketplace of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.

But no reasonable person values diversity as such. [. . .] Only some sorts of diversity are valuable. Diversity worth having presupposes a principle of unity that controls the diversity. Diversity must be checked and balanced by the competing value of unity, a value with an equal claim on our respect.

[. . .]

Diversity unchecked by the competing value of unity leads to divisiveness. For this reason, one ought not ‘celebrate diversity’ unless one is also willing to ‘celebrate unity.’ And this is precisely what too many liberals and leftists cannot, or will not, comprehend. They unreasonably emphasize diversity at the expense of unity.

The Second Coming

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

Paul Gottfried on Propositionalism

Here:

White nationalists are not really nationalists since they are engaged in a globalist enterprise. They are reaching beyond traditional nation states and seek to unify all peoples of a certain race, partly by demonizing other races. But propositionalists like Buckley and the neoconservative journalists are likewise involved in a global pursuit. They are not content to live in a politically diverse world among different cultures. They seek to win adherents to their political religion supposedly predicated on universal propositions. The validity of what they believe requires that it be put into practice universally, since their propositions are intended for all of humanity. This rights-based globalism is nothing new. It was practiced by the Jacobins during the French Revolution and later, and more devastatingly, by the Bolsheviks. (Emphasis added)

This passage may help focus the ongoing discussion with my Right-identitarian colleague. I don't see why I ought to accept the bolded sentence above. The sentence encapsulates an argument, which could be put like this:

1) The supposedly universal propositions are intended to hold true for all of humanity.
2) If so, then the supposedly universal propositions must be put into practice universally.
Therefore
3) The supposedly universally propositions must be put into practice universally.
Therefore
4) One can justify nation-building, exporting American/Enlightenment values, toppling dictators using military force, teaching the benighted Muslim tribalists of the Middle East the values of open inquiry, free speech, equal rights for women, etc.

The argument is unsound because we have no good reason to accept (2).

I reject (2). I say: There are propositions relating to human flourishing that are true for all humans. An example of such a proposition might be: A happy and productive human life is unlikely and perhaps impossible if one never learns to control one's appetites and emotions. (Had Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown been brought up to exercise self-control, they would be alive today. Those two brought about their own deaths by their lack of self control, and 'racism' had nothing to do with it. Harvey Weinstein is a 'white' example: had he been brought up to control his concupiscence he wouldn't be in the deep trouble he is in now. )

But such propositions, while true for all humans and in this sense true universally, are not recognized by all humans, and not presently capable of being recognized or put into practice by all humans. The attempt to impart these propositions to some groups will be futile, especially if it involves force, or can be interpreted by the group in question as a cover for an attempt to dominate or control them for ulterior motives.

So I distinguish two questions. One is whether the propositions in question are universal. The other is whether they are capable of being recognized and implemented by all humans under present conditions. The answer to the first is Yes; the answer to the second is No. So one cannot infer the requirement that the propositions be put into practice universally from the the fact that they are universal. (2), then, is false.

The bolded sentence involves a confusion. Read it again: The validity of what they believe requires that it be put into practice universally, since their propositions are intended for all of humanity.

The sentence embodies a non sequitur. Consider this proposition: A government contributory to human well-being upholds the value of religious liberty and tolerates dissent on religious matters. This proposition is essential to the American founding and is one of the expressions of the hard-won wisdom of the Founders.

But not every ethnic or racial group on the face of the earth is ready for this universally valid truth, and perhaps some of these groups will never be ready for it. To impose it on them would be folly and elicit only blind reaction. On this point the neo-cons had it wrong. The benighted must be left to their fates. But it doesn't follow that the proposition in question is true only for those of European ancestry. It is true for all. Analogy: the truths of mathematics are true for all, even for those who cannot understand them and put them to work. First-graders cannot understand Rolle's Theorem, but it is true for them too. Those who know no physics are just as subject to its laws as those who do.

If one rejects even a moderate propositionalism, what will one put in its place? A racially purified state along National Socialist lines?

There is a reason why a lot of people get the heebie-jeebies when they hear alt-right and neo-reactionary talk. And this despite the fact that most of what one hears about the alt-right is mindless, psychologically-projective, leftist nonsense. Leftist scum use 'white supremacist' and 'alt-right' as semantic bludgeons and they should be condemned for their scurrilousness. Nevertheless, most of us become justifiably concerned when we hear talk of Blut und Boden.

