Jonathan Haidt: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, in general, you’ve been critical of identitarianism, people identifying too much with a racial or ethnic group. If you think of young people using concepts from psychology as identity labels — like I’m ADHD, I’m autistic, I’m neurodivergent — what do you think of that trend? Well, to be clear, I’m not against identity. I have no problem with people identifying strongly with a group, with their race, with a disability. When I use the word identitarianism, I don’t mean just people having an identity. That’s fine. What I mean is two things. It means a theoretical commitment to putting identity first analytically. In the academic world, what it means is, whatever we’re talking about, whether it’s Shakespeare or inequality or chemistry, even, “We’re going to put identity — especially racial identity — first. That’s the proper lens.” I’m really opposed to teaching young people to do that. It’s fine if there are some classes here and there at the university, but to the extent that DEI procedures have imported that into like, “Here’s how we’re going to orient you. When you come to campus, we’re going to orient you around identitarianism.” More worrying than just the analytical lens — which causes what I’ve called monomania, an obsessive focus on one thing — is that identitarianism, at least on campus, is not morally neutral. That is, the groups are not morally equal. The old white supremacists used to rank White people as the best race and Black people as the worst race, Asians in the middle. The new identitarianism reverses that because it’s all about power and oppression. The oppressors are the bad people, morally bad. The oppressed are the good people. They’re morally good. The idea of teaching young people to see if you look at someone, you can see their race, you know whether they’re good or bad to some extent — that’s horrible. That was contrary to what I thought the whole last half of the 20th century was about. So, yes, I’m opposed to identitarianism. Do you think we do that with the disability concept today? We even call it disability, but people, say, with Tourette Syndrome — it’s not clear they have lesser outcomes than other individuals. Do we need some kind of identitarian movement to invert the fact that a whole set of different kinds of people seem to be called inferior right now? Both the left and the right just go along with this. Should we be outraged by that, and we need a new identitarian movement?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.