Maverick Philosopher

Who Am I? Personal Identity versus Political Identity

Preliminary note: what has been exercising me lately is the question whether there is a deep common root to the political identitarianism of the Left and the Right, and if there is, what this root is. Nihilism, perhaps?

I wrote:

. . . my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup.  For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person.

My right-wing identitarian sparring partner reasonably objects:

This is puzzling to me.  If I 'identify' myself as a man, or a human being, I don't think I'm reducing myself to anything.  I'm just stating an obvious fact about myself or, if you prefer, myself qua mammal or living organism or something of the kind.  Is there some contradiction or tension between 'I am a human being' or 'I am an animal' and 'I am a person'? 

Later on in his comments he says that "to defend an identitarian position in politics" it is not necessary to engage with the metaphysics of personhood.  I am inclined to disagree.

No Escaping Metaphysics

As I see it, practical politics presupposes political philosophy which presupposes normative ethics which presupposes philosophical anthropology which is a discipline of special metaphysics. Philosophical anthropology, in turn, finds its place within general metaphysics.  Rationally informed political action requires a theory of the human good that needs to be grounded in a theory of human nature which itself needs embedding in a comprehensive metaphysics.  And if the political action is to be truly ameliorative, then the theory of human nature had better be correct. For example, the terrible scourge on humanity that Communism has proven to be flows from the Left's false understanding of human nature.

Concessions

But before getting in too deep, let me concede some points to my interlocutor.  I concede that if he tells me he is a Caucasian male, then there is an innocuous  sense of 'identify' according to which he has identified himself as Causasian and male, and that in so doing he needn't be 'reducing' himself to anything in any pejorative sense. He is simply giving me information about his sex and his ancestry.  He is simply pointing out a couple of his attributes.

By the same token, he can identify himself as a citizen of this country or that, a member of this political party or that, an adherent of this religion or that, or an adherent of no religion at all.  And so on for a long list of essential and accidental attributes: military veteran? blood type? Social Security number?   Take larger and larger conjunctions of these attributes and you get closer and closer to zeroing  in on the individuating identity of a particular human animal in society, that which distinguishes him from every other human animal.

Personalism and False Self-Identification

But what I am getting at is something different. Not WHAT  I am objectively viewed in my animal and social features, but WHO I am as a person, as a unique conscious and self-conscious subject of experience and as a morally responsible free agent, as an I who can address a Thou and be addressed in turn by an I. (M. Buber)  I am a subject for whom there is a world and not merely an object in the physical and social worlds.

The question concerns the 'true self,' WHO I am at the deepest level. Who am I? A mere token of a type? But that is all I would be if I were to identify myself in terms of my race.  This is one example of what I am calling a false self-identification.  A tribal black who identifies himself in his innermost ipseity as black has reduced himself to a mere token of a racial type, a mere instance of it, when being an interchangeable token cannot possibly be what makes him the unique person that he is.  After all, there are many tokens of the type, black human being. 

Not only does he reduce himself to a mere instance of one of his attributes, he reduces himself to a mere instance of one of his animal attributes.  It is qua animal that he has a race, not qua person. But we are not mere animals; we are spiritual animals.   

Such false self-identification is a form of spiritual self-degradation.

And the same goes for whites who seek their true identity in their racial 'identity.' That is a false self-identification because who I am as this unique individual cannot be reduced to being a repeatable and interchangeable token of a type.  The reason, again, is that (i) there are indefinitely many tokens of the type, white human animal, but there is exactly one me, and (ii) a self-identification in terms of a bodily attribute pertains to my animality but not to my spirituality.  

Suppose I address a black man or woman as a person. When I do that I am precisely not confronting an instance of black human animal with all the stereotypes that go with it. I am then attempting an I-Thou relation with the black man or woman and not an I-It relation with an instance of black human animal. I am showing respect for the person.

There are many types of false self-identification and I oppose them all. On the present occasion I come out against racial self-identification. You cannot be in your innermost ipseity (selfhood) white or black, and any such self-identification is false. Now what does this have to do with identity politics?

Connection with Identity Politics

First of all, what is identity politics?  Logically prior question: What is politics? Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere. Human flourishing is not possible apart from social interaction and when that interaction is public, as opposed to private, we are in the political sphere. Such interaction is both cooperative and conflictual. So perhaps we can say that politics aims at maximizing cooperation and minimizing conflict within a given society for the benefit of all involved.

Identity politics, however, is not concerned primarily with the promotion of the common human good within the public sphere but with the empowering of particular factions within it.  An oppressed group will seek power to alleviate its oppression. Think of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA in the '50s and '60s. The identity politics of that movement was understandable and probably necessary for blacks to make the progress they did.  Blacks exhorted each other to stand tall and take pride in being black.  Some of us are old enough to remember the "Black is beautiful" bumper stickers of that era.

Before long the Civil Rights movement turned into a hustle with race-hustlers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton leading the pack. Long story short, the instrumentally necessary identity politics of the Civil Rights movement came to displace politics in its proper sense which has to aim at comity and the common good and not at the appeasing of aggrieved parties.  No surprise, then, at the rise of white resistance to the excesses and absurdities of Affirmative Action with its reverse discrimination, minority set-asides, and race-norming.

But tribalism  is tribalism whether black or white. Our only hope is to get beyond tribalism.  (I am not sanguine that we can get beyond it.) But when I pointed this out to my interlocutor and some of his fellow travellers some years ago in these pages,  I was shocked, SHOCKED (well, not really) to find them disagreeing with me. They apparently think that whites need their own tribalism, their own White Pride, their own consciousness-raising.

This makes no ultimate sense to me. (It makes some proximate and pro tempore sense as a reactive gesture of self-defense.) How can you take legitimate pride in what is merely an element of your facticity (in Sartre's Being and Nothingness sense of 'facticity.')  You had to be born somewhere, to some pair of parents or other, of some race or other, of some sex, and so on.  You're stuck with that. If you need to feel pride, feel pride in what you have done with your facticity, with what you have made of yourself, with the free accomplishments of yourself as a person, as an individual.

Common Human Good?

I wrote, "Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere." But can we agree on what the common human good is? Not if we are identity-political in our approach.  Can we even agree that there is such a thing as the common human good? Not if we are identity-political. 

If who I am at the deepest level of the self is a white man, if my race is constitutive of my very innermost ipseity, then I have nothing fundamentally in common with blacks. But then conflict can be avoided only by racial segregation.

It is worth noting that one could be a white-identitarian without being a white-supremacist.  One could hold that one's innermost identity as a person is racially constituted without holding that white identity is any better than black identity.

I hope it is becoming clear that we cannot avoid in these discussions what my sparring partner calls "heavy-duty metaphysics." Whether you affirm or deny a common human good, you are doing metaphysics.  And if metaphysics gets in, theology is sure to follow. Justin Dean Lee in his review of Mark Lilla writes, 

. . . any serious — that is, internally coherent — movement away from identity politics and toward a robust discourse of the common good requires that we reintroduce metaphysics into our politics. This entails granting theology a privileged place in the public square at a time when most of the left and the far right are loath to grant it any place at all.

Nihilism as the Common Root of Left and Right Identity Politics

Rod Dreher:

So, to recap: Justin Dean Lee rightly says we cannot have a politics of the common good without substantive agreement on what the Good is, or how it might be known. Liberalism, in both its classical and progressivist forms, is agnostic on that question, or at most assumes things (“all men are created equal”) that cannot be sustained absent a shared commitment to a metaphysical ideal. Last week in Paris, talking about these things with Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher said that he sees no exit for the French, because they have concluded as a society that there is no realm beyond the material. Most Americans would deny that they believe this, but that’s not the way we live, not even Christians. It is true that we Americans are not as far gone into atheism as the French are, so we still have time to recover. But to recover, you first have to recognize the problem. You first have to recognize that the way you are living as a Christian is not going to survive the prolonged encounter with liquid modernity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Spencer are both atheists who have found a strong source of belief in their respective races. Spencer, a Nietzschean, has said that Christianity is a religion of the weak. They have drawn the line between good and evil not down the middle of every human heart, as that great Christian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, but between their race and the Other. There is immense power in that kind of tribalism, and it lies in large part because it denies the fallenness of one’s own people. Where in contemporary American Christianity can we find the resources to resist falling prey to the malign power of racialism, in all its versions?

[. . .]

Only a strong Christianity can counter this nihilistic tribal religion. But this we do not have today. 

Preliminary note: what has been exercising me lately is the question whether there is a deep common root to the political identitarianism of the Left and the Right, and if there is, what this root is. Nihilism, perhaps?

I wrote:

. . . my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup.  For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person.

My right-wing identitarian sparring partner reasonably objects:

This is puzzling to me.  If I 'identify' myself as a man, or a human being, I don't think I'm reducing myself to anything.  I'm just stating an obvious fact about myself or, if you prefer, myself qua mammal or living organism or something of the kind.  Is there some contradiction or tension between 'I am a human being' or 'I am an animal' and 'I am a person'? 

Later on in his comments he says that "to defend an identitarian position in politics" it is not necessary to engage with the metaphysics of personhood.  I am inclined to disagree.

No Escaping Metaphysics

As I see it, practical politics presupposes political philosophy which presupposes normative ethics which presupposes philosophical anthropology which is a discipline of special metaphysics. Philosophical anthropology, in turn, finds its place within general metaphysics.  Rationally informed political action requires a theory of the human good that needs to be grounded in a theory of human nature which itself needs embedding in a comprehensive metaphysics.  And if the political action is to be truly ameliorative, then the theory of human nature had better be correct. For example, the terrible scourge on humanity that Communism has proven to be flows from the Left's false understanding of human nature.

Concessions

But before getting in too deep, let me concede some points to my interlocutor.  I concede that if he tells me he is a Caucasian male, then there is an innocuous  sense of 'identify' according to which he has identified himself as Causasian and male, and that in so doing he needn't be 'reducing' himself to anything in any pejorative sense. He is simply giving me information about his sex and his ancestry.  He is simply pointing out a couple of his attributes.

By the same token, he can identify himself as a citizen of this country or that, a member of this political party or that, an adherent of this religion or that, or an adherent of no religion at all.  And so on for a long list of essential and accidental attributes: military veteran? blood type? Social Security number?   Take larger and larger conjunctions of these attributes and you get closer and closer to zeroing  in on the individuating identity of a particular human animal in society, that which distinguishes him from every other human animal.

Personalism and False Self-Identification

But what I am getting at is something different. Not WHAT  I am objectively viewed in my animal and social features, but WHO I am as a person, as a unique conscious and self-conscious subject of experience and as a morally responsible free agent, as an I who can address a Thou and be addressed in turn by an I. (M. Buber)  I am a subject for whom there is a world and not merely an object in the physical and social worlds.

The question concerns the 'true self,' WHO I am at the deepest level. Who am I? A mere token of a type? But that is all I would be if I were to identify myself in terms of my race.  This is one example of what I am calling a false self-identification.  A tribal black who identifies himself in his innermost ipseity as black has reduced himself to a mere token of a racial type, a mere instance of it, when being an interchangeable token cannot possibly be what makes him the unique person that he is.  After all, there are many tokens of the type, black human being. 

Not only does he reduce himself to a mere instance of one of his attributes, he reduces himself to a mere instance of one of his animal attributes.  It is qua animal that he has a race, not qua person. But we are not mere animals; we are spiritual animals.   

Such false self-identification is a form of spiritual self-degradation.

And the same goes for whites who seek their true identity in their racial 'identity.' That is a false self-identification because who I am as this unique individual cannot be reduced to being a repeatable and interchangeable token of a type.  The reason, again, is that (i) there are indefinitely many tokens of the type, white human animal, but there is exactly one me, and (ii) a self-identification in terms of a bodily attribute pertains to my animality but not to my spirituality.  

Suppose I address a black man or woman as a person. When I do that I am precisely not confronting an instance of black human animal with all the stereotypes that go with it. I am then attempting an I-Thou relation with the black man or woman and not an I-It relation with an instance of black human animal. I am showing respect for the person.

There are many types of false self-identification and I oppose them all. On the present occasion I come out against racial self-identification. You cannot be in your innermost ipseity (selfhood) white or black, and any such self-identification is false. Now what does this have to do with identity politics?

Connection with Identity Politics

First of all, what is identity politics?  Logically prior question: What is politics? Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere. Human flourishing is not possible apart from social interaction and when that interaction is public, as opposed to private, we are in the political sphere. Such interaction is both cooperative and conflictual. So perhaps we can say that politics aims at maximizing cooperation and minimizing conflict within a given society for the benefit of all involved.

Identity politics, however, is not concerned primarily with the promotion of the common human good within the public sphere but with the empowering of particular factions within it.  An oppressed group will seek power to alleviate its oppression. Think of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA in the '50s and '60s. The identity politics of that movement was understandable and probably necessary for blacks to make the progress they did.  Blacks exhorted each other to stand tall and take pride in being black.  Some of us are old enough to remember the "Black is beautiful" bumper stickers of that era.

Before long the Civil Rights movement turned into a hustle with race-hustlers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton leading the pack. Long story short, the instrumentally necessary identity politics of the Civil Rights movement came to displace politics in its proper sense which has to aim at comity and the common good and not at the appeasing of aggrieved parties.  No surprise, then, at the rise of white resistance to the excesses and absurdities of Affirmative Action with its reverse discrimination, minority set-asides, and race-norming.

But tribalism  is tribalism whether black or white. Our only hope is to get beyond tribalism.  (I am not sanguine that we can get beyond it.) But when I pointed this out to my interlocutor and some of his fellow travellers some years ago in these pages,  I was shocked, SHOCKED (well, not really) to find them disagreeing with me. They apparently think that whites need their own tribalism, their own White Pride, their own consciousness-raising.

This makes no ultimate sense to me. (It makes some proximate and pro tempore sense as a reactive gesture of self-defense.) How can you take legitimate pride in what is merely an element of your facticity (in Sartre's Being and Nothingness sense of 'facticity.')  You had to be born somewhere, to some pair of parents or other, of some race or other, of some sex, and so on.  You're stuck with that. If you need to feel pride, feel pride in what you have done with your facticity, with what you have made of yourself, with the free accomplishments of yourself as a person, as an individual.

