Evolutionary Basis for Identity Politics
Some of you may have read the recent New York Times essay titled, "The Moral Instinct."
The article observes that there is an evolutionary and physiological basis for moral decisions that people make.
Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral ("killing is wrong"), rather than merely disagreeable ("I hate brussels sprouts"), unfashionable ("bell-bottoms are out") or imprudent ("don't scratch mosquito bites").
Like Chomsky's observations about language ability, research suggests that the moral sense, too, "is rooted in the design of the normal human brain."
The part of our brain that soberly and analytically weighs alternatives is different from the part of our brain that says, "That's immoral and wrong." Given a moral dilemma, the decision we make may depend on whether or not the moral part of our brain activates with sufficient intensity to overcome the analytical part of our brain that would answer the dilemma differently.
When we make moral decisions based on activity in the moral brain regions (medial frontal lobes + anterior cingulate cortex), we don't so much reason (dorsolateral frontal lobes) our way to decision and action. We rationalize afterwards.
I suspect identity politics physiologically works much the same. We have an evolutionary predisposition to affirm people with whom we identify, people like ourselves. Not having done the research to verify this, I leave it as a proposal for your consideration. Emotional, subliminal activity of the identity-affirming brain often trumps reason-based approach to decision-making and action.
Identity Politics
It seems self-evident to me that identity politics dominates the political scene. It also seems self-evident that a huge part of our discourse is in the vein of rationalization, not reason. It comes after the identity decision, even if identity bias is subliminal.
Dog whistle politics, using code words that mean something different to a subgroup of the general population, serves as an appeal to identity. For example, "Reagan" serves as one of the codewords of the day. That's obvious on the right, where no self-identified "Conservative" speaks without invoking Reagan. We recently saw it used on the left, too, as elements of the progressive base used it as a wedge to drive perception of Obama right, which occurred after Obama had used it partly as a dog whistle (aside from his main point which was widely ignored) to independents.
Even in the blogosphere among Democratic activists here, people have been dismayed at the level of discourse. Why? Partly because such a large portion of the discourse has been about rationalization, and rationalization invites every form of distortion. Identity politics, too, invites trolling and endless dittoing as political tactics -- neither of which serves reality or substance-based insight.
"Fierce Urgency of Now"
Part of the intrinsic beauty of dog whistle language occurs in the embrace of language's capacity to invoke multiple meanings in a simple word or phrase. "Fierce Urgency of Now" does this in at least three ways.
1) Obviously, it has become a catch-phrase for those who now identify with Obama,
2) Borrowed from Martin Luther King, it also invokes the Civil Rights Movement, becoming a dog whistle for people for whom the Civil Rights movement was important, including maybe especially blacks,
3) It also serves as a dog whistle to a small number of us who are alarmed at the capitalist excesses of modern industrial society.
It is the third meaning that I want to emphasize here. If you're still with me, and you haven't yet viewed the 8.5 min video clip, "Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast," please do so.
Many of us are concerned about global warming, environmental destruction, etc.. This is true, even among older progressives to some extent, I believe.
It is a much smaller subset among us who feel fierce urgency in this regard, however. A handful of people come to mind; we might include Jerad Diamond (Collapse, Ecology and the Evolution of Communities) on societies, species, and ecocystems that fail, Edwin O. Wilson (The Diversity of Life) on impending mass (species) extinction, Garret Hardin (Living within Limits) on ecological limits, Donella Meadows (Limits to Growth) on systems thinking and ecology, and a handful of people reflecting on the implications of global peak oil production and impending scarcities.
Establishment figures sometimes allude to this group, although usually they do so dismissively. One would not want to be labeled as a "doomer," or as a "pessimist."
When not dismissive, establishment figures tend to be vague. For example in today's New York Times, in the article "Oil Demand, The Climate and the Energy Ladder", we learn that Royal Dutch Shell has entered another round of scenario planning. (It is notable that during the 1970 energy crises, Shell Oil had done scenario planning that successfully anticipated the energy crises of that decade, allowing them to capitalize on the crises while other integrated oil companies took huge hits. Read "The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World.")
The name of Shell's current, more dismal scenario? "Scramble." Well, that's a scenario, more or less, that other people might call "Collapse," "Bottleneck," or "Mad Max."
I purpose that among people who are alert to the fierce urgency of these type scenarios, boomers of the Clinton/McCain generation are a significant minority.
The Promise of a Clinton/McCain Presidency
We already see it.
1) A political engagement style that invites identity-based animosity and splitting rather than common-interest lumping.
2) Heaviest investments in/by the status quo business-as-usual establishment (corporations, military industrial complex).
3) Perpetuation of the post 1960s political divisions ("Conservative-Liberal").
The transformation that Obama invites is more than what Andrew Sullivan so brilliantly alluded to in "Goodbye to All That." Sullivan wrote:
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war-not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade-but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war-and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama-and Obama alone-offers the possibility of a truce.
The transformation invited by Obama also is procedural. Obama's emphasis on generating new alignments based on emphasizing common interests and shared problem-solving in a climate that acknowledges mutual responsibility (for our ills as well as successes) and civility also represents a huge potential transformation.
Our culture gives short shrift to "process." That's unfortunate because nothing happens without process, and sub-optimal processes almost guarantee suboptimal results.
The transformation invited by Obama also is generational in an identity-politics sort of way. And that is its Achilles heel. The oldster boomer bulge in population demographics -- even among self-identified progressives -- does not pay close attention. I believe they vote based on identity, and they rationalize.
That is most unfortunate.
Unfortunate because the boomer bulge is huge. Most unfortunate for all of us, I believe. |
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