Let me tell you a story about identity politics. A friend was queueing to check in for a flight back to the UK and was finding it tiresome; the check-in desk had one assistant and was taking perhaps 15 minutes over each person. There was a very over-made up person at the front of the queue; a male-looking person dressed as a woman, who looked as if possibly on the way home after surgery. An elderly, smart woman summoned a manager to complain about the situation and the transexual/transvestite reported a hate crime. On landing in London the police took both people off the aeroplane and asked for witnesses. My friend, who had experienced the extremely long wait and overheard the complaint and chuntering leading up to it, volunteered to explain that complaining about the wait was extremely reasonable, especially if a frail 80 year-old, and that who was at the front of the queue at the time of the complaint was entirely irrelevant.
Identity politics is often very much like this story: people who associate themselves thoroughly with one particular grouping see everything through this lens and imagine that they are seeing the world more clearly when actually the lens is distorting their perception. Just because a minority is involved doesn’t mean that the issue has arisen because of minority characteristics. There may be people, and even rules and regulations, that don’t care: that think that oppressed groups are so oppressed that hypersensitivity on their behalf will help make up for the oppression that still escapes notice. This is wrong: we teach tiny children that two wrongs do not make a right, so adults shouldn’t struggle with the concept. The elderly lady in my story did nothing wrong, so her police detention and interview can only have fuelled resentment; the trans person suffered the same harm that the complaint was about and no more and so the hypersensitivity brought no benefit.
I have experienced the horror of being bullied: of most people around me being deliberately malicious. Sometimes misfortune looks like bullying but the perpetrator has engineered enough plausible deniability that no-one else can be sure. Even in the depths of my hatred for my fellow children, even as an immature child myself, I understood the concept of ‘innocent until proven guilty’. I would let such misfortunes pass without hurting anyone else. If we punish the innocent in the name of a cause, that cause will come to be regarded as an unjust one. There is no such thing as karma, whereby if you suffer you can release suffering back into the world in general and it will home in on the correct target.
I have also experienced the pain of things not going my way in the wider world: feeling that I was supremely well-qualified for jobs I was rejected from, and hearing of less well-qualified people, or people I knew to be worse at the job, somehow flying high. I have seen incompetent managers, bosses and owners and wondered at how I have a mediocre life when apparently even dolts can get great jobs and wealth. When minority campaigners discuss their lived experience of discrimination, what they often describe is the same experience that most non-minority people have: life is unfair.
Random chance, people’s inability to assess ability, their tendency to conflate ability and likeability, lying and hopeful people swamping everything good all contribute to the unfairness in life and none is minority discrimination. It’s more satisfying to have a definite injustice to point to, but that doesn’t make it true. Sometimes the lived experience of discrimination is all in someone’s head, as in my anecdote, and should not be indulged. If you indulge childish delusions too much you create a monster that no-one likes, even if you do it in the name of preserving happy, optimistic innocence and avoiding the conflict that comes from teaching disappointing truths.
One anecdote does not make data; the criticism is obvious. But I am using the anecdote to illustrate my points, not as sole justification for them. It is a story that helps narrative-minded people grasp general principles through their application. What data are there that injustices suffered by particular identities exist, are caused because of that identity and are important enough to merit the national attention they receive?
For example, we all know that women tend to be paid less than men. Does this mean that all women should receive a blanket pay rise or that all men should be charged an extra tax? Only to hard-core identity campaigners who have forgotten that the world is not just two sexes in conflict. Women do more part-time work; women in some industries tend not to be in the better-paid roles; and women in their early lives earn the same as men. The pay gap arises, it seems, at the age people tend to have children. Perhaps taking time out from a career means that you have less experience in that career and therefore a reduced chance at bagging jobs.
Yes, we should also ask why women tend to do more part-time work; whether absence from ‘top’ jobs is fully explained by babies and childcare; whether the pay gap arises for women of a certain age even if they do not have children; why we reward greedy and grasping overconfident men who ask for pay rises, but not solid, dependable and humble men and women… etc. But when we get into the detail, a blanket pay gap is tiny and feminists and sociologists attribute most of the difference to differences in behaviours, such as how overconfident and grasping you are, which can exist in either sex. Why should shy and humble men pay again for the fact that more men than women are greedy and overconfident?
When women, or minorities, complain that white men have ruined the world and it’d be better with them in charge, I hear people who are too stupid to realise that correlation does not equal causation (one of the most basic maxims of statistics). I doubt that the world would be better with other stupid people in charge. The truth is that it is stupidity and cupidity that have ruined the world. People tend to like others like them; and people tend to promote and reward those they like. Rich, white, stupid, old men with certain cultural beliefs happen to have been in power in the most powerful countries in the world and therefore people who share more of these characteristics will be most likely to join them.
Millions of people can look at stupid decisions and wonder why someone stupid came to have the power to make that decision. The stupid question to rely on is whether some other factor could overpower the natural rise of more intelligent people. The more intelligent question is whether the most intelligent will indeed naturally rise, and how we can make it so.
I suspect that the problem is partly that there are a lot of people who know that they are not the most intelligent. Intelligence is, broadly, measurable. But if we instead say that people deserve jobs or power based on how much they want it, or whether it’s their turn… this gives people hope, because no-one can see inside another’s mind and feel how badly they want anything. There are a lot of chancers out there who want to have a go. Many people desire power more than they truly desire justice or meritocracy, and their hatred of the injustice of having no power at all is as much driven by their lack of power as their hatred of injustice.
For many people, no matter how overtly confident, the idea of meritocracy fills them with dread, because a perfectly meritocratic system would measure them and find them wanting, with no excuse left. Everyone hopes that one only needs to be good enough to do a job; and that they are in fact good enough. The truth seems to be that very few are good enough for the hardest, most complex tasks, such as governance and research. By relying on the idea of being ‘good enough’ we enable discrimination, as out of a cast of people who are ‘good enough’ people will take those they like; the rich, pale, ebullient, lying, manipulative, overconfident, unchallenging candidates.
