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Thank you, Andrew, for your informed, spirited and thought-provoking defense of identity politics against Peter Baldwin's determined impeachment. You may have noticed that I tried to indicate similar considerations in my first reply to Peter following his "j'accuse" article.

Thanks also for introducing me to "Mary's Room", a thought experiment that I immediately connected to John Searle's "Chinese Room", in that both raise important questions about what it is that we can "truly know", and consequent problems about decisions made and actions initiated on flawed and/or incomplete "knowledge" ("false" or "unjustified" opinion, in the classic platonic definition).

For this is what I think prompts identity politics themselves, and the discussion of identity politics (such as this one): if the wielders of power/adherents to the dominant narratives (Gramsci has elaborated) in any given socio-political context only ever made good, wise and beneficial decisions, there would be no need to challenge this narrative - everybody would, or at least should happily submit to the auspicious leadership of the great and good, regardless of the fact that those great and good, sitting in the Australian National Chinese Room situated on Capital Hill (in the case of federal politicians, but we could also reference bank board members, say) make decisions about things that they have at best limited and second-hand "hear-say" knowledge. Haroun al-Rashid at least made the occasional effort to mingle, incognito, with his subjects, to gauge for himself the effect of his rule, and to deliberately deny his underlings and courtiers any chance of deceiving him with elaborately constructed potemkin villages. I am not sure that widely televised occasions of politicians in flouro vests and hard hats are quite comparable.

On the other hand: do I really need first hand combat experience in Afghanistan to decide that war is not a particularly good idea, or is it legitimate for me to come to that conclusion on the basis of largely abstract reflection, and without listening to endless iterations of stories about limbs being blown off, and mates being killed, and watching chopper crews burn to death in the wreckage of their aircraft?

What, exactly, is the relevance of Jean Améry's assertion that only survivors of the holocaust do not speak of its horrors "like blind people speak of colour"? Are we to apply Wittgenstein's dictum "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"? And if so, how are we ever going to maneuver ourselves into a position where we can, in Karl Popper's words, "Let our [abstract] hypotheses die in our stead"?

In other words, in which direction, if any, are identity politicians actually trying to take the discourse?