Tales from the Bitface

I recently read Alembic Offerings, by hippieish writer Erik Davies. It included this line, which intrigued me:

I cut my teeth in the post-structuralist 1980s, more interested in difference than identity.

It reminded me of how I had long been confused by identity politics. That is, for years — possibly decades — when I heard the term ‘identity politics’, I had supposed it to be about individual identity, about how each of us is different.

Which means I must have actually been confused by some of the things I read that used the term, since it means almost exactly the opposite.

My misunderstanding came from the idea of proving one’s identity, of identifying yourself, showing identity documents. Identifying a suspect, even. They all mean demonstrating that a person is a specific, unique individual.

Whereas identity politics is about memberships of groups.

It feels like a linguistic shift. I am a member of several groups, but none of them uniquely identifies me. Even the intersection of all of them doesn’t do that. So why does the politics of group membership get tagged with the term ‘identity’?

Well it turns out the Latin root of the word relates to similarity:

mid 16th century (in the sense ‘quality of being identical’): via French from late Latin identitas, from Latin idem ‘same’.

to quote the Mac OS dictionary. But different fields use it differently. From Wikipedia’s Identity (social science) :

Identity is the set of qualities, beliefs, personality traits, appearance, or expressions that characterize a person or a group.

Identity emerges during childhood as children start to comprehend their self-concept, and it remains a consistent aspect throughout different stages of life. Identity is shaped by social and cultural factors and how others perceive and acknowledge one’s characteristics. The etymology of the term “identity” from the Latin noun identitas emphasizes an individual’s “sameness with others”. Identity encompasses various aspects such as occupational, religious, national, ethnic or racial, gender, educational, generational, and political identities, among others.

But in its Identity (philosophy) we find:

In metaphysics, identity (from Latin: identitas, “sameness”) is the relation each thing bears only to itself. The notion of identity gives rise to many philosophical problems, including the identity of indiscernibles (if x and y share all their properties, are they one and the same thing?), and questions about change and personal identity over time (what has to be the case for a person x at one time and a person y at a later time to be one and the same person?).

So the politics version appears to come from the social science use of the word, unsurprisingly.

Funny old word, identity. I think, like Erik Davies, I’m more interested in difference than identity, in the group-membership sense.

A great post from Ian Betteridge, called Zen fascists will control you…. Dead Kennedys fans will recognise the title as a quote from ‘California Über Alles’, their single and album track from 1979. Ian builds on it to write a history of the various movements, ideas, cults, that have believed or supposed that humans can be improved or perfected, by diet, exercise, drugs, physical enhancement…

Or by following the word of an ’enlightened’ leader, for example.

He sees the overarching theme as purity:

This is the thing about the politics of purity that makes it so durable, and so dangerous: it doesn’t require malice. It requires only the conviction that you know what clean looks like, and the will to impose it on others, for their own good.

Both the counterculture and the authoritarian right are obsessed with purity. The targets differ wildly — the body, the race, the culture, the blood, the food, the mind. But the cognitive shape is identical. And that shared shape is the on-ramp. It’s how you can get from granola to fascism without ever feeling like you’ve made a wrong turn.

He traces the idea through Joni Mitchell singing ‘we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’ to the Human Potential Movement and the Whole Earth Catalog, to est, and from there to the modern biohacking idea¹, and billionaires trying to extend their lives using the blood of young people.

You can draw a straight line from est to the productivity cult of contemporary tech culture, to the biohacking movement, to the particular flavour of self-optimisation that has become the dominant religion of the Silicon Valley overclass.

And connects it to the Nazis:

The line from the organic farm to the death camp is not straight. It requires many other things to be true simultaneously. But the fact that it is possible to draw the line at all should give us pause, every time we find ourselves in the presence of someone who is very, very concerned with purity — of whatever kind.

It’s an excellent piece, and the guy’s a great writer. So it slightly surprises me that, after he writes:

somewhere in the feed, the purity logic is still running, clean and patient, waiting for the next person to decide that they have woken up. That they are clean.

he doesn’t extend his argument to the state of the modern ‘woke’ idea. Detached from its origins in Black US culture, its adherents demand such a strong acceptance of all parts of the ‘omnicause’, that any disagreement about one tenet of the belief system can lead to ostracism. Purity politics at its purest.

Or so it seems, at least. And indeed, Ian appears to insulate or distance himself from such an attack in his first footnote:

I should make this clear up front: when I talk in this essay about “purity politics”, what I’m not talking about the kind of instant condemnation that happens on social media platforms (Bluesky, I am looking at you). That’s interesting, but it’s not what I’m interested in right now.

Those attackers on Bluesky sound like exactly the type of hyper-woke folks I’m thinking of.

OK, he’s mainly talking about the danger of these beliefs from today’s super-rich; but they need foot soldiers. Mobs can be as dangerous as rich individuals.