A Sense of Self and a Sense of Nothing
- Bookshelf
- October 25, 2023
Observe any public dialogue and lines of division are apparent. Yascha Mounk, in The Identity Trap, warns that this strict polarization, if unchecked, will slowly deny the democratic principles that have kept authoritarian influences at bay. The seeds of unrest are inevitably objects of the past. But it is never clear where or how far back to look. Mounk begins with the identity synthesis; initially, an arcane field of thought it has steadily grown in popularity alongside social media and the movement of graduates from elite (typically liberal) universities into positions of influence. What began as a well-intentioned, strong identitarian position to make instances of oppression more visible eventually suppressed dialogue. The Identity Trap, as Mounk puts it, emerges when an oppressed or marginalized group denies the relevance of outside perspective. Truth becomes personal experience. Relativism of this sort is not however dependent on the identity thesis alone. Mounk notes the indemnity thesis is an extension of postmodernist thought.
Postmodernism became a dominant intellectual tradition after World Wars I and II. It was/is an aggressive revaluation of truth and fact, suggesting that truth wasn’t something “out there,” a fact of the world; it was constructed. Although this sounds nihilistic, it wasn’t necessarily a denial of all truth and virtue but an interpretative shift. Truth, for a thinker like Derrida, was methodological. Intellectual work was deconstructive—meaning that it was aimed not at uncovering absolute truths, but revealing the cracks, so to speak, in claims that such absolute truths actually existed. The goal, then, was to reveal inconsistencies; in an ethical or moral context, as Foucault had done, these inconsistencies could be seen as examples of oppression or oppressive institutions). Rather than deny order altogether the French thinkers, which dominated postmodernist thought, desired a more just organization of society.
However, this becomes problematic because deconstruction denies, as defined above, the universals that social organization seems to demand. And on many ethical issues, while Postmodernists could uncover societal woes, they had to remain silent or deny their own position. For example, what could a Western European intellectual say about oppression in the East? The cultures seem distinct—that bias, discrimination, or oppression manifests itself uniquely. Some French intellectuals were beginning to recognize this – that they couldn’t speak for all oppressed peoples.
Indian literary critic and feminist thinker, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was, according to Mounk, influenced by postmodernism and its insistence on relative or soft truths, but saw identifying labels as an exception. Spivak’s strategic essentialism held that while society should deny grand narratives (for example, universal culture, language, ethics), it may best to adopt and then embrace social constructs as if they weren’t arbitrary, meaningless labels; examples include gender, race, and sexuality. By embracing a limiting label, Spivak argued, the marginalized group may enter into or create a public dialogue; the oppressed may take control of a narrative that would otherwise have been swept under the table, ignored by the apparently neutral institutions (for example, institutions nobody thinks of as problematic).
But as the Mounk argues the position led to logical inconsistencies that for lack of a more recognizable and less polarizing term, came to define “wokeness.” In this context, without a commitment to productive dialogue and amid uncontrollable uncertainty, activism is casual—support marginalized peoples by uprooting language conventions, for example, that may be insensitive to the growing number of identity categories. In effect, this aggressive subtraction affirms identity for both out-group and in-group members, ensuring that although uncertainty pervades, at least something is controllable. Notably, this fairly minor victory is at the expense of commonalities that were once championed by liberal philosophers and are pillars of democracy. And this is Mounk’s major point. Is it worth abandoning democracy? There can’t be liberty and justice for all if all ceases to exist.
To escape the Identity Trap, society must evaluate its relationship with digital media, and this again, is a matter of history. Postmodernism and strategic essentialism are part of this history. But Mounk sees digital media as the popularizer of ideas that were once largely restricted to niche research communities.
Identity construction through Tumblr
Although I would argue the Identity Trap significantly
predates digital media, which I’ll get into later, Mounk focuses on social
media and its role in popularizing the identity thesis. Tumblr was an early
social media platform with features resembling Twitter (now X), Facebook (now
Meta), and Instagram. It provided a space for individuals to express themselves
through articles, images, and discussion forums.
