Identity Politics vs. Human Achievement
By Edward Hudgins
How do you think of yourself? As a man, woman, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Italian, Chinese, Mexican, Nigerian, Kenyan, Egyptian, Indian, straight, gay, or a long list of other possibilities? If these are your primary identifications, take care, because you might well be doing yourself a disservice or even contributing to one of society’s deep problems.
Accidents of birth. All of these descriptions are accidents of birth. You didn’t choose any of these. Most of these attributes come with cultural characteristics–traditions, celebrations, rites of passage, food, music, art, you name it. It is possible to take joy in much of your culture. You share the culture in community with others. It can provide familiarity and frameworks for understanding yourself and the world. It can reinforce good moral habits, values, priorities, assumptions, and expectations. It can encourage creativity. The Italian Renaissance saw painters and sculptors inspiring one another. Chinese decorative arts inspired across generations.
But to say you take “pride” in your culture can be misleading. Of course, you can appreciate the positive aspects of the culture to which you belong. You can be thankful to those who have helped create and sustain the best aspects of it. To the extent you choose to let those aspects nurture the best in you and to the extent you might contribute to it yourself, you can be proud, but more of yourself. (Warning: I carry on the tradition of my Italian mom of making the tastiest pizzelles you’ve ever had!)
Open to all. Further, others can appreciate and participate in the best your culture in which you were born has to offer. And your creative activities need not be confined to your culture. Asians are represented far above their numbers as classical musicians, offering the works of Beethoven as good as any German.
And here we understand the moral absurdity of the notion of “cultural appropriation.” To begin with, no group “owns” any particular aspects of a culture. Anyone can create anything in any field or medium. This is because we are all, first and foremost, human and individual.
It is also the case that characteristics of various subcultures can also be destructive of our potential and the best within us. An obvious example is that historically, many cultures relegated women to second-class status or even treated them as property. Want to create social discord? Get into a fight over which culture has the ugliest and absurdest practices. Of course, cultures are open, which means we can each participate in the aspects that enrich us and reject those aspects that impoverish our souls.
Ugly identity. And here we understand the dark side of today’s ugly “identity politics.” Identity politics is destructive of the individual and divisive of society. Identity politics today involves demanding that others respect one because of an accident of birth. This demand, in and of itself, is reason to give someone no respect. Someone who demands the unearned, usually with an emotional arrogance and irrationality, should cause any person of decent moral character to turn away in disgust.
Consider how the leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, uses identity politics. They start with the legitimate demand that police be trained to not use deadly force when not actually protecting lives and be prosecuted when they kill unnecessarily, as in the case of George Floyd. These neo-racists turn this demand into a justification for destruction of the property of others, including other blacks. Worse still is the demand that individuals who never owned slaves be forced to pay reparations to individuals who never were slaves, all based on race. And worst of all are the elites who run our institutions from media, entertainment, corporate boards, religions, civic groups, politics, and education who do not immediately denounce this divisive identity politics. They enable such politics out of dogma, fear, and unearned guilt.
It is collectivism of the ugliest moral sort.
By your achievements. A true evaluation of yourself should be based on your achievements. Novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand wrote, “As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.” Your achievements come from what you make and do. To further quote Rand, ”It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as an inferior because his race has ‘produced’ some brutes—or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has ‘produced’ Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.” She puts “produced” in quotations because she rightly believes that our race or group doesn’t “produce” us but, rather, that we produce ourselves.
We are all better than this. We can celebrate the election–twice–of Barack Obama as the first black president, even if we disagreed with his policies, not because it’s somehow intrinsically good to have a black individual in the White House. Rather, his election showed that in America, where only about 12 percent of the population is black, race is not a bar to election to the highest office in the land. But voting for anyone just because of an accident of birth rather than what they stand for or what policies they advocate is to perpetuate the ugly tribalism that has afflicted the world for millennia.
And we all should want to live in a society in which we all see each other and see ourselves as individuals and judge others and ourselves accordingly. Martin Luther King set an ideal when he declared “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Any other path leads to exactly the divisions and hate that have plagued all societies that have valued the tribe or collective over the individual. Anyone who wishes to save the civilization and culture based on the Enlightenment values that are the only ones appropriate for human beings need to understand that true individualism is a uniting rather than dividing ethos. So let’s strive to be the best individuals we can be–whatever our background!
—
Edward Hudgins, Ph.D., is president of the Human Achievement Alliance.
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Thanks so much, glad you liked the piece! The website is new, so I’ll be doing a lot of upgrading in weeks to come. I hope you will post or send around the link to anyone you think would be interested. We are fighting a battle for our culture and need to celebrate achievements and inspire the best in others! — Regards, Ed Hudgins
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Thanks for your reply and glad this piece was useful. I have two nine-year-old daughters so I’m always looking for ways to best teach and communicate. And I always welcome feedback. Please feel free to send the send the link around to anyone your think would find the piece useful. Best regards, Ed Hudgins
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Yes, my personal creation! Hope to have the “Who are they?” page up soon! — Ed
I have not seen where the leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement has gone to the length to “turn this demand into a justification for destruction of the property of others”. It has happened, but the leaders have repeatedly pleaded for the opposite, to please remain peaceful and not cause destruction.
Furthermore, when you see that people of your race repeatedly get treated as less-than human for no other identifiable reason other than for looking like you, it’s really not a matter of bringing on identity politics, it’s confronting the reality of racism.
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Thanks! Much appreciated! Now that I’m getting the Human Achievement Alliance site built out more, I’ll be posting even more materials. Cheers! Ed Hudgins
Great delivery. Sound arguments. Keep up the amazing spirit.
Thanks! This is the world we have to build! Also, I hope you’ll mark Human Achievement Day on social media, in your family, school, business, community and heart, Oct 21. See link above!
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Thanks for the meal!! But yeah, thanx for spending the time to
discuss this subject here on your web site.
Thanks! It’s truly self-defeating for self-appointed black leaders to argue that individuals should be judged by accidents of birth and members of groups rather than as individuals based on their own achievements. This is especially true when the news presents blacks as rioting, looting, and burning down their neighborhoods. Every decent black is, thus, tarred with this group identity rather than being judged, in M.L. King’s words, by the content of their character. Our fight in years to come will be against this neo-racism.
Don’t forget to mark Human Achievement Day!
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Hope it is useful as we try to reform the culture! – Ed Hudgins
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If my thoughts help us get beyond the polarization and dysfunction in our culture and society, I am pleased. And I welcome any constructive thoughts and suggestions. Let us make a country and world as it can be and should be! — Ed Hudgins
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Thanks for the heads-up. It seems okay on several PCs i’ve used to view it. I’ll see if the hosting site has any insight! – Ed Hudgins
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