Common Human Good?

I wrote, "Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere." But can we agree on what the common human good is? Not if we are identity-political in our approach.  Can we even agree that there is such a thing as the common human good? Not if we are identity-political. 

If who I am at the deepest level of the self is a white man, if my race is constitutive of my very innermost ipseity, then I have nothing fundamentally in common with blacks. But then conflict can be avoided only by racial segregation.

It is worth noting that one could be a white-identitarian without being a white-supremacist.  One could hold that one's innermost identity as a person is racially constituted without holding that white identity is any better than black identity.

I hope it is becoming clear that we cannot avoid in these discussions what my sparring partner calls "heavy-duty metaphysics." Whether you affirm or deny a common human good, you are doing metaphysics.  And if metaphysics gets in, theology is sure to follow. Justin Dean Lee in his review of Mark Lilla writes, 

. . . any serious — that is, internally coherent — movement away from identity politics and toward a robust discourse of the common good requires that we reintroduce metaphysics into our politics. This entails granting theology a privileged place in the public square at a time when most of the left and the far right are loath to grant it any place at all.

Nihilism as the Common Root of Left and Right Identity Politics

Rod Dreher:

So, to recap: Justin Dean Lee rightly says we cannot have a politics of the common good without substantive agreement on what the Good is, or how it might be known. Liberalism, in both its classical and progressivist forms, is agnostic on that question, or at most assumes things (“all men are created equal”) that cannot be sustained absent a shared commitment to a metaphysical ideal. Last week in Paris, talking about these things with Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher said that he sees no exit for the French, because they have concluded as a society that there is no realm beyond the material. Most Americans would deny that they believe this, but that’s not the way we live, not even Christians. It is true that we Americans are not as far gone into atheism as the French are, so we still have time to recover. But to recover, you first have to recognize the problem. You first have to recognize that the way you are living as a Christian is not going to survive the prolonged encounter with liquid modernity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Spencer are both atheists who have found a strong source of belief in their respective races. Spencer, a Nietzschean, has said that Christianity is a religion of the weak. They have drawn the line between good and evil not down the middle of every human heart, as that great Christian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, but between their race and the Other. There is immense power in that kind of tribalism, and it lies in large part because it denies the fallenness of one’s own people. Where in contemporary American Christianity can we find the resources to resist falling prey to the malign power of racialism, in all its versions?

[. . .]

Only a strong Christianity can counter this nihilistic tribal religion. But this we do not have today. 

The New Right: More Combative, Less Conservative

Culturally, the Left won; so what's to conserve? The Old Right, bow-tied and bespectacled, gentlemanly and erudite, has proven impotent to slow down, let alone stop, the Left's long march through the institutions and their subversion of them. Assembled in their well-appointed 'cucksheds,' the likes of George F. Will fiddle with ideas while the Republic burns.  Enter the New Right which, as David Azzerad puts it,

. . . is anchored in the realization that the conservative project in America today is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary one. We lost. They won. Painful as it is to admit, we no longer feel at home in our own country. In this progressive theocracy in which all must worship at the altar of Wokeness, conservatism, if one can still even call it that, is more about overthrowing than conserving. Burke’s edifying exhortation—“Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna”—must be altered to suit the times: Sparta was your inheritance, now reclaim her.

As such, this new Right has a decidedly unconservative temperament. It is spirited, manly, and combative. We fight with the same intensity, resolve, and clarity of purpose with which the Left fights. And we fight not to stem our losses, but to win. As Pat Buchanan once wrote, we “want to engage the Left on every front; to defund it; to drive it back into the redoubts whence it emerged decades ago. We want to return to their places of honor the republican beliefs, cultural norms and moral values we were raised with.”

This new Right understands not just ideas, but power. The Left’s ideological hegemony is not principally the result of better ideas, but of its long march through the institutions. We understand the need to build new institutions—in particular those with the power to shape public opinion—and to reconquer lost ones or, at the very least, defund them. The universities, in particular, must be brought to heel.

Absolutely. Defunding the leftist seminaries is a job each of us can do right now.  Every day brings news of a new outrage and an additional reason to divest the institutions of the Higher Enstupidation.  For example,  the cancellation of Mike Adams, and that of Flannery O'Connor by Loyola University Maryland.

The Catholic Universities are among the worst of the leftist seminaries. They are neither Catholic nor universities. 

Related: Defunding: The Most Effective Weapon in Our Arsenal?

Addendum (7/31): "Every day brings news of a new outrage . . . ." A bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Just this morning I learned that a dean at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell was fired for stating in an e-mail that "black lives matter, but also, everyone's life matters."

On Transcending Tribalism

Jonathan Haidt:

Humans are tribal, but tribalism can be transcended. It exists in tension with our extraordinary ability to develop bonds with other human beings. Romeo and Juliet fell in love. French, British and German soldiers came out of their trenches in World War I to exchange food, cigarettes and Christmas greetings.

The key, as Cicero observed, is proximity, and a great deal of modern research backs him up. Students are more likely to become friends with the student whose dorm room is one door away than with the student whose room is four doors away. People who have at least one friend from the other political party are less likely to hate the supporters of that party.

But tragically, Americans are losing their proximity to those on the other side and are spending more time in politically purified settings. [. . .]

Haidt is right that tribalism can be transcended, at least to some extent, and that proximity and interaction can facilitate the transcending.  But he is far more optimistic that I am.

What Haidt ignores is that there is no comity without commonality, as I like to put it.  You and I can live and work together in harmony only within a common space of shared values and assumptions and recognized facts.  But that common space is shrinking.

Take any 'hot button' issue, Second Amendment rights, for example.  What do I have in common with the anti-gunner who favors confiscation of all civilian firearms, or only slightly less radically, wants to ban all hand guns or semi-automatic weapons?  To me it is evident that my right to life grounds a right to self-defense, and with it a right to acquire the appropriate means of self-defense.  If you deny this, then we have no common ground, at least not on this topic.  On this topic, we would then be at loggerheads.  If you then work politically or extra-politically  to violate what here in the States are called Second Amendment rights, then you become my enemy.  And the consequences of enmity can become unpleasant in the extreme. Push can come to shove, and shove to shoot.

In a situation like this, proximity and interaction only exacerbate the problem.  Even the calm interaction of scholarly argument and counter-argument does no good.  No matter how carefully and rigorously I argue my position, I will not succeed in convincing the opponent, with only a few exceptions.  This is a fact of experience over a wide range of controversial topics, and not just in politics.  The only good thing that comes of the dialectical interaction is a clarification and deeper understanding of one's position and what it entails.  If you think, say, that semi-automatic weapons ought to be banned for civilian use, then you and I will never find common ground.  But I will perfect my understanding of my position and its presuppositions and better understand what I reject in yours.

After we have clarified, but not resolved, our differences, anger at the intransigence of the other is the likely upshot if we continue to interact in close proximity whether in the same academic department, the same church, the same club, the same neighborhood, the same family . . . .  This is why there are schisms and splits and factions and wars and all manner of contention.

Anger at the intransigence of the other can then lead on to the thought that  there must be something morally defective, and perhaps also intellectually defective, about the opponent if he holds, say, that a pre-natal human is just a clump of cells.  One advances -- if that is the word -- to the view that the opponent is morally censurable for holding the position he holds, that he is being willfully morally obtuse and deserves moral condemnation.  And then the word 'evil' may slip in and the word 'lie': "The bastard is not just wrong; he is an evil son-of-a-bitch for promoting the lie that an unborn child is just a clump of cells, or a disposable part of woman's body like a wart." The arguably false statements of the other get treated as lies and therefore as statements at the back of which in an intent to deceive. And from there it ramps up to 'Hillary is Satan' and 'Trump is Hitler.'

One possible cure for  this unproductive warfare is mutual, voluntary, segregation via a return to federalism.   I develop the thought in A Case for Voluntary Segregation.  I say 'possible' because I am not sure the federalist route is sufficient.  Secession and partition are other options, not to mention the one no sane person could want: full-on hot civil war.  We are already beyond cold civil war, what with the Left's violent Stalinist erasure of monuments and memorials (and not just that).

So while Haidt is right that proximity and interaction can promote mutual understanding and mitigate hostility, that is true only up to a point and works only within a common space of shared assumptions, values, and recognized facts.  (His examples, by the way, were poorly chosen: Romeo and Juliet were young Italians; the French, German, and British soldiers were Europeans.)  Absent the common space, the opposite is true: proximity and interaction are precisely what must be avoided to preserve peace.  

The Problem and Three Main Solutions

The problem is how to transcend tribalism.  I count three main solutions, the Liberal, the Alt Right, and the Sane (which is of course my view!)

There is first what I take to be Haidt's rather silly liberal solution, namely, that what will bring us together is proximity and interaction. He assumes that if we all come together and get to know each other  we will overcome tribalism.  This borders on utopian nonsense.  It is precisely because of proximity and interaction that many decide to self-segregate.  The more I know about certain individuals and groups the less I want to have to do with them.  The Marxist thugs of Black Lives Matter, for example.  By the way, 'thug' is not code for 'nigger.'  'Thug' means thug.  Look it up.  The Antifa fascists are another example. The anti-white White Fragility racists. I could go on.

At the other extreme we find the 'alties' and neo-reactionaries.  They have a sound insight, namely, that there are unassimilable elements and that they must be kept out.  For example, Sharia-supporting Muslims are unassimilable into the U. S. because their values are antithetical to ours, perhaps not all of their values, but enough to make for huge problems.   

The success of e pluribus unum depends on the nature of the pluribus.  A viable and vibrant One cannot be made out of just any Many.  (Cute formulation, eh?) The members of the manifold must be unifiable under some umbrella of common values, assumptions, and recognized facts.  One proposition nation cannot be made out of many tribes of immigrants unless the many tribes of immigrants accept OUR values, American values, and our propositions.  The tribalism is overcome or at least mitigated by acceptance of a unifying set of American values and ideas.

The alt-rightists, however, do not really offer a solution to the problem of transcending tribalism since their 'solution' is to embrace an opposing tribalism. They are right about the reality of race, as against the foolish notion that race is a social construct, but they push this realism in an ugly and extreme direction when they construe American identity as white identity, where this excludes Jews. American identity is rooted in a set of ideas and values.  It must be granted, however, that not all racial and ethnic groups are equally able to assimilate and implement these ideas and values.  Immigration policy must favor those that are.  

The sane way is the middle way.  To liberals we ought to concede that diversity is a value, but at the same time insist that it is a value that has to be kept in check by the opposing value of unity.   Muslims who refuse to accept our values must not be allowed to immigrate.  They have no right to immigrate, but we have every right to select those who will benefit us.  That is just common sense.  The good sort of diversity is not enhanced by the presence of terror-prone fanatics. Immigration must be to the benefit of the host country. 

What we need, then, to mitigate tribal hostility is not more proximity and interaction, but less; fewer 'conversations' not more; less government, more toleration, voluntary segregation, a return to federalism, a total stoppage of illegal immigration, and a reform of current immigration law.

Will any of this happen?  Trump has taken steps in the right direction.  Flawed as he is, he is all we have, and best we have who is ready, willing, able, and electable. You know what you have to do come November.

Anarcho-Tyranny: Where Multiculturalism Leads

Samuel Francis:

Unwilling to control immigration and the cultural disintegration it causes, the authorities instead control the law-abiding.

This is precisely the bizarre system of misrule I have elsewhere described as “anarcho-tyranny”—we refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny).

The Francis article is from 2004.  What struck me is how well the quotation applies to recent events, especially those of the last few days.  The authorities stand back and allow looters and thugs to destroy public and private property and generally disrupt our cities while at the same time imposing draconian restrictions on law-abiding citizen using an exaggerated pandemic as a pretext.

Abdication and over-reach at once.  The empowerment of criminals by virtue-signaling elites with no skin in the game to the detriment of the meek middle-class law-abiding.

More grist for the mill; more blog-fodder for the Bill.  But it is not just blog-fodder. The survival of the Republic is at stake. That is not an exaggeration. I wish it were.

Read it all.

The Dissident Right

Here:

The dissident right is, to some degree, a reaction to the shift on the Right, among the Buckleyites mostly, to embrace the blank slate and egalitarianism. This was mostly due to the infestation of neoconservatives and libertarians. The neocons brought with them that old Marxist belief that society can be willed into any shape you like, regardless of the people in it. Libertarians, like Marxists, simply refuse to accept the reality of the human condition. As a result, the mainstream Right implicitly embraced the blank slate.

 

Paul Gottfried versus NeoCon Mythology

Here:

Professor Gottfried goes on to examine several examples of these purges, correcting the errors of those who have distorted the record. For example, many have claimed that Buckley’s 1965 denunciation of the John Birch Society was because the Birchers were guilty of anti-Semitism. This is simply slander. Whatever their other errors may have been, it wasn’t anti-Semitism that led Buckley to denounce the JBS, but rather their opposition to LBJ’s escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

As we know, both Williamson and Jonah Goldberg belong to the “Never Trump” cult that National Review created in late 2015, and the anti-Trump fury of “the socially and professionally acceptable Right” illustrates how jealously they regard their status as Gnostic archons of the movement, with the authority to banish anyone they dislike. Trump won the GOP nomination despite the opposition of the National Review crowd and, while they predicted (and openly planned for the aftermath of) his defeat in November 2016, somehow Trump won again. We’ve had to endure the butthurt whining of the Never-Trumpers ever since.

How do we explain this? A major factor is the vanity and careerist ambitions of the intelligentsia. Those whom Ace of Spades has dubbed “the Cruise Ship Wing of fake conservatism” (a reference to the travel-with-pundits deals sold to subscribers of National Review and the Weekly Standard) are careful to protect their “respectable” reputations, and they cannot enhance their reputations by admitting they were wrong.

That's right. The bow-tied boys have an inordinate concern with 'respectability' and the perquisites of high status. They want to be liked and accepted and taken seriously. They don't seem to realize that leftists will always loathe them no matter how many concessions they make.

