Book Review: The Identity Trap
5/5 stars
"A very old tale: Destructive intellectuals run amok. In this case, the Manichean identity synthesis." 
15 chapters/286 pps (=19 pps/ per)
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Good explanations are like bathing suits, in that they reveal everything by covering only what is necessary. 

Such is this book. 

What is the good explanation? It is a balanced, intellectual analysis of "wokeism" from its epistemic foundations, through to its influence on present society, and speculation on ways that it might burn itself out. 

Or, ways that people can work to oppose it.

The author chooses to use the term "identity synthesis"  in favor of the thrashed-out / loaded word "wokeism."(It is spoken of in contradistinction to classical liberalism.)

A lot of ideas get started in academia, and they spill over with extremely destructive effect - - and this explains the "identity synthesis"  (An obscene hybrid of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory.)

The book is miraculous just on the strength of the fact that he manages to discuss the pertinent-to-explain-this-phenomonon Philosophy with the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary so as not to lose his reader. (We have all taken undergraduate philosophy courses, and if anyone ever perished of boredom, it was in undergraduate Philosophy.) 

The book has resonances to several books (of varying degrees of influence):

1. "The True Believer," Eric Hoffer. (Interchangeability of mass movements. Intellectuals infecting "common people"  with grievances that only their own superior insight can solve. Such games being played over the head of the moderate majority by extremists on both sides. And so on and so on.)

2. "The Burden of Bad Ideas," by Heather McDonald.  (The destructive intellectual foundations that culminated in wokism were still only in progress--The book was written in 2000-- and the horror was not yet revealed.)

3. Radicals: Portrait of a Destructive Passion," by David Horowitz.

4. "Intellectuals," by Paul Johnson. (He gave too much detail about figures that were too obscure.)

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Mounk also corrects Mark Levin (and many others) that like to equate today's identity politics with Marxism. (That debunking is the first appendix of the book.)

A book like this could explain the mechanism of action by which a country tears itself apart more accurately.

And it could offer solutions to reverse/halt such things (The author does, in fact, try to do this in the last section of the book);  But having a more correct explanation of the mechanism (or even providing solutions to stop the process) only helps in the same way that make up helps a corpse.

FIRST THOUGHT: Maybe it didn't have to be this way.

DEI initiatives lately are falling apart for the strangest of reasons; Patrick Boyle has noted that tech companies (that actually have to turn a profit) are cutting back their DEI departments because a high interest rate environment has revealed that they were luxury items anyway. (Does that make me want to believe that the rise of DEI is a result of extended low interest rates? Does it make me believe that keeping interest rates how long enough will be enough to quench the idiocy?)

Also, a lot of people who want beer really just want a beer. They don't want their purchase of a recreational drink to turn into an affirmation of the Transgender Hysteria.

And now that you think about it: Idiot Academics that perpetuate these destructive ideas are luxury items, because the United States has an inflationary student loan system, as well as a tenure system, and asks no questions about why trillions of dollars of student loans are non-performing.

SECOND THOUGHT: Maybe it DID have to be this way. 

There is a paper trail several thousand years of societies tearing themselves apart or masses of people stuck in one particular stupid idea for a long time (supported/led by the intelligensia in that particular place), seemingly for no reason--and such banality has to have *some* beginning point.

a. China thought that all human beings were subjects of the Chinese sovereign, and that it was the center of three concentric rings of civilization. They only found out it was false in 1979, after about 23 centuries; 

b. The Indian Brahmins have convinced the other 95% of the country that they are less than for at least an equal amount of time.

c. The Catholic church, at one point,  was going to execute everybody that did not believe the world was flat.

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The critical bêtes noires by this author are:

1. Michel Foucault (skepticism about objective truth) 

2. Edward Said (The use of discourse analysis for explicitly political ends) 

3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (essentialist categories of identity 

4. Derek Bell (public policy should explicitly depend on a person's identity group) 

5. Kimberlé Crenshaw (intersectionality) 

6. Ibram Kendi; Robin D'Angelo (antiracism; white fragility)

Mounk does mention that the intellectuals who did survive found that their positions took a direction that they did not anticipate or even agree with.

Second order thoughts: 

1. Maybe being stuck in stupidity is actually the default human condition. 

Maybe human beings have to forever alternate between the Scylla of no ideas and no progress (China, India) and the Charybdis of generating ideas, a fraction of which will be stupid and destructive.

2. Even though the author can go through and find the most influential people in this destructive cascade of ideas, I don't think that the events depend on them specifically (in the same way that an avalanche depends on the initial state of a system, and NOT on which specific snowflake was the first). 

It could be that if some assassin made efficient use of 21 bullets (one in the head and two in the sternum for each bête noire), then there just would have been another seven and the result would have been about the same--and that's because the initial conditions are a country that is overfed and lacks any stressors. (Think: "The Princess and the Pea"  story.)

3. This seems to be one of the (many) problems that education makes worse: Left alone, groups of people will reach some sort of equilibrium. And, as the author aptly notes: getting up and going to work is a great way to learn how to deal with all sorts of other people. 

4. The '60s came and went because the movement just burned itself out. Could this be more of the same? 

It has been my experience that a lot of university radicals moderate after a few years in the workforce. (When people are trying to make a living and get the house note paid, they have a lot in common; They don't want to turn everything into a critical race colloquium cuz ain't nobody got time for that.)

5. "Social media is a tool to construct identities (starting with Tumblr and continuing through everydayfeminism, Vox, and many others). also, since so much of life takes place on the internet, people live in echo chambers and don't have to learn to work with other types of people."

Verdict: Recommended.

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Vocabulary: 

Strategic essentialism
"Retreat into a labyrinth of textuality" 
wallah
Standpoint theory 
Cultural appropriation 
Progressive separatism 
Identity sensitive public policy
Propositional vs experiential knowledge
Cultural appropriation (related problems of original ownership / group membership) 
Repressive tolerance

Quotes:

1. But as shared and celebrated on Tumblr, intersectionality became an all-purpose operating system for online activism.

2. When the real target of your wrath is beyond your grasp, and the moral stakes of the moment are high, the inability to do anything useful becomes intensely frustrating. Some people who are so desperate to do something - - anything - - to keep the threat at bay then start to direct their anger at those who are under their control.

3. Bayard Rustin: "The notion of the undifferentiated black community is the intellectual creation of both whites... And of certain small groups of blacks who illegitimately claim to speak for the majority." 

4. Trying to assign particular instances of culture to one group in a clean way is a fool's errand.

5. The single most compelling reason against restrictions on free speech stems from the impossibility of appointing smart and selfless censors. 

6. At the time, O'Connor and Ginsburg expected that "25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest-approved today."

7. In the 1960s, left-wing radicals wanted to overthrow capitalism. We ended up with Whole Foods.