Against identity politics

The mistake I've made before, in the field of knowledge, was imagining other people's ideologies were grounded in some form of reality rather than in self-serving ideology. I think this overestimation stemmed from my own needs and desires: I wanted it to be true that others -- all others -- knew something that they could impart to me by way of knowledge. I was knowledge hungry, hence craven, for I believed that others must have something to give.

It was this attitude of mine that was always frustrated by the attitudinal stance others adopted in relation to my quest -- the presentation of knowledge as oppositional and combative rather than as revelatory and of universal interest. To frustrate my quest for knowledge by making it into a battle of wills, to turn it into an abject field for the struggle for rudimentary or bare existence, seemed to me to be very wrong indeed. But that is how identity politics interfered with my quest for knowledge.

It would have been okay if identity politics was much more grounded in historical fact than it often appears to be. One can learn from others insofar as they carry in their minds and hearts the memories of past struggles, and their present day significance. Yet most forms of identity politics seem to be based less upon a positive and heroic striving, but upon the fear of allowing others to get ahead. It is only one's own tribe, one's own group, which should be permitted to get ahead, and so others' quests for knowledge should be stymied as a project that would feed the success of an oppositional power.

As I have noted, I see this as very wrong indeed. If you keep people at a level of being craven by not giving them the knowledge they desire, they are more likely to take a bite out of you than not. This artificially induced scarcity of knowledge and truth is harming those who promote it.

Perhaps partly because of the nature of this very cultural milieu (and my recently more developed understanding of it), I'm finding that few people know as much about anything as their belligerence and emphatic manner would imply. Whereas I used to overestimate most people, I now see that in their relationship to knowledge, most in fact strive for a comfortable internal equilibrium -- a feeling of harmony and relaxation that is (paradoxically) defended at their boundaries by a feeling of extreme agitation. Thus the individual defends the boundaries of his selfhood from the encroaching sensation of the 'depressive position' (see Lacan). The path of least resistance for bolstering this flailing sense of selfhood is identification with the agenda of one's group of identity (the colour of one's skin, one's gender, etc.)

Setting up such barricades against those who happen to be different is inimical for developing a more complex and probably beneficial kind of knowledge. You can't develop your sense of reality if you are forced to look inwards all the time. You are stuck at the level of registered the phenomenology of experience of people just like you! That's okay as a starting point, but when you turn it into a political dogma, you are going exactly nowhere.

Most people  these days (and much to my regret) cannot read some new material with an open minded heart and manner. They feel disturbed if they don't know from the outset what political perspective you are taking. Some feel that their greatest achievement, upon reading something that takes one way outside the conventional categories of identity, is to label the point of view of the writer, as being "pro this" or "for that". Such readers betray the desperation entailed in their anxiety to put everything away in a safe box. (To them, there is either identity politics or there is nothing.)