In What Sense are We Equal? Equality, Natural Rights, and Propositionism

Michael Anton (Publius Decius Mus), in a review of Thomas G. West, The Political Theory of the American Founding  speaks of an "error," 

. . . from a certain quarter of the contemporary Right, which holds that any appeal to equal natural rights amounts to “propositionism”—as in, the “proposition that all men are created equal”—which in turn inevitably leads to the twin evils of statist leveling and the explicit or tacit denial that there is anything distinct[ive] about the American nation. In this telling, “all men are created equal” is dangerous nonsense that means “all men are exactly the same.” Among other dismal policies we are allegedly compelled to enact if we recognize the existence of equal natural rights are redistribution, racial quotas, and open borders.

Refuting this is easy, and well-trodden, ground. 

[. . .]

West does so, in perhaps the clearest articulation of natural human equality penned since the founding itself. The idea is elegantly simple: all men are by nature equally free and independent. Nature has not—as she has, for example, in the case of certain social insects— delineated some members of the human species as natural rulers and others as natural workers or slaves. (If you doubt this, ask yourself why—unlike in the case of, say, bees—workers and rulers are not clearly delineated in ways that both groups acknowledge and accept. Why is it that no man—even of the meanest capacities—ever consents to slavery, which can be maintained only with frequent recourse to the lash?) No man may therefore justly rule any other without that other’s consent. And no man may injure any other or infringe on his rights, except in the just defense of his own rights. The existence of equal natural rights requires an equally natural and obligatory duty of all men to respect the identical rights of others.

I find this articulation of human equality far from clear. What bothers me is the sudden inferential move in the passage quoted from the factual to the normative.  I agree arguendo that it is a fact about human beings that 

1) No man ever consents to slavery

but I don't see how we can validly infer from (1) the normative claim that

2) No man may justly rule any other without that other's consent.

I maintain that slavery is a grave moral evil and a violation of a basic human right, one possessed by all humans and possessed by all equally. My point, however, is that the moral impermissibility of slavery does not immediately follow from the fact, if it is a fact, that no human ever consents to be enslaved. If I don't consent to your enslaving me, how does that make it morally wrong for you to enslave me?

The problem is that the notion of a natural right is less than perspicuous. Part of what it means to say that a right is natural is that it is not conventional. We don't have rights to life, liberty, and property because some body of men has decided to grant them to us. We have them inherently or intrinsically. We don't get them from the State; we have them whether or not any state exists to secure them as a good state must, or to deprive us of them as a bad state will.

Rights are logically antecedent to contingent social and political arrangements, and thus logically antecedent to the positive law (the law enacted by a legislature).  One can express this by saying that rights are not conventional but natural.  But then 'natural' just means 'not conventional.'  

Suppose our rights as individual persons come not from nature but from God. Then their non-conventionality would be secured. Now it would be good if we could proceed in political philosophy without bringing God into it.  But then we face the problem of explaining how norms could be ingredient in nature.

Perhaps someone can explain to me how my right not to be enslaved could be grounded in my being an animal in the material world.  How could any of my rights as an individual person be grounded in my being an animal in nature? I am open for instruction.

One could just insist that rights and norms are grounded in nature herself.  But that would be metaphysical bluster and not an explanation.

To put it another way, I would like someone to explain how 'natural right' is not a contradictio in adiecto, provided, of course, that by a natural right we mean more than a non-conventional right, but a right that is non-conventional and somehow ingredient in or grounded in nature.

And let's never forget the obvious: as natural beings, as part of the fauna of the space-time system, we are manifestly not equal either as individuals or as groups.  

So I say that if you want to uphold intrinsic and unalienable rights, rights that do not have their origin in human decisions and conventions, and if you want to uphold rights for all humans regardless of their empirical strengths and weaknesses, and the same rights for all, then you must move beyond nature to nature's God who is the source of the personhood of each one of us human animals, and the ground of equality of persons. No God, no equality of persons and no equality of rights.

It seems clear that something like this is what the second paragraph of the  Declaration means with its talk of men being CREATED equal and being ENDOWED by their CREATOR with certain unalienable rights. The rights come from above (God) and not from below (nature). 

This is why it is either stupid or highly uncharitable when neo-reactionary conservatives read the plain words of the Declaration as meaning that all humans are empirically equal as animals in nature.  It can't mean that for the simple reason that no one in his right mind, and certainly not the great men of the Founding, could believe that all humans are empirically equal either actually or potentially.

Suppose there is no God. Then talk of equal rights is empty.  We may continue to talk in those vacuous terms, somehow hiding the vacuity from ourselves, but then we would be 'running on fumes.' People may continue to believe in equal rights, but their belief would be groundless.  

The trouble with the view I am recommending is that it requires a lot of heavy-duty metaphysics of God and Man.  This metaphysics is widely contested and certainly not obvious. But the same goes for the naturalism that denies God and puts man back among the animals.  It too is widely and very reasonably contested and certainly not obvious.

Welcome to the doxastic-epistemic side of the human predicament.

Now I would like you to surf on over to Malcolm Pollack's place and read this and the posts immediately subsequent to it, i. e., scroll up.

P. S. I didn't get around to propositionism/propositionalism. This discussion of Paul Gottfried will have to do for now.  

 

The Left Eats Its Own: Andrew Sullivan

Despite 'credentials' that ought to endear him to the Left, Mr. Sullivan has learned the hard way that he still has too much good sense to count as one of them:

As for objective reality, I was at an event earlier this week — not on a campus — when I made what I thought was the commonplace observation that Jim Crow laws no longer exist. Uncomprehending stares came back at me. What planet was I on? Not only does Jim Crow still exist, but slavery itself never went away! When I questioned this assertion by an African-American woman, I was told it was “not my place” to question her reality. After all, I’m white.

The reason I can't take Sully all that seriously is that, while he sees through the insane lies of the Left, he refuses to do the one thing necessary to combat them effectively in the present constellation of circumstances, namely, support Donald Trump and his administration. Sullivan's deranged hatred of the man blinds him to Trump's political usefulness in beating back the destructive Left.

Look: I don’t doubt the good intentions of the new identity politics — to expand the opportunities for people previously excluded. I favor a politics that never discriminates against someone for immutable characteristics — and tries to make sure that as many people as possible feel they have access to our liberal democracy. But what we have now is far more than the liberal project of integrating minorities. It comes close to an attack on the liberal project itself. Marxism with a patina of liberalism on top is still Marxism — and it’s as hostile to the idea of a free society as white nationalism is. So if you wonder why our discourse is now so freighted with fear, why so many choose silence as the path of least resistance, or why the core concepts of a liberal society — the individual’s uniqueness, the primacy of reason, the protection of due process, an objective truth — are so besieged, this is one of the reasons.

Although Sullivan goes too far when he implies that it is never justifiable to discriminate against a person on the basis of immutable characteristics, see below, I basically agree with his little speech.  I agree with his four core concepts.

In particular, I oppose the tribalism of those who see others as mere tokens of racial/ethnic/sexual types and who identify themselves in the same way.   Tribalism could be defined as precisely this reduction of a person to a mere token or instance of a racial/ethnic/sexual type, whether the person is oneself or another. It is a refusal to countenance the potential if not actual uniqueness of the individual. The Left is tribal in this sense but so is the Alt-Right. What they have in common is the reduction of individual identity, personal identity, to group identity. My brand of conservatism resists this reduction and attempts to navigate a via media between the identity-political extremes.

I have found it difficult to get these ideas across to my open-minded and good-natured alt-right interlocutors. 

They will tell me that, as a matter of fact, people identify tribally.  I agree. My point, however, is that such identification is not conducive to social harmony and that we ought to at least try to transcend our tribalism.  

The claim that such-and-such ought to be done cannot be refuted by the fact that it is not done.  The propositions that people ought not sexually molest children, ought not drive drunk, ought not embezzle, etc.  cannot be refuted by invoking the fact that they do.  The same goes for institutions. The existence of an institution does not morally justify its existence.

The claim that people ought to do A could, however, be refuted if it could be shown that people, or some group of people, cannot do A.   Ought implies can. I cannot reasonably demand of blacks, say, that they think and act less tribally if they are simply incapable of so thinking and acting.  

So my interlocutors' point might be that urging people to be less tribal is empty preaching that unreasonably demands that people do what they cannot do. To which my response will be that many blacks and Hispanics and women -- who can be thought of as a 'tribe' in an extended sense of the term -- do transcend their tribal identities. For example, while Hispanics would naturally like there to be more Hispanics in the USA, many of them are able to appreciate that illegal immigration ought not be tolerated.

You might say that for Hispanics like these, their self-identification as a rational animal, zoon logikon, in Aristotle's sense, trumps their self-identification as Hispanic.

There are higher and lower, noble and base, modes of self-identification.  Philosopher versus cocksman, say. You can guess my view: self-identification in terms of race, ethnicity, and sex is toward the base end of the scale.

Do I deny that I am a white male? Not at all. What's more, those attributes are essential to me. To speak with the philosophers: I am a white male in every possible world in which I exist.  I cannot be an animal at all unless I have some immutable characteristics. (And to think of them as socially constructed is the height of leftist lunacy.)   Then why is it base to identify in terms of these characteristics? Because there are higher modes of self-identification. 

What makes them higher or better? They are less divisive and more conducive to social harmony. We are social animals and we benefit from cooperation. While competition is good in that it breeds excellence, conflict and enmity are bad. If we can learn to see one another as unique individuals, as persons, as rational beings rather than as interchangeable tokes of racial/ethnic/sexual types, then we are more likely to achieve more mutually beneficial social interactions.

The higher self-identifications are also more reflective of our status as free moral agents. I didn't choose my race or sex, but I did choose and continue to choose to develop myself as an individual, to actualize my potential for self-individuation.  My progress along that line of self-development is something I can be proud of.  By contrast there is something faintly absurd and morally dubious about black pride, white pride, gay pride, and the like.  You're proud to be white? Why? You had no say in the matter. Nancy Pelosi is apparently ashamed to be white. That is equally mistaken.

Am I saying that race doesn't matter? No. Race does matter, but it matters less than leftists and alt-rightists think and more than some old-time (sane) liberals and conservatives like Dennis Prager think. (See Dennis Prager on Liberalism, Leftism, and Race.) Certain racial and ethnic groups are better equipped to appreciate, i.e., both understand and value, the points I have been making.  Part of it has to do with intelligence. Asians and Jews, as groups, are more intelligent than blacks and Hispanics as groups. That is just a fact, and there are no racist facts. (A fact about race is not a racist fact.) What's true cannot be racist or sexist.

I spoke above of the uniqueness of the individual. I know that sounds like vacuous sermonizing and utter bullshit to many ears. But to adequately discuss it we would have to enter metaphysics. Some other time. But please note that ameliorative politics must be grounded in political theory which rests on normative ethics which presuppose philosophical anthropology which leads us back to metaphysics.

I should stop now. I have given my alt-right sparring partners enough to punch back at.  Have at it, boys. Comments crisp and concise are best.  People don't read long comments.  Many short, good; one long, bad.

Addendum: Is it ever morally justifiable to discriminate against a person on the basis of an immutable characteristic? 

Of course it is. I flunked my Army pre-induction physical. The Army discriminated against me because I hear out of only one ear. Southern Pacific Railroad did the same when, following in the footsteps of my quondam hero, Jack Kerouac, I tried to get a job as a switchman. Examples are easily multiplied. Want to join the Army? There are age restrictions. You can't be over 40. Should every combat role in the mlitary be open to females? Obviously not. 

You would have to be as willfully stupid as Nancy Pelosi to think that all discrimination is unjust.

'Diversity' is Not a Dirty Word

Contrary to what some alt-righties of my acquaintance seem to think, 'diversity' is not a dirty word. To quote from my old entry, Diversity and Divisiveness:

Liberals emphasize the value of diversity, and with some justification. Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive marketplace of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.

But no reasonable person values diversity as such. [. . .] Only some sorts of diversity are valuable. Diversity worth having presupposes a principle of unity that controls the diversity. Diversity must be checked and balanced by the competing value of unity, a value with an equal claim on our respect.

[. . .] 

Diversity unchecked by the competing value of unity leads to divisiveness. For this reason, one ought not ‘celebrate diversity’ unless one is also willing to ‘celebrate unity.’ And this is precisely what too many liberals and leftists cannot, or will not, comprehend. They unreasonably emphasize diversity at the expense of unity.

Some of my interlocutors on the Alt-Right call themselves neo-reactionaries.  The trouble with reaction, however, is that it ties you to what you are reacting against in a merely oppositional way with the result that you tend toward the opposite extreme. So, recoiling from the absurdities of leftist 'inclusion,' the neo-reactionaries tend toward the view that all diversity is suspect.

References to the "widening gyre" of the William Butler Yeats poem  have become a little too common recently, but I won't let that stop me from one more reference. For centrifugal forces threaten to tear the body politic asunder, not that I have any solution. I am too busy trying to understand the problem. As a citizen, I am worried. As a philosopher, I accept with equanimity that "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk." All things must pass, and if the passing brings wisdom, then therein  lies the compensation.

The Second Coming 

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity. 

 

Surely some revelation is at hand; 

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep 

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

 

 

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989) 

Liberals emphasize the value of diversity, and with some justification. Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive marketplace of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.

But no reasonable person values diversity as such. [. . .] Only some sorts of diversity are valuable. Diversity worth having presupposes a principle of unity that controls the diversity. Diversity must be checked and balanced by the competing value of unity, a value with an equal claim on our respect.

[. . .] 

Diversity unchecked by the competing value of unity leads to divisiveness. For this reason, one ought not ‘celebrate diversity’ unless one is also willing to ‘celebrate unity.’ And this is precisely what too many liberals and leftists cannot, or will not, comprehend. They unreasonably emphasize diversity at the expense of unity.

Some of my interlocutors on the Alt-Right call themselves neo-reactionaries.  The trouble with reaction, however, is that it ties you to what you are reacting against in a merely oppositional way with the result that you tend toward the opposite extreme. So, recoiling from the absurdities of leftist 'inclusion,' the neo-reactionaries tend toward the view that all diversity is suspect.

References to the "widening gyre" of the William Butler Yeats poem  have become a little too common recently, but I won't let that stop me from one more reference. For centrifugal forces threaten to tear the body politic asunder, not that I have any solution. I am too busy trying to understand the problem. As a citizen, I am worried. As a philosopher, I accept with equanimity that "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk." All things must pass, and if the passing brings wisdom, then therein  lies the compensation.

