Identity

Following on from the inauguration of Joe Biden yesterday there's been a lot of talk in the media about the concept of unity and togetherness. It's something that featured large in the various speeches and interviews taking place around the event. It relates, of course, to the lack of said virtues within the current population of the USA (and elsewhere) whether that be divisions between left and right, race, religion, cultures and so on, it could perhaps be summarized as a plea to end the scourge of identity politics. 

Simple logic dictates that the pursuit of "Policy by Identity" is ultimately doomed. If we make rules based on random immutable characteristics of people then we're faced with a bottomless pit of division and ever increasing inequality. It may start with somewhat obvious things like ethnicity but can only then evolve to much less objective things like sexuality and then to totally subjective things like poverty within ethnicity and sexuality and then post-code within poverty within ethnicity and so on and so on. Ever decreasing "identities" and nothing but division to the far horizon. This so called "intersectionality" theory is a path to ruin in my view, which ever way you cut things someone has to decide that one group is more important or deserving than another and that's fraught. 

A better approach is the classic liberal one, where it's not identity that's important, it's the individual. The individual is sovereign, and what we should all be striving toward is equality of opportunity (as opposed to equality of outcome) only then do we focus on our (overwhelmingly more numerous) similarities over our parochial (and often petty) differences. Of course a change in focus doesn't automatically mean we'll live in a world that's "fair", far from it, but what do we do? We can accept reality and try to raise the ocean, thereby raising all the boats, or we can just focus on the canoes and the dinghies, the history of our species so far would suggest that we're more successful when we do the former.

Clearly we need a left wing in our politics, we need a bunch of people concerned with compassion and fairness and equality, we have come too far in the last 200 years to abandon social safety nets and ideals of public utility and service. But, I do worry that the left in the UK and US are still firmly under the spell of identity politics, recent election results (i.e. a lurch to the right) suggest that they need to let it go and get back to worrying about people and equal opportunity rather than attempting to bludgeon equality of outcome into the system for tiny minorities. Often running counter to everything we know about Biology and Psychology. Biden and his cohorts seem to play lip service to this cult of identity to some extent, time will tell if this is purely symbolic or whether he really gets it.