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The Guardian
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Against Identity by Alexander Douglas review – a superb critique of contemporary self-obsession
Identity is something socially negotiated, both claimed and given. I cannot be French if that nation does not exist; I can't be a doctor if no one will grant me a medical degree. Social media, however, promises that we can don or doff identities like so many digital masks. We may become persuaded that identities are private goods over which we have rights of ownership and choice, that we can freely select what we 'identify as'. The heightened salience of identity in modern political discourse thus represents an unwitting internalisation of the neoliberal view of humans as atomised individuals who navigate life purely by expressing consumer preferences. The idea that the identity of the speaker should count when assessing his or her argument is what the right used to denounce as 'identity politics' (now subsumed under the general concept of 'wokeness'), though it is in this way a logical outcome of Thatcherite and Reaganite economics. One strong critique of the critique of identity politics, on the other hand, points out that privileged white males, of the sort who make such complaints, don't have to worry about their identity because theirs is the default one of power and influence – whereas for various minorities identity might matter much more, not least in how it influences the ways in which privileged white males will treat them. Philosopher Alexander Douglas's deeply interesting book diagnoses our malaise, ecumenically, as a universal enslavement to identity. An alt-right rabble rouser who denounces identity politics is just as wedded to his identity as a leftwing 'activist' is wedded to theirs. And this, Douglas argues persuasively, explains the polarised viciousness of much present argument. People respond to criticisms of their views as though their very identity is being attacked. The response is visceral and emotional. That's why factchecking conspiracy theories doesn't work. And it's not just a social media problem; it's far worse than that. 'If you define yourself by your ethnicity or your taste in music,' Douglas argues, 'then you ipso facto demarcate yourself against others who do not share in that identity. Here we have the basis for division and intergroup conflict.' The escape route Douglas recommends is nothing so banal, then, as policing misinformation or even just being nicer to one another; no, we should strive to abandon identity all together. He deploys close readings of three thinkers from wildly differing epochs and cultures: the ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza, and the 20th-century historian-critic René Girard. Each of them, he argues, hints at a similar ideal of enlightenment: to abandon our attachment to identity and become one with the undifferentiated flow of all things. This sounds fluffy and improbable in precis, but we should begin by noticing how fragile our own sense of self really is. Douglas says of his three thinkers: 'Look within, they would say, and you will find a mess. Introspection reveals only a confusion of qualities.' Oddly, the author doesn't mention the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, though his is probably the most famous expression of this idea: that what we call the self is, per Hume, 'nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement'. If so, it follows that what we think of as our identity must have been drawn from the example of others. This is the meaning of 'mimetic desire' as theorised by Girard: that we choose an admired person to imitate and so teach ourselves to want similar things. 'Individualism,' Douglas concludes, 'is really conformism to a model.' What we think of as our own special identity is just a suit of borrowed clothes. What, then, is the alternative? It is somehow to psychically merge with the 'superdeterminate' nature of Spinoza's concept of God, who exists everywhere and in every thing. Has any human being achieved such a feat? Perhaps, Douglas suggests, Jesus. Another model for us is Hundun, an emperor with no face in an old Chinese fable. His friends drilled holes into his head in an attempt to give him human features, and thereby killed him. Against Identity is a powerfully strange book, melding such matters with enjoyable references to Evelyn Waugh and Jean-Paul Sartre, and a strongly aphoristic turn of phrase. 'The 'inner voice',' he writes, 'is just the noise of others echoing inside your own emptiness.' To the 'romantic lie' that says you can be what you want to be, Douglas counterposes the bracing challenge: Don't be yourself. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Here, then, is a superb counterblast to modern identity fetishism. Whether readers will agree with its proposed solution is more doubtful. It warns against 'making value judgments', but we should make some value judgments, for example about murderers. And Douglas relays the Taoist advice he finds in Zhuangzi like this: 'We would be happier and more peaceful letting things flow, vanish, transform, be indistinct, be ambiguous' – which is all very well, but terrible advice if you're trying to build a bridge. Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self by Alexander Douglas is published by Allen Lane (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