The Second Coming 

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity. 

 

Surely some revelation is at hand; 

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep 

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

 

 

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989) 

Paul Gottfried on Propositionalism

Here:

White nationalists are not really nationalists since they are engaged in a globalist enterprise. They are reaching beyond traditional nation states and seek to unify all peoples of a certain race, partly by demonizing other races. But propositionalists like Buckley and the neoconservative journalists are likewise involved in a global pursuit. They are not content to live in a politically diverse world among different cultures. They seek to win adherents to their political religion supposedly predicated on universal propositions. The validity of what they believe requires that it be put into practice universally, since their propositions are intended for all of humanity. This rights-based globalism is nothing new. It was practiced by the Jacobins during the French Revolution and later, and more devastatingly, by the Bolsheviks. (Emphasis added) 

This passage may help focus the ongoing discussion with my Right-identitarian colleague. I don't see why  I ought to accept the bolded sentence above.  The sentence encapsulates an argument, which could be put like this:

1) The supposedly universal propositions are intended to hold true for all of humanity.
2) If so, then the supposedly universal propositions must be put into practice universally.
Therefore
3) The supposedly universally propositions must be put into practice universally.
Therefore
4) One can justify nation-building, exporting American/Enlightenment values, toppling dictators using  military force, teaching the benighted Muslim tribalists of the Middle East the values of open inquiry, free speech, equal rights for women, etc.

The argument is unsound because we have no good reason to accept (2).

I reject (2). I say: There are propositions relating to human flourishing that are true for all humans. An example of such a proposition might be: A happy and productive human life is unlikely and perhaps impossible if one never learns to control one's appetites and emotions. (Had Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown been brought up to exercise self-control, they would be alive today. Those two brought about their own deaths by their lack of self control, and 'racism' had nothing to do with it. Harvey Weinstein is a 'white' example: had he been brought up to control his concupiscence he wouldn't be in the deep trouble he is in now. ) 

But such propositions, while true for all humans and in this sense true universally, are not recognized by all humans, and not presently capable of being recognized or put into practice by all humans.  The attempt to impart these propositions to some groups will be futile, especially if it involves force, or can be interpreted by the group in question as a cover for an attempt to dominate or control them for ulterior motives.

So I distinguish two questions. One is whether the propositions in question are universal. The other is whether they are capable of being recognized and implemented by all humans under present conditions. The answer to the first is Yes; the answer to the second is No. So one cannot infer the requirement that the propositions be put into practice universally from the the fact that they are universal.  (2), then, is false.

The bolded sentence involves a confusion.  Read it again: The validity of what they believe requires that it be put into practice universally, since their propositions are intended for all of humanity.

The sentence embodies a non sequitur. Consider this proposition: A government contributory to human well-being upholds the value of religious liberty and tolerates dissent on religious matters. This proposition is essential to the American founding and is one of the expressions of the hard-won wisdom of the Founders.

But not every ethnic or racial group on the face of the earth is ready for this universally valid truth, and perhaps some of these groups will never be ready for it. To impose it on them would be folly and elicit only blind reaction. On this point the neo-cons had it wrong. The benighted must be left to their fates.  But it doesn't follow that the proposition in question is true only for those of European ancestry. It is true for all. Analogy: the truths of mathematics are true for all, even for those who cannot understand them and put them to work. First-graders cannot understand Rolle's Theorem, but it is true for them too. Those who know no physics are just as subject to its laws as those who do.

If one rejects even a moderate propositionalism, what will one put in its place? A racially purified state along National Socialist lines?

There is a reason why a lot of people get the heebie-jeebies when they hear alt-right and neo-reactionary talk. And this despite the fact that most of what one hears about the alt-right is mindless, psychologically-projective, leftist nonsense. Leftist scum use 'white supremacist' and 'alt-right' as semantic bludgeons and they should be condemned for their scurrilousness. Nevertheless, most of us become justifiably concerned when we hear talk of Blut und Boden.

As for heebie-jeebies, that puts me in mind of 'hebe,' a slur word for a Jew.  The anti-semitism of alt-righties -- not all of them of course -- should also make a morally decent person nervous.  If nothing else, the Alt-Right has a PR problem. They won't get anywhere politically if their rhetoric includes 'blood and soil.' I guarantee it.

Some words and phrases are not candidates for semantic rehabilitation. 

Related articles

A Version of Alt-Right Identitarianism

Maverick Philosopher: Will the Culture War Issue in Civil War?

Are We Really Talking about Nationalism?

More on Tribalism and the Identitarian Right

This entry continues the discussion with my Right-identitarian interlocutor.  My current position is one of rejection of both Left- and Right-identitarianism. I am open, however,  to a change of position. That is part of what makes me a philosopher as opposed to an ideologue. I wrote in my critique of Dennis Prager:

"The correct view is that racial differences are real and significant just as sexual and age differences are real and significant, but  for purposes of social harmony and political cooperation we had better not identify ourselves racially but in terms of attributes more conducive to comity." My correspondent responds:

I agree with your criticisms of Prager.  In a normal society men don't pretend that they're just human beings rather than men (who are also human beings) and women don't pretend that they're just human beings rather than women.  Rather, in a normal society the distinctive male and female abilities and interests and ways of being are accepted, and society adapts itself to these differences--these male and female 'identities'  in other words.  But then, if race is similar to sex and age in this respect, why would it be bad for people to 'identify' in terms of race along with attributes like sex and age?  Shouldn't we say instead that this is also reasonable and healthy?

In discussions like these it is always a good idea to seek (and rejoice over) points of agreement. Points of disagreement will emerge soon enough.

One thing we can agree on is that no human being can be just a human being if that implies having no sex or no race or no age or no height, etc. And so if I pretended to be a human being indeterminate with respect to one or more of the above-listed attributes, then my pretense would empty and absurd. My talk of treating people as individuals rather than as tokens of ethnic or racial types does not imply that they are bare individuals bereft of all attributes.

But there is nothing empty or absurd about prescinding from this or that characteristic in certain contexts.  Characteristics prescinded from don't matter for the purpose at hand, but they are still there. For example, age and citizenship matter when it comes to voting, but race and sex by  current law do not and ought not.  But if we don't take into consideration a person's sex when it comes to the right to vote, it does not follow that the person is sexless.  In general, if attribute A is instantiated by the members of a given population of individuals, and abstraction is made from A, it does not follow that the members of the population are indeterminate with respect to A.

So far, near-platitudes, unless my opponent questions my voting example which I fear he might. (If he does, then that discussion belongs in a separate thread.) We have yet to locate the bone of contention.

Are there "distinctive male and female abilities and interests"? I would say so, and I would add that they are not merely socially constituted.  The biology of the female plays a role in the explanation of why women are more nurturing than men, more cooperative and conciliatory, make better real estate agents, but also why they are more emotional than men and why their political judgment is not as good. (I would argue, however, that the last two points are not reasons to withhold from women full voting rights.)  So far, then, no disagreement. No disagreement with my conservative interlocutor, that is. I have already said enough to elicit howls of rage from the lunatic Left. Their howling, however, is music to my ears. Their destructive extremism only galvanizes the resoluteness of my opposition to them.

Does it follow that there are male and female 'identities'?  Here is where it gets tricky and sticky. 'Identity' can be used in different ways. What is meant by 'identity 'here ? A stereotype?  That is apparently what my sparring partner has in mind. I will assume that he agrees with me that stereotypes, most of them, or at least many of them, have a fundamentum in re and are true in the way that generic statements can be true.  (It is surely true, for example, that Germans are more rule-bound and respectful of authority than Italians. See this list of generic statements.) Stereotypes are not, most of them, expressions of mindless bigotry or irrational hatred of the Other. What are truly mindless and irrational are liberal denials of this plain truth.

My opponent is going to agree with me that women as a group are more nurturing, caring, cooperative, conciliatory, averse to heated disagreement, better with children, etc., than men as a group.  But that is a positive, accurate stereotype which not all women fit. Women are nurturing and Sally is a woman; it does not follow, however, that Sally is nurturing.  'Women are nurturing' is a generic statement: it cannot be replaced by a universal generalization such as 'Every woman is nurturing.' Sally is a chess-playing, nerdy engineer who works for Google, worships Ayn Rand, enjoys heated debate, and has no interest in children or in taking care of anybody. And all of this without prejudice to her being, and being essentially (as opposed to accidentally), a full-fledged biological female with the 'plumbing' and chromosomal make-up to prove it.

It may be that my opponent is conflating stereotype with identity. In one sense  of 'identity,' the identity of a thing is what it is by nature, what it is essentially. Since Sally does not fit the gender stereotype, and yet is essentially biologically female, we ought not conflate identity with stereotype. (I am assuming a distinction between sex, which is a biological reality, and gender which, while it reflects sex, is in part socially determined. Anyone who elides the distinction I would have to consider very foolish indeed.)

My claim is that there are no "male and female 'identities'."   There are male and female stereotypes and gender roles but no male and female identities. If there were a female identity or nature that included such stereotypical features as being nurturing, being conciliatory, shying away from heated argument, then every female would fit that identity; Sally does not fit the female identity; ergo, there is no female identity.

And because there is no female identity, if Sally so self-identifies, then her self-identification is a false self-identification. She falsely self-identifies if she so apperceives herself as to be nothing but an instance of that identity.  And if we deny Sally her right to be a nerdy, chess-playing, Rand-reading, non-nurturing engineer, then we reduce her to a gender stereotype in violation of her true identity as a free, self-determining person.  As an animal, Sally's biological identity or nature is essential to her; as a person, however, she is free to pursue engineering in defiance of the stereotype.

And the same goes for race. There are different races as a matter of biological-anthropological fact. (Race is not a mere social construct.) And there are different racial and ethnic stereotypes, accurate stereotypes, i.e., stereotypes with a basis in reality, some negative, some positive. But there is no white identity or black identity or Italian identity or Polish identity.  Granted, I am essentially Caucasian and essentially of Italian ancestry; no change is possible in these respects. But there is no white identity that includes stereotypical features since there is no such identity had essentially by every biological white.  Bear in mind that 'white' in this context does not refer to skin color but to race. It is a mistake to confuse race with skin color. 

So I continue to maintain my thesis that, "for purposes of social harmony and political cooperation we had better not identify ourselves racially but in terms of attributes more conducive to comity." The opponent hasn't given me any good reason to abandon this thesis. 

Is a reversion to tribalism, even if inevitable, something to be regretted, or is it healthy?

But then, in my critique of Prager, after listing some candidate attributes, I waxed pessimistic. For example, can we Americans identify for political purposes as Americans, as people  committed to the values and principles enshrined in our founding documents? Obviously not. Too many of our fellow 'citizens' have no respect for these documents. The universities of the land are lousy with such people. There are leftist knuckleheads who speak of a 'living constitution,' which, of course, is no constitution at all. And in what sense are these fellow 'citizens' fellow citizens if they don't accept our great Constitution? Think of the liberal-left liberty-haters who call for the elimination of the Second Amendment.

"So I end with a dark thought: in the end tribalism wins."

Again I wonder why this is a dark thought.  You seem to be considering the possibility that identities like 'citizen' or 'American' are too weak to form the basis for a healthy society.  But suppose that's true.  Then it's _good_ that people will eventually reject these identities in favor of some 'tribal' identity which could serve as a better basis for society--something that is more "conducive to comity".  Suppose it's not true, and identities like 'citizen' are enough.  Then it seems to me that people should be able to get along and share a society simply on the basis of being 'citizens' or 'Americans' while at the same time having distinct racial or tribal identities, just as they can share a society and get along despite having distinct identities based on sex and age.

Amazingly, my opponent thinks that tribalism is good and that tribal identification can unify us. I can't see that this makes any sense at all. So here we find a bone of serious contention!  If we can no longer identify as citizens or Americans, it does not follow that tribal self-identification with the resultant Balkanization would be good.

I am saying that we conservatives, through inattention and inaction, have allowed things to get to the point where identities like 'citizen' and 'American' can no longer form the basis of a healthy society and polity.   We are now in a very bad state of affairs. But tribalism makes things worse.  The reversion to tribalism may be inevitable, but as I see it, it can't be good.  Tribalism can't be the basis of comity or social harmony precisely because different tribes with different values and interests oppose one another.  Furthermore, when we think and act tribally we fail to see important individual differences.  Clearly, there are important differences between Clarence Thomas and Trayvon Martin, Jason Riley and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Walter E. Williams and Michael Brown. Coates is a despicable racist fool and an enemy, but I would love to have Riley and Williams and Thomas as next-door neighbors. No social harmony is likely to ensue if we lump all these blacks together as members of the opposing tribe.  It is of course different in war. But we want to avoid war. Don't we?

I am saying that, as a matter of contingent fact, we are no longer united under an umbrella of shared values and principles, and that tribal identification will only make it worse.  If, on the other hand, we were united under that 'umbrella,' then of course there would be no problem.  We would be united publicly, and privately people could do their tribal thing.

Of course, there is a crucial disanalogy:  Human nature is such that differences of sex and age occur naturally and inevitably within a given human community, since these are part of the basic structure of the extended family.  By contrast, differences of race and ethnicity do not occur within the natural human community.  On the contrary, since the natural community is based on the family and extended family, that kind of community eliminates racial or ethnic differences--any natural community ends up being a single racial-ethnic community. 

So it's doubtful that racial difference and racial identity can be accepted as part of the normal structure of society in the way that these others already are.  To the extent that racial and ethnic differences exist within a society, that society must be somewhat artificial; it must be made up of sub-cultures that have a stronger claim on the natural loyalties and identities of its members.  Racial-ethnic differences are a primordial sign of Otherness, of Not Belonging--of potential danger and competition rather than safety and co-operation.  We can try to pretend otherwise, but this is contrary to our own instincts, and it probably won't work in the long run.  But, again, is this dark?   

Well, intermarriage among different European ethnicities has worked hasn't it?  

My opponent seems to be suggesting that racial/ethnic uniformity is essential for a well-functioning society.  I don't buy it.  Suppose blacks had never been brought as slaves to North America. The other racial and ethnic groups get along tolerably well. But the key is assimilation and commitment to a set of values and principles that transcend blood.  Unfortunately, the Melting Pot is a thing of the past never to return. Leftists have destroyed it by exploiting racial tensions to forward their agenda.  And of course we no longer agree on values and principles.

