New versus old identity politics

The recent emergence of identity politics as a topical issue is an important development. It is, however,  nothing new but merely an elucidation of how politics has generally been conducted for generations.

For the purpose of distinguishing the different versions of these politics, it is helpful to entitle the more recent variety the new identity politics.

Old identity politics were located within socially and economically embedded identity hierarchies, created and nurtured over the past few centuries.

According to this hegemonic cultural paradigm that has been receding over recent decades, human dignity, quite crudely, was conceived of in terms of the human phenotype as the absurd de-facto measure.

Social and legal status, in many parts of the world, and the economic privilege flowing from them, cascaded downwards along a value spectrum that diminished according to the shade of pigmentation.

Though the political power that created that world is generally receding , that world is still with us and will continue to be so for some time yet.

It is understandable, given the quantum of time involved, why the lingering identity constructs and their intrinsic hierarchies came to be invisible to their beneficiaries over time, in plain sight.

After all a fish might be forgiven for failing to see water after a while.

That is why some might see the new identity politics, perhaps disingenuously, as the genesis of identity politics instead of a rebellion against extant identity realities.

The present generation must navigate the fraught terrain of highlighting existing identity-based socioeconomic realities, with the risk that this political stance might be confused with defending the idea of identity politics albeit with reversed roles.

I hope this alluring trope misrepresents those in the main stream of the new identity politics. 

Yes, because of the past and the present it created, there is an uncomfortable but necessary emphasis on identity. After all the doctor can only cure those ailments that are identified.

This time around, however, the end-game rather than racial dominance, must be the removal of the cancer of the structural identity imprints in our country and world.

Such a world is possible only if justice and equity are deemed worthwhile pursuits rather than burdensome inconveniences or instruments of cheap political point-scoring.

Otherwise we risk abandoning the noble quest for a world shaped by universal values for the benefit of all, for one characterised by a perpetual contest between various identity constructs. One that ebbs and flows according to who happens to possess sociocultural power at a given moment in history

Identity politics are dangerous precisely as they tend to operate within the confines of an insular zero-sum moral framework that is impervious to persuasion by superior moral logic, particularly when that logic emanates exogenously.

This is because according to identity politics, identity is the sole arbiter of what is right and wrong.

Of course, the preponderance of this Manichean logic in an unavoidably diverse country and world can only know dominance not by transcendent values but that of one identity group by another.

My point here is that those who, like Ms Helen Zille, are given to endless pontifications about the rise of identity politics, must reflect on why the credibility of their supposed moral stand is being questioned.

Perhaps it may become clear that  there is a marked difference between a principled stand against the use of identity as proxy for human dignity and the prerogative to question the immorality of identity hierarchies of the past continuing unhindered in their present status as reliable indicators of present socioeconomic privilege.

Strange and uncertain times

History records that a young Abraham Lincoln, brimming with idealism and ambition, rued the times in which he was born. 

He peered back, it is said, with longing eyes toward an earlier age that unfairly conferred upon the likes of George Washington, an enviable stage for their bounteous talents - a heroic age of a revolutionary war and the birthing of a new nation.

We might surmise that the young Lincoln succumbed to the familiar tendency to look at the past and its heroes through a lens sanitised by a rose-tinted hue of quixotic romanticism.

Perhaps some of those who, like me, came of age after WWII, a time that future generations may call Pax Americana, share some of his restless sense of injustice. As if robbed of a rightful platform for our repressed heroism.

Lincoln and his generation would soon discover just how ghastly war can be, when their turn to emulate their departed heroes was abruptly thrust upon them.

Ours is a lamentably unheroic age. One afflicted by not merely the dearth of great men and women but, quite tellingly, the perverse unappreciation for the very idea of greatness.

Lingering memories of two of the most gruesome wars in history and the implicit deterrence of nuclear weaponry have produced an unusually long absence of open war between the great powers. Something that may unnerve the discerning among us.

