The Batty Logic of Identity Theory
One of the great problems that our culture faces is that it does not value the concept of identity enough. It plays around with identity as a toy or sets in on the shelf as an award to be celebrated. If it truly understood the value of identity, it would revere it as an object of unapproachable wonder.
Unfortunately, the concept has been hijacked by radical revolutionaries who have attempted to resurrect the failed philosophies of the French Revolution and have spilled the laboratory of Victor Frankenstein all over society. Mentally and physically stitched together, many walk the streets of our cities as the product of ideas that have proven better suited for the pit than for the pavement. They claim two great arrogances that produce two great errors. The two claims lead to a logical contradiction and a philosophical conflation. However, not all hope is lost. The winged wonder of the night can offer these radicals some sound reasonings to guide them back home.
The first great arrogance of these revolutionaries is an arrogance concerning consciousness. Identity, or what it is to be one’s self, is fundamentally a mind/body problem. If the identity is tied solely to the mind (whatever that may be), then the body in which one is “contained” is of no great concern. If the identity is tied solely to the body (whatever that may look like), then it is of great concern how it is represented and interacts with the world. No matter where someone comes down on the mind/body problem (though it is hard to argue as a Christian that the mind and body are not somehow of vital importance for identity as given in Scripture), it must be acknowledged that consciousness plays an important role. The first great arrogance of this generation is seen in the claim set forth by Tom Petty, “You don’t know how it feels to be me.”
This claim, while metaphysically true and of important significance (to be shown later), is fallacious when applied to the realm of ethics, which happens to be the very place where this generation touts this philosophy. The entirety of cancel culture rests on the ability to judge whether another qualifies as having the right consciousness to speak into any given moral situation. The thinking goes something like this:
I have qualities p, q, r, s, and t, given my gender, racial, historical setting, etc.
In order to understand and speak to me and my society about moral issues, you must share qualities p, q, r, s, and t.
You only share qualities p, q, r, and s.
Therefore, you do not understand the moral dilemmas in my life and therefore your voice must be silenced.
It is the ironic twist of history that the radical identity revolutionaries of our generation take Edmund Burke’s words to heart, without realizing it. In his famous political commentary, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke famously is the first person to coin the term moral imagination and he shows how the revolutionaries destroy it with their abstract notions of equality and fraternity. He writes that the revolutionaries of France sought to strip everything from society that did not fit exactly into their p,q,r,s, and t template based on abstract notions of societal consciousness. He wrote,
All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.
Radical revolutionaries, for Burke, are inherently reductionistic. They seek, through abstraction, a way to structure the world that will bring about utopian dreams. The irony of the radical revolutionaries of our generation is that they believe by making their principles so narrow and particular (p,q,r,t, and s), they are avoiding Burke’s abstract critique. In reality, they are doing something far worse. Burke’s idea of a moral imagination requires something that the modern revolutionaries have missed - imagination. Is it possible for an old, rich, white man to imagine what it would be like to be a young, poor, black woman? Certainly. Hence, the whole realm of literature exists. Is it possible for a conservative republican to imagine why a liberal democrat might argue in favor of expanded governmental control? Certainly. It is not necessary, due to moral imagination, for one person to have lived the exact same experiences as another to entertain another’s viewpoint. In the realm of ethics, the denominator is low for one to imagine the consciousness of another. That denominator is general human consciousness, not a particular individual’s human consciousness. If I know what it is like to be a human, then I should be able to empathize with another that is also a human. I need not suffer in the same fashion to know what suffering feels like. I need only know what suffering feels like to a human.
It is extremely misinformed and arrogant to think that no other human is capable of having a moral imagination and therefore cannot possibly understand to some degree what another human faces. The radical revolutionaries believe their consciousnesses are so unique that they are beyond the imagination of others. This is to claim that identity itself is a weak concept for it necessarily isolates the individual from all others and only produces a frightening solitude. Contrary to their hopes, it is unable to bring humanity together and produces islands of unique sufferings that no other being in existence has ever felt nor is capable of ameliorating. This great claim of arrogance, insults the rest of humanity, while also isolating the speaker from all hope of relief.
How does a bat help with all of this? Simply, consider the famous thought experiment of Thomas Nagel from 1974. He writes about the mind/body problem and has the reader ponder this:
I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience..
I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections from objects within range of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat…
Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.