Horribile dictu, leftist filth are now attacking free speech!

Is invocation of Blut und Boden dark? I would say so.  For one thing, blood ties and racial purity do not insure comity. I have more in common with Korean and Turkish philosophers than with anyone in my family. Consanguinity is no guarantee of spiritual affinity, and  spiritual affinity can exist without consanguinity.  We are told that "To the extent that racial and ethnic differences exist within a society, that society must be somewhat artificial; it must be made up of sub-cultures that have a stronger claim on the natural loyalties and identities of its members."

This begs the question by assuming what I argued against, namely, that there are ethnic and racial identities. Beside, the emphasis on narrow natural loyalties works against social harmony. That's the mentality of mafiosi. Social harmony requires a commitment to higher loyalties.  John Gotti's children should have 'ratted out' their father.  The Unabomber's brother was right to turn him in. He was acting under the inspiration of a higher loyalty.

Multi-culturalists and Leftists would say it's 'dark' to imagine shutting down mass immigration of Muslims into Europe--because for them, the attempt to force incompatible cultures together into some kind of incoherent mess seems good!  But a conservative doesn't want to force people to live in weird new ways that (we think) go against human nature, so a conservative doesn't think it's 'dark' to imagine Muslims in Muslim lands, Christians in Christian lands, etc.  Feminists think it's 'dark' to imagine a world where most women are focused on having kids and staying home to care for them, because they think the ideal is to have women be just like men in all respects; but a conservative thinks it's better to let the sexes live in ways they find natural,  and so doesn't think this scenario is 'dark'.  Of course, excessive tribalism is possible (and 'dark') but why not allow for some degree of tribalism?  A sound conservative position, I think, is that society must provide people with healthy ways of expressing their instincts rather than forcing us to suppress them.  Telling people they have to think of themselves as just 'citizens' or 'humans' is telling them to suppress some very powerful instincts.  So (I think) conservatives should regard this as an oppressive and unhealthy policy.

We agree that allowing mass immigration of Muslims into Western lands is suicidal.  This is because they don't, as a group, share our superior Western values and because they want to replace them with unenlightened Sharia-type values. It is not because of their being Turks or Arabs or whatever. (The few that do share our values can be allowed to immigrate.) And of course there is nothing 'dark' about traditional Muslims staying in their lands.

Nor is there anything 'dark' about women devoting themselves to the noble and difficult task of being good mothers and homemakers.  The feminists who attack motherhood have a lot to answer for.

What I see as 'dark' is the racial self-identification on the identitarian Right. It amounts the deliberate erasure of one's unique personhood in favor of being an interchangeable token of an ethnic or racial type. (This has some connection to the Marxist notion of man as Gattungswesen, but I am not in a position to explain it clearly.)  How can my identity reside in an attribute shared with billions of others?

My identity is what make me be me and no one else. It is therefore impossible to locate one's identity in being an interchangeable token of a  racial type. For every token of a type, qua token of a type, is the same as every other one.  

There is also a slippery slope consideration. If you identify as white, then why not as Southern white, and if Southern white, why not rural Southern white, and so on until you identify as a Hatfield or a McCoy?  

Furthermore, race is part of my animality. So if I identity racially, then I identify myself as a particular instance of a particular race of animals. But I am more than an animal, and my true self cannot be located in my animality.

But now we move into metaphysics. This is unavoidable in a thorough discussion. But this entry is already too long. Tomorrow's another day.

Who am I? Personal Identity versus Identity Politics

Preliminary note: what has been exercising me lately is the question whether there is a deep common root to the political identitarianism of the Left and the Right, and if there is, what this root is. Nihilism, perhaps?

I wrote:

. . . my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup.  For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person.

My right-wing identitarian sparring partner reasonably objects:

This is puzzling to me.  If I 'identify' myself as a man, or a human being, I don't think I'm reducing myself to anything.  I'm just stating an obvious fact about myself or, if you prefer, myself qua mammal or living organism or something of the kind.  Is there some contradiction or tension between 'I am a human being' or 'I am an animal' and 'I am a person'? 

Later on in his comments he says that "to defend an identitarian position in politics" it is not necessary to engage with the metaphysics of personhood.  I am inclined to disagree.

No Escaping Metaphysics

As I see it, practical politics presupposes political philosophy which presupposes normative ethics which presupposes philosophical anthropology which is a discipline of special metaphysics. Philosophical anthropology, in turn, finds its place within general metaphysics.  Rationally informed political action requires a theory of the human good that needs to be grounded in a theory of human nature which itself needs embedding in a comprehensive metaphysics.  And if the political action is to be truly ameliorative, then the theory of human nature had better be correct. For example, the terrible scourge on humanity that Communism has proven to be flows from the Left's false understanding of human nature.

Concessions

But before getting in too deep, let me concede some points to my interlocutor.  I concede that if he tells me he is a Caucasian male, then there is an innocuous  sense of 'identify' according to which he has identified himself as Causasian and male, and that in so doing he needn't be 'reducing' himself to anything in any pejorative sense. He is simply giving me information about his sex and his ancestry.  He is simply pointing out a couple of his attributes.

By the same token, he can identify himself as a citizen of this country or that, a member of this political party or that, an adherent of this religion or that, or an adherent of no religion at all.  And so on for a long list of essential and accidental attributes: military veteran? blood type? Social Security number?   Take larger and larger conjunctions of these attributes and you get closer and closer to zeroing  in on the individuating identity of a particular human animal in society, that which distinguishes him from every other human animal.

Personalism and False Self-Identification

But what I am getting at is something different. Not WHAT  I am objectively viewed in my animal and social features, but WHO I am as a person, as a unique conscious and self-conscious subject of experience and as a morally responsible free agent, as an I who can address a Thou and be addressed in turn by an I. (M. Buber)  I am a subject for whom there is a world and not merely an object in the physical and social worlds.

The question concerns the 'true self,' WHO I am at the deepest level. Who am I? A mere token of a type? But that is all I would be if I were to identify myself in terms of my race.  This is one example of what I am calling a false self-identification.  A tribal black who identifies himself in his innermost ipseity as black has reduced himself to a mere token of a racial type, a mere instance of it, when being an interchangeable token cannot possibly be what makes him the unique person that he is.  After all, there are many tokens of the type, black human being. 

Not only does he reduce himself to a mere instance of one of his attributes, he reduces himself to a mere instance of one of his animal attributes.  It is qua animal that he has a race, not qua person. But we are not mere animals; we are spiritual animals.   

Such false self-identification is a form of spiritual self-degradation.

And the same goes for whites who seek their true identity in their racial 'identity.' That is a false self-identification because who I am as this unique individual cannot be reduced to being a repeatable and interchangeable token of a type.  The reason, again, is that (i) there are indefinitely many tokens of the type, white human animal, but there is exactly one me, and (ii) a self-identification in terms of a bodily attribute pertains to my animality but not to my spirituality.  

Suppose I address a black man or woman as a person. When I do that I am precisely not confronting an instance of black human animal with all the stereotypes that go with it. I am then attempting an I-Thou relation with the black man or woman and not an I-It relation with an instance of black human animal. I am showing respect for the person.

There are many types of false self-identification and I oppose them all. On the present occasion I come out against racial self-identification. You cannot be in your innermost ipseity (selfhood) white or black, and any such self-identification is false. Now what does this have to do with identity politics?

Connection with Identity Politics

First of all, what is identity politics?  Logically prior question: What is politics? Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere. Human flourishing is not possible apart from social interaction and when that interaction is public, as opposed to private, we are in the political sphere. Such interaction is both cooperative and conflictual. So perhaps we can say that politics aims at maximizing cooperation and minimizing conflict within a given society for the benefit of all involved.

Identity politics, however, is not concerned primarily with the promotion of the common human good within the public sphere but with the empowering of particular factions within it.  An oppressed group will seek power to alleviate its oppression. Think of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA in the '50s and '60s. The identity politics of that movement was understandable and probably necessary for blacks to make the progress they did.  Blacks exhorted each other to stand tall and take pride in being black.  Some of us are old enough to remember the "Black is beautiful" bumperstickers of that era.

Before long the Civil Rights movement turned into a hustle with race-hustlers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton leading the pack. Long story short, the instrumentally necessary identity politics of the Civil Rights movement came to displace politics in its proper sense which has to aim at comity and the common good and not at the appeasing of aggrieved parties.  No surprise, then, at the rise of white resistance to the excesses and absurdities of Affirmative Action with its reverse discrimination, minority set-asides, and race-norming.

But tribalism  is tribalism whether black or white. Our only hope is to get beyond tribalism.  (I am not sanguine.) But when I pointed this out to my interlocutor and some of his fellow travellers a year or so ago in these pages,  I was shocked, SHOCKED (well, not really) to find them disagreeing me. They apparently think that whites need their own tribalism, their own White Pride, their own consciousness-raising.

This makes no sense to me. How can you take legitimate pride in what is merely an element of your facticity (in Sartre's Being and Nothingness sense of 'facticity.')  You had to be born somewhere, to some pair of parents or other, of some race or other, of some sex, and so on.  You're stuck with that. If you need to feel pride, feel pride in what you have done with your facticity, with what you have made of yourself, with the free accomplishments of yourself as a person, as an individual.

Common Human Good?

I wrote, "Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere." But can we agree on what the common human good is? Not if we are identity-political in our approach.  Can we even agree that there is such a thing as the common human good? Not if we are identity-political. 

If who I am at the deepest level of the self is a white man, if my race is constitutive of my very innermost ipseity, then I have nothing fundamentally in common with blacks. But then conflict can be avoided only by racial segregation.

It is worth noting that one could be a white -identitarian without being a white-supremacist.  One could hold that one's innermist identity as a person is racially constituted without holding that white identity is any better than black identity.

I hope it is becoming clear that we cannot avoid in these discussions what my sparring partner calls "heavy-duty metaphysics." Whether you affirm or deny a common human good, you are doing metaphysics.  And if metaphysics gets in, theology is sure to follow. Justin Dean Lee in his review of Mark Lilla writes, 

. . . any serious — that is, internally coherent — movement away from identity politics and toward a robust discourse of the common good requires that we reintroduce metaphysics into our politics. This entails granting theology a privileged place in the public square at a time when most of the left and the far right are loath to grant it any place at all.

Nihilism as the Common Root of Left and Right Identity Politics

Rod Dreher:

So, to recap: Justin Dean Lee rightly says we cannot have a politics of the common good without substantive agreement on what the Good is, or how it might be known. Liberalism, in both its classical and progressivist forms, is agnostic on that question, or at most assumes things (“all men are created equal”) that cannot be sustained absent a shared commitment to a metaphysical ideal. Last week in Paris, talking about these things with Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher said that he sees no exit for the French, because they have concluded as a society that there is no realm beyond the material. Most Americans would deny that they believe this, but that’s not the way we live, not even Christians. It is true that we Americans are not as far gone into atheism as the French are, so we still have time to recover. But to recover, you first have to recognize the problem. You first have to recognize that the way you are living as a Christian is not going to survive the prolonged encounter with liquid modernity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Spencer are both atheists who have found a strong source of belief in their respective races. Spencer, a Nietzschean, has said that Christianity is a religion of the weak. They have drawn the line between good and evil not down the middle of every human heart, as that great Christian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, but between their race and the Other. There is immense power in that kind of tribalism, and it lies in large part because it denies the fallenness of one’s own people. Where in contemporary American Christianity can we find the resources to resist falling prey to the malign power of racialism, in all its versions?

[. . .]

Only a strong Christianity can counter this nihilistic tribal religion. But this we do not have today. 

A Version of Alt-Right Identitarianism

My right-wing identitarian sparring partner makes a good response to my attempt, earlier today, to locate a common root of both right-and left-wing identitarianism.  My responses are in blue.

.................

Wouldn't you agree, on reflection, that the bolded passage [from a NYT article] is a straw man?

"Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural."

A typical 'alt-right' identitarian in Europe or America believes things like this:

(a) race is real, 

(b) race is an important part of human identity, and a natural basis for organizing society,

(c) racial differences have important political consequences, 

(d) whites have the right to act in their own interest, e.g., by stopping immigration or defending the dominance of white European culture and norms in white European societies . . . 

I accept, with qualifications, all four of these propositions. Much depends, of course, on what exactly they are taken to mean.

As for the first proposition, I accept it as it stands if it is the negation of the claim that racial differences are wholly a matter of social construction. Racial theories and classifications are of course social constructs; but these theories and classifications are attempts to understand an underlying biological reality.  That there are biological differences between the races is as obvious as that there are such differences  between men and women.  These biological realities make it impossible for a person to change his race.  See my response to Rebecca Tuvel's "In Defense of Transracialism."

As for the second proposition, I can accept it, but only with serious qualifications. I hold that a human being is a spiritual animal, and therefore not just an animal. My opponent will probably not accept this; my impression is that he is a naturalist.  My theistic personalism is a version of anti-naturalism.  As a personalist I maintain that race bears only upon my animal identity, WHAT I am as a bit of the world's fauna; not upon WHO I am as a person.  Furthermore, my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup.  For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person.  See Is There a Defensible Sense in which Human Beings are Equal?

Of course, I don't expect my interlocutor to accept any of this if he is a naturalist. But then the discussion shifts to naturalism which comprises a set of questions logically prior to the present set.

With respect to the first half of (b), I would say that race is not an important part of my identity as a person, because it is not any part of my identity as a person, even though it is essential to my identity as an animal:  I am not accidentally Caucasian any more than I am accidentally male.  (Thus even if I pulled a Bruce Jenner and donned 'superdrag' apparel complete with surgically fabricated vagina, mammaries, etc, I would still remain biologically male. I would just be parading around in 'superdrag.' )  My opponent, if he is a naturalist who sees himself as identical to a living human animal, is committed not only to saying that race is an important part of human identity, but is essential to human identity.  

