I'm posting this because this guy and I have a lot in common. I feel his differentiation. And I can really relate to his reaction to the responses he gets. <g>
Why I Write These Columns
Tags: analytical judgment
Every once in a while I feel that it might be helpful to readers if I explained what it is I am trying to do in these columns. It is easier to state the negative: For the most part, it is not my purpose in this space to urge positions, or come down on one side or the other of a controversial question. Of course, I do those things occasionally and sometimes inadvertently, but more often than not I am analyzing arguments rather than making them; or, to be more precise, I am making arguments about arguments, especially ones I find incoherent or insufficiently examined.
When I find an argument incoherent, it is not because I find the argument on the other side persuasive; although that is the assumption made by those who lambaste me for being a conservative or a liberal, a hopeless fuddyduddy or a corrosive postmodernist, and address me in the confidence that they know on what end of the ideological or moral spectrum I am to be found.
But, in fact, a reader of a typical “Think Again” column will have no idea at all where I stand on the issues that catch my attention, because at least for the length of the column (as opposed to real life, which is much longer), I am agnostic on those issues and interested only in the way they are playing out in our present cultural moment. When, for example, I wrote three columns criticizing the atheist tracts written by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, I was motivated not by a belief in God — which I may or may not have, you’ll never know — but by what I took to be sloppy, schoolboy reasoning that was passing itself off as wisdom. I could have been an atheist myself, and I still would have found the so-called logic of these books weak and risible.
The difference between making arguments and analyzing them is not always recognized, and when it is missed, readers get outraged about things I never said. This is this case with two recent columns, one on identity politics, the other on the shape of a possible Obama-McCain contest in the general election. My point in the first column was that although identity politics was often a term of accusation — as in “that’s just identity politics” — at least one version of it could be considered rational. Someone who believes that the racial, ethnic, religious or gender identity of a candidate makes it more likely that he or she will support and work for certain favored policies is not performing a base or discriminatory act by voting for that candidate.
The voter, of course, may be wrong — the candidate may be elected and then go in a completely different direction — but being wrong is not the same thing as being irrational, that is, without reasons of the appropriate kind. But if the same voter were to pull the lever simply because of the candidate’s skin color or gender or faith, and without regard to matters of policy, that would, I said, be a quite different act, an act, basically, of tribal loyalty, and it might well deserve the criticism it received.
This distinction between tribal identity politics and policy or interest identity politics could of course be challenged (as it was by many posters), but the challenge would be to its cogency or adequacy, not to its agenda, because it has none. The distinction is descriptive, not normative. In offering it, I do not say, “practice identity politics.” I only say that those who do take identity into consideration either by voting for someone on the basis of an identity affiliation or choosing a candidate because he or she is perceived to be friendly to identity interests are not doing something patently reprehensible.
Is it the best thing to do? Is it good for the country? These are real questions, but they are not questions I take up, although a number of readers take me to task for the answers they presume me to have given. Cdn Expat writes that “Whether identity politics is ‘rational’ is hardly the question. The question is whether it is culturally and socially helpful.” No, it isn’t. That is Expat’s question and I have no obligation either to ask or answer it. I’m just asserting the rationality of identity politics, not giving my blessing to it. Whether its exercise is culturally helpful is not something I consider. I just don’t go there.
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