What I'm Working On

Mid October 2023: Thoughts on identity politics, irony, David Chalmers, and more.

I spent the first two weeks of October traveling around Italy seeing museums and things. Very edifying, good exercise, and good for my marriage.

Immediately upon my return, the Partially Examined Life was scheduled to discuss Yascha Mounk’s book The Identity Trap, and while my original plan was to skip the discussion, I was able to get an audiobook version and listen to it in the three days before we interviewed him. It was a very spirited discussion and will come out on Oct. 30. (You can hear Yascha describe many of his theses in the book in this interview with Coleman Hughes.)

We’ve had mixed success with author interviews, given that the PEL format is designed for cooperative discussion, and the author of course knows much more than we do. We often (as with our recent Michael Tomasello interview) have the author only on the first hour of the recording so that we have the air time in the second half to do our usual analytical sniping without the author there to launch into more speeches recapping the relevant section of the book and/or getting defensive. In this case, we decided we were having a lot of fun with Yascha and invited him to stay, but as a result haven’t yet fully done our jobs. We hope to do this next week in a supporter-only third hour of the discussion, which will also be good to do because my co-host Seth who read the book wasn’t able to attend the interview due to technical problems, so we’ll have a chance to get his take after he (and I) listen back to the interview.

One reason I wasn’t planning on attending was a general discomfort with this type of book, which is a polemic against wokeness, which Mounk renames “the identity synthesis” to avoid the connotations of the word “woke.” He usefully lays out the intellectual origins of this synthesis, pointing out that it is not “cultural Marxism” as illiterate critics claim, but grows out of the legitimate work of several figures including Derrick Bell and Donna Haraway, both of whom we’ve covered on PEL in the past. Our takeaways from those figures were pretty modest: There are undeniable economic disparities that will not just disappear without positive (i.e. affirmative) action, and it sure does seem like a good idea to have members of historically oppressed groups involved in scientific decision making. Mounk, however, goes beyond merely summarizing the findings of these thinkers, but is interested in what their thought has been over-simplified into to create our public discourse. In these cases, the resultant slogans are that racism is permanent, with no real progress being made due to the civil rights era, and that no one outside of an oppressed group is in a position to understand the challenges that group faces, and so we need to simply defer to the judgment of those groups on issues that concern them.

I wouldn’t call these straw man positions, as individuals clearly have them (Mounk documents these), but they’re absurd enough to be unworthy of philosophical rebuttal. While we are not yet in a post-racial place in history, clearly things are not as bad as they were in the 1950’s; it’s not just that the same racism has just become more covert. While it requires effort and participation to understand and act on the concerns of oppressed groups, and of course there are limits to how well any individual can understand any other, suffering is not so private that we simply can never understand each other.

By arguing against these extreme positions that I as someone generally amenable to wokeness (who doesn’t want to be awake to the historical suffering of others?) do not at all hold, Mounk’s book comes off to me as basically a screed against current cultural trends (though a well researched, well written, measured, and entertaining screed!). I have mixed feelings about my podcast promoting such a book, and I’m not particularly comfortable having to argue about such widely aimed and so rather nebulous theses: for example, that the woke generation sees our differences as “more important” than what we have in common. Is that really what they think, or merely that we can’t merely emphasize what we have in common via color-blind/ethnicity-blind policies? Mounk goes out of his way to sympathetically express his opponents’ views, but given that his opponent is “the culture” widely, this is very different than considering the arguments of one philosopher against another.

I initially urged the group to invite a minority-scholar friend of mine so that intellectually and optically our podcast would not come off poorly, given that part of the book’s agenda is telling members of historically oppressed groups to get over their victimhood, which again seems like a mischaracterization of woke views, and is in any case condescending. That plan didn’t work out, and I’m glad I was on the call, but per usual I’m hoping people take the episode in the context of our whole effort: Insofar as we cover politics, we cover both left-wing and conservative figures, though certainly not in similar amounts. All the way back to the aftermath of the 2016 election, were were discussing Richard Rorty’s diagnosis that identity politics is a losing electoral strategy, and we’d do much better gaining support for widespread economic reform to help everyone in need rather than crafting policies to preferentially benefit certain groups, even if social justice demands this. Of course, we’ve tried and failed to pass many more ambitious economic plans (see Elizabeth Warren); those haven’t gained enough support either.