The second half of (b) also requires qualification. First of all it is not clear what it means to say that race is a natural basis for organizing society.  Is this supposed to rule out a 'proposition nation'? And what exactly is a 'proposition nation'?  The Alt-Right seems adamantly opposed to such a thing. But the unity of the USA is not the unity of a tribe but the unity of a set of ideas. Those who accept these ideas are Americans regardless of whether they come from England or Germany or Italy, or Greece -- or China.  I grant, of course that certain ethnic groups are better equipped to implement American values and ideals than others. But that is consistent with the USA being a 'proposition nation.'  

As for the third and fourth propositions, I agree. Racial differences do have political consequences, and  immigration policy must be to the benefit of the host country and its culture.  It would therefore be national suicide to allow the immigration into Western nations of sharia-supporting Muslims.  But what about educated secular Turks who are religiously Muslim to about the same extent as a Boston Unitarian is Christian and bear some of the innocuous cultural marks of Muslims such as the valuing of modesty in women and an aversion to the consumption of alcohol?  What could justify excluding them from immigrating? 

An Identitarian is an Identitarian, Left or Alt-Right

And a pox on both houses, say I. What strikes me is what they have in common. Here is something from the NYT that makes sense (emphasis added):

In the most memorable sentence in “The First White President,” Mr. Coates declares, “Whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.” I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish.

This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural. For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a “talisman,” an “amulet” of “eldritch energies” that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a “meta-biological force,” a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring

I am not so sure the febrile, destructive  bullshit of millionaire celebrity Coates is  morally superior to white supremacism, but the bolded passage gets at the truth of the matter.

By the way, the bums at the NYT have made it difficult to copy from their articles, but here are two work-arounds.  I just now employed the first and it is not too much of a pain.

Related articles

The Left, Root Causes, and White Supremacists

Is Every Racist a White Supremacist?

Mirror Images

Leftist whining about 'cultural appropriation' and Alt-Right denial of the universality of certain cultural goods may be mirror images of each other.  The shared assumption is that cultural goods are not universal but can be owned.

The theorem of Pythagoras has his name on it but neither he nor his descendants own it.  

The same goes for the life-enhancing bourgeois values lately preached by Amy Wax.

Sullivan is Right: Universalism Hasn't Been Debunked

Andrew Sullivan is down with a very bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. But he hasn't lost his mind entirely. He is hip to the absurdity of leftist talk about cultural appropriation.  After wading through yet another load of his anti-Trump hyperventilatory hysteria, I came upon these reasonable words of his:

I love the phrase “long-debunked universalism” by the way. Debunked by whom? Universalism — the idea that human beings can exist as individuals, rather than as members of assigned groups — is far from debunked. It is, in fact, one core premise of liberal society.

Sully is right, but it is not easy to state clearly what is at issue here or what it even means to "exist as individuals rather than as members of assigned groups."   A while back I was complaining about tribalism and I was saying things like: we need to get beyond tribal and racial and other particularistic self-identifications; we need to learn to see ourselves and others as individuals and not as tokens of types or members of groups.  To my surprise, certain alt-righties disagreed with me, seeming to say that what we need to oppose black tribalism, say, is not a transcendence of tribalism, but an equal but opposite white tribalism.

Now that makes no sense to me, except as a sort of interim or stop-gap defensive measure. If some black dude gets in my face about the how great it is to be black, I will be tempted to get in his face and reply in kind.

But that sort of thing does not comport well with my irenic, philosophical nature. We need to transcend our tribalisms and learn to respect each other as persons with equal rights. We are equal as persons!

But what could that mean? Is it not just empty talk? It sounds like the pious verbiage of a preacher or a politician who doesn't really believe what he is saying but says it because he is paid to do so.

Talk of equal rights and respect for persons is indeed empty if naturalism is true. If we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal, then talk of equality is blather. For we are obviously not equal empirically either as individuals or as groups. The alt-righties and neo-reactionaries hammer on this point and they are correct in so doing. So normative equality cannot be grounded in empirical equality if for no other reason than that there is no empirical equality. On the other hand, normative equality cannot 'float in the air.' It cannot subsist independently of any basis in reality.

What then could possibly ground our normative equality as persons with equal rights to life, liberty, and property, if we are nothing but complex physical systems?  If there is no equality in fact, how could there be in norm?

If naturalism is true, what could make it morally wrong always and everywhere and for everyone -- not just pragmatically or prudentially inadvisable in particular circumstances -- for one group to enslave another? Nothing that I can see.  Not the ability to reason since, on naturalism, that is just an empirical feature of human organisms. In any case, the ability is not equally present in human animals.  Hoe could a non-normative property, unequally distributed, ground a right to be tretaed with respect and never to be treated as a means only? If you say that all normal humans have the ability to reason to some degree or other, then you are abstracting away from our differences. How could that abstraction, which remains on the non-normative plane, ground a right to be treated equally?

Here is the problem expressed as an aporetic tetrad:

1) Humans are not empirically equal either as individuals or as groups.

2) Talk of the normative equality of persons, that each ought to be treated as an end and never merely as a means (Kant), is empty if it cannot be provided with a basis in concrete non-normative reality.

3) Naturalism is true: concrete reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.

4) Persons are normatively equal.

The limbs of the tetrad are inconsistent; something has to give. (1) is non-negotiably true as a matter of plain fact. (2) is extremely plausible, and we are committed to (4) if, as our moral intuitions instruct us, slavery, sex trafficking, and the like are moral abominations. So I reject (3). 

If (3) is false, then it is possible that theism is true. If all finite persons are creatures of one and the same infinite person, then all persons are metaphysically equal. This metaphysical fact is then the non-normative basis that grounds the normative equality of persons.

Question for atheists: If you hold that slavery is morally wrong, what on your view makes it morally wrong? 

Related articles

Potentiality and the Substance View of Persons

Maverick Philosopher: Is There a Defensible Sense in Which Human Beings are Equal?

Abortion and Infanticide: What's the Difference?

Is Reason a White Male Euro-Christian Construct?

Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

Is There a Defensible Sense in Which Human Beings are Equal?

My brand of conservatism is personalist, which may help explain why I find myself at loggerheads with those on the so-called 'Alternative Right.'  And my brand of personalism is conservative which may help explain why I look askance at libertarianism and at 'mainstream conservatism' to the extent that the latter is libertarian and insufficiently attentive to the importance of national sovereignty and the right of a nation to preserve its culture from dilution and indeed subversion.  The libertarian overemphasizes the economic.  He is followed in this by the mainstream conservative. The alt-rightist rightly resists this overemphasis but runs the risk of falling into an excessive and morally obnoxious particularism. One form this particularism takes is in the alt-right's anti-egalitarianism.  See here:

The Alt Right is anti-equalitarian. It rejects the idea of equality for the same reason it rejects the ideas of unicorns and leprechauns, noting that human equality does not exist in any observable scientific, legal, material, intellectual, sexual, or spiritual form.

We are being told that there is no non-trivial sense in which human beings are equal.  This, I take it, is a characteristic and defining Alt Right claim to which I oppose the Trad Right thesis that there is a sense in which all human beings are equal, namely, as persons.  I suspect that this may be the main difference between the Alt and the Trad versions of conservatism.  Or if not the main difference, then an important one.

But my concern is not to oppose the Alt Right, whatever exactly it is supposed to be, but to defend the thesis that human beings are equal, not as animals in nature, but as persons.  Here, as elsewhere, my aim is clarity, not agreement. Agreement is out of reach, but clarification of differences is an achievable and worthwhile goal.

Empirical Inequality is a Fact

Empirical inequality cannot be denied:  by the various empirical measures there is plenty of inequality among individuals and groups.   (Trivial example: men on average are taller than women. Height is an example of an empirically measurable attribute.)   So if human beings are taken solely in their empirical and material natures, or if human beings are nothing more than material beings, then talk of the equality of all human beings is either false or trivial.  (That all human beings are equal in that they all have been born at or near the surface of the earth is empirically true, but trivially true.)

Let me make  a couple more pedantic points just to make sure that the issue is clear. That we are not all empirically equal is of course consistent with two or more of us being equal in some measurable respect or even in all such respects. If it should turn out that Tim and Tom are alike in all empirical respects, that would be  consistent with the denial that we are all empirically equal. A second point is that the denial that we are all empirically equally is not a normative, but a factual, claim and as such axiologically neutral. There is no implication that this is a bad, or a good, state of affairs. It is just a fact. 

The Question

Given the plain fact of empirical inequality, is there any defensible sense in which human beings could be said to be equal and in possession of equal rights?

Equality is not a Matter of Abstraction

There is a misunderstanding that needs to be squelched at the outset.  Talk of the equality of humans as persons does not involve abstraction from all the empirical differences that divide individuals and groups. No doubt there is the concept human being in general which every individual human animal falls under. We arrive at this concept by abstracting from all the differences between individuals to arrive at a determination common to them all.    But to speak of persons is not to engage in such an abstraction.  It is to refer to the unique subject of experience that each of us is, and to which each one of us can refer using the first-person singular pronoun.  That to which I refer when I say 'I' is a unique personal reality, a concrete individual, not an abstraction.

The Concept of Person 

A person, then, is a concrete subject of experience. By 'subject,' I don't just mean something that has or supports experiences as in the Aristotelian notion of a substrate or  hypokeimenon, but something that is an initiator or enactor or source of experiences.  Analogously as rays of light emanate from a light source, 'rays' of intentionality emanate outward from the subject (in the modern sense) toward objects. A person is a subject in both of these ancient and modern senses. 

To unpack it a bit: a person is a conscious and thus sentient individual, capable of self-consciousness, possessing feeling and will and memory and the capacity to reason and plan and seek the truth about itself and everything else.   I have just limned the concept of person in the descriptive sense of 'person.' We may now add the normative sense. A person in the normative sense is a rights-possessor which, in virtue of having rights, induces in other persons various duties.  For example, my right to life induces in you the duty to refrain from taking my life, and your duty derives from my right.  In this sense rights and duties are correlative.

Equality of Persons, not of Animals

So when I speak of the equality of persons, that does not mean that all human animals are empirically equal, either as individuals or as groups, which is plainly false, nor does it mean that all human animals are equal just insofar as they are instances of the concept human being.  The latter is true of course: each instance of human being is the same as, and equal to, every  other such instance qua instance.  But while true it misses the point, namely, that each human being is a unique person.

We need to distinguish among: (a) All humans are empirically equal, which is false; (b) All humans are equally instances of the concept human being, which is true but trivial; (c) Each human being is a unique person. 

My claim, then, is that we are all equal as persons in the descriptive sense, and therefore all equal in the normative sense.  That is, if any one of us is a rights-possessor in virtue of being a descriptive person, then every one of us is a rights-possessor in virtue of being a descriptive person.  And all of this regardless of sex, race, age, and any other empirical feature. We are equal as persons even if my will is stronger than yours and my intellect more penetrating. We are equal as persons even if you are more compassionate than me.

The point, then, is that equality is grounded in personhood, not in animal constitution.  To clarify this, we need to think some more about the relation of persons and human beings or human animals when the latter are viewed from the angle of the natural sciences of biology and anthropology.

Persons and Human Animals

The above definition of 'person' allows for persons that are not human beings and human beings (genetic humans) that are not persons, as well as persons that are human beings. In the following Venn diagram, A = persons and  B = humans. The intersection C represents persons who  are human.  God, angels, demons, and pre-embodied and disembodied Platonic souls are examples of persons that are not human. They are not human because they are not animals at all, but pure spirits. Also examples of persons that are not human are embodied persons whose personhood is realized in non-human material stuff, e.g. extraterrestrials and persons realized, not in living matter, but in computers. Examples of humans that are not persons, on my definition of 'person,' would be anencephalic human neonates. They would not be persons because of their lack of capacity to develop language and reasoning skills. (For more on the anencephalic business, see Potentiality and the Substance View of Persons, the comments to which were good.)  But these anencephalic individuals are nonetheless genetically human as the offspring of human parents.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To repeat, our equality is grounded in our shared personhood despite our considerable empirical differences. Personhood cannot be understood in natural-scientific terms. 

I am not commited to saying that we can exist as persons without animal embodiment.  I am committed to saying that persons cannot be reduced to animals. 

Equality in the Declaration of Independence

The first sentence of the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence reads, "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Clearly, on a charitable interpretation, what this affirms is not (a) or (b) but something in the vicinity of (c).  We are equal as persons, as subjects of experience and as rights-possessors, not as animals in nature.  As objects in the natural world having natural and empirically detectable properties, we are obviously not all equal.  

Our equality is grounded in our being, not objects in the world, but subjects for whom there is a world. Subjectivity looms large on the personalist conception. It is only as conscious and self-conscious subjects that we are purposive beings who pursue things, including happiness, and have a right to the sort of life that conscious beings enjoy.  This is life via intentional acts emanating from a personal center and not life in a merely biological sense.  Human living cannot be exhaustively understood biologically, and this despite the plain fact that we are animals in nature.

That empirical equality is not at issue  should also be obvious from the talk of a Creator.  We are said to be  created equal.  If we are created equal, but are at the same time plainly unequal empirically speaking, then the respect in which we are created equal cannot be an empirical respect.  We are not equal as specimens of a biological species, but equal in some other respect. What respect could that be?

Talk of a creator brings a purely spiritual being, God, into the picture. In the context of Christianity, which is the context in which the Founders operate, that means that we are created in the image and likeness of God. And what that means is that we too are spiritual beings possessing free will and the dignity and worth that comes with it, despite our embodiment in nature.

On this scheme, political equality and equality of rights rest on a metaphysical foundation, namely the metaphysics of persons, where persons are spiritual individuals with a destiny that transcends their animal mortality.  We are all equal as creatures of the same Creator.

Interim Conclusion

Our problem was to explain how how humans could be said to equal when they are manifestly unequal empirically speaking. The classical theist will have no trouble answering.  We are more than animals. We are spiritual individuals created by God in his image and likeness. As such we are equal in dignity and worth and equal in rights, whether tall or short, white or black of brown or yellow, male or female young or old, etc.

If it is essential to the Alt Right to deny that there is any sense in which humans are equal that is not either false or trivial, then the Alt Right view excludes classical theism and conversely.