In this regard, our times are not unlike the relative peace that descended upon the world following the Congress of Vienna, that concluded the disruptive Napoleonic Wars. One that reigned until WWI, almost a century later, with the only notable interruption being the Franco-Prussian war of 1871.

Pax Britannica, so called, came to a rapid conclusion as a result of the failure to resolve the familiar contestation that tends to eventuate between rising and incumbent world powers.

We live now before the looming shadow of the same spectre.

Furthermore, the extended peace of our times has come with unparalleled global prosperity. So many of us have been lavished with the type of ease that has rendered virtues of courage, honour and nobility dispensable luxuries, strange relics of a charming but long departed romantic age.

War is an unmitigated horror, the ugliest expression of the worst in humanity. Yet there is something about it that makes it a crucible for greatness, disinterring long-buried virtues of honour, humanity and courage, perhaps out of the sheer impulse for collective survival.

This may be the reason the qualities of many of those we consider great often emerge before the haunting spectre of encroaching apocalypse.

Ours, on the other hand, is the age of narcissism, defined by a generational self-indulgence that seems to set us indisputably apart from bygone eras.

I never cease to be amazed by just how unimportant history seems to so many of my contemporaries.

This may have to do with our staple diet premised on the supposed indispensability of constant entertainment and distraction.

So myopically obsessed with the present we have become, even events from a mere decade ago occupy a remote place in the contemporary memory bank. Ominously, that time-span might be erring on the generous side.

This is disconcerting for numerous reasons, not least the missed opportunity to develop a broad and grounded perspective that correctly contextualizes contemporary events.

What seems ubiquitous is a mind-set that inordinately magnifies current newspaper headlines. Such that we have become akin to a bipolar society, given to oscillation between soaring euphoria and morose despair and usually nothing in-between. As informed by the latest soundbite on the news cycle.

We resemble those who have been enslaved by the tyranny of now.

Thus, we have been robbed not only of a strategic perspective, but our temporal parochialism represents a tragic squandering of all the accumulated lessons of the ages that seem to exist beyond the scope of contemporary consciousness.

One hopes we do not live to ratify the age-old aphorism brilliantly captured by George Santayana:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned repeat it.”

It is precisely this myopic preoccupation that misses the winds of change currently blowing in the geopolitical environment.

Pax Americana is now rapidly retreating beyond the sunset to be united with the grand eras of ages past. It was no Pollyanna, of that we can be sure. But few epochs rival the peace and prosperity it brought about.

Former president Obama has rightly described these as “strange and uncertain times”.

He captured thus a nagging feeling that we have entered into an unfamiliar and unpredictable epoch. One that elicits thoughts of disquietude much more than it does those of hopeful anticipation.

Perhaps it was too idealistic to imagine that the curtain would never close on so optimistic a period, where the universal triumph of freedom seemed within reach for so many of us. One that oversaw the triumph over the tyrannies of Fascism, Marxist-Leninism and Colonialism.

It is a tragic sight to behold the excesses and hubris that threaten the demise of Pax Americana. So soon after the unipolar moment that followed the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.

In fact, we may be forgiven to conclude that Trump’s “America first” paradigm signals the final nail on Pax Americana as the great super power flirts with retreating into its customary Monroe doctrinarian posture.

If a decade ago has now become akin to ancient history, there should perhaps be little wonder that the global consensus that emerged from a world deeply chastened by the horrors of the grisliest of wars, means so little to so many of us. It was, after all, almost seventy-five years ago, akin to a millennium to our anti-historical sensibilities.

It seems, tragically, we are now ready to relearn the very same lessons purchased by the rivers of blood flowing from tens of millions of our very own fellow human beings, in a war that ought to have forever cured us of our congenital bent towards violence. But alas!

Let us pray that the mercurial hand of fate will be kind to the romantics among us; those of us who for years have cast longing eyes to the grand ages that produced the Lincolns, the Churchills and the Mandelas of yesteryear. 

Perchance we soon be presented with our own stage upon which to discover the heat of the furnaces that reveal the great among men.