James Lindsay has been hated on the left for some time because he’s been actively involved in ridiculing the woke left. He’s recently become somewhat similarly hated by some on the right as he’s spent the last few months talking about the “woke right.” I haven’t engaged in any of those battles online but today I came across this article in which Lindsay tries to define our modern politics as boiling down to three basic views of the self which then sometimes (often) become pathological and become extreme. It’s an interesting argument and I think our readers will enjoy mulling it over as much as I did.
First, he starts from the idea that political discussions are often derailed because they are not simply about facts but about identity.
Most of the time, everyone believes they’re talking about the facts, the “what’s happening” level of conversation, but sometimes they’re really talking about something deeper. Emotions are deeper than facts in human relationships (so, indeed, it is that feelings don’t care about your facts), and identity is even deeper still—imagine the effect “Woke” identity politics has here, then…
An incredible amount of the sociopolitical dysfunction we have experienced over the last highly polarized and insane decade (and beyond) can be attributed to this fact—and that everything is identity now, and every identity is political now too.
Lindsay isn’t adopting the idea that the personal is political (which he calls the most toxic doctrine in the universe) but he is suggesting that the political may be personal. In other words, we have sorted ourselves by identity and those identities are the things we really care about in our political arguments, our skin in the game if you will.
From there he moves on to the idea that while we mostly talk about left vs. right, there are actually three fundamental views of identity (and thus politics), not two.
Take, for example, the idea that our political spectrum is “Left” and “Right.” Where are Liberals on that spectrum? The Right will tell us they’re Left; the Left will tell us they’re Right; and Liberals themselves will tell you we’re neither and that both Left and Right are lunatics. Hicks could step in and explain this easily, even if the example is simple. “Left and Right” isn’t an adequate model for describing political reality because where we think there are two sides there are actually three positions that have fundamentally different commitments, not just on political views but also on fundamental, deep issues of philosophical orientation like epistemology and metaphysics.
Those three identities/politics are left, right and liberal. And Lindsay defines those in terms of what they fundamentally believe about the self. It’s a lengthy discussion so I’ll summarize.
- Leftism believes in the self-defined self, a self which can be created without reference to the received order of religion, nation, tribe, family, etc. An obvious example of this would be trans identity which is very much a self-defined identity which willing rejects everything up to and including the concept of biological sex.
- Conservatives by contrast believe in the received-self. Man is “the product of a vast system of people, place, and tradition, none of it of his choosing, and it is up to him to receive this selfhood and grow into its duties and expectations.”
- Finally, Liberalism is what he calls the “discovered self.” He writes, “Liberals believe there’s a self and that there are true things that can be known about it, even if that’s somewhat open-ended, so as we look around the world and experience some things for ourselves, we discover who we are, sometimes by experiment and sometimes by observation and most frequently by unconsidered intuition operating on autopilot as it tends to do.”
What’s interesting is that this definition of politics in terms of identity does seem to explain why both the left and the right have a habit of seeing liberals as part of the other team. From the right’s perspective, liberalism is just a less aggressive rejection of the “received-self.” They are still taking a choose-your-own adventure approach to morality, they just aren’t as hostile or confident about it as the far left.
From the left’s perspective, liberalism is not willing to abandon or repudiate tradition in a way that makes them something like collaborationists with conservatives. They are still the enemy, just a less dogmatic enemy than the right. Liberals are effectively the swing-voters of identity and politics, moving left or right on a case-by-case basis.
Here’s Lindsay’s summary of his views.
To summarize and state my thesis, then, it is this. Political identity is preceded by deeper philosophies of self that vary across at least the three major political dispositions, namely Conservatism, Liberalism, and Leftism…People who land clearly in each of these broad political camps do so, I insist, at least partly because they understand themselves accordingly first. That is, Conservatives are Conservatives because they believe the self, itself, is a Received Self; Liberals are Liberals because they believe the self, itself, is a Discovered Self; and Leftists are Leftists because they believe the self, itself, is a Self-defined Self.
Finally, the rest of the article turns to the idea of pathology. What happens when each of these ideologies becomes bent on power and domination of the other two? He sees these as three pathological identities which create pathological politics: Marxism, Fascism and Technocracy.
In Marxism, it is the enlightened few who truly understand liberation who must rule over everyone else until they believe in it too. Then it will work this time. In Fascism, it is those who understand the necessity of what the Nazis called the Führerprinzip, a pyramidal top-down structure of absolute authority, to the right ordering of society and its progress into an ideal future. Under technocracy, the scientists—or the artificial intelligence—must rule all because it’s the only thing logical enough. All three are doomsday projects for the overwhelming majority in their societies.
Linsdsay argues that in each case, the pathological identity becomes convinced that only their ideology (excluding the others) can lead to the ultimate utopia, For conservatives this is heaven on earth, a perfect hierarchy creating a perfect order. For liberals this is the egalitarian Marxism without state or class and everyone is liberated to do whatever they want all the time. And for liberals utopia is some mix of the two, perhaps a Star Trek future in which there is logical hierarchy and duty but no money or need.
Of course it’s not necessary that any particular view has to proceed to what Lindsay sees as the pathological state. At the same time he’s not entirely optimistic.
I present this model in the hopes of opening avenues for more and better discussion about the circumstances we find ourselves in, which are increasingly unpleasant, perhaps because of our short understanding and tendency toward tribalistic collapse of the bigger picture.
My own reaction, as someone who once considered himself a leftist (long ago) but has long considered himself a conservative is that the connection between identity and politics seems right to me. We don’t choose our politics based solely on facts but also to some degree on what resonates with us as people. It’s why it’s so often true that a conservative is just a liberal who has been mugged. Everyone wants to self-define their own reality when they are young (to some degree) but after you bang your head into the brick wall of actual reality a few times you learn that you can’t always do that. At some points you probably do have to conform yourself to some of the expectations of your fellow men and women if you ever hope to a) have a job, b) have a spouse and c) stay out of prison.
For me the appeal of the right is not dogmatic demands for conformity but the idea that certain structures survive over time because they work and solve/avoid a lot of potential problems. We may have forgotten what problems some of those structures are solving over the centuries, but that doesn’t mean we should kick out the foundations without thinking it over.
Put another way, the received wisdom isn’t always right but it probably deserves a presumption of value if it’s been around for a long, long time, kind of like the social equivalent of stare decisis in the law. Sometimes we need to break precedent, but not quickly and not often. Some real weight needs to be given to the length of time certain understandings of the social order have been held by people.
That enrages the left but we’ve seen plenty of examples of their approach lately and the results haven’t been good. If we just defund the police everything will be great! Once they convince a few fellow travelers to do that it all goes to hell. It turns out they hadn’t thought about it very carefully, if at all. This is true of many things the left believes they can abruptly change/do away with. It’s why Ezra Klein book about left-wing competence is necessary at this moment.
In the broadest sense, the fact that we have these massive societies that mostly work and mostly make life better for billions of people around the globe is a miracle. Progress can and should happen but at a pace that doesn’t threaten to collapse everything of value we’ve built to this point.
