Yascha Mounk discusses some of the ways in which focussing on gender, racial, and sexual identities can distort political argument and be counterproductive for oppressed minorities.
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We all have various identities, ethnic, class, religious identities based on our passions or values, upbringing, and much else besides.
These identities frame our lives.
They provide them with meaning.
But according to Yascha Munk, what should be a healthy relationship with particular identities has become an obsession, a sickness.
Yashemuk, welcome to philosophy bites.
Thank you so much.
The topic we're going to talk about is the identity trap.
What is the identity trap?
Well, I think over the last decades we've had the rise of a new set of ideas about race and gender and sexual orientation that have really transformed how the left thinks about those issues and had increasing influence in mainstream institutions as well.
This trap has a lure, which is to say that it is a set of ideas which claims that they are the most radical, the most consistent in fighting against injustices that are all too real, against forms of discrimination that clearly still characterize our societies.
But they actually reject other traditions of how to fight for a more just society, including those that have inspired the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement for a long time.
And as a result, I think that they are a trap.
They end up being counterproductive.
And we have seen in the last years how the norms inspired by these ideas have made it harder for progressive institutions to function and serve their important missions, have inspired pedagogical practices that teach children to conceive of themselves as racial beings, to see the most important thing about themselves as being the particular group into which we're born.
And I even think that it's a political trap because it ultimately helps rather than harms the far right populists around the world who remain a very serious danger to our democratic institutions.
Just before we get into identity a bit deeper, could you give an example of the kind of tradition that's been rejected by people who you think have fallen for the identity trap?