"The Algorithm Can Indoctrinate You And Radicalize You": This Woman Is Going Viral For Sharing The Social Media Trends That Are A "Slippery Slope" To Alt-Right Ideologies
With President Donald Trump's approval rating at its lowest (43%) since he took office this year and fears of a looming trade war, it's easy to wonder how we got here. Lots of factors converged to get Trump elected, but we can't ignore the influence social media can have in swaying voters toward the right. Online content creator Jess Britvich has posted multiple videos about the 'alt-right rabbit holes' that target women on social media — just a few that she cites are clean eating, clean-girl makeup, girl dinner, and homesteading. In her video, she said they're the 'trends that can lead to the alt-right pipeline. Because while these things aren't inherently conservative or, dare I say, even fascist sometimes, they can be a starting point for a very slippery slope.' Britvich's videos have received upward of a million views on both TikTok and Instagram. Britvich told HuffPost she was inspired to make these videos after reflecting on how she, as a millennial, was told over and over that Gen Z was going to help make the country more progressive when they were able to vote. 'And then, it turns out this past election that Gen Z men were one of the big factors in getting Trump elected, and that kind of got me started to think, where did this shift come from?' Britvich said. If the social media trends Britvich referenced don't go so far as encouraging the alt-right movement, which is against 'political correctness' and criticizes social justice as it's viewed as a 'threat' to white ideology, experts say they certainly do often lead users to right-wing content. Here's what to know about these trends and how they relate to far-right politics, according to the experts we spoke to. First — no one is saying that everyone who shops for clean beauty products or enjoys homesteading is on their way to far-right, or even right-wing, politics. Lots of people shop for clean beauty products and opt for foods with fewer chemicals; no one is saying that everyone who does these things is on their way to the alt-right pipeline, stressed Britvich. 'That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how the algorithm can indoctrinate you and radicalize you. One does not necessarily equal the other,' Brivitch said. But the social media algorithm is now set up to push certain political agendas. During the pandemic, 'people were hungrier than ever for agency in the information they were consuming and relying on for their own safety and their family's safety ... but ... you really weren't actually able to search for content without then having it lead you down pathways — some people will say rabbit holes,' said Jiore Craig, a resident senior fellow of digital integrity at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue. Craig studies how online content can harm society. 'A mom searching for what to do about her child's allergy, or a mom searching for her horoscope reading that day, would have equally been led, likely, to anti-vaccine content during COVID, just because of the way that the suggestions were being made, and how prominent the topic of vaccines and COVID became in the context of all these other cultural topics,' Craig noted. We may be years out of lockdown, but this has only continued today. 'A lot of the groups that had stakeholders in the COVID conversation were political stakeholders, and the far right in particular took a position anti-science, anti-vaccine, and that has carried forward to this administration and their positions on many of these things,' Craig said. Here's why social media content topics like 'clean-girl makeup,' 'girl dinner,' 'homesteading,' and 'clean eating' give experts pause. Related: "I Realized I Was Going To Die": 15 People Who Cheated Death Are Sharing Their Scary Stories Clean Beauty And Clean Eating 'I like to eat healthy, I'm expecting a kid, so you would not imagine the amount of stuff that is coming at me all the time about being 'clean,'' said Catherine Tebaldi, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Luxembourg. 'What I'm noticing around clean beauty, first, is there's a lot of very much these eugenic discourses of purity, bodily purity, pureness in your food, pureness in your makeup, that is very closely aligned to white supremacists [and] eugenics,' Tebaldi noted. It's also not clear what these terms like 'clean,' 'non-toxic,' and 'natural' mean. 'Even words that we're using, like clean, what does that even mean? And from there, just unregulated terms like saying things like, 'oh, bad chemicals.' Well, everything's a chemical. Water is a chemical,' said Brivitch. 'These are unregulated terms that don't really mean anything, but they get an emotional response,' Brivitch added. While opting to use makeup that contains fewer chemicals is not a bad thing, where this could go via the social media algorithm is not ideal. 'This can kind of lead to this anti-science rhetoric and this distrust in our regulatory bodies, which then leads down this path of, 'OK, well, this is toxic. What else is toxic?' And the more you start rejecting science, it could trend closer and closer to what I think has a huge impact on what we're seeing with anti-vax, the rise of measles, etc. It just opens the gateway to these larger ideological shifts,' said Brivitch. Homesteading, Tradwives, And A 'Natural' Way Of Living Related: "The Damage Is Irreversible." Doctors And Nurses Are Revealing The "Small" Health Signs That People Should Never, Ever Ignore Going back to the 'ancestor's way of living,' tradwives, homesteading, and a more 'natural' life are more social media rabbit holes that often come up via gardening videos, cooking content, and more. While these topics have some admirable qualities, they, too, can lead to some of these problematic pipelines. 