Hi Peter

Thanks for running a very successful year at the Forum and particularly for your excellent presentation and writings on this blog.

In dealing with "identity politics", especially in the context of a philosophical approach, a good starting point is to consider what "identity" is before dealing with its "political" aspects.  Much of the commentary in this area is based simply on the use labels to ascribe a supposed identity to either oneself or to others, when typically the labels only deal with one aspect of an inherently multi-dimensional concept.  It may be true of a person, or even a group of people, that they have one particular attribute in common, whether their religion, sexuality, gender, age, ethnicity, social class and so on.  The fact that these attributes are so varied is itself problematic for the advocates of any particular form of "identity politics".  It raises a question as to why the chosen attribute is pre-eminent for the purposes of ascribing an "identity" to a person or group, when that attribute is just one of many variables comprising a description of who we are. 

At different times and in different contexts, each of us may reasonably see one attribute as more significant than others.  If I am travelling abroad I need a passport that identifies me as an Australian so nationality seems pre-eminent for legal reasons in this situation.  If I am claiming a concession as a senior citizen, then age is obviously the decisive factor.  An ideological fixity on just one factor as defining of a person's identity is at odds not only with the multi-faceted nature of identity but also with its inherent fluidity and responsiveness to context. 

In relation to free speech, the points you make about advocates of one or other form of "identity politics" being prone to prejudicial judgements about others are well made.  As my comments above suggest, although I approach this from a different starting point, I also find this type of advocacy to be at best distorting and unconvincing and at worst, prejudiced, condescending and offensive.

Nonetheless, at a higher level of abstraction, it is arguable that all politics is identitarian.  In political science, partisanship studies have long sought to associate demographic factors with a person's support for or allegiance to particular parties or causes.  This is similar to the profiling that social media companies now undertake using personal data, to build an identity for each of us, often taking revealed preferences as the critical behavioural variable.  The point of this type of data analytics is to make inferences about a person or group's future behaviour and opinions, based largely on correlations of certain variables and past choices (and often as quite successful predictors).  While it is clear that there are dangers in an overly deterministic approach using these analytic methods, and acknowledging their strong reliance on empirical evidence, it could also be held that both ancient and modern philosophers of ethics who stress consistency and principle based decision making have much in common with this approach to predictive association.

One of the lecturers at this year's Forum described John Rawls' Theory of Justice as "the most important contribution to political philosophy in the 20th century".  I think the best interpretation of Rawls' theory is consistent with the idea that all politics is identitarian.  Rawls considered politics so intrinsically self interested that a just society could only develop under a "veil of ignorance"; justice he wrote could prevail only when and where the decision makers were unsure of their own identities.  This argument is consistent with laws and codes dealing with conflicts of interest which recognise that in many (but not all) situations, a person's interests and identity may profoundly compromise their judgement.  Such laws assume that fairness, objectivity and rationality demand a level of detachment from the calculus of self interest that can elude even those most enamoured of Enlightenment ideals.

So while I am strongly in sympathy with your criticisms of many of those who engage in "identity politics", as this term is often used today, I regard politics as intrinsically identitarian in the terms outlined above.  As such, sharp distinctions of an "us and them" kind about identity politics is my view misplaced. 

Mark McDonnell