Speaking as an idiot...

It's around fifty years since the coming into force of the political law of identity, where all pretence of principled solidarity was discarded in favour of outright factionalism. It is an extremely misleading coincidence that over this period, we have been more prosperous, inclusive and peaceful than at any previous point in recorded history. These things are not positively correlated. I hate identity politics and not just the crazy-eyed personality cult "call me Tony" nonsense.

I hate that there is thought to be such a thing as the Black Community, the Scottish Perspective and the Arab Street (why do Arabs just get a street by the way?). Regardless of subtextual slights, the whole idea is nonsense and is based on the idea that genetically similar people must think along roughly the same lines. 

And it's not confined to race. A close relative of mine who otherwise has an extremely sophisticated sense of his own racial identity, told me recently that Dundee United supporters are all wankers. 

The lesson of the enlightenment is that the ancestral paths of thought are not necessarily the ones to which we are most sternly attached. At age 8, I was shown a diagram and explanation of the Big Bang and some luridly coloured illustrations of the formation of our galaxy. This single intrusion into my anthropocentric universe eventually led to my studies in Celtic origin myths and fractal infinity theory (I prefer this latter term to chaos theory - fractals are not chaotic and nor do they sound like a 90s pop-punk band).

The point is that although gene theory suggests that our actions are conditioned on the preference for the survival of our closest genetic relations, this does not mean that our intellectual understanding of life need be similarly hamstrung.

And yet I have participated in seminars devoted to 'queer theory', 'postcolonial theory', 'marxist theory' and 'femenist theory'. As if a straightforward Historicist approach to the problems would not have turned up the shock result that women, homosexuals and former subjects of the empire had been oppressed and persecuted by the forces of capital, phallocracy and theism.

Each of these seminars were marred and stultified by a continuous choir of people offering points no more detailed than 'Speaking as a <insert identity group here>, I think <insert author/politician here> is a desperate bigot.' Well of course they fucking were!

Closer to the present we have Tories in the present government insisting that the reason for their continual local election defeats is the failure of their leadership to adhere to the interests of their core voting bloc... Or the far-right view in America that Obama retained everything except Indiana because of moral weakness on the part of a minority coalition who want 'stuff'. In these cases the identity group responsible is, the white nearly-poor who have been around forever but are transitioning into a new political identity. In truth the enduring popularity of their old-guard Conservative leadership is close to unbelievable and seems to be only attributable to a headmasterly demeanour that seems to play on the old class system. It's like Richard Curtis had written a Prime Minister/President and plopped them down into their respective cabinet rooms.

My point is that when we come up against someone whose motives and character are similar to our own and who comes to different conclusions, we must think 'Are they in the right?'.

This is good. A sign of sanity even. The problems arise when those who have not thought too deeply about anything, ever apply this type of thought. The calculus changes from 'has this person come to a better conclusion than I have?' to 'is that the conclusion I would have come to had I actually thought about it?'

One may spot such malingerers in the public discourse by their propensity to start their contributions with the words, 'Speaking as a... <insert identity here...>' I don't mean to point fingers at any particular group here. In the West we are preoccupied with race, gender, class and occupation. If, for example you are one of those people who believe that the moral health of the nation requires that the Doctor regenerate into a woman, stop it.

If you believe that it is the turn of a black person to lead one of the major political parties in the UK, stop it. There are no turns. To believe that there are is to reinforce the myth that the rules of natural justice exist independently of human conceit. To believe this in turn is to believe that exploitation of the weak by the strong is something that will sort itself out by itself. How has that worked out in the Congo or Somalia or the Russian Federation?

The gains of the past fifty years were achieved in a very short space of time immediately following the horrors of the Second World War. A war entirely caused by a sense of an injustice imposed upon a particular national group that was warped into a teleological race myth. Every step we have taken back towards identity politics since then has been a step back into the quagmire of early 20th century, modernist loathing and separatist ideology.

We have every right to say that we and our fellows must be treated the same as you and yours. We do not have the right to say, we and our fellows are facing a problem therefore the solution applies to all.