Although guided by a well-intentioned interest in inclusive
dialogue, the platform was quickly divided along the lines of identity groups.
As a consequence, out-group members (white or heterosexual) couldn’t understand
a disadvantaged group on the platform. One could not disagree, since on
experiential grounds, the disadvantaged group was simply educating the
platform’s users. One early user described interest in the platform in these
terms.
“We wanted to educate ourselves. We saw it as a platform to
be more woke.”
Niche content steadily reached more people as classical
media outlets began endorsing personal narrative journalism—an effort to claim
a percentage of the growing digital market by appearing “hip” to a younger
tech-savvy demographic. By linking or referring to or commenting on social
media posts or articles, flagship newspapers were implicitly legitimizing these
sources. However, this blurred the traditional boundary between opinion pieces
(like editorials) and objective reporting.
Recommendation algorithms that had been developed by social
media platforms independently discovered that users were more engaged with
sectarian or identitarian content. Since clicks and views represented money,
sectarian (or biased) news was suddenly big business.
From the Ivory Tower to the Public Forum
.An argument can and should be made that social media wasn’t popularizing an identity thesis. Social media may simply expose human nature, with or without the influence of academics. What the academic or intellectual observes may independently surface elsewhere in simpler terms. There is no need for a causal relationship between one or more social thinkers and social behavior. The social theorist, Mounk, suggests is an active participant, but they could be a passive observer describing in complex terms what may be plainly visible to all. This, I think, is the real magic of social media. It denies the academic by suggesting the research may not influence society; it may appear deep, but the content reduces to something seemingly anti-intellectual like a meme or a Reddit thread. In other words, the scholarly book, so to speak, may now be visibly enacted or lived, rendering its observations unnecessary, To me, Mounk, as a social theorist, cannot admit this.
Instead, Mounk discusses standpoint theory. A postmodernist, feminist theory, it suggests knowledge depends on social position. Marginalized or oppressed groups, then, provide unique and more desirable (hence, objective and less biased) perspectives. Perspectives from dominant groups, lacking this unique experiential knowledge, act to strengthen oppressive forces. Society’s dominant members must therefore defer to marginalized groups in building a better future.
The author also looks at popular cases of cultural appropriation that similarly acted to suppress or devalue some opinions in favor others, leading to blanket assertions that cultural features must emerge purely, which ignores obvious intermixing. What is now an established custom, practice, or wardrobe for one culture, the author argues, may have originated elsewhere. Unique additions emerge over time, but products of any culture are amalgams. To think otherwise requires a simplifying narrative that fails to differentiate between a celebration of and deep respect for a culture and what the author sees as the legitimate claims, where elements of a culture have been appropriated simply to reinforce prejudicial views.
These ideas were circulating thought elite universities during the rise of social media. When the students graduated, they heavily influenced non-profits. University, government, and big-name media outlets were suddenly reshaped. This new tech savvy generation of college graduates used social media to expertly channel formerly fringe movements until they were not just a perspective among alternatives, but the only way public discourse could be sensible.
As a consequence, social policing, which suppressed free speech rights in the name of justifiable oppression, went a long way to deepening the partisan divide, evoking images not of a new, bolder, more equitable future but tyranny and dystopian novels.
Key in developing strong divisions, the book argues, was the shift from propositional to experiential knowledge. When experience became the final arbiter, there was no need to challenge or question one’s own positions. Democracies have, however, relied on a seemingly contradictory belief in universal experience or knowledge. Universals as in “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” an excerpt from the United States Constitution, are true without regard for individual experience. They rely on propositional knowledge.
A society caught in the Identity Trap must reassess its commitment to a set of common principles, Mounk argues. But society must translate personal, experiential knowledge into the propositional knowledge a free and equal society demands.
Can Experiential Knowledge be Propositional Knowledge?