We’ve now turned our reading attention to Kierkegaard’s thoughts on irony via his verbose dissertation. Irony is one of my favorite topics to think and write about, but I’ve seldom gotten to engage with this via a philosophy A-lister. From what I’ve read so far, Kierkegaard seems to agree with my that the best kind of irony is not like sarcasm merely a matter of meaning the opposite of what you say, but a way of being able to experiment with saying things when you’re not quite sure what you want to say or otherwise don’t want to fully commit to something. I use this often in songwriting.

Speaking of which, during my Italian walking, I finally managed to musify a song concept that I’ve had buzzing around for over a year: My own wondering about whether I might have some kind of diagnosable mental illness and which one this might be. Feeling distracted a lot? Maybe ADD! Have to learn skills on how to read people? Maybe I’m on the spectrum. Definitely some highs and lows, but clinically bipolar? I may or may not actually want to know, and things have never gotten so bad that I’ve felt the need to seek a professional opinion. The song that came out of this is called “The Dao of Self-Doubt,” which has some musings in it on whether conceiving one’s behavior through the lens of mental illness might not be trying to abdicate responsibility, and whether this might not necessarily be a bad thing. The song starts out by contrasting forward movement with giving oneself a label, but it ends by concluding that these are compatible. Also, because I wrote this melody-first, in a foreign country without a guitar, the chords inevitably ended up being stupidly simplistic. Tradeoffs!

I am amazed that we actually did get philosophy A-lister David Chalmers to come play our goofy games on Philosophy vs. Improv, and even recorded video of the event. He seemed to enjoy it and immediately recommended some other philosophers to come on with us. His new book Reality+ is a beginner-friendly introduction to philosophy that seems very up to date regarding current technology, and in fact revisits classic problems of knowledge, ethics, and even theology through the lens of the questions of whether we might now be in a simulation and whether future and current simulation technology will rob us of our humanity by allowing us to live in what might seem like essentially dream worlds. To massively over-simplify, Chalmers concludes that a) We can’t know that we’re not in a perfect simulation, but that b) simulated reality is still reality, still meaningful, and objects we currently can interact with via simulations (in video games, Second Life, etc.) are real, albeit digital, objects.

For Nakedly Examined Music, I’ve been long preparing for an interview with Wreckless Eric, who’s sort of like a less commercially successful Elvis Costello, and so he never got to collaborate with Paul McCartney and Burt Bacharach, but instead after losing his record deal in the ‘80s produced some pretty weird, desperate sounding music and now channels some interesting Englishman-relocated-to-the-US sentiments. His work is now closer to that of two of my favorite musician interviews, Robyn Hitchcock or Phil Judd. Check out Eric’s song “Depression,” one of the ones that I picked for our interview, which was postponed from this week to Monday morning.

For Pretty Much Pop, I’ve been boning up on all things Exorcist and now turning to Poe in light of Netflix’s Fall of the House of Usher. Fun stuff! The episode I just released is on the show Reservation Dogs, which is really an exceptional achievement, if you haven’t looked into it. As is very rare on this entertainment-oriented podcast, we actually engaged in some political election discussion during our aftertalk, which while normal restricted to our very small number of Patreon supporters is this time included at the end of the public discussion.

For the Core Texts In Philosophy class I’m teaching online, I just finished a few weeks immersed in Stoicism and have now returned to the ever classic Descartes’ Meditations, which I appreciate more every time I turn back to it. Strangely, while my Saturday morning class has near-full attendance, my Friday afternoon one has shrunk to around half its original size. No one has yet demanded their money back, so I guess it’s proceeding well enough! I need to decide soon whether to attempt to teach the same course with new people next semester and/or pitch a new course to my current students that yet doesn’t require new people to have already taken the current semester’s course. A survey will be forthcoming, but feel free to reach out to me with your preferences, if you’d like to be involved.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for listening.