Identity politics

Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider review – the best criticism of identity politics

I found this review of the book by Asad Haider satisfying — despite the title of the book, and the title of the review, I don’t think he just criticises identity politics. Haider defends a strand of it and criticises another and makes the distinction quite clear.

Haider traverses a tricky area. OTOH he can be critical of corporate feminism or indigenous capitalism. On the other hand he avoids two traps: One would be to go (or be seen to go) all sexist and racist. The other would be to fall into offensive class dogma, and say that all will be well in these areas of identity after the working class revolution.

Even in the summary in the review what is constructive and what is not, comes through clearly:

This is the original demand of identity politics, and it’s one that Haider embraces: for a revolutionary practice rooted in people’s identities as racialised, sexed, gendered and classed individuals who face interlocking systems of oppression. These systems have to be fought together, by organising people of different identities in what Haider calls “a project of universal emancipation” devoted to dismantling all of the structures that make them unfree, including and especially capitalism itself.

But if anticapitalist revolution is where identity politics began, it has since become something quite different, and is now invoked by certain liberals and leftists to serve distinctly non-revolutionary ends, Haider argues. It involves members of marginalised groups demanding inclusion, recognition, or restitution from above – a seat at the table. These demands are made in response to very real injuries endured by those groups. But their method, he says, ends up strengthening the structures that produced those injuries in the first place.

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I’m intrigued that Asad Haider is a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness. I listened to him in a podcast and he is indeed knowledgeable in this area. See my blog post.

I look forward to what else he has written.

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Found this:

An Intercept interview with Haider.

Evolution and human behaviour and culture.

So much on my mind – I can’t keep up with it!

Books to read on relationships – “Marriage is the medium”

I have been reflecting on the role of evolution in relationships.

I doubt that marriage was somehow hard wired or ‘natural’ yet what is our pairing history?

I have a hypothesis:

We became human through a process of evolutionary development where we gained an advantage by walking upright, liberating the hands, developing language, having a bigger brain. Some of these processes or all of them, involved us being born as infantile creatures more vulnerable than other mammals. We are born at what  might be a more juvenile stage in other primates. This means that the parents play a vital role in development.  Grandparents do too; an explaining why we live beyond our reproductive life. Through the grandparents the group has a collective memory and redundancy in its nurturing capacity.

Psychologically this can all go haywire, evolution did not provide a fool proof post-natal environment. In fact it may be that what does not kill us makes us stronger psychologically. We have attachment wounds and seek out spouses that offer the possibility for psychological healing, a second go at being nurtured. It may be that the fear of change leads us to seek out partners that confirm our familiar view of the world and ourselves and reinforce it. Or there may be strong out-of-awareness mechanisms that can see the healing opportunity. But for some reason pair-bonds evolve that have the potential for re-living (a hellish time) and then repairing attachment wounds.

Some of this may happen while the partners are young, though I imagine it is more likely in the grand-parent phase of life. It may not have happened a lot, but if a tribe had sufficient elders who were somewhat psychologically healed it would lead to significant advantages for the group. Hence the evolution of cultural taboos against divorce and incentives for staying together.

Whatever the reason for the power of hanging-on in a relationship, there is a process of healing that is possible if there is guidance and consciousness. This healing does not happen if at the point of difficulty in the relationship partners just move on. By staying in the relationship, and becoming conscious the marriage becomes a healing space just like a therapeutic relationship. In fact the therapeutic healing space is a surrogate marriage, it can even be a futile substitute. Marriage becomes an alchemical crucible, where stages of transformation can be facilitated by conscious attention. The evolutionary basis is there but we also have reason and consciousness and we have developed capacity for depth and loving relationships. This cultural evolution can happen much faster than physical changes, and there is currently a rapid shift from individualism to a relational paradigm.

There are plenty of other, less benign forces at work that explain marriage, such as inheritance of wealth and bonding families and tribes, however the healing potential of relationships is also there. Very recently (slowly) we as humans may be ridding ourselves of sexist elements of marriage such as ownership of women by men and becoming more conscious of the healing potential.

With this hypothesis to sharpen and examine I have a pile of books to read on my kindle:

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Darwin’s Legacy: Scenarios in Human Evolution (African Archaeology Series) [Kindle Edition] Sue Taylor Parker (Author), Karin Enstam Jaffe (Author)

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Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity are Revolutionizing our View of Human Nature

 

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The Dawn Warriors: Man’s Evolution Toward Peace

 

Robert Bigelow was my teacher in 1969 at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. I was deeply influenced by his teaching. It seemed like we were getting genetics 101, but I now see that his insights were very rare, and they did not get a good grip on the orthodoxies. Sone of the details may be wrong or dated – the overall hypothesis makes sense and makes his book a worthy candidate for Peace Studies.

Time I read it again – not on the kindle unfortunately.

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The Meaning of Human Existence [Kindle Edition]
Edward O. Wilson (Author)

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Then a couple by Stephanie Coontz (she is mentioned in an earlier post relevant to this discussion) here :

The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap Paperback – October 6, 1993
by Stephanie Coontz>

Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage [Kindle Edition – downloaded sample] Stephanie Coontz

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Diane Wolfthal Images of Rape

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A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion
Here is a review: Goodreads

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Sex: A Natural History

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The Evolution of Marriage and of the Family
By Charles Jean Marie Letourneau

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LATER Sunday, 20 October 2019 

And now add Engles!!

Then there is a book in this

I’d love to do this as a project one day.

Sometime/Maybe — in the list

The Plot to Save Socrates — Paul Levinson

The Plot to Save Socrates

Came across this book when looking for this…

The Soft Edge — Paul Levinson

This book is on my list because I’m exploring the relational paradigm. Archetypes of Relational Space? What comes up is that marriage is a medium. This might be relevant?

The Soft Edge

I can get the paper version here for 1c But I want a digital one… And that is here on Google

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There is a lovely video of Paul Levinson on Amazon

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While on the journey I downloaded a sample of another book, this one looks like fun. The Plot to Save Socrates

(Thanks Brian for pointers)

Speed Reading

Looks like one that will work!

http://semanticrestructuring.com/lookma.pdf

Identity & boundaries

This might be of interest:

http://mashable.com/2010/02/25/dont-friend-your-boss-on-facebook/

Bent Flyvbjerg – Phronetic social science

http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/Publications2006/ForesightNo2PRINT.pdf

http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/Publications2008/PhronOrgDict62Proof.pdf

Two pdfs by Bent Flyvbjerg. I almost bought his book on Social Sciences, but not really sure that it is on the track I want to pursue. I’ll read these two items and decide.

I want to shape a form of research that is practice based in psychotherapy. But this might be the opposite?

Phronesis is a complex idea.

Books & Bookmarks

I just used:

Books in my library

books.google.co.nz

This could be useful, if I add tags it might just be a resource, or should I just use delicious? Yes! Delicious for everything. I just added a Tag Bundle for Books

Google Notebooks

I am enjoying this Google feature. Really nice way to manage all sorts of note taking, and linking to the web. Making them public seems ok, though my notes are mainly for me, bookmarks and tools for my writing etc. The public version does not show the lovely ajax enabled fluidity for managing these notes, showing & hiding them & moving them to different notebooks. Here are my public ones just set up today:

waltzzz’s notebooks

Comics & Movies

It’s not always who draws wins – Saturday entertainment – Times Online

Looks interesting. To read.

A presence that disturbs

Wordsworth, William. 1888. Complete Poetical Works.

“… And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”

Bartleby – a place I like to visit.