Discrimination and injustice are still of universal interest to democratic societies. Civil rights activists of old embraced and likely contributed to the success of these movements by promoting shared experience as opposed to group identities. Martin Luther King Jr., for one, discussed civil rights violations as societal injustice or crimes against humanity, calling on society to act because of its shared moral or ethical foundation. In the following excerpts, President John F Kennedy also famously appeals to common human values:
It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the fact that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.
We cannot say to 10 percent of the population that you can’t have that right; that your children cannot have the chance to develop whatever talents they have; that the only way that they are going to get their rights is to go into the streets and demonstrate. I think we owe them and we owe ourselves a better country than that.
Therefore, I am asking for your help in making it easier for us to move ahead and to provide the kind of equality of treatment which we would want ourselves; to give a chance for every child to be educated to the limit of his talents.
Have We Heard it all Before?
Although I’m sympathetic to Mounk’s emphasis on shared experience, I think it and other recent efforts, are examples of that social thinkers write from a third-person perspective, ignoring that their methods (or academic traditions) may actually contribute to the problem. A public opinion, a book, or a lecture is for the academic a branding opportunity. Hidden beneath the apparent disembodied telling or commentary are sympathies that turn an attempt at unity into further division. What Mounk offers as a problem of recent history in The Identity Trap, emphasizing social media, is in reality much older. To deny this history denies the deep psychological/neurobiological origins, which, presumably are omitted by the author because they are off-brand.
Historian Richard Hofstetter, for example, previously wrote about the rise of Anti-Intellectualism in America while Christopher Lasch identified the seeds of a Cultural of Narcissism, and Allan Bloom observed the Closing of the American Mind in his critique of the university system. All of these social thinkers wrote throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. But the society to which these observations apply has been undergoing changes even earlier as in The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man and the novels Revolutionary Road and The Man in Grey Flannel Suit, all commentaries on a society that has discarded age old values and is wrestling with the nothingness left behind. The poet Wallace Stevens captured the moment in his telling of a listener alone in a quiet wilderness blanketed in snow and ice:
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
So, it would seem like in The Identity Trap we see a society that is still struggling with the nothingness of 30 or 40 years ago.
Has the Historical Form of Democracy Been Rejected?
If we return, for a moment, to the founding of the United States, we are immersed in a society with a stronger commitment to liberal philosophy. This is true. But its sympathies are clearly rooted, if not in formal religious traditions, in agnostic or humanistic beliefs that were religious by proxy. Societies of the past had remained steadfast in their belief in a world that transcended self-interest. To believe in equality does not demand outright belief in a supernatural God. But equality is an idea. If God doesn’t make it so, ideas must be divine or risk endless questioning. A society undergoing increasing secularization sees its core values as human creations. Propositional knowledge (e.g., “we hold these truths to be self-evident”), this society concludes, has always been experiential knowledge–someone else, an oppressive White European patriarchal society. However, for the sake of social organization the values can’t be tossed entirely. They must become more agreeable without being ineffectual: Okay, this is the situation. What can we believe in?
Although the origins may be deep-seated, Presidential addresses from the 1960s to the 1980s are a window into a society answering this question, moving away from the liberal philosophy Mounk prescribes. John F. Kennedy was clearly sympathetic to a classic liberal philosophy. The rhetoric, however, notably shifts in excerpts from Ronald Reagan’s Presidential addresses during the 1980s. It is as if society here has already abandoned the common value thesis. Reagan (and his speechwriters) were trumpeting a strong individualism, and the idea of equality persisted, but it was an equality of economic opportunity. Everyone was free to climb the ladder. The common thread, in his speeches, was an American mythology, reimagining the country as a “City upon a Hill”; the early New England settler and Puritan, John Winthrop, who influenced Reagan’s rhetoric, continued, explaining that this hypothetical city was elevated because “the eyes of all people are upon us.”
It was the idea that, listen, you’re great just by being an American—there’s no call to action; fortunately, others have made and continue to make the necessary sacrifices to ensure long-lasting prosperity. Daniel T. Rodgers in Age of Fracture (2011) noted the strong economic interpretation of We the People in Reagan’s earliest speeches. “At times, Reagan’s speechwriters slipped into something close to Franklin Roosevelt’s image of the people as a broad occupational phalanx: workers, farmers, and businessmen bound by bands of economic interdependence. Further alternations to the “People” appear in later speeches. Rogers observed in a 1985 speech, “In Reagan’s very celebrations of the people, the plural noun tended to slip away, to skitter toward the singular.”
