Category: How to think Page 13 of 22

Identity is not nonsense.

The stats on rape or attempted rate for women are somewhere between one in four and one in six. Those are high stats.

Women earn less money than men in general. Yes, an unmarried, white professional woman without children probably does as well or even better than an equivalent male, but a lot of women want to get married or have children and not suffer financially for it. (Males do better when married.)

If you are black, you get about half the interview request from resumes that a white would on the same resume. You are subject to “driving while black.” For the exact same crime, you are more likely to be arrested, you are more likely to be convicted, and, if convicted, you will almost certainly suffer a greater penalty than a white would.

As a result, you have interests in common with other people with the same ethnicity. This is true of males, whites, Latinos, and so on. White males are an identity group with shared interests.

Identity is not a bad parser of interest. You do have interests in common with the average person of the same identity. Especially given identities which usually cannot be chosen like your biological sex or your skin color.

There are three issues with identity and interest.

The first is that not everyone who has the same identity markers as you puts their identity as their most important interest. Obama is black. He has done very little for blacks as blacks.  There are plenty of woman politicians who do nothing for other women, including on basic women’s issues- like abortion.

This is the second issue. Identity as, say, evangelical Christians may be more important to them, or they may simply be acting out of more narrow self-interest.

Since it is the topic du jour, let’s discuss Sanders and Clinton.

Bernie is as good as Clinton in feminist issues, better on race issues (at least according to Black Lives Matters and, well, Clinton’s record), and better on economic issues.

There is a tendency to assume clustering. If a person is a lesbian (in Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, in the US, Liz Cheney), many assume she is also a left-winger in general. Wynne has been very good on gay issues in Ontario, but she is terrible on economic issues. She is a neo-liberal economically, a left-winger socially.

This is super common. Clinton is a left-winger for women, and a conservative for pretty much everything else. She has no actual beliefs on non-female social issues. If it is politically expedient, she’ll talk about black super predators and support terrible criminal policies which punish blacks. She’ll be against gay marriage. But she’ll be for this stuff, too, if she thinks it’s expedient.

Identity does not have to cluster. It is less likely to cluster in important people, who identity strongly with other important people.

This leads to the third issue: You have interests as your primary identity, but you have other interests with which you may not identify as strongly (or not strongly enough to vote or act on them).

Poor whites who want to keep down ethnicities and thus vote hard conservative are hurting their economic class interests, yes. But they are competing with new immigrants for a lot of the same bad jobs. Business owners whine that native born Americans don’t want shitty jobs, but they’ll do them if they pay more, and are treated better. Minus immigrants, a lot of jobs that couldn’t be moved overseas would have to pay more and treat people better.

This is not irrational. It is based on daily lived experience. It is, I believe, a mistake.  Immigration is a secondary effect, and there are better ways to make labor markets tight, which generally involve what an economic left-winger would call “class solidarity.”

From an identity point of view, class solidarity is just taking your class identity as a primary interest.

Still, there is no question, you can hurt yourself really, really badly by parsing the world in identity terms. Most of the people who voted for Clinton in the primary will do worse under her than they would have with Bernie as President.

Clinton can be expected to continue neo-liberal policies. Under Obama, those policies made only about the top three to five percent of the US population better off. If you aren’t in that class, Bernie is a better bet. Again, he’s as good as Clinton on women’s issues, and better on race and economics.

Most people don’t think this way. They don’t go the extra steps. They choose a primary identity, assume anyone else with the markers is like them, and vote on that identity.

They may also simply decide that the identity IS more important than their other interests. I doubt most Clinton supporters would admit “I”ll lose money under Clinton, a lot more people will die overseas, but I think having a woman as President is more important because it will change how people think about gende–even if Bernie’s policies were every bit as good.”

Most wouldn’t, but some certainly do. And that is the implicit argument.

If you want to change behaviour, your job is to change the cluster with whom people identity. This isn’t some post-modern realization; communists, socialists, and Marxists have been obsessed with this issue for as long as they have existed (read Mobilization theory for the Marxist/Conflict Theory take).

People use shorthands to think. They mostly don’t think, actually–they use emotion to make decisions. This is a really good way to make decisions as a hunter-gatherer in a band where you’ve known everyone since you or they were born, whichever is shorter, and where most decisions are about environments you know very well and where, if you fuck up, you’re very likely dead.

It is a bad way to make decisions in our world, where you don’t really know important people, where most decisions will kill you years down the road, not now, and where lots of people are effectively con-artists using your mental shortcuts to fleece you.

Being gay, or female, or colored is a really strong asset when dealing with most modern left-wing types because they tend to assume clustering, discount sell-outs and not understand that their assumptions are being used against them by con-artists.

This is the critique of modern identity. That it has led to a lot of bad decisions about who to trust and that biological marker identity is often not the most important identity.

Is that right? I suppose it depends. Some groups have done very well in this era–gays, for example.

But others, like women in the US (losing effective abortion treatment, but a general reduction in rape), have mixed records; while still others have done terribly over the last few decades (African Americans). The Black Congressional Caucus has been particularly bad for poor blacks, and includes some of the biggest recipients of, for example, payday loan industry money.

Visible identity is a terrible parser of whether someone will act in your interests, especially if you assume clustering. This is especially true when someone has a record, like Clinton and Sanders do. We know who they are, because they have very long records.

So, identity is basic to humans. It is a way of quickly making sense of the world and choosing who you can trust because they have interests and experiences in common with you. But it has serious limits. It is subject to manipulation. And which identity you take as primary is very important if you’re going to make decisions based on identity.

Women are right to think men keep them down; blacks are right to think that whites keep them down; gays that straight people are a problem.

Etc.

But that does not always mean that someone who has the visible signs of that identity will act on those interests when in power (i.e., Blacks and Obama). Even if it does, it does not mean they will act on clustered interests (economic, local, your industry).

Those interests might, an outside observer would think, outweigh the pure identity interests. If you lose your job and wind up on the street, an economic populist might point out, the rest of it is crap.

But for those who are trying to change how people act, the real lesson of identity is that changing how people think about identity matters.

And perhaps the other lesson is to teach people just not to trust anything powerful people say, but instead watch what they do, because powerful people are far more likely to be con-artists than Jane or Joe on the street.