‘The Identity Trap’: How ‘Woke’ Hit the Big Time
A review of ‘The Identity Trap’, by Yascha Mounk; Penguin, 2023.
You know, reader, I really hesitated before writing the title of this post. Because I am not wild about the term ‘woke’. I think it is vague, and I find that most of the time it is used as a catch-all insult levelled at any progressive cause deemed undesirable, and even at reasonable, good-faith attempts to have a frank conversation about race, for instance, or gender. So, to the extent that it is worth clarifying ideas and systems of ideas, and understanding who we are and how we think, it is fairly useless; and Yascha Mounk, a German-American political scientist and the author of The Identity Trap, would seem to agree. He prefers to describe the hodgepodge of views that characterise some on the political left, (and wind up many on the political right), as ‘the identity synthesis’, which is less catchy and more wordy than ‘woke’ — but perhaps a better designation.
In the opening chapters, Yascha traces the history of this ‘synthesis’. A commonly held view is that it is essentially Marxist, but with identity in place of class. Disappointed by the triumph of capitalism over socialism and, moreover, the failure of the working class in some countries to, if you like, throw off their chains, those sympathetic to the vision of human nature in which Marxist thought is rooted have turned their attention to identity. Hence ‘cultural Marxism’.
A commonly held view is that it is essentially Marxist, but with identity in place of class.
But this is wrong, says Yascha. The synthesis sprang not from Marxism but from thinkers like Michel Foucault, Edward Saïd, Derrick Bell and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Foucault, because he proposed that institutions and social norms wield power that shapes how we think about ourselves; Saïd, because he argued that Western depictions of Eastern cultures inform how people in those cultures are seen; Bell, because he denounced the beliefs of the Civil Rights Movement and proposed that the interests of white people drove racial progress; and Spivak, who said that treating race, gender, sexuality, and other identities as fixed, despite believing them to be social constructed, was permissible for the purpose of achieving political ends.
But these ideas did not simply appear in the public square. It is thanks to social media in general, and Tumblr in particular, that marginal ideas about identity found their way into the mainstream. Yascha argues that on Tumblr, communities spontaneously formed around increasingly specific identities: he gives the example of ‘demisexual’, which describes one who only feels sexually attracted to someone after forming a close emotional relationship with him. Tumblr users, most of them teenagers, discovered that they could now self-identify as this or that and find others who felt similarly. That Tumblr generation soon reached university age, and by the 2010s, the identity synthesis had taken hold on American college campuses. Students at these colleges perceived identity as central to social and political life; and when they graduated and found jobs in the corporate world and in the media, they took this view with them, spreading the synthesis to those domains.
The Tumblr generation soon reached university age, and by the 2010s, the identity synthesis had taken hold on American college campuses.
Yascha, as will probably have guessed by now, is troubled by all of this. He is troubled, in particular, but what he perceives as the closing down of honest conversation, by the branding of natural cultural exchange as ‘appropriation’ and by the punishment of dissenters from the identity synthesis. His central theme — or central claim — is that in respect of values, universalism is preferable to relativism. Dr. King exhorted the American people to look past race to the content of one’s character; the champions of CRT, Yascha claims, say we ought to do the opposite – that we ought to stress identity, at least in the first instance, over the individual. Consequently, we have parents asking headmasters to put their child in a class with children of the same race — in other words, to segregate kids of different races. Yascha views this as a step backwards. We must overcome our divisions, not entrench them, he says, and emphasise not what is different about us, but our common humanity.
Yascha avoids the clotted prose that characterises so much academic writing, but his book is quite academic in some ways nonetheless: he opens with an unnecessary description of what each chapter will concern (is that not what the contents is for?) and so on. Some of his sentences run on a bit long, too — so long, in fact, the guy who reads the audiobook version sometimes has difficulty reading them. It is perhaps too thorough; but then again, my perception may spring from having witnessed the changes he describes, in the form of news reporting, in real time. Otherwise it is a readable book, and Yascha wears what must be quite extensive learning lightly while also wrapping his details in a narrative. We are told, for instance, about the debate between Chomsky and Foucault, who is the closest thing to a villain that this story has. Chomsky was appalled by Foucault’s refusal to set out any kind of positive vision for the political left, later saying he had ‘never encountered someone so completely amoral.’ Little stories like this bring the thing to life.
Chomsky was appalled by Foucault’s refusal to set out any kind of positive vision for the political left.
It seems to me that identity politics is an odd term, for it suggests that only some of us think about politics in terms of our identity. All politics, in fact, is about identity; indeed all philosophy — it is at least arguable — is to some extent about identity. (Per Plotinus: ‘But we; who are we?’) Moreover, conservatives — those most likely to condemn identity politics — are especially concerned with identity. An intellectual hero of mine, Michael Oakeshott, wrote in his beautiful essay ‘On Being Conservative’ that ‘a conservative is one who is attached to his identity’. Sir Roger Scruton said that what the conservative wished to conserve, at bottom, was the ‘first-personal plural’: the ‘we’.
So we cannot escape questions of personal and collective identity, it seems to me, and if that is the case (as one argument runs) perhaps we need collective ‘umbrella’ identities spacious enough and flexible enough to include many other identities. For without a big-tent, collective identity — something anathema to liberalism, which calls us to invent ourselves (something I hold to be impossible) — we are liable to go looking for labels. Martin Seligman, the psychologist, says that this has historically been provided by the nation or family, though he is not necessarily saying we ought to exalt them for that reason. In any case, adopting the identity of ‘human being’ manifestly does not work for many people. But getting into this is really beyond the scope of my review. What isn’t is to say that this is an interesting, well-researched, sometimes slightly alarming book that urges its readers to avoid what the author perceives as the divisive narrative of a new, illiberal and identitarian left, and embrace what he sees as the universalist, if imperfect, worldview of the liberal left instead. As to whether you agree with him — well, that is up to you.