As for heebie-jeebies, that puts me in mind of 'hebe,' a slur word for a Jew. The anti-semitism of alt-righties — not all of them of course — should also make a morally decent person nervous. If nothing else, the Alt-Right has a PR problem. They won't get anywhere politically if their rhetoric includes 'blood and soil.' I guarantee it.

Some words and phrases are not candidates for semantic rehabilitation.

More on Tribalism and the Identitarian Right

This entry continues the discussion with my Right-identitarian interlocutor. My current position is one of rejection of both Left- and Right-identitarianism. I am open, however, to a change of position. That is part of what makes me a philosopher as opposed to an ideologue. I wrote in my critique of Dennis Prager:

"The correct view is that racial differences are real and significant just as sexual and age differences are real and significant, but for purposes of social harmony and political cooperation we had better not identify ourselves racially but in terms of attributes more conducive to comity." My correspondent responds:

I agree with your criticisms of Prager. In a normal society men don't pretend that they're just human beings rather than men (who are also human beings) and women don't pretend that they're just human beings rather than women. Rather, in a normal society the distinctive male and female abilities and interests and ways of being are accepted, and society adapts itself to these differences–these male and female 'identities' in other words. But then, if race is similar to sex and age in this respect, why would it be bad for people to 'identify' in terms of race along with attributes like sex and age? Shouldn't we say instead that this is also reasonable and healthy?

In discussions like these it is always a good idea to seek (and rejoice over) points of agreement. Points of disagreement will emerge soon enough.

One thing we can agree on is that no human being can be just a human being if that implies having no sex or no race or no age or no height, etc. And so if I pretended to be a human being indeterminate with respect to one or more of the above-listed attributes, then my pretense would empty and absurd. My talk of treating people as individuals rather than as tokens of ethnic or racial types does not imply that they are bare individuals bereft of all attributes.

But there is nothing empty or absurd about prescinding from this or that characteristic in certain contexts. Characteristics prescinded from don't matter for the purpose at hand, but they are still there. For example, age and citizenship matter when it comes to voting, but race and sex by current law do not and ought not. But if we don't take into consideration a person's sex when it comes to the right to vote, it does not follow that the person is sexless. In general, if attribute A is instantiated by the members of a given population of individuals, and abstraction is made from A, it does not follow that the members of the population are indeterminate with respect to A.

So far, near-platitudes, unless my opponent questions my voting example which I fear he might. (If he does, then that discussion belongs in a separate thread.) We have yet to locate the bone of contention.

Are there "distinctive male and female abilities and interests"? I would say so, and I would add that they are not merely socially constituted. The biology of the female plays a role in the explanation of why women are more nurturing than men, more cooperative and conciliatory, make better real estate agents, but also why they are more emotional than men and why their political judgment is not as good. (I would argue, however, that the last two points are not reasons to withhold from women full voting rights.) So far, then, no disagreement. No disagreement with my conservative interlocutor, that is. I have already said enough to elicit howls of rage from the lunatic Left. Their howling, however, is music to my ears. Their destructive extremism only galvanizes the resoluteness of my opposition to them.

Does it follow that there are male and female 'identities'? Here is where it gets tricky and sticky. 'Identity' can be used in different ways. What is meant by 'identity 'here ? A stereotype? That is apparently what my sparring partner has in mind. I will assume that he agrees with me that stereotypes, most of them, or at least many of them, have a fundamentum in re and are true in the way that generic statements can be true. (It is surely true, for example, that Germans are more rule-bound and respectful of authority than Italians. See this list of generic statements.) Stereotypes are not, most of them, expressions of mindless bigotry or irrational hatred of the Other. What are truly mindless and irrational are liberal denials of this plain truth.

My opponent is going to agree with me that women as a group are more nurturing, caring, cooperative, conciliatory, averse to heated disagreement, better with children, etc., than men as a group. But that is a positive, accurate stereotype which not all women fit. Women are nurturing and Sally is a woman; it does not follow, however, that Sally is nurturing. 'Women are nurturing' is a generic statement: it cannot be replaced by a universal generalization such as 'Every woman is nurturing.' Sally is a chess-playing, nerdy engineer who works for Google, worships Ayn Rand, enjoys heated debate, and has no interest in children or in taking care of anybody. And all of this without prejudice to her being, and being essentially (as opposed to accidentally), a full-fledged biological female with the 'plumbing' and chromosomal make-up to prove it.

