The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

by Yascha Mounk

This is related to another serious worry about the effects that standpoint theory is likely to have in the real world: Its view of collective action gives short shrift to what true political solidarity entails.

Most people simply won’t be willing to delegate their judgment about what actions or policies they should support to a representative of a different group. They are especially unlikely to do so when they can’t understand the reasons for the demand or when they disagree with it based on their own moral or religious views.

The textiles most people think of as traditional West African cloths are known as Java prints; they arrived in the 19th century with the Javanese batiks sold, and often milled, by the Dutch.

This means that the artisans who created much of the cultural heritage of humanity were extremely unlikely to identify with the kinds of broad groups that are salient to us in mass societies embedded in a much more interconnected world. Rather than believing themselves to be part of the large ethnic or racial categories codified by the U.S. Census Bureau or the British Office for National Statistics, these artisans likely saw themselves as members of a specific indigenous tribe or as residents of a particular village.

The ability of people from different cultural backgrounds to inspire each other is one of the most attractive features of diverse societies. While genuine injustices motivate the opponents of cultural appropriation, we should proudly defend the joys of mutual cultural influence.

As John Stuart Mill pointed out during the Victorian era, society practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them. This is why a free society requires a genuine culture of free speech.

Because the culture of the United States is deeply suffused with white supremacy, even well-meaning whites treat their Black and brown compatriots in racist ways. Any race-blind policy would, they conclude, only serve to compound the fact of structural disadvantage with the fiction that it doesn’t exist.

Or, as the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel argues in The Tyranny of Merit, “even a fair meritocracy . . . induces the mistaken impression that we have made it on our own.” To break its tyranny, we must recognize that “the meritocratic ideal is not a remedy for inequality; it is a justification for inequality.”

This means that liberals must hold two beliefs in our heads at the same time. We should celebrate the way in which our principles have helped to bring about vast improvements in the world. And we should remember that liberalism is a force of progress, not of the status quo—vowing that we will continue to do what we can to bring the world into fuller alignment with our ideals.

At their best, philosophical liberals believe, humans are driven by their capability to make common cause with people who have different beliefs and origins rather than their membership in specific groups. People who hail from different parts of the world and now think of themselves as members of different identity groups can build real solidarity with each other. Universal values and neutral rules can make the world a better place if they are applied with conviction and implemented with care.

Over the past couple of years, many companies and nonprofit organizations have attracted public outrage for unfairly dismissing their employees or slandering their business partners; as a result, institutional leaders around the country are starting to recognize that giving in to moral panics on social media carries as much risk as refusing to do so.

The best way to avoid these pitfalls is to overcome the internalized feeling of shame. So when I notice that I feel nervous about arguing for a position that is unpopular among many of my friends and colleagues (as I have in parts of this book), I remind myself that I am proud of the views I hold. I have thought about them long and hard. They are rooted in a noble tradition that has done a tremendous amount of good for the world.

A similar danger now confronts some critics of the identity trap. Its opponents are united by what they oppose, not by what they endorse. This creates a temptation to outsource their moral judgments to their opponents.

The identity trap seduces complex people into seeing themselves as wholly defined by external characteristics whose combinations and permutations, however numerous, will never amount to a satisfactory depiction of their innermost selves. Its supposedly validating focus on our identity as a product of the various group attributes into which we are born leaves little space for the individual tastes and idiosyncratic temperaments that actually make us unique.

The identity trap poses serious dangers. It undermines important values like free speech. Its misguided applications have proven deeply counterproductive in areas from education to medicine. If implemented at scale, it won’t provide the foundation for a fair and tolerant society; it will inspire a zero-sum competition between mutually hostile identity groups.

We should keep striving for a society in which categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation matter a lot less than they do now because what each of us can accomplish—and how we all treat each other—no longer depends on the groups into which we were born. We must not let the identity trap lure us into giving up on a future in which what we have in common finally comes to be more important than what divides us.

As I showed in part I, it simply isn’t true that the main intellectual roots for the identity synthesis are Marxist. On the contrary, its original impetus stems from postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard who were deeply concerned about what they called “grand narratives,” including both liberalism and Marxism, that then enjoyed a strong hold over intellectual life in Paris.