How people think about their own lives is not political thinking and thus not identity politics. Political thinking is about how you interact with other people.
This statement seems both wrong and deeply implausible to me. Are there a few forms of thought that don’t really concern other people? Sure. That’s things like playing Sudoku, or getting a song stuck in your head, or maybe working on pure mathematical research. Almost every other form of deliberate thought cashes out to interacting with other people and influencing the polis.
Why? That muddles the term and makes it harder to speak about important things that are happening currently.
Because thinking about our lives, which I deem a political act, is based on private information that’s heavily correlates with the various forms of identity that are important to us. This makes perfect sense. The problems I face, solutions I find, and overall attitude towards life that I develop will be heavily shaped by the mutable and permanent factors that make up my identity. They’ll seem most sensible and be most useful to others who share those characteristics. The people I know will tend to be like me, because we associate with those who have the most targeted useful information to share with us.
It should be no surprise when the attitudes, priorities, and practices of other groups don’t align with our own, and when they find us strange in turn. We have different identities and therefore interact with the polis in different ways. The output of our communities in speech and action is a form of identity politics.
The drive in this community to downplay conventional identity characteristics, such as race, gender, orientation, and so on, in favor of either a universal identity (as rational humans) or an adoptable identity (futurists, utilitarians, STEM-oriented people, atheists, etc), speaks to a particular need that people with this constellation of identities have. To someone who doesn’t share these identities, the amount of weight we put onto this wouldn’t make sense. To others, our insistence on downplaying conventional identities and denying that we’re engaging in identity politics might seem disingenuous or even sinister. They’ll have reasons for this that will make sense to them based on the particular problems they face because of the shared patterns of their own lives—their shared identity.
I find it comforting and helpful to understand that we’re all engaged in identity politics. That it’s OK. That it’s normal for it to produce deep disagreement. What’s happening here is a collective attempt to triangulate useful ideas to our allies who are most likely to find them sensible and helpful.
I need to move on from this line of thought, so I hope you find this reply helpful. I’m committing to this being my last response along these lines within this post.
This statement seems both wrong and deeply implausible to me. Are there a few forms of thought that don’t really concern other people? Sure. That’s things like playing Sudoku, or getting a song stuck in your head, or maybe working on pure mathematical research. Almost every other form of deliberate thought cashes out to interacting with other people and influencing the polis.
Because thinking about our lives, which I deem a political act, is based on private information that’s heavily correlates with the various forms of identity that are important to us. This makes perfect sense. The problems I face, solutions I find, and overall attitude towards life that I develop will be heavily shaped by the mutable and permanent factors that make up my identity. They’ll seem most sensible and be most useful to others who share those characteristics. The people I know will tend to be like me, because we associate with those who have the most targeted useful information to share with us.
It should be no surprise when the attitudes, priorities, and practices of other groups don’t align with our own, and when they find us strange in turn. We have different identities and therefore interact with the polis in different ways. The output of our communities in speech and action is a form of identity politics.
The drive in this community to downplay conventional identity characteristics, such as race, gender, orientation, and so on, in favor of either a universal identity (as rational humans) or an adoptable identity (futurists, utilitarians, STEM-oriented people, atheists, etc), speaks to a particular need that people with this constellation of identities have. To someone who doesn’t share these identities, the amount of weight we put onto this wouldn’t make sense. To others, our insistence on downplaying conventional identities and denying that we’re engaging in identity politics might seem disingenuous or even sinister. They’ll have reasons for this that will make sense to them based on the particular problems they face because of the shared patterns of their own lives—their shared identity.
I find it comforting and helpful to understand that we’re all engaged in identity politics. That it’s OK. That it’s normal for it to produce deep disagreement. What’s happening here is a collective attempt to triangulate useful ideas to our allies who are most likely to find them sensible and helpful.
I need to move on from this line of thought, so I hope you find this reply helpful. I’m committing to this being my last response along these lines within this post.