Daniel Little: How to think about social identities

Daniel Little muses on How to think about social identities.

Finally, it is also clear — as the theorists of intersectionality have demonstrated (for example, Patricia Hill Collins; link) — that most of us possess multiple identities at the same time. We are Irish, European, lesbian, working class, anti-fascist, and Green, all at the same time. And the imperatives of the several identities we wear are often different in the political actions that they call for. Here again the question of consistency arises: how are we to reconcile these different calls to action? Is there an underlying consistency of values, or are the orienting values of one's anti-fascism largely independent from one's commitments to a pro-environmentalist agenda?

It is clear that various kinds of identities are highly relevant to politics and collective action. Appeals to identity solidarities have powerful effects on mobilization and political activization. But given that identities are not primeval, it is also clear that identities are themselves the subject of political struggle. Leaders, activists, and organizations have powerful interests in shaping the content and focus of the identities that are realized in the groups and individuals around them.

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The only identities that matters are those of worker and capitalist. One has to choose one over the other. There is no grounds for compromise between the two (2).

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Chirs Dillow: Why I'm not a lefty

Chris Dillow reveals Why I'm not a lefty.

There is, in fact, a common theme to all these differences. It’s about attitudes to knowledge. I’m much more wary of how much we can know for sure and so am sceptical of policies which presume such knowledge. This might reflect a class difference: as someone of working class origin, I’ve had humility beaten into me in a way that posher lefties might have.

Unlike Nick, however, I’m not going to disown the left. The differences I’ve described are perhaps those between Marxists and non-Marxists. The non-Marxist left believes, with Orwell, that England is “a family with the wrong members in control”. My problem is that in a class-divided society the wrong members will always be in control.

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I agree with Dillow that the Right conflates the Marxists and non-Marxist Liberals into the Left. The structure of society has to change.

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Andrew Bacevich: How We Learned Not To Care About America's Wars

Andrew Bacevich reveals How We Learned Not To Care About America's Wars.

Bacevich lists the following reasons for why Americans generally care the ongoing wars waged by the USA around the world:

1. U.S. casualty rates are low.
2. The true costs of Washington’s wars go untabulated.
3. On matters related to war, American citizens have opted out.
4. Terrorism gets hyped and hyped and hyped some more.
5. Blather crowds out substance.
6. Besides, we’re too busy.
7. Anyway, the next president will save us.
8. Our culturally progressive military has largely immunized itself from criticism.

In other words, the general American population has no skin in the game. War has become an abstraction. There is an immaturity imposed on the American people by the media: adults are doing their thing, and the children should be quiet.

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Dan Little: Social consciousness and critical realism

Daniel Little argues that Social consciousness and critical realism are interrelated. The material basis of social structures exposed through Critical Realism can explain the subjective reality constructed by agents in their Social Consciousness. Little omits the reproduction of the objective reality by agents reproducing their subjective reality.

Little argues that the subjective view of one's social identity is constructed …through interaction with other individuals, and many of those interactions are determined by enduring social structures and institutional arrangements. We do not have a sense of who and what we are in isolation. My concept of being male is built as distinct from what I perceive femaleness to be, and what others perceive femaleness to be.

So ideas and identities are objective in at least two senses, and are therefore amenable to treatment from a realist perspective. They have objective social determinants that can be rigorously investigated; and they have a particular grammar and semiotics that need to be rigorously investigated as well. Both kinds of inquiry are amenable to realist interpretation: we can be realist about the mechanisms through which a given body of social beliefs and values are promulgated through a population, and we can be realist about the particular content of those belief systems themselves.

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In a patriarchal society, the idea of gender is expressed as either male or female. How this gender is expressed is through a particular set of signs, and an acceptable set of language and actions. An example would be wearing pants for males, and wearing dresses for females. One would say that a male wearing a dress to be taboo.

Ironically, this position seems to converge in an unexpected way with two streams of classical social theory. This approach to social consciousness resonates with some of the holistic ideas that Durkheim brought to his interpretation of religion and morality. But likewise it brings to mind Marx's views of the determinants of social consciousness through objective material circumstances. We don't generally think of Marx and Durkheim as having much in common. But on the topic of the material reality of ideas and their origins in material features of social life, they seem to agree.

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In Marx's case, this is usually expressed as the Objective creating the Subjective. Reality creates our ideas about reality. If one sees two (2) genders, then one has the idea that there are only two (2) genders. This is reinforced when others report that there are only two (2) genders.

These considerations seem to lead to a strong conclusion: critical realism can be as insightful in its treatment of objective social structures as it is in study of “subjective” features of social consciousness and identities.

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What Little omits is that Marx also said that the Subjective creates the Objective. What we see as reality is not the true reality: it is only an approximation. Our ideas inform what we see. In this case, the existence of other genders is considered to be an impossiblity. This idea of impossibility precludes any discussion of other genders.

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