Therefore, strong identitarian themes have apparently been dominating society for some time. The examples I have provided so far – from speeches to writings of past and recent social thinkers – cover 100 years of social commentary, identifying a fractured, self-interested, and, sometimes, deeply lonely society, going back to the 19th century.
Hypothetically, even if we were to lessen the grasp of the identity thesis, extinguishing some of the fires of cancel culture, the problematic identitarian of old won’t go away. The so-called Trap must inevitably resurface elsewhere because an Identity Crisis, a topic of psychological/neurobiological interest, won’t go away.
The Identity Crisis is the True Source of Instability
To better understand the psychological and psychobiological origins, we must travel to the 19th century and a society undergoing rapid industrialization. American entrepreneurship is beginning to dominate; intellectuals in response to uncontrollable economic forces are mythologizing progress and economic prosperity; a myth that saw the entrepreneur and inventor as a heroic Individual—permeating American artwork, popular and academic writing of the era. American industrialization, with its significant reach, spread this mythology globally.
For example, the book American Nietzsche provides a solid case study in its description of the influence American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson had on the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche’s work. As such, Nietzsche is more of a self-help writer, empowering individuals of his time to overcome oppressive institutions, to do away with unjust and arbitrary moral codes. Emerson labeled his enlightened individual, freed from oppression, the Oversoul whereas Nietzsche labeled his future idealized person the Superman. Importantly, these aren’t political theorists. This isn’t Montesquieu or Locke. The problems they are addressing may be institutional or structural, but the prescribed solution isn’t productive reform or dialogue. It’s to reform the self, to find your brand, to control the narrative, or be woke, so to speak. Reinvent society, in other words, by reinventing the individual.
Once the precedent is acknowledged, European postmodernist thought seems inevitable—continuing an ancient human vs. machine debate, which dates back to a still maturing field of astronomy, ultimately formalized in the works of Newton and Laplace, two mathematicians that popularized the image of a clockwork universe —and the later, more recent form of this debate that uses economic terms (human vs. industry or human vs. capitalism or human vs. methods of efficiency). It was in this latter translation into economic terms that Emerson, the Pragmatists, and Nietzsche began shaping or reinforcing public discourse, and that influence continues in the guise of other thinkers as well as in US Presidential speeches.
The identity crisis, then, to put it clearly, is the question: who am I, really? Am I just a machine, a cog or a gear? No, that can’t be right. And then a struggle, amid ambiguous data and necessarily fuzzy thinking, begins. What is this “I am”? Our crisis must, at bedrock, be one of knowledge since the observations and responses have been repetitive, and I provided some historical examples supporting this view earlier.
Similarly, by framing the Identity Trap claim as the longstanding Identity Crisis, Mounk’s proposed solution, calling for a renewed commitment to liberal democratic principles, seems insufficient—that it has been a topic of discussion before; therefore, had such a renewed commitment been plausible, it would have been embraced, avoiding today’s problems altogether.
Mounk, however, doesn’t seem interested in the deeper origins anyway. Mounk is administrative. Put out the small university fires. Allow speakers on campus that some students disapprove of. However, just as universities have acted in favor of these disapproving students for efficiency (“bad for business,” so to speak), if universities allowed the speakers to go through with their talks it may be an alternative form of “bad for business”—namely, it’s bad for the democratic brand name; now, equality and openness, whether fundamentally believed in, are at least on display. This clearly does not address a dysfunctional and volatile society in the grips of an identity trap. If society devalues democratic principles, like free speech, an invitation to “hear someone out” simply forces the individual members of that society into a historical play in which reasonable people had once sorted out their differences. To permit free speech and then deny its content on principle is still a rejection of democracy. We don’t get out of the trap.