An Objection and a Reply

Correspondent Jacques raises the following objection:

Let's agree it's ["All men are created equal"] a normative claim to the effect that all 'persons' have certain 'rights'.  What then entitles all of them to these rights?  A normative fact like that doesn't float free from all empirical facts.  There's got to be some reason why all normal human adults have these rights but chickens or pencils don't, some empirical property of these beings only that generates or confers certain rights.  Is it the shared property of being a person?  Or the shared property of being human?  Something else?  I suspect that any of the candidate properties will be either morally irrelevant, even by liberal-leftist standards, or else relevant but distributed so unequally that it will be hard to understand how it could be the basis for 'equal' rights.

This is a fair question. We do not ascribe rights such as a right to life to chickens. We raise them to eat them.  We treat them as mere means to our ends, even if we treat them humanely. Why is it morally permissible to eat chickens but not to eat humans? Why is it morally permissible to force animals to work for us but impermissible to enslave humans? What grounds the normative properties? 

I agree with Jacques that normativity does not "float free": it needs anchorage in the non-normative. But the non-normative need not be observable by the senses. The non-normative is not equivalent to the empirical.  It is open to me to say that the moral impermissibility of eating humans is grounded in the non-normative fact of their being persons in the descriptive sense. Humans are persons while chickens are not; this factual difference grounds the normative difference.  It also explains why it is permissible to make a beast of burden of a donkey, but not of a man.  I may agree to carry your load, but if you force me to carry it, then you violate my normative personhood which is grounded in my descriptive personhood.

Jacques also asks, "Why should we think there is any suitable empirical basis for the normative claim that 'all men are equal' or that such normative claims could be true regardless of any empirical facts?" I agree that there is no empirical basis for the normative claim.  But it doesn't follow that it has no basis. The normative claim has a metaphysical basis in the nature of persons.   

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What is the Alt-Left?

Victor Davis Hanson nails down some important points.  I add a bit of commentary in blue.

But first a question. Do we really need the designator 'Alt-Left'? Isn't the referent of this term pretty much indistinguishable from the contemporary Left?  Granted, we need to distinguish between the contemporary Left and old-time liberalism. There is not much, or anything, that is paleo-liberal about the contemporary Left, as will emerge below. We also need to distinguish between the Right and the Alt-Right.  Let me make it clear that I am not now, and never have been, Alt-Right. My brand of conservatism takes on board key elements of paleo-liberalism. It is also far from anything that could be called white nationalism, although it does espouse what I call an enlightened nationalism. (See here and here.) But I am having a hard time seeing any need to distinguish between the (contemporary) Left and the Alt-Left.  

My impression is that 'Alt-Left' is a knee-jerk coinage brought onto the field by commentators such as Sean Hannity to counter the false notion that Trumpism is an Alt-Right movement. Be that as it may.  Now a few excerpts from Hamson's piece.

Its overarching ideology seems to be a filtered version of campus postmodernism. Therefore the “truth” is simply a pastiche of “stories” or “narratives.” They can gain credence if those with power and influence “privilege” them, in efforts to enhance their own status and clout. “My story” is just as viable as “the truth,” a construct that does not exist in the abstract.

BV: Correct. For the Alt-Left there is no such thing as truth. There are only power and narratives. A narrative is a story, and we all know that a story need not be true to influence people and inspire them to action. The influence of Nietzsche is unmistakable here. For Nietzsche there are no facts, only interpretations. (Cf. W. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, p. 458) A narrative is an interpretation that subserves the interests of some individuals or groups that either have power or seek to gain power.

Interpretations and perspectives are ideological reflections of power. Their function is to legitimate the power of those in power. The question of truth cannot arise since there is no truth, only competing perspectives  of competing power centers. There is no truth because the world is devoid of intrinsic intelligibility.  All intelligibility is partial and perspectival and projected by the stories we tell in support of our interests and power prerogatives.  Intelligibility is relative to us and our narratives. We make the world intelligible and in many different ways since we are many and competing. Why is there no way things are, no nature of things, no intrinsic intelligibility? Because, at bottom, the world is the will to power. This is Nietzsche's central ontological claim.  Die Welt ist der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders. (Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht) This ontological claim underpins his central epistemological thesis, perspectivism.  Both the ontology and the epistemology are consequences of the death of God, as N. himself clearly sees. No God, no truth. No God, no unitary source of all things but a blind seething will to power at odds with itself. See my Nietzsche category for more on this.

I would say that Nietzsche is as important as Marx for understanding the Alt-Left.  Nietzsche is part of what makes cultural Marxism cultural.

For the Alt-Left, there are not really inanimate [immutable?] laws of human nature or language. Instead political mobilization can construct powerful narratives of change: Opposition to gay marriage can be endorsed by both Obama and Clinton in 2008 and then be reconstructed as proof of right wing bigotry by 2012.

BV: Thus for the Left truth doesn't matter.  The narrative or party line shifts with political needs. It's about power and control. If power can be achieved by reversing the narrative, then the narrative is reversed. Nothing new here: it is right out of the commie playbook.

Zones of neo-Confederate federal nullification to stop the deportation of illegal alien criminals can be rebranded as “sanctuary cities” to protect the innocent “migrants” from arbitrary and racist immigration laws. “La Raza” does not really mean “The Race.” Instead Raza simply denotes the “people” in reference to oppressed communities.

BV: As I have said a hundred times, leftists regularly engage in self-serving linguistic distortions and innovations even unto the Orwellian.  The Orwellian template: X, which is not Y, is Y. War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Less liberty is more liberty. La Raza is not La Raza. Illegal aliens are neither illegal nor alien.

Leftists also refuse to make obvious distinctions such as that between legal and illegal immigrants. Not because they are stupid, but because their power agenda swamps every other consideration. Power rushes to fill the vacuum left when truth absents itself in the wake of the death of God. 

The Alt-Left also believes that racial, ethnic, sexual, and religious identity is essential not incidental to character—as evidenced from the profound by the recent racialist statements of would-be candidates to head the DNC, to the ridiculous, as the careerist-driven and invented identities of a Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Ward Churchill or former white/black activists such as Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King attest.

BV: The Alt-Left shares this anti-personalism with the Alt-Right. Both are race-based and identity-political. The reactionary stance of the Alt-Right ties it to its opponent with which it shares the repugnant, anti-Christian, and anti-paleoliberal notion that one's very identity as a person is racially determined. The issue of personalism is crucial. I will explore it in future posts. 

Perhaps the battle between the Alt-Left and the Alt-Right comes down to the struggle between two forms of atheism, a febrile socially constructivist anti-realism and a biologically determinist naturalism.

Please read the whole of Hanson's outstanding article.  

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On Transcending Tribalism

Jonathan Haidt:

Humans are tribal, but tribalism can be transcended. It exists in tension with our extraordinary ability to develop bonds with other human beings. Romeo and Juliet fell in love. French, British and German soldiers came out of their trenches in World War I to exchange food, cigarettes and Christmas greetings.

The key, as Cicero observed, is proximity, and a great deal of modern research backs him up. Students are more likely to become friends with the student whose dorm room is one door away than with the student whose room is four doors away. People who have at least one friend from the other political party are less likely to hate the supporters of that party.

But tragically, Americans are losing their proximity to those on the other side and are spending more time in politically purified settings. [. . .]

Haidt is right that tribalism can be transcended, at least to some extent, and that proximity and interaction can facilitate the transcending.  But he is far more optimistic that I am.

What Haidt ignores is that there is no comity without commonality, as I like to put it.  You and I can live and work together in harmony only within a common space of shared values and assumptions and recognized facts.  But that common space is shrinking.

Take any 'hot button' issue, Second Amendment rights, for example.  What do I have in common with the anti-gunner who favors confiscation of all civilian firearms, or only slightly less radically, wants to ban all handguns?  To me it is evident that my right to life grounds a right to self-defense, and with it a right to acquire the appropriate means of self-defense.  If you deny this, then we have no common ground, at least not on this topic.  On this topic, we would then be at loggerheads.  If you then work politically or extra-politically  to violate what here in the States are called Second Amendment rights, then you become my enemy.  And the consequences of enmity can become unpleasant in the extreme.

In a situation like this, proximity and interaction only exacerbate the problem.  Even the calm interaction of scholarly argument and counter-argument does no good.  No matter how carefully and rigorously I argue my position, I will not succeed in convincing the opponent.  This is a fact of experience over a wide range of controversial topics, and not just in politics.  The only good thing that comes of the dialectical interaction is a clarification and deeper understanding of one's position and what it entails.  If you think, say, that semi-automatic weapons ought to be banned for civilian use, then you and I will never find common ground.  But I will perfect my understanding of my position and its presuppositions and better understand what I reject in yours.

After we have clarified, but not resolved, our differences, anger at the intransigence of the other is the likely upshot if we continue to interact in close proximity whether in the same academic department, the same church, the same club, the same neighborhood, the same family . . . .  This is why there are schisms and splits and factions and wars and all manner of contention.

Anger at intransigence can then lead on to the thought that  there must be something morally defective, and perhaps also intellectually defective, about the opponent if he holds, say, that a pre-natal human is just a clump of cells.  One advances -- if that is the word -- to the view that the opponent is morally censurable for holding the position he holds, that he is being willfully morally obtuse and deserves moral condemnation.  And then the word 'evil may slip in: "The bastard is not just wrong; he is an evil son-of-a-bitch for promoting the lie that an unborn child is just a clump of cells, or a disposable part of woman's body like a wart." The arguably false statements of the other get treated as lies and therefore as statements at the back of which in an intent to deceive. And from there it ramps up to 'Hillary is Satan' and 'Trump is Hitler.'

The cure for  this unproductive warfare is mutual, voluntary, segregation.  A return to federalism.   I develop the thought in A Case for Voluntary Segregation.

So while Haidt is right that proximity and interaction can promote mutual understanding and mitigate hostility, that is true only up to a point and works only within a common space of shared assumptions, values, and recognized facts.  Absent the common space, the opposite is true: proximity and interaction are precisely what must be avoided to preserve peace.  

The Problem and Three Main Solutions

The problem is how to transcend tribalism.  I count three main solutions, the Liberal, the Alt Right, and the Sane (which is of course my view!)

There is what I take to be Haidt's rather silly liberal solution, namely, that what will bring us together is proximity and interaction. He assumes that if we all come together and get to know each other  we will overcome tribalism.  This borders on utopian nonsense.  It is precisely because of proximity and interaction that many decide to self-segregate.  The more I know about certain individuals and groups the less I want to have to do with them.  The thugs of Black Lives Matter, for example.  By the way, 'thug' is not code for 'nigger.'  'Thug' means thug.  Look it up.  

At the other extreme we find the 'alties' and neo-reactionaries.  They have a sound insight, namely, that there are unassimillable elements and that they must be kept out.  For example, Sharia-supporting Muslim are unassimillable into the U. S. because their values are antithetical to ours, perhaps not all of their values, but enough to make for huge problems.   

The success of e pluribus unum depends on the nature of the pluribus.  A One cannot be made out of just any Many.  (Cute formulation, eh?) The members of the manifold must be unifiable under some umbrella of common values, assumptions, and recognized facts.  One nation cannot be made out of many tribes of immigrants unless the many tribes of immigrants accept OUR values, American values.  The tribalism is overcome or at least mitigated by acceptance of a unifying set of Ametrican values and ideas.

The alt-rightists, however, do not really offer a solution to the problem of transcending tribalism since their 'solution' is to embrace an opposing tribalism. They are right about the reality of race, as against the foolish notion that race is a social construct, but they push this realism in an ugly and extreme direction when they construe American identity as white identity, where this excludes Jews. American identity is rooted in a set of ideas and values.  It must be granted, however, that not all racial and ethnic groups are equally able to assimilate and implement these ideas and values.  Immigration policy must favor those that are.  

The sane way is the middle way.  To liberals we ought to concede that diversity is a value, but at the same time insist that it is a value that has to be kept in check by the opposing value of unity.   Muslims who refuse to accept our values must not be allowed to immigrate.  They have no right to immigrate, but we have every right to select those who will beneft us.  That is just common sense.  The good sort of diversity is not enhanced by the presence of terror-prone fanatics.

What we need, then, to mitigate tribal hostility is not more proximity and interaction, but less, fewer 'conversations' not more, less government, more toleration, voluntary segregation, a return to federalism, a total stoppage of illegal immigration, and a reform of current immigration law.

Will any of this happen under Hillary? No.  So you know what you have to do tomorrow.

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Justice Thomas: ". . . so politically incorrect that he may not even be black."

Edward J. Erler, Last Chance to Defeat Political Correctness? Excerpt (exphasis added):

. . . Progressive Liberals have viciously criticized Justice Clarence Thomas for refusing to represent his racial class on the Supreme Court. He sees his duty, instead, as following the rule of law and the Constitution. When the law classifies on the basis of race or attempts to promote racial class interests, he has written many times, it undermines the rule of law by violating the crucial principal that all persons are equal before the law. Progressive Liberals despise Thomas for arguing that “benign” racial classifications to benefit racial classes or groups are morally equivalent to invidious racial classifications designed to harm or disadvantage racial or ethnic groups. Race, an arbitrary, inessential feature of the human persona, has no role to play in the rule of law. Since rights belong to individuals, Thomas correctly insists, they are not conditioned by the racial class an individual happens to occupy.

Justice Thomas is so politically incorrect that he may not even be black. (We “cannot tell every story,” says the Smithsonian Institution about Thomas’s absence from the new National Museum of African American History and Culture.) If race is as much a political fact as a biological one, then the failure or refusal to promote a group’s interests and identity nullifies membership in that group. Conversely, Bill Clinton was acclaimed America’s first black president.

The vicious insanity of  contemporary liberals is truly mind-boggling.  But that's nothing new.  What may be worth pointing out, however, is that the bolded passage, with which I fully agree, is contested not only by leftists but also by alt-rightists and neo-reactionaries.   

Both groups, while otherwise at each other's throats, jump into the same bed when it comes to the importance of 'blood.'  Both groups favor an identity politics in which race is an essential determinant of one's very identity.  I have a post (56 comments) in which I lament the tribal identification of so many blacks and in which I recommend getting beyond tribal identifications.  But certain 'alties' or NRs would have none of it: they think that the right response to black tribalism is white tribalism.