Nagel takes it for granted that we can imagine what it is like for a human to be a human, but given the very strange mechanisms of a bat, we cannot imagine what it is like for a bat to be a bat. We can easily imagine what it would be like for a human to exhibit bat behavior or even bat characteristics, but we have no category for understanding bat consciousness. Nagel is not making an ethical point, but rather a metaphysical one. The bar is low for conceiving what it is like for another one of our species, but high for a being that is outside it. In order for society to have a base line of ethical relations, it must be taken for granted that human consciousness is the only prerequisite for shared experiences. Any bar higher than this introduces different degrees of humanity, which quickly seeks to justify actions against others or eventually non-humans. The radical revolutionaries of identity set the bar so high that those who are invited into the ethical discussion are only those who meet the arbitrary and fluctuating list moderated by the speaker himself.
The glaring contradiction of the radical revolutionaries of identity is seen clearly when their second claim is set in juxtaposition to their first claim.
X cannot know Y unless X is identical with Y. (No one can know me.)
X knows Y when X claims identical identity with Y. (I know exactly what it is like to be someone else.)
The logicians will immediately see the fallacy of Special Pleading present here. The very narrow (p,q,r,s,t) qualifications can be applied to others to silence them from having any voice, but they magically fall away when I claim to identify with someone else.
The examples of these claims abound in culture at present. Though biologically a man, we hear the claim, “I am a woman.” Though biologically a woman, we hear, “I am a man.” Though biologically a human, we hear, “I identify as a wolf.” These statements all reflect the same sentiment, “Though I may appear X, I claim Y as my true identity.” While those that make these claims are being praised for such courageous moves, the general public has neither challenged with the contradiction shown above, nor show the arrogance of the claims themselves.
Think of what those making these claims are actually saying. Whether that person is transgender or transspecies (a.k.a. The Furries or Otherkin), he is making the claim to know two different types of consciousness at the same time. Once again, this is why these revolutionaries do not value identity enough. Let us explore the idea with a transspecies man identifying as Nagel’s bat. The man in question may have had a unique childhood. Perhaps, he grew up with bats as pets. Perhaps, he felt it easier to relate with the bats than people. Perhaps, he preferred the dark, eating mosquitos, and high-shrieks over light, pizza, and conversation. Certainly it would be easy to see this person as exhibiting behaviors that appear to mimic a bat, but it is another thing entirely to claim that this person could know bat-consciousness and know it so well that, in and through his human consciousness, he could make it known. He would be making a claim of more distinction than the person with multiple personality disorder. Whereas the latter claims multiple identities within on body but appearing at separate times, the former is claiming multiple consciousnesses within the same body appearing at the same time. The claim is absurd as saying, “I know what it is like for a bat to be a bat and for a human to be a human and for a human to be a bat and for a bat to be a human.” Identifying as a bat would be to hold all those claims at once.
It is with a mere switch of the object to state the same about those claiming to be transgender. A man identifying as a woman is stating, “I know what it is like for a woman to be a woman and for a man to be a man and for a man to be a woman and for a woman to be a man.” In order to be in a man’s body, the identifier has to claim that they know what it is like to have a woman’s consciousness trapped in a man’s body. However, no other woman knows what it is like for a woman to be in man’s body. Any heterosexual husband knows the danger of claiming to know exactly what it is like to be a woman, especially at childbirth.
Ethically, the bar is gracefully low for identity. The mere shared experience of human consciousness is enough for the moral imagination. But metaphysically, the bar is extremely high for identity claims. To claim to know the conscious experiences of the other gender as that gender is the same as claiming to know a bat as a bat. The evidence for the high bar is always seen in trying to claim what it is like for a woman to be a woman. If one suggests it is merely the attraction for the male agenda, many lesbians would defiantly claim their womanhood in opposition to this. If it were merely biological organs that identify a woman as a woman (as many Christians want to claim), any woman would certainly push hard against the idea that a Victor Frankenstein could create a woman out of a man with surgery alone. The addition or subtraction of organs does not change the conscious experience of that individual.
Identity has been stripped of its mystery by the radical revolutionaries. Edmund Burke even predicted this result of the French Revolution. The paragraph that follows the one cited earlier in the essay states,
On this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly.
As Burke makes clear, in order for the radical revolutionaries to reset society, no distinctions could be sustained; rather, they had to be reduced to the lowest common denominator. When the question was recently posed to both Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and the British finance minister Rishi Sunak on what the definition of a woman was, the silence was profound. When men are identifying as women and women as men, there is little left in the radical revolutionary’s dictionary but, “A woman is but an animal.”
The radical revolutionaries of identity find themselves in quite the pickle. In supporting cancel culture they claim their identities are entirely unique and therefore ethically unaccountable, but at the same time, they claim metaphysically all identities are set before them as a buffet table and choice is their instrument of acquisition. The contradiction is clear and the philosophical confusion is glaring. But all this can be cleared up if they would take some time to consider the bat. The consciousness of the bat reminds us that identity is too mysterious to be the plaything of a reductionist and too common to be the trophy of an isolationist. Perhaps that which is blind will give sight to those with eyes to see.