Who am I? Am I really that different from anyone else?
Throughout human history, these are the questions of love and peril that have built and broken empires—that are behind the cave paintings and the wonder of the night sky—and they never rest for long, always chasing what is not yet real. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Increasingly, these have become neuroscientific questions. This is not to say science is now the universal arbiter. But a society that recycles ideas, proposing old, ineffective solutions to its troubles, must need new knowledge or an alternative perspective on the knowledge, traditions, and customs of the past. Though, admittedly, this is a complex subject, and it must be dealt with superficially here, it is the topic of the final section. What is the science underlying identity?
A Sense of Equality in the Science of Self
Where we have been
After countless efforts to promote the individual (self and self-interest) throughout history, my goal is to portray a more fragile image of self or identity with examples from neuroscience.
To recount, I have already mentioned that the identity divisions that plague society may not be addressed, as Mounk argues, through a revitalized commitment to democratic principles alone. I suggested, through examples, that society has progressively reinvented democracy by assigning self-interest as its guiding principle. Subsequently, to appeal to age old principles or traditions is akin to valuing the mere existence of something—that somehow if these principles are on display, believed in or understood, it is a win for a society and a path to stability. The main issue is the concept of self.
I have also already argued that the self-concept, driving the eventual Identity Trap, became prominent after Newton and Laplace. At this time, the universe became less supernatural; however, the observer, that is, the experiencing self, could still be supernatural or divine; a second, lesser claim — that remains even to this day—was that an experiencing self, if not divine, could be a window through which the ordinary may become divine again (e.g., shades of this appear in the counterculture, hippies, beats, and the general drug culture of today, around peyote, DMT, and other hallucinogenic substances; also, books from Leary and Huxley). Some combination of the two attempts at revitalizing divinity appear in Emerson and Nietzsche, the two 19th century thinkers, and likely precursors of an Identity Criss that is now plaguing society.
Most contemporary books continue to emphasize this inward shift—that reinforcing of self amid industrialization or as of writing Artificial Intelligence (AI). Take for example, The Rigor of Angels by philosopher William Egginton. Egginton writing on space and time and reality through the works of the famed Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, and the 20th century intellectuals, skilled short story writer and essayist Jorge Louis Borges and quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg.
In an excerpt discussing Borges thoughts on memory and time, and the necessity of self, Eddinton writes, “The more precisely you relive the past, the less it is a past you remember and the more it becomes the present… A perfect memory … destroys the very self that remembers.”
Eddinton refers to this as a crisis for the writer, Borges who was fascinated with the case of a man that remembers everything; he feared remembrances, inundated with mountains of detail, diminish the prominence the self of or worse yet possibly erase the self entirely. In the Rigor of Angels, Eddinton continues: “The hell that haunted Borges was the prospect of losing that sense of self that provided the basis for all attachments … even if the alternative was an eternity of pain.”
Eddington, channeling Borges, though I’ve not seen a direct quote from Borges supporting the claim, writes, “To recognize time passing is to recognize that you are embedded in perception. Eddinton then concludes, implying that he’s speaking for Borges yet again, “The self was not nothing. It couldn’t be. The very impossibility of recovering a scene from the past … guarantees that self’s persistence.”
Setting aside Eddinton’s posthumous interpretations of Borges, which may be inaccurate, the conclusion is lacking. While it may be true of memory, much like Descartes famous “I think therefore I am,” the mere existence of a self-concept, just like the mere existence of a show free speech, doesn’t address fears that it’s an empty shell that exists.
Where we are now
Modern neuroscience has over the past 20 years steadily denied the prominence of self. But one must be careful not to draw the conclusion that this implies meaninglessness. As we move down this path, there isn’t, so to speak, an empty shell. There is nothing, but contrary to popular thinking, for the mathematician or scientist, nothing is equivalently possibility. With that in mind, let’s explore the data.