In another post I cited the Declaration's "all men are created equal," which elicited from an NR the riposte that it is false!  The response displayed a failure to grasp that the famous declaration in the Declaration is not an empirical claim about the properties and powers of human animals whether as individuals or as groups, but a normative claim about persons as rights-possessors.

Some good points are made by some on the Alternative Right.  But their response to the insane extremism of the Left is -- wait for it -- a reaction that is also extreme, though not  insane.  Trads and the alties share some common ground, so dialogue is possible; but self-enstupidated leftists are beyond the pale of dialogue.  They are enemies that have to be defeated, not fellow rational beings with whom it would make sense to have a conversation.  One hopes that their defeat can be achieved politically; but extrapolitical means remain 'on the table.'

A lot rides on the concept of person when it comes to differentiating a tenable conservatism from the reactionary particularism of  the Alt Right.  A separate post will sketch a personalist conservatism.  

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Further Questions About the 'Alternative Right'

Jacques, in a debate in an earlier thread with Bob the Ape (sic!) writes:

[. . .] The mere fact that conservatism, or western civilization more generally, is the product of a specific group does not _imply_ that "it must remain the exclusive property of that group, or that that group is essential for its existence". On the other hand, there is no particular reason to believe that these things are _not_ the exclusive property of western peoples or that white Europeans are _not_ essential to the conservation and functioning of our western civilization. What evidence could anyone have for thinking that western civilization encodes principles or ways of being that are "true for everyone" or, more to the point, feasible for everyone? Obviously a healthy western society can do just fine with small numbers of foreigners, including even Australian Aborigines. But the question is whether our societies can thrive (or even exist) when non-whites, non-westerners, non-Christians are introduced in numbers so huge as to reduce white western Christians to minorities. I can't think of any reason for optimism about this scenario. And there's lots of evidence for the view that western civilization could only have been created and sustained by the specific racial-cultural groups that in fact created and sustained it. Certainly it seems far-fetched to imagine that groups such as the Aborigines have the capacity to produce anything like the civilization of Italy or England or France or Holland. These are groups who have never left the stone age. [. . .]

One claim Jacques seems to be making is that

C1.  There is no reason to believe that Western civilization includes principles true for everyone.

Now (C1) strikes me as plainly false.  Suppose we mean by a principle a  true proposition fundamental to some body of knowledge. Accordingly, the  Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) is a principle of logic. It is true and it is foundational.  This principle, along with all the rest of the principles of logic, is not just true, but necessarily true.  So they are true not only for every actual person but for every possible person.  Is Jacques a relativist who thinks that the truths of logic vary from tribe to tribe, that LNC is true for whites but not for blacks, for Europeans but not for Australian aborigines?  I hope not.

Obviously the same holds for the principles of mathematics and all the propositions derivable from these principles.  They are necessarily true for all actual and possible persons.

All of these truths of logical and mathematics are true for everyone, not in the sense that they are accepted or believed by everyone, but in the sense that they are binding on everyone.

The principles of natural science, though presumably not necessarily true, being contingently true, are nonetheless true for all if true for any.  Consider the principle of the additivity of velocities at pre-relativistic speeds.  If a Zulu on a train fires a gun in the direction of train travel, the velocity of the projectile will be governed by this principle just as it will be if it were an Englshman doing the firing.

Further examples could be given, but the foregoing suffices to refute (C1).  Another claim Jacques seems to be making is 

C2. There is no reason to believe that the principles included in Western civilization are not the exclusive property of Western peoples.

Jacques is suggesting that the these principles are the exclusive property of Western peoples.  The suggestion is absurd.  No one has proprietary rights in truth.  Truths cannot be owned.  Pythagoras discovered the theorem of Pythagoras, but he did not thereby come to own it.  If a German or an African uses the theorem to calculate the length of the hypotenuse on a right triangle is he violating Pythagoras' property rights, or those of his descendants?

Had Pythagoras invented the theorem bearing his name, then perhaps one could say that he owned it.  But he didn't invent it; he discovered it.  To latch onto a truth is to latch onto something absolute:  the truth of a proposition is not subject to the whim of arbitrary creativity.  A truth of mathematics is not like an advertising logo or a song.  A song can be copyrighted, but not a truth.

Suppose I write a post in which I state some well-known truths in my own classy way.  Impressed by my inimitable style, you decide to plagiarize my post.  All you succeed in doing is plagiarizing my classy, or perhaps quirky, formulations: you cannot plagiarize the truths the formulations express.  Plagiarism is literary theft.  You can steal my formulations by copying without quoting and attributing the sentences I have constructed, but you cannot steal the truths, if any, that I have expressed via those formulations. I own the formulations, but not the truths they express.  Truth is too noble a thing to be owned by the likes of me -- or you.  And what one cannot steal, one cannot own.  Or to put the point with precision:  if x cannot be stolen, then there cannot be any y such that y owns x.  (Please run that proposition through your counterexample detector.)

The Egyptians measured land and so were involved in geo-metry, but it was the ancient Greeks, Euclid and the boys, who made of geometry an axiomatic deductive science.  Those Greek geniuses discovered axiomatics.  Did they own it?  Is an Italian or a German who axiomatizes set theory guilty of theft, or 'cultural appropriation'?

And now we notice something very interesting.  These alt-rightists are the mirror image of crazy leftists.  This is no surprise inasmuch as they are reactionaries.  He who reacts is defined by that against which he reacts.  He has decided to dance with the pig and get dirty instead of eschewing the dance altogether.  Thus to the identity politics of the Left, they oppose an identity politics of the Right, when what they ought to be doing is getting beyond identity politics altogether.  

And if they maintain that the cultural goods we have in the West (logic, philosophy, science, law, engineering, architecture, music, art, Judeo-Christian ethics) are owned by Western peoples, then they will have to endorse some notion of illicit 'cultural appropriation' when non-Western peoples make use of them.  But notice: if it is wrong for the Koreans, say, to appropriate the engineering know-how of Germans and Americans in their auto manufacturing and elsewhere, then why wasn't it wrong for the French and Italian mathematicians to 'culturally appropriate' the fruits of Greek mathematics?

The point here is that there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as Greek mathematics; there is mathematics and the Greeks were uncommonly gifted at getting at its truths.  Do you alt-rightists think that there is Jewish physics and Aryan physics?  Physics is physics.  Race, ethnicity, class, and 'gender' are irrelevant when it comes to the contents of physics.  

Are men as a group better than women as a group when it comes to contributing to math and phsyics?  Yes.  But it doesn't follow that there is male math and female math.

One of the alt-right fallacies, then, is to think that Western culture is somehow tied necessarily to Western peoples either by being true or normatively binding only for Western peoples, or by being owned by Western peoples.  The fact that Western peoples originated this culture is irrelevant.  What is Western in origin, and thus in this sense particular, is yet universal in validity.

More defensible than (C1) and (C2) is 

C3. There is little or no reason to think that Western civilization includes ways of comportment that are feasible for everyone.

This is a large topic.  I agree that our recent foreign policy has been irresponsibly interventionist.  

But consider that the barbarian bastards from the North, the Goths and Visigoths and others who sacked Rome more than once and laid waste to the civilization of the Mediteranean -- didn't those Teutonic and other bad asses end up getting civilized by the great Graeco-Roman, Judeo-Christian culture to the extent that, in the fullness of time, they could produce a Goethe and a Kant and a Beethoven?      

I am not opposed to everything Jacques says above.  I agree with, or at least find very plausible, these further claims:

C4. There is good reason to think that white Europeans are essential to the preservation of our Western civilization. 

C5. Our civilization is at risk if Western Christians become a minority.

C6. "Western civilization could only have been created and sustained by the specific racial-cultural groups that in fact created and sustained it."

More on the Alternative Right

What exactly is the alternative right (alt-right), and how does it differ from other views on the right?

Yesterday I argued that John Derbyshire's definition is useless because too broad.  Jacques by e-mail contributes the following:

If the alt-right is simply the (or a) right-wing alternative to the mainstream or dominant kind of conservatism, you count as alt-right if and only if you reject at least some of the central ideas of the mainstream dominant kind of conservatism and your general orientation is right-wing.  The definition does imply that the alt-right differs from some other forms of conservatism or rightism, and we can specify these kinds of differences by specifying the central tenets of mainstream conservatism.  You might well be alt-right under this definition. 

For example, it's a tenet of mainstream conservatism that there are no important natural racial differences; if you disagree, you're in the alt-right.  You might not think so, because you don't agree with tribalists and anti-semites who also oppose mainstream conservatism for different reasons, and with different right-wing agendas.  But my definition is appropriately broad and vague:  the alt-right is a big tent, since there are so many things wrong with mainstream conservatism that otherwise right-wing people can object to for many different and incompatible reasons.  This is how the term is being used, anyway.  Lots of people who call themselves 'alt-right' and get called 'alt-right' by others are not anti-semites, for example; some of them are even (non-anti-semitic) Jews.  You can be 'alt-right' under my definition even though you disagree with lots of others in the 'alt-right' about lots of important things.  Just like a Calvinist and an Anglican can both be Protestants.  What do you think?

I take Jacques to be saying that if I disagree with even one tenet of mainstream conservatism, then that makes me a 'big tent' alt-rightist. He brings up the question whether there are important natural racial differences, and maintains that it is a "tenet of mainstream conservatism" that there are none.  I think this is correct if we take the mainstream conservative to be maintaining, not that there are no natural (as opposed to socially constructed) racial differences, but that such differences are not important.  The idea is that 'blood' does not, or rather ought not matter, when it comes to questions of public policy. Consider immigration policy.  Should U. S. immigration policy favor Englishmen over Zulus?  If race doesn't matter, why should Englishmen be preferred?  If race doesn't matter, both groups should assimilate just as well and be beneficial to the host population in the same measure.

So one question concerns what a mainstream conservative is:

Q1. Do mainstream conservatives hold that there are natural racial differences but that they don't matter, or that that there are no such natural differences to matter?

The answer depends on who best represents mainstream conservatism.  What do you say, Jacques?

Suppose the mainstream conservative holds that there are natural racial differences, but that they don't matter.  If I hold that they do matter, then I am not a mainstream conservative, and my position is some sort of alternative to mainstream conservatism.  But I don't think that this difference alone would justify calling me an alt-rightist since 'alt-right' picks out a rather more specific constellation of theses.

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So What is Alt-Right Anyway?

John Derbyshire gives the following answer (HT: Malcolm Pollack):

So what, in my opinion, makes the Alt-Right a distinct thing — not by any means a party, a faction, or a movement, but a collection of souls with something in common?

Here's my answer: We don't like flagrant nonsense in the discussion of human affairs. We don't like being lied to. We especially don't like being lied to by credentialed academics like Jerry Coyne.

The lies are so flagrant, so outrageously obvious, you'd have to laugh at them, if not for the fact that laughing at them is close to being a criminal offense. "There is no such thing as race!" What a preposterous thing to say! What a multiply preposterous thing for an academic in the human sciences to say. Yet look! — they say it!

As Ann Coulter has quipped: It's like saying "there are no such things as mountains." When, after all, is a mountain just a hill? Similarly with "there are no such things as colors," since, after all, no-one can tell you how many colors there are, or the precise wavelength at which turquoise is more blue-ish than green-ish. How many neighborhoods are there in New York City? Beats me; so are there no such things as neighborhoods? This is infantile.

Much more to the point, it's like saying "there are no such things as families." When do you stop being a member of my family? Fourth cousin? Ninth cousin by marriage? So are there no such things as families?

But of course there are such things as families. And that's all races are: big old extended families of mostly-common deep ancestry.

This acquiescence in obvious lies — even by academics, who should be the guardians of truth — is characteristic of totalitarian societies. The money quote here is from Tony Daniels, a/k/a "Theodore Dalrymple." Quote:

>>In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is … in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.<<

Tony himself, I should say, lines up with Goodwhites in the Cold Civil War, not with us Badwhites of the Alt-Right. I very seriously doubt he'd consider himself a member of the Alt-Right. His insight there, however, is very penetrating, and could be inscribed on an Alt-Right banner, if we ever get around to brandishing banners.

And so it is with the NYU Student Council ninnies and the Student Diversity Initiative bedwetters, not one of whom is fit to shine James Watson's shoes.

They don't want to shine his shoes. They don't want to persuade or convince him. They want to humiliate him. They, midgets and mites, want to humiliate a giant, one of the world's greatest living scientists. And the cringing administrators at New York University want to help them!

That's what the Alt-Right is about; that's what unites us; disgust with, and resistance to, these liars and weasels and commissars.

While I agree with everything Derbyshire says above, though not with everything he says, the above is useless as a definition of Alt-Right.  Suppose I 'define' an airplane as a vehicle.  This fails as a definition, not because it is false, but because it specifies only a necessary condition for a thing's being an airplane. Every airplane is a vehicle, but not every vehicle is an airplane.  An adequate definition lays down individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the application of a concept.  An adequate definition of 'airplane' must list those features that make airplanes different from other vehicles.

Similarly, an adequate definition of 'alternative Right' must list those features that make alt-rightists different from other sorts of conservatives.  On Derb's definition, I count as alt-right, when I am no such thing.

I hate leftist liars and crapweasels.  I have contempt for Jerry Coyne, or rather his attitudes and views. (See here.)  I hold that the silencing of James Watson is an outrage and a betrayal of the values and purposes of the university.  I find absurd the notion that race is a social construct.  No doubt racial theories are social constructs, but the notion that race and racial differences are is preposterous.  I agree with Dalrymple as quoted above.  And I share Derb's "disgust with, and resistance to, these liars and weasels and commissars."

So I have some serious conservative 'cred' in the sense of both credentials and credibility,  not to mention the civil courage to speak the truth as I sincerely see it under my real name publicly as I have been doing since 2004.

But none of these attitudes or commitments or virtues make me alt-right.

I am not exactly sure what 'alt-right' refers to, and apparently those who fly this flag don't either, as witness Derbyshire above, but I get the impression that the position includes some very specific theses that differentiate it from other types  of conservatism.  I hope to go into this in more detail later, but for now I'll mention the following: white tribalism, anti-semitism, rejection of classically liberal notions such as the value of toleration, rejection of the formal (as opposed to empirical) equality of persons and with it key elements in the documents of the American founding as well as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and a rejection of the normative universality of truth and value.