Recently, I was in a large meeting where the Enlightenment was brought up. The meeting was centered on post-election reactions and support but the quote made me curious. It was both the period that saw the contradictory definition of humans as having “inherent rights” through thinkers like Locke and Rosseau, as well as laying the groundwork for eugenics and the division of humans by essentializing their race, gender, and other immutable characteristics.
As the slave trade took hold and these ideas were used to rationalize slavery, hierarchy, and conquest, they didn’t create them. Rather humans had been doing this under the guise of divine intervention as well as plain rules of war. Later, ideas from this same period would lead to the fight against slavery, and rights for women, people of color, and other marginalized groups. The quote mentioned by the facilitator was by Jon A. Powell, a Berkelely legal scholar that has written about the challenges of the western legal system as developed by the enlightenment. He also talks about the way that the emphasis on the individual like other ideas of enlightenment sees the self as fixed and static. As objective and rational rather than a part of an interconnected system we should all be moving to that emphasizes shared humanity and community.
While divine rule was inherently hierarchical the system did see everyone from serfs to knights as being part of a divine order. As rights were gained and the identities were turned into ideologies we saw a rise in identity politics. Powell says that this line of thought does a couple of things: first it disconnects us to ourselves, but it also disconnects us from others. I’ve seen those around me say things like “I can’t be in a room with anyone that is white” or “ men are always wrong and women are always right.” It’s clear these beliefs are an overactivation of the amygdala and the DMN in response to some harm. It’s in this way that our brains, and the ensuing algorithmic media we tend to consume, creates divergent realities for those who have been harmed by people that don’t look like us.
When a friend mentioned the white comment to me, he and his partner were surprised by my lack of endorsement of that belief. Rather, one of my biggest challenges is actually what has led me to this. We often speak positively about things like oxytocin, the “love hormone,” or mirror neurons as essential in building empathy, and something that people with autism squarely lack, but actually these decidedly human characteristics are not all-encompassing. Rather oxytocin helps us empathize with those we perceive to be like us, and mirror neurons do the same. These features likely helped our ancestors in things like tribal warfare. But what they don’t do is create empathy for those we perceive to be outside of our group. And-that’s exactly how for me that statement didn’t resonate. I have a hard time understanding myself but I’m also equally likely to have empathy for those that I don’t see myself in.
The over-emphasis on identity politics has caused an understandable reaction. The rise of unhealthy identity-building for groups like men, the working class, and whites in America has grown for a couple reasons. The first is that while scholars had long defined these groups in theory, and some laws had exclusively given rights to them, the community of modern whites or men doesn’t necessarily have an awareness of their own identity. When efforts were made to uplift black voices, women’s power, or the LGBT community, the identity that was created in response to that was a negative one. The discourse which many would say was the normative belief in academia and the media in the 2010’s created a vacuum. It also seemed to essentialize identity as it became diluted outside of the lecture hall. Men argued that of course they had issues, mainly concerning mental health and physical work safety but this discourse never reached the mainstream. Recently, at the Clinton Global Foundation Summit, a bastion of the cultural milieu, I saw at least twice the refusal of the interviewee to answer questions around the amount of men out of work or the lack of opportunities the rural-urban economic divide creates for working-class whites. These are the kinds of things that created an abandonment of the democratic party, exactly by those who were not outlined as an in-group.
One of the big discussions here is about ideology. Whereas academia defines things like the Patriarchy and White Supremacy in a hierarchical lens, it doesn’t do the same for Feminism or Black Liberation. What is missing is a creation of a healthy masculinity and white identity rooted in ancestral traditions, histories, and practices without a hierarchical imperative. When these things were not redefined the response was a white and male and working class identity that was built on defensiveness, frustration, and a lack of equality. A rejection of academia, elitism, and ideology as truth. While I do believe that these responses had their moment, a broadening cultural base is what led to the 2024 election outcome. Disavowals from the republican party from this extremism and the adoption of anti-pharmaceutical stances and techno-pragmatism as highlighted by Vance, Musk, and Ramaswamy was able to push past the democratic appeals to ideology.
Instead we saw women, Latinos, Muslims, and other groups veer right more focused on their frustration with the current economy than anything else. I wrote last year about the failure of Bidenomics, and was expecting the outcome but many weren’t. While now I see many on the left try to further their ideological appeals by narrowing who is “with” us and “against” us, a colleague said that no group has enough voters to win. And-that’s true. As someone else regarded that they had moved into an area that had voted differently they felt a sense of rage that made me think about the challenges in building community. The ways we have to empathize with those we see as “others” in order to move forward. After the election we saw the left begin to further isolate themselves, cutting off young latino men, muslims, and Jill Stein voters.
While many on the left speak of safety, and I do honor people like my friend who can’t be in the room with white people, I do think that it is largely caused by political isolationism. The way the media and the profit-driven algorithms we consume cause stronger reactions in our Amygdala, our DMN, and our oxytocin and mirror-neuron systems. We come to see the trump voter as an opposing tribe with a spear in hand. But the truth is, when I heard the statements “ they want to kill us” I knew that person lived in an ideological bubble. And while that man has real trauma, he also is in the economic 1% and has created a social world where he doesn’t have to interact with people not like him.
As someone who has been in all types of political spaces and spoken with people across the spectrum I know that is not true. When we do this we both reduce the humanity of the person in the out group and also deem them morally inferior. In this way we come to be disconnected from ourselves, and the histories and biases that create our responses, as well as each other.
Unfortunately we have to build community. While we can desperately search for a tennis instructor who is not American in our neighborhood in order to avoid encountering someone in our community who voted differently, we can’t do it forever. Building a community requires us to put ourselves in positions where our empathy can grow and we reduce our fight or flight response. Research has shown that by engaging outside the algorithm and with people with different political beliefs we can expand our oxytocin and mirror-neurons to those we deem outside of our bubble. This is true for people of any political beliefs as both Tik Tok and X have become mirror conspiracy academies of each other.
While it may be hard at first I do think that is the most important step we can take at ensuring we see the shared humanity of people across identity, champion working people, and create a healthy and livable society. I would challenge the left to instead of trying to cut even more people out of a group now in the minority, it instead looks outwards and begins bringing people in creating a mutual recognition of shared humanity.
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