It may be that my opponent is conflating stereotype with identity. In one sense of 'identity,' the identity of a thing is what it is by nature, what it is essentially. Since Sally does not fit the gender stereotype, and yet is essentially biologically female, we ought not conflate identity with stereotype. (I am assuming a distinction between sex, which is a biological reality, and gender which, while it reflects sex, is in part socially determined. Anyone who elides the distinction I would have to consider very foolish indeed.)

My claim is that there are no "male and female 'identities'." There are male and female stereotypes and gender roles but no male and female identities. If there were a female identity or nature that included such stereotypical features as being nurturing, being conciliatory, shying away from heated argument, then every female would fit that identity; Sally does not fit the female identity; ergo, there is no female identity.

And because there is no female identity, if Sally so self-identifies, then her self-identification is a false self-identification. She falsely self-identifies if she so apperceives herself as to be nothing but an instance of that identity. And if we deny Sally her right to be a nerdy, chess-playing, Rand-reading, non-nurturing engineer, then we reduce her to a gender stereotype in violation of her true identity as a free, self-determining person. As an animal, Sally's biological identity or nature is essential to her; as a person, however, she is free to pursue engineering in defiance of the stereotype.

And the same goes for race. There are different races as a matter of biological-anthropological fact. (Race is not a mere social construct.) And there are different racial and ethnic stereotypes, accurate stereotypes, i.e., stereotypes with a basis in reality, some negative, some positive. But there is no white identity or black identity or Italian identity or Polish identity. Granted, I am essentially Caucasian and essentially of Italian ancestry; no change is possible in these respects. But there is no white identity that includes stereotypical features since there is no such identity had essentially by every biological white. Bear in mind that 'white' in this context does not refer to skin color but to race. It is a mistake to confuse race with skin color.

So I continue to maintain my thesis that, "for purposes of social harmony and political cooperation we had better not identify ourselves racially but in terms of attributes more conducive to comity." The opponent hasn't given me any good reason to abandon this thesis.

Is a reversion to tribalism, even if inevitable, something to be regretted, or is it healthy?

But then, in my critique of Prager, after listing some candidate attributes, I waxed pessimistic. For example, can we Americans identify for political purposes as Americans, as people committed to the values and principles enshrined in our founding documents? Obviously not. Too many of our fellow 'citizens' have no respect for these documents. The universities of the land are lousy with such people. There are leftist knuckleheads who speak of a 'living constitution,' which, of course, is no constitution at all. And in what sense are these fellow 'citizens' fellow citizens if they don't accept our great Constitution? Think of the liberal-left liberty-haters who call for the elimination of the Second Amendment.

"So I end with a dark thought: in the end tribalism wins."

Again I wonder why this is a dark thought. You seem to be considering the possibility that identities like 'citizen' or 'American' are too weak to form the basis for a healthy society. But suppose that's true. Then it's _good_ that people will eventually reject these identities in favor of some 'tribal' identity which could serve as a better basis for society–something that is more "conducive to comity". Suppose it's not true, and identities like 'citizen' are enough. Then it seems to me that people should be able to get along and share a society simply on the basis of being 'citizens' or 'Americans' while at the same time having distinct racial or tribal identities, just as they can share a society and get along despite having distinct identities based on sex and age.

Amazingly, my opponent thinks that tribalism is good and that tribal identification can unify us. I can't see that this makes any sense at all. So here we find a bone of serious contention! If we can no longer identify as citizens or Americans, it does not follow that tribal self-identification with the resultant Balkanization would be good.

I am saying that we conservatives, through inattention and inaction, have allowed things to get to the point where identities like 'citizen' and 'American' can no longer form the basis of a healthy society and polity. We are now in a very bad state of affairs. But tribalism makes things worse. The reversion to tribalism may be inevitable, but as I see it, it can't be good. Tribalism can't be the basis of comity or social harmony precisely because different tribes with different values and interests oppose one another. Furthermore, when we think and act tribally we fail to see important individual differences. Clearly, there are important differences between Clarence Thomas and Trayvon Martin, Jason Riley and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Walter E. Williams and Michael Brown. Coates is a despicable racist fool and an enemy, but I would love to have Riley and Williams and Thomas as next-door neighbors. No social harmony is likely to ensue if we lump all these blacks together as members of the opposing tribe. It is of course different in war. But we want to avoid war. Don't we?

