Latent Contradictions in Modern America
How is possible that, in contemporary American life, we are able to see someone advocate fiercely for gender equality or identity equality or to abolish the patriarchal power structure and then, in the very next moment, see advertising which exploits a woman’s physical sexuality or targets a particular brand of product to a particular gender or promotions for shows like the Bachelor or America’s next top model? How is that these contradictory positions can coexist in America? Does it indicate a culture in transition — where the antiquated is being replaced with the annointed? Does it indicate a profound cultural clash between generations, between socioeconomic classes, between the educated and the non-educated, between the genders? Does it indicate a worrying break down of social norms and natural principles which govern human activity?
Each of these questions may lead to fruitful, and thoughtful, answers. But each of them really misses the driving contradiction - the logic of identity politics, which has driven so much activism to incorporate women, racial minorities, sexual minorities, and other disenfranchised groups into the American bodipolitick is laced with the very contradictions we now see emerging in American culture. In order to assess the implications of the logical framework of identity politics, it’s going to be beneficial to look at one of its intellectual forebears, Lockean liberalism.
Locke contends in his immensely influential (especially on British Whigism and its intellectual children, the liberal republicans of the American Revolution) works of political theory — Two Treatises on Government — that human beings are self owning creatures and that through the extension of our self ownership, we come to own things in the world. In essence, Locke is arguing that the foundation for property is the extension of human will into the world — that when one mixes their will into something, it becomes a part of that person. Our desire for self-preservation drives us to secure as much as we can, and ultimately, our fear of losing what we have acquired drives us to create government to protect the fruits of our labor — the physical manifestations of our will.
How does this account of the origin of government tie into the logic of identity politics? Before this can be answered, there are still two steps to be briefly assessed — the liberal republicanism of the American Founding and the shift in rights language away from natural right to human right. First, the powerful rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence — specifically in the preamble with its explicit endorsement of Whig political theory — argues that man exists with certain inalienable rights and that government is instituted by human beings solely to protect those rights. Those rights are predicated on human life being a competition of wills, all attempting to dominate all others in a life of scarcity, a life of unlimited desire, and a life where one was free to pursue those desires without any noble or monarch placing limitations upon you. The rhetoric of natural right came to replace the rhetoric of natural law because the first ascribes, as self evident, that human beings have the right to extend their will into the world and make of themselves what they can barring hindering another from being able to do the same. Natural law argued that human beings are subject to eternal principles in their behavior within a hierarchy of existence and that our will was to be judged against those natural principles. By the end of the 17th century, the argument for natural law had become subsumed into the advocacy of monarchy, and therefore, natural right became the rhetoric of opposition, of support for republicanism (though, in the Lockean case, it really is majoritarianism). This shift, away from having eternal standards of ethical and political conduct toward a universal set of natural rights predicated on the extension of will, is one of the predominant themes of the liberal republicanism of the American founding and continues to be deeply ingrained in our political rhetoric.
That rhetoric, however, is no longer predicated on the ontological principles of natural right but of human right. While this may seem like a semantic change, or even as an evolution of the same idea (which is certainly a popularly held opinion, especially among those who are democratic theorists and democratic advocates) the transformation from natural to human is just as great as change as natural right was from natural law. With natural right, human will was still limited by nature — our desires were limited by our capacity to extend the will into nature to meet our desire to survive in a place of scarcity. Human rights are not limited to this kind of application. Instead, they maintain the notion that ethics and politics are just an extension of will but not merely for preservation; that extension of will is identified as human dignity (something borrowed from the German thinker Immanuel Kant — a topic for a different day) and that to violate the expression of one’s will is to violate one’s human right. Therefore, the purpose of government is not to protect the product of one’s will (one’s property) but to protect the very act of expressing one’s will into the world. We see this logic at play in the recent Obergefell ruling in the Supreme Court (as well as in the precedent cases of Lovings v. Virginia and Lawrence v. Texas — but also in the right to privacy cases that extend to Griswald v. Connecticut). The purpose of government is to protect the act of expressing one’s will, which is fundamentally different than protecting the result of the expression, and certainly alien to the idea that government must guide citizens toward living a life more attuned to natural law.
But how does all of this relate to identity politics, and, for that matter, to the duality of desires exemplified by the view toward women in contemporary America? Identity politics grows out of the rhetoric of human rights and the purpose of government predicated on that logic. What identity politics does is identify those who have been marginalized by institutional development through time and proclaim that the expression of their will requires just as much protection as the expression of those who have dominated the institutions. Thus the rise of the rhetoric of ‘women’s rights’ or ‘gay rights’ or ‘transgender rights’ etc. — all of these extend from the foundational principle that it is the expression of will which must be protected, thus when a historically marginalized group’s expression has been suppressed, their rights have been violated. Therefore, by extension through the tenuous relationship between natural right and human right, the Lockean principle of self-ownership as the foundation for property rights stands at the foundation of these claims. Where we see the deviations, however, between the principles of natural right and of human right is in the contradictions on the contemporary American view toward woman mentioned above.
On the one hand, the utilization of a woman’s sexuality to sell products (or as the justification of selling products to her) is an expression of the Lockean principle of self-ownership as the foundation of property — everyone involved is using their will to mix their labor with nature in order to generate property: the women are using their body ownership, the marketing is using the desire to acquire, and the consumer is desiring to acquire property as an extension of their will. (Thus, is it very surprising that we have such a profound issue with sexual assault, particularly among young people, since they have been raised in a political culture which has confused the desire to acquire material goods with the desire to propagate the species through sexual activity?) The extension of will as the foundation of economics is fundamentally at work in the exploitation of sexuality. On the other hand, calls for outrage over this exploitation are predicated on the human right desire to protect the expression of the will — not to utilize that expression only for material gain — which combines with the rhetoric of identity politics and creates the condition for arguing that a woman’s expression of will should be just as much protected as a man’s. The conflict between these expressions of will (and of the purpose of government relative to those expressions) is what fundamentally underlies these contradictions.
Where Locke (and the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment) is most culpable for this condition, however, is in his inability to provide any meaningful or intelligible way to work ourselves out of the contradiction. Though, on the other hand, the Kantian notions on the expression of the will also fails to provide any meaningful way of speaking of these contradictions. Both fail because they view government and citizenship as means of protecting the mere expression of individual wills into the world. Therefore, when the expression of wills conflict, it’s predicated on the deeper clash of the understanding of what species of expression government is to protect, we are left bereft of meaningful solutions, of thoughtful proposals, and, most disheartening of them all, of a way to educate our youth to abolish the sexual exploitation of women without having to refer back to the very logic which perpetuates their exploitation.
