Old academic yells at clouds
Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics
31–40 of 134 posts
Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the material demands of those groups? There seems to be a general demand for special treatment and privileged legal status based on membership in their identity group, but symbolic issues seem very much at the center of identity politics.
When a group is disproportionately excluded from the education, economic and other systems of society due to, for example, racism or sexism, they tend to have disproportionately worse economic outcomes (sometimes extremely so.) This is almost always recognized by that group of people and a strong motivating factor from overcoming their systemic disadvantage. > demand for special treatment and privileged legal status…
> When a group is disproportionately excluded from the education, economic and other systems of society due to, for example, racism or sexism, they tend to have disproportionately worse economic outcomes
Well, it depends. A lot of real-world identity politics amounts to malicious, overt marginalization of "market-dominant" or "model" minorities who, despite their marginalized status, have better educational and economic outcomes than the relevant majority group.
This is the story of, e.g. Asians in the U.S. but also of recent African immigrants from subcultures like the Igbo, Ashanti and Yoruba with a focus on education and cultural development, who get marginalized in Black communities throughout the West for supposedly "acting white" or, more diplomatically stated, "pursuing respectability politics".
Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics
#33I hate identity politics as much as the next guy, but I think a lot of Fukuyama's takes here are pretty bad. He repeatedly paints massive groups with a large and indiscriminate brush. For instance: "The right seeks to cut off immigration altogether and would like to send immigrants back to their countries of origin." Uh, what? The United States is a nation of immigrants and we all know it. I don't think anyone wants…
> I don't lend much credence to this guy anyway, considering that he thought history ended in 1992
I'm not sure why people jump on this so much - it very well could have ended if the US had better leadership & strategy... If the US had Marshal plan equivalent for the former USSR & a realist China strategy, things would have been different. But sure Huntington's book is better.
Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics
#34Now I realise you have to produce many words to fill a book, but a more succinct argument would be appreciated, and this seems to be all over the place, with pat explanations of recent history, which is probably much more complex in reality. And is the argument really about 'identity', or just 'status'? IMHO, economics is flawed at it's core, because people do not just value material wealth, but relative, social weal…
Ego rents are very much a part of modern economic theory. As are any range of cognitive biases (see behavioral economics), institutional frictions, spatial constraints, and on and on. It's a wide tent. Some say too wide.
Could you explain ego rent? Google didn't give me an answer (it sucks these days tbh).
Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics
#35Graeber tears this guy’s work apart in his new book and shows his work is incompatible with recent and old anthro research. Hard to take him seriously in other areas
> recent and old anthro research
"Anthropology" is a field that so thoroughly discredited itself by political advocacy that no one to the right of Trotsky could possibly take it seriously. These are the people who trashed Napoleon Chagnon, who actually lived with the Yanomani, for the audacity of reporting what they were like, which wasn't what they like to hear.
From the NYT obituary:
Dr. Chagnon dismissed as “Marxist” the widespread anthropological belief that warfare in tribal life was usually provoked by disputes over access to scarce resources.
“The whole purpose and design of the social structure of tribesmen seems to have revolved around effectively controlling sexual access by males to nubile, reproductive- age females,” he wrote in his 2014 memoir, “Noble Savages.”
Other anthropologists rejected these assertions as exaggerated and even racist, saying they could do harm to the tribe by casting it in a bad light. Many argued that human behavior was best explained not by genetics and evolution but by the social and natural environments in which people live.
Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics
#36Also Francis Fukuyama: history ended in 1992.
Well, it kinda did though, didn't it? Being charitable for a second, I suspect it's more that history is "on pause" than ended, but I do get a feeling of almost timeless stasis. In comparison to the scale of ideological, political, economic, and social changes for the 19th and 20th centuries, essentially nothing has happened since 1992. No major nation has had a revolution. There have been no major wars between natio…
> essentially nothing has happened since 1992.
Oh yeah, the web changed nothing. /s
> No major nation has had a revolution.