I am saying that, as a matter of contingent fact, we are no longer united under an umbrella of shared values and principles, and that tribal identification will only make it worse. If, on the other hand, we were united under that 'umbrella,' then of course there would be no problem. We would be united publicly, and privately people could do their tribal thing.

Of course, there is a crucial disanalogy: Human nature is such that differences of sex and age occur naturally and inevitably within a given human community, since these are part of the basic structure of the extended family. By contrast, differences of race and ethnicity do not occur within the natural human community. On the contrary, since the natural community is based on the family and extended family, that kind of community eliminates racial or ethnic differences–any natural community ends up being a single racial-ethnic community.

So it's doubtful that racial difference and racial identity can be accepted as part of the normal structure of society in the way that these others already are. To the extent that racial and ethnic differences exist within a society, that society must be somewhat artificial; it must be made up of sub-cultures that have a stronger claim on the natural loyalties and identities of its members. Racial-ethnic differences are a primordial sign of Otherness, of Not Belonging–of potential danger and competition rather than safety and co-operation. We can try to pretend otherwise, but this is contrary to our own instincts, and it probably won't work in the long run. But, again, is this dark?

Well, intermarriage among different European ethnicities has worked hasn't it?

My opponent seems to be suggesting that racial/ethnic uniformity is essential for a well-functioning society. I don't buy it. Suppose blacks had never been brought as slaves to North America. The other racial and ethnic groups get along tolerably well. But the key is assimilation and commitment to a set of values and principles that transcend blood. Unfortunately, the Melting Pot is a thing of the past never to return. Leftists have destroyed it by exploiting racial tensions to forward their agenda. And of course we no longer agree on values and principles.

Horribile dictu, leftist filth are now attacking free speech!

Is invocation of Blut und Boden dark? I would say so. For one thing, blood ties and racial purity do not insure comity. I have more in common with Korean and Turkish philosophers than with anyone in my family. Consanguinity is no guarantee of spiritual affinity, and spiritual affinity can exist without consanguinity. We are told that "To the extent that racial and ethnic differences exist within a society, that society must be somewhat artificial; it must be made up of sub-cultures that have a stronger claim on the natural loyalties and identities of its members."

This begs the question by assuming what I argued against, namely, that there are ethnic and racial identities. Beside, the emphasis on narrow natural loyalties works against social harmony. That's the mentality of mafiosi. Social harmony requires a commitment to higher loyalties. John Gotti's children should have 'ratted out' their father. The Unabomber's brother was right to turn him in. He was acting under the inspiration of a higher loyalty.

Multi-culturalists and Leftists would say it's 'dark' to imagine shutting down mass immigration of Muslims into Europe–because for them, the attempt to force incompatible cultures together into some kind of incoherent mess seems good! But a conservative doesn't want to force people to live in weird new ways that (we think) go against human nature, so a conservative doesn't think it's 'dark' to imagine Muslims in Muslim lands, Christians in Christian lands, etc. Feminists think it's 'dark' to imagine a world where most women are focused on having kids and staying home to care for them, because they think the ideal is to have women be just like men in all respects; but a conservative thinks it's better to let the sexes live in ways they find natural, and so doesn't think this scenario is 'dark'. Of course, excessive tribalism is possible (and 'dark') but why not allow for some degree of tribalism? A sound conservative position, I think, is that society must provide people with healthy ways of expressing their instincts rather than forcing us to suppress them. Telling people they have to think of themselves as just 'citizens' or 'humans' is telling them to suppress some very powerful instincts. So (I think) conservatives should regard this as an oppressive and unhealthy policy.

We agree that allowing mass immigration of Muslims into Western lands is suicidal. This is because they don't, as a group, share our superior Western values and because they want to replace them with unenlightened Sharia-type values. It is not because of their being Turks or Arabs or whatever. (The few that do share our values can be allowed to immigrate.) And of course there is nothing 'dark' about traditional Muslims staying in their lands.

Nor is there anything 'dark' about women devoting themselves to the noble and difficult task of being good mothers and homemakers. The feminists who attack motherhood have a lot to answer for.

