The Social Changes of Today - Increased Identitarian Thinking - and the Clefted

     Non discrimination once betokened a tolerant, egalitarian outlook. So long as everyone abided by general civic standards, good citizenship meant, Don’t stick your nose in other people’s business. Let them pursue happiness. It is the standard of a liberal society which leaves you alone and lets you be.

     A recent article on how to be an anti racist imposed requirements which go beyond the standard of a liberal society. A selective, some-animals-are-more-equal-than-others standard prescribes caution about those highly ranked in the politics-of-identity hierarchy. Minorities, women, and LGBTQ people are treated with caution. Everyone else, you can probably diss. This is not to the advantage of the clefted.

     What has happened is that today, groups are more likely to think of themselves as a collective. An in-group which has its own group interests. The specific example: Until recently, dwelling in an apartment building was relatively anonymous. Populated by individuals from all walks of life. In this and the previous building I lived in, there’s been something new - the sense that “You’re not part of our in-group. Nobody likes misfits. We have the right to say, you’re not wanted here.”

     The general increase in prejudices that the civil rights laws of the mid-sixties had been thought to discredit - increasing hostility toward minorities, different gender orientations, etc. - is also adverse to disabled people.

     The liberty intended in The Declaration and the Bill of Rights was founded on a non-identitarian outlook. “We the People” is the classic statement that identity should not matter in a free society. The classic opposite was Marx’s announcement that the proletariat was inherently good and the bourgeoisie - their exploiter - was inherently bad. Columnist Andrew Sullivan suggests that we have a “Neo-Marxism” in which women, minorities, and LGBTQ people are good, and the rest are guilty of “privilege.” Born good and born bad, in effect.

     There was already a tendency against those who were born “different”  - tragic Oedipus, whose name means “swollen foot,” and the scriptural “Master, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born thus?” Again, this undoing of the gains of the civil rights laws of the mid-sixties does those who have a cleft little good.

     Identitarianism implicitly elevates some identities at the expense of others, at the cost of the ideal of human equality.