Out of Body Experiences (OBE), derealization and depersonalization have now been reliably produced in experiments with healthy volunteers. What remains is a vision of the self as a pattern in a complex system. Researchers can manipulate the information flow in that system and observe the pattern change or fade. The participant describes this experience, confirming that the researchers have successfully altered the information flow. When the participant describes an “out of body” sensation during this experimental setup, it is, mathematically, a prediction, and we might add, in a way, it’s an inaccurate prediction. Inaccurate predictions are often called illusions, but one must be careful not to read too much into the term, since far from being worthless, illusions arise from useful rules or facts that have evolved over thousands of years. For all of their survival benefits, these rule-based systems are rigid; they can’t account for all possible experiences, and, at times, will not provide a complete or accurate interpretation of reality. In predator and prey games, animals evolve strategies that exploit the fragility of these rule-based systems—mimicking the color and texture of tree bark, or non-venomous animals evolving physical characteristics (colors and patterns) of venomous animals, all of which lead to inaccurate predictions (Figure carousel, below; images 1-2 show how sensory evidence and prior beliefs affect the model of reality, then in image 3 concepts covered in images 1-2 have been translated into the more familiar terms of self and identity; image 3 therefore shows identity, one’s sense of being a person a separate from the world, is generated form a experience and available sensory information. Given immersive virtual environments, even prior experience may be called into question. The experimenter prompts the participant, through the manipulation of sensory evidence (the likelihood), to revaluate core assumptions (experiential and genetic) about identity and reality.
Accordingly, we can think of the self in plain, mathematical terms. Most neuroscientist agree that the human brain is a prediction machine, a generative model that relies on Bayesian Inference. This model is comprised of three functions: the prior, the likelihood, and the posterior, which describe probability distributions. Where do these probabilities come from? Brains (or brain networks) rely on life experience but also on rules acquired over the span of many generations through evolution in building these probabilities. Over time the brain selects, given a certain perceptual or sensory experience, the most probable conclusion. Effectively, the brain generates a guess or prediction (the prior) and checks that model against new information (the likelihood). The product (achieved by multiplication) of the prior and likelihood is the updated guess (posterior). For the next guess, the posterior becomes the prior. So, it is an iterative process of constantly trying to make sense of the world through the lens of a coarse or naïve mathematical model.
Out of Body (or depersonalization) experiments (OBE) involve a participant that is presented with a sensory stimulus, a touch, for instance, while simultaneously observing a prosthetic limb, virtual body or avatar that mirrors that action. When virtual reality is incorporated, the experimental conditions can be manipulated further, leading to a dramatic and sometimes uncomfortable perception that participant has been detached from one’s body, occupying the position of the virtual body (Figure Carousel, Image 3; refer to the greyscale images for examples of the mirroring protocol that is used to induce disembodiment)
The OBE virtual reality experiments imply that scientists can equally exploit these rule systems, altering the way the brain predicts or generates its model of reality. This pertains to our original discussion on identity because, here, we must conclude that while identity exists in some form, it is very abstract—mathematical. And if identity is mathematical, it can’t be rigidly defined. It becomes the game we play, and we should embrace and find joy in this game, while acknowledging that the distinction between oneself and anyone else is, at bedrock, non-existent. We don’t find in the result an appeal to intellectual principles, imploring people to believe in equality. It is an appeal to an equality that is as sure as thermodynamic law.
Wallace Steven’s in his poem The Snowman, which I quoted from previously, observed the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that it is.” It is a nuanced observation from the poet, Stevens, as it implies nothing is an idea with layers of meaning. Amid the deepest nothingness is it truly an experience of nothing or a matter of perspective, as Stevens writes, “For the listener, who listens in the snow…”?
We find ourselves today, in many ways, as Stevens’ listener in the snow. It is time for us to recognize that identity is a kind of nothingness. And like Martin Luther King Jr and John F Kennedy equality is not as impossible as it seems. Not because of a shared belief in intellectual principles, which I have argued society has progressively devalued; the Pandora’s box now seemingly open simply will not close again. Instead, it is an equality that emerges from a position of shared nothingness—that we might pursue from this position, respectfully, the something that awaits us all on the horizon.
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