What I see as 'dark' is the racial self-identification on the identitarian Right. It amounts the deliberate erasure of one's unique personhood in favor of being an interchangeable token of an ethnic or racial type. (This has some connection to the Marxist notion of man as Gattungswesen, but I am not in a position to explain it clearly.) How can my identity reside in an attribute shared with billions of others?

My identity is what make me be me and no one else. It is therefore impossible to locate one's identity in being an interchangeable token of a racial type. For every token of a type, qua token of a type, is the same as every other one.

There is also a slippery slope consideration. If you identify as white, then why not as Southern white, and if Southern white, why not rural Southern white, and so on until you identify as a Hatfield or a McCoy?

Furthermore, race is part of my animality. So if I identity racially, then I identify myself as a particular instance of a particular race of animals. But I am more than an animal, and my true self cannot be located in my animality.

But now we move into metaphysics. This is unavoidable in a thorough discussion. But this entry is already too long. Tomorrow's another day.

Who am I? Personal Identity versus Identity Politics

I wrote:

. . . my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup. For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person.

My right-wing identitarian sparring partner reasonably objects:

This is puzzling to me. If I 'identify' myself as a man, or a human being, I don't think I'm reducing myself to anything. I'm just stating an obvious fact about myself or, if you prefer, myself qua mammal or living organism or something of the kind. Is there some contradiction or tension between 'I am a human being' or 'I am an animal' and 'I am a person'?

Later on in his comments he says that "to defend an identitarian position in politics" it is not necessary to engage with the metaphysics of personhood. I am inclined to disagree.

No Escaping Metaphysics

Concessions

Personalism and False Self-Identification

Not only does he reduce himself to a mere instance of one of his attributes, he reduces himself to a mere instance of one of his animal attributes. It is qua animal that he has a race, not qua person. But we are not mere animals; we are spiritual animals.

Such false self-identification is a form of spiritual self-degradation.

Connection with Identity Politics

But tribalism is tribalism whether black or white. Our only hope is to get beyond tribalism. (I am not sanguine.) But when I pointed this out to my interlocutor and some of his fellow travellers a year or so ago in these pages, I was shocked, SHOCKED (well, not really) to find them disagreeing me. They apparently think that whites need their own tribalism, their own White Pride, their own consciousness-raising.

This makes no sense to me. How can you take legitimate pride in what is merely an element of your facticity (in Sartre's Being and Nothingness sense of 'facticity.') You had to be born somewhere, to some pair of parents or other, of some race or other, of some sex, and so on. You're stuck with that. If you need to feel pride, feel pride in what you have done with your facticity, with what you have made of yourself, with the free accomplishments of yourself as a person, as an individual.

Common Human Good?

It is worth noting that one could be a white -identitarian without being a white-supremacist. One could hold that one's innermist identity as a person is racially constituted without holding that white identity is any better than black identity.

. . . any serious — that is, internally coherent — movement away from identity politics and toward a robust discourse of the common good requires that we reintroduce metaphysics into our politics. This entails granting theology a privileged place in the public square at a time when most of the left and the far right are loath to grant it any place at all.

Nihilism as the Common Root of Left and Right Identity Politics

Rod Dreher:

So, to recap: Justin Dean Lee rightly says we cannot have a politics of the common good without substantive agreement on what the Good is, or how it might be known. Liberalism, in both its classical and progressivist forms, is agnostic on that question, or at most assumes things (“all men are created equal”) that cannot be sustained absent a shared commitment to a metaphysical ideal. Last week in Paris, talking about these things with Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher said that he sees no exit for the French, because they have concluded as a society that there is no realm beyond the material. Most Americans would deny that they believe this, but that’s not the way we live, not even Christians. It is true that we Americans are not as far gone into atheism as the French are, so we still have time to recover. But to recover, you first have to recognize the problem. You first have to recognize that the way you are living as a Christian is not going to survive the prolonged encounter with liquid modernity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Spencer are both atheists who have found a strong source of belief in their respective races. Spencer, a Nietzschean, has said that Christianity is a religion of the weak. They have drawn the line between good and evil not down the middle of every human heart, as that great Christian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, but between their race and the Other. There is immense power in that kind of tribalism, and it lies in large part because it denies the fallenness of one’s own people. Where in contemporary American Christianity can we find the resources to resist falling prey to the malign power of racialism, in all its versions?

[. . .]

Only a strong Christianity can counter this nihilistic tribal religion. But this we do not have today.

