“
I looked at the internet for too long today and start.
ed feeling depressed. The worst thing is that I actually think
people on there are generally well meaning and the impulses
are right, but our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply
and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempis
to make sense of our present historical moment turn out to
be essentially gibberish. Everyone is understandably attached
to particular identity categories, but at the same time largely
unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how
they came about, and what purposes they serve. The only
apparent schema is that for every victim group (people bom
into poor families, women, people of colour) there is an oppres-
sor group (people born into rich families, men, white people)
But in this framework, relations between victim and oppressor
are not historical so much as theological, in that the victims are
transcendently good and the oppressors are personally evil. For
this reason, an individual's membership of a particular identity
group is a question of unsurpassed ethical significance, and a
great amount of our discourse is devoted to sorting individu-
als into their proper groups, which is to say, giving them their
proper moral reckoning.
”
”