Adherents to identity politics have presumably never read (or at least blindly misinterpreted) George Orwell’s 1942 essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War” in which he writes: “Nazi theory specifically denies that such thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘science’. There is only ‘German science’, ‘Jewish science’ etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a world in which the leader, or some ruling clique, control, not only the future, but the past.”
I’m a heterosexual, white male. Just for this crime, some will stop reading, or denounce me as biased, unjustly privileged, racist, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic and misogynistic. As Grayson Perry says in his recent book The Descent of Man (in full agreement with the intersectional feminist mob), “Objectivity is male subjectivity.” Simply for existing, I am, as a political writer, already at a disadvantage, and must be judged as suspect. Like many who refute the far right, but can’t abide the insanity of the far left, I find myself in a quandary.
In Helen Pluckrose’s blistering essay “How French ‘Intellectuals’ Ruined the West: Postmodernism and its Impact, Explained,” postmodernism (as she understands it) states: “Shared humanity and individuality are essentially illusions and people are propagators or victims of discourses depending on their social position; a position which is dependent on identity far more than their individual engagement with society. Morality is culturally relative, as is reality itself. Empirical evidence is suspect… far more important is the lived experience, narrative and beliefs of ‘marginalised’ groups all of which are equally ‘true’ but must now be privileged over Enlightenment values to reverse an oppressive, unjust and entirely arbitrary social construction of reality, morality and knowledge.”
When victimhood is currency, there’s an incentive to create as much of it as you can....
We live in a political climate that, unlike other previous generations, is measured in minutes. It’s possible for lackluster minds to draw huge social media followings in short order, and one of these ways is to stick to the established liberal agenda. Identity politics has more in common with radical Islamism than anything else, a cult of personality that absolves you of personal responsibility for your failures, and gives you a clear enemy to oppose. The appeal of identity politics is obvious: If you have failed in life, don’t have the job you want, are poor, unhappy, it’s because of the white cis-hetero-patriarchy, and nothing to do with your own inherent mediocrity.