'It's an ideological construction of, what is natural, that uses this idea of nature and beauty to signal what? You're meant to be desired,' said Tebaldi. 'It's propaganda ... you're supposed to be glowing and look really healthy and beautiful and this is sort of signaling that you're worthy,' Tebaldi said. It also feeds into this idea of looking at medicine and health care as 'unnatural,' Tebaldi added. More, going back to the way the ancestors lived is a very privileged, very white idea — Black people with enslaved ancestors, Japanese people whose ancestors were wrongly imprisoned and forced to do labor in the U.S., or Jewish people with ancestors who died during the Holocaust. 'Nobody should want to return to that, but I think that the returning to a time before women had the right to vote, returning to a time before the abolition of slavery, this is definitely a feature of it,' said Tebaldi. 'Girl Dinner' And 'Girl Math' When it comes to comes things like 'girl dinner' and 'girl math' it's a little more nuanced — having a snacky dinner of your favorite foods is fun, and finally purchasing a pair of shoes you've been eyeing is equally fun, but Brivitch noted that categorizing these types of things as 'girl' can be problematic. 'Just the overall trend promotes the infantilization of women in a time when our reproductive rights are on attack ... and this infantilization almost kind of promotes this idea of like, 'Oh yes, it's girl math. We don't understand this, we don't know what's best for us,'' Brivitch added, 'and it can be a dangerous way to go and just a way to shift public opinion.' It also erases nonbinary folks and promotes gender essentialism, Brivitch said, meaning women have certain traits while men have certain traits, and there's no in-between (which we know is not true). More, this is reflected in politics, as Trump recently signed an executive order that states the U.S. will only recognize two sexes. The draw of these subjects shows a systemic failure. 'One of the things I'm consistently frustrated with is the way in which people who try to tackle some of these challenges miss the fact that a lot of what makes these challenges possible is the systemic problems that people are facing in their real, offline lives,' said Craig. Many women deal with burnout, loneliness, and frustration when it comes to finding a partner, which makes these alternatives — things like homesteading, clean beauty, and finding a community of like-minded folks online — appealing, and is why these alternatives to these problems get popular, according to Craig. 'So, whenever I see any of this, let's take clean beauty, or let's take raw milk, I think about the ways that the system has failed people in terms of them feeling confident that the system is going to keep their kids safe, or that the system is going to keep chemicals out of their kids' food,' Craig said. These social media trends also put the onus on the individual, which is not actually how a healthy society operates. 'To be healthy, you shouldn't, say, have a better environment, better social determinants of health, better medical care, but instead, it's about the practices that you do that make you the most healthy, or your 'innate better genetics,' said Tebaldi. Until some of the systemic reforms necessary for the health of Americans happen, there will continue to be versions of this, added Craig. Here's how you can make sure you're not following bad actors on social media. Craig said there are a few helpful things to keep an eye out for when using social media. Remind yourself that what you're seeing in your social media feed is designed to keep you online, and that's true across the board, whether you're looking at left-leaning or right-leaning content. More, know that creators want you to watch videos to the end because it helps them make money. 'Ideally, we'll sort of get folks' guards up,' Craig added. Craig also recommends that you click through to bios and websites to learn more about the influencers you follow and see who's involved in their content or who's paying for their account. For these influencers who are trying to sell you a certain political message, they'll be funded by organizations that lean a certain way. 'And then any opinion that you are hearing about that is making you close to changing a part of your lifestyle, you should double check. You should check multiple sources, not just with your friends. You should look for, is there anyone out there who has said anything about this being a trap before? Have you really done enough research to warrant a behavior change?' Craig added. It's hard to give very specific advice as this content shows up differently depending on the platform you're on and depending on what content you're consuming, but these blanket reminders can be useful for building up resistance overall, Craig said. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Also in Goodful: 19 "Garbage" Modern Trends People Refuse To Partake In Despite Their Popularity Also in Goodful: 21 "Fatal" Safety Mistakes People Make Every Day (And How To Avoid Them), According To First Responders Also in Goodful: Medical Professionals Are Sharing "Mundane" Things That Actually Make So Many People Sick