You are disrespecting Syria, Iraq, Venezuela, Ukraine, Turkey... and of course Yugoslavia, which started breaking up in 1991 (Fukuyama started his ramblings in 1989) and didn't end until 2001 - if you can consider the current fragile peace an end, which it really isn't. Plus, most South American countries continue to "tweak" their constitutions every few years, one way or the other. And if you go to Africa, well, have I got news for you...
> There have been no major wars between nation-states.
The US literally invaded and occupied two sovereign countries since then, in both cases continuing major operations for more than a decade. But if we consider "nation-states" only Western states or superpowers, there has been no such war in the 30 years before 1992 either. That's because conventional "top-quality" nation-state conflicts have been made impractical by nuclear weapons and MAD, well before 1992. What we have now is asymmetrical warfare (superpower vs minnow) or proxy warfare. That doesn't mean these conflicts don't make history or don't change things significantly - they very much do.
> No ideologies of note have arisen or been cast down.
The techno-utopianism that the internet generated is an ideology in itself, and the backlash has only just started. Same for conspiracy-theorism as a way of life, climate change, identity politics... just because they don't make people wear the same shirt and march in the streets, it doesn't mean they are not deeply-ideological movements. You can argue that they were "invented" before 1992, but 1) inevitably these things take time, 2) they didn't really have that much traction until the '00s.
> Nothing historical has happened
That's such a sheltered viewpoint. I'm sure quite a few people in Yemen, Syria, Venezuela, Brazil, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Ukraine, Tunisia, Lybia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Rwanda, Sudan, Chad, Congo, Somalia, Algeria, Liberia, Mali, etc etc, would have something to say.
History is very much grinding all around us, it's just a question of whether we actually want to look at it or we'd rather pretend it didn't exist.
Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
When a group is disproportionately excluded from the education, economic and other systems of society due to, for example, racism or sexism, they tend to have disproportionately worse economic outcomes (sometimes extremely so.) This is almost always recognized by that group of people and a strong motivating factor from overcoming their systemic disadvantage. > demand for special treatment and privileged legal status…
> When a group is disproportionately excluded from the education, economic and other systems of society due to, for example, racism or sexism, they tend to have disproportionately worse economic outcomes Well, it depends. A lot of real-world identity politics amounts to malicious, overt marginalization of "market-dominant" or "model" minorities who, despite their marginalized status, have better educational and econo…
> overt marginalization of "market-dominant" or "model" minorities who, despite their marginalized status, have better educational and economic outcomes than the relevant majority group.
Because they aren't "disproportionately excluded from the education, economic and other systems of society due to, for example, racism or sexism." Being a minority does not automatically make one marginalized and one does not need to be a minority to be marginalized.
Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics
#38Graeber tears this guy’s work apart in his new book and shows his work is incompatible with recent and old anthro research. Hard to take him seriously in other areas
> recent and old anthro research "Anthropology" is a field that so thoroughly discredited itself by political advocacy that no one to the right of Trotsky could possibly take it seriously. These are the people who trashed Napoleon Chagnon, who actually lived with the Yanomani, for the audacity of reporting what they were like, which wasn't what they like to hear. From the NYT obituary: Dr. Chagnon dismissed as “Marxi…
If you’d like to see the writing on Chagnon that Graeber promoted, which I’m not certain your summary really captures - http://dwhume.com/darkness_documents/0246.htm
Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics
#39No post body was provided.
Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
What, in your mind, was 20th century politics defined by? Edit: like I get the economism here feels reductive to you, I think, but I just think it would at least be equally absurd to say they were predominantly defined by identity issues. As is shown in the essay, our concept of identity is intractable from globalism and modernity. So I'm just not sure what the obvious issue is here. If we admit that it is nuanced, t…
Really, it’s just a shitty comment that probably doesn’t belong in any discussion and should be ignored. “Huh?!” This doesn’t pass as substantive in any way whatsoever. Don’t waste your time thinking about it.
I have always wished for an official rule against beginning comments with either “Huh?” or “What are you talking about?”