A Version of Alt-Right Identitarianism

My right-wing identitarian sparring partner makes a good response to my attempt, earlier today, to locate a common root of both right-and left-wing identitarianism. My responses are in blue.

……………..

Wouldn't you agree, on reflection, that the bolded passage [from a NYT article] is a straw man?

"Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural."

A typical 'alt-right' identitarian in Europe or America believes things like this:

(a) race is real,

(b) race is an important part of human identity, and a natural basis for organizing society,

(c) racial differences have important political consequences,

(d) whites have the right to act in their own interest, e.g., by stopping immigration or defending the dominance of white European culture and norms in white European societies . . .

I accept, with qualifications, all four of these propositions. Much depends, of course, on what exactly they are taken to mean.

As for the first proposition, I accept it as it stands if it is the negation of the claim that racial differences are wholly a matter of social construction. Racial theories and classifications are of course social constructs; but these theories and classifications are attempts to understand an underlying biological reality. That there are biological differences between the races is as obvious as that there are such differences between men and women. These biological realities make it impossible for a person to change his race. See my response to Rebecca Tuvel's "In Defense of Transracialism."

As for the second proposition, I can accept it, but only with serious qualifications. I hold that a human being is a spiritual animal, and therefore not just an animal. My opponent will probably not accept this; my impression is that he is a naturalist. My theistic personalism is a version of anti-naturalism. As a personalist I maintain that race bears only upon my animal identity, WHAT I am as a bit of the world's fauna; not upon WHO I am as a person. Furthermore, my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup. For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person. See Is There a Defensible Sense in which Human Beings are Equal?

Of course, I don't expect my interlocutor to accept any of this if he is a naturalist. But then the discussion shifts to naturalism which comprises a set of questions logically prior to the present set.

With respect to the first half of (b), I would say that race is not an important part of my identity as a person, because it is not any part of my identity as a person, even though it is essential to my identity as an animal: I am not accidentally Caucasian any more than I am accidentally male. (Thus even if I pulled a Bruce Jenner and donned 'superdrag' apparel complete with surgically fabricated vagina, mammaries, etc, I would still remain biologically male. I would just be parading around in 'superdrag.' ) My opponent, if he is a naturalist who sees himself as identical to a living human animal, is committed not only to saying that race is an important part of human identity, but is essential to human identity.

The second half of (b) also requires qualification. First of all it is not clear what it means to say that race is a natural basis for organizing society. Is this supposed to rule out a 'proposition nation'? And what exactly is a 'proposition nation'? The Alt-Right seems adamantly opposed to such a thing. But the unity of the USA is not the unity of a tribe but the unity of a set of ideas. Those who accept these ideas are Americans regardless of whether they come from England or Germany or Italy, or Greece — or China. I grant, of course that certain ethnic groups are better equipped to implement American values and ideals than others. But that is consistent with the USA being a 'proposition nation.'

As for the third and fourth propositions, I agree. Racial differences do have political consequences, and immigration policy must be to the benefit of the host country and its culture. It would therefore be national suicide to allow the immigration into Western nations of sharia-supporting Muslims. But what about educated secular Turks who are religiously Muslim to about the same extent as a Boston Unitarian is Christian and bear some of the innocuous cultural marks of Muslims such as the valuing of modesty in women and an aversion to the consumption of alcohol? What could justify excluding them from immigrating?

An Identitarian is an Identitarian, Left or Alt-Right

And a pox on both houses, say I. What strikes me is what they have in common. Here is something from the NYT that makes sense (emphasis added):

In the most memorable sentence in “The First White President,” Mr. Coates declares, “Whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.” I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish.

This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural. For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a “talisman,” an “amulet” of “eldritch energies” that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a “meta-biological force,” a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring

I am not so sure the febrile, destructive bullshit of millionaire celebrity Coates is morally superior to white supremacism, but the bolded passage gets at the truth of the matter.

By the way, the bums at the NYT have made it difficult to copy from their articles, but here are two work-arounds. I just now employed the first and it is not too much of a pain.

Mirror Images

Leftist whining about 'cultural appropriation' and Alt-Right denial of the universality of certain cultural goods may be mirror images of each other. The shared assumption is that cultural goods are not universal but can be owned.

The theorem of Pythagoras has his name on it but neither he nor his descendants own it.

The same goes for the life-enhancing bourgeois values lately preached by Amy Wax.