The philosophy of identity politics | Stephen Hicks #CLIP

democracy is really a do-it-yourself kind of political system but it depends on a strong sense of individual agency now if though you have a very different understanding of human nature you don't believe in human agency you think that what people think is conditioned into them by the social forces right that they are born into that you know there's a linguistic version of this we all learn different languages but built into the grammars of different languages are are very different assumptions about the way the world works but human beings are born into different language groups and they're never going to be able to think objectively about the way the world is or even communicate meaningfully with people in other language groups so that's going to be one variation that's a philosophical issue that's been powerfully advocated in the 20th century and it feeds into our our positions right now if you think that people are born into different economic circumstances and again those different economic circumstances dramatically mold people into different kinds of beings then you're going to have a class Warfare understanding the classes will never be able to understand each other and they don't even have the same economic issues if you think it's a matter of ethnicity not so much economics that you're born into an ethnic group and language might be a part of that economic issues might be a part of that but rather it is your your polish ethnicity or your Korean ethnicity that gets deep and that shapes who you are and so first and foremost you're not an individual but rather you're a Korean or you're a pole or whatever then again you're going to have a different understanding of where values come from and so forth in a different kind of politics so is this at heart the problem arising out of identity policy it is it is yes so this is why I think the the philosophical debate over volition versus determinism is is fundamental it's not an accident that all of the classical liberals were strong Believers in the ocean individual moral responsibility the marxists are pure environmental determinists uh the The saper Wharf hypothesis linguistically that I just threw out very powerful in in linguistics American pragmatism of the John Dewey variety very much a collectivized understanding of of human formation and anti-individualistic and I think it's also important to emphasize the biological versions of this as well so if you are uh uh for example take Freudian psychology which is very biologically based that we have as human beings instincts that have been bred into us in varying degrees well you're not really an individual with any sort of autonomy to think about it rather you know your your individual rational agency and your moral agency is just this very thin civilizational veneer that's laying over underlying instinctual by biological drives pretty sad and low view of human well your fellow humans really what identity politics is produced certainly in this country is a desertion of the idea that we ought to celebrate and participate in Freedom and if we were responsible we will look for people who are still being marginalized and try and include them you know out of a generosity of spirit and doing what you ought to by your neighbor because you know that's the right thing to do to a situation now where we say to people well you have rights uh but by the way they're uh clashing rights so you've got to compete for your rights and so we've set up all of this discrimination uh and anti-discrimination legislation in this country over the last nearly 60 years now uh and uh you know and you have your rights basically determined by technocrats increasingly including in the legal profession in the courts and so now we have to go and compete for our rights somehow it's very counter-intuitive yeah it's nowhere near as Noble as saying we'll celebrate freedom we'll exercise freedom and we'll try and create the greatest freedoms possible for ourselves and everyone around us yeah foreign

Channel: John Anderson

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Id: 9ErvjNQSM4g

Length: 4min 22sec (262 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 23 2023