Hold your identity up to the light

Julia Galef's scout mindset, Christopher Beem's democratic virtues, and the epistemics of identity.

Jan 03, 2023

person holding paper lantern — Photo by Austin Neill on Unsplash

If it were possible to slam my Kindle edition e-book down, I would have. As it was, I closed my laptop and walked away from my desk.

“Hold my identity lightly?” No, just no. I was, in Julia Galef’s words, experiencing an ‘identity-laden belief’ - that my identity is, in fact, a “central source of pride and meaning in [my] life,”1 and not merely something I could casually don and doff in step with elite social fads.

That’s not to say that my identity hasn’t evolved, and at times in profoundly fundamental ways. Only that my identity, and its value to me, isn’t subject to directives from others. I suspect this is true of many for whom identity - be it ethnic/racial, gender/sexual, religious, social/political, regional/national, familial, professional, financial, recreational, or otherwise - is the thing to which seemingly all else is subordinated.

That’s also not to deny that identity plays a central role in information processing and belief formation. How could it be otherwise? Because identities are inherently social, they play a role in both how we come to know or believe things, as well as what knowledge or belief we profess.

Identity-laden beliefs

Rich with exercises and thought experiments for developing “accuracy motivated reasoning,”2 Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t, dabbles equally in cognitive psychology and popular culture. HxLibraries was lucky to welcome Galef for an author talk during our 2022 community read, and to explore mindset metaphors beyond her dichotomy of soldier/scout.

To identify identity-laden beliefs, Galef3 posits the following eight signs:

“I believe…” statements
Annoyance when an ideology is criticized
Defiant language (ex. “Proud Nerd” paraphernalia)
Righteous tone (“Period. Full stop.”)
Gatekeeping (“You’re not ________ if/unless…”)
Schadenfreude
Epithets
Having to defend one’s view.

Perhaps by nature of her argument, Galef focuses disproportionately on the negative effects of identity-laden beliefs. But while identity, in Galef’s words, “wrecks your ability to think clearly,”4 self-knowledge and -acceptance can also deliver peace of mind, sense of purpose, community belonging, shared understanding and worldview, and navigational aids on the path of life.

Identity is nothing to be taken lightly.

Tribal alignment

In The Seven Democratic Virtues: What You Can Do to Overcome Tribalism and Save Our Democracy, Christopher Beem situates the problem not with identity per se, but with tribalism. He characterizes tribalism as an outgrowth of identity, affinity, and belonging reinforced by the ingrained cognitive processes of categorization, in-group bias, and favoritism.5 For Beem, tribal alignment - the phenomenon in which all facets of one's identity coincide with the attributes of one's partisan tribe - ultimately threatens social cohesion.6 HxLibraries presented Beem as our 2022 Fall Symposium speaker.

Beem points to “cross-cutting identities” as a check on tribal alignment7; that is, cultivating individual identities that do not readily fit into (or align with) a single tribe. In his formulation, individual identity is more important - not less important - to evading the groupthink, discrimination, dehumanization, and other intellectual distortions of tribalism. The idea is to belong to many small-t tribes, rather than one all-defining capital-T Tribe.

Thinking with identity in mind

Both Galef and Beem offer useful strategies for thinking around and beyond one’s identity. Among her numerous exercises, Galef includes the ‘ideological Turing test,’8 an approach to steelmanning that invites one to articulate the stance of an ideological opponent in terms and tone they would accept as their own:

It’s a way to determine if you really understand an ideology: Can you explain it as a believer would, convincingly enough that other people couldn’t tell the difference between you and a genuine believer?

For Beem, democractic thinking requires both humility and honesty, which in turn both rely on self-knowledge. Referencing St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Beem relates that “humility grows naturally from knowing the truth about ourselves.”9 Later citing Hannah Arendt, Beem10 makes a similar case to mine for long tail metaphysics - that we each singularly perceive, experience, and interpret the world.

As far as epistemology is concerned – that is, the study of what we can know and justifiably believe – we are all, in a limited but inescapable sense, on our own.

Again referencing Arendt, Beem asserts it is through communication and the sharing of this personal knowledge that we approximate the Truth - not through the suppression or denial of our identities.

Taken together, Galef and Beem’s approaches are complementary: while Galef challenges us to adopt the mindset of an ideological other, Beem places intellectual humility and honesty at the foot of self-knowledge (and its attendant appreciation for fallibility).

Asking the Five Whys

The Five Whys (or 5Y), developed by Japanese industrialist Sakichi Toyoda in the 1930s, is best known for its application in cause-effect and root-cause analysis for problem solving. I think it also has value in understanding the identity dimensions of belief-formation.

The exercise is simple enough: one begins with a declarative statement, and seeks to understand the root-cause of the statement by iteratively asking Why? five times. An example related to epistemic identity might look like this:

I am an epistemic populist.
Why?
Because I am more apt to trust independently-acting individuals than experts.
Why?
Because experts are generally operating at a level of abstraction from reality, while common people are dealing with reality.
Why?
Because experts do not bear the cost of being incorrect as directly as common people do.
Why?
Because the epistemic institutions that confer expert status protect experts through mechanisms like financial security, reputation management, and gatekeeping of the expert class.
Why?
Because gatekeeping expertise is a means of consolidating and conferring social power.

If you’ve given this a try yourself, you can probably tell that there are innumerable paths through the Five Whys; an answer to one Why can impact all the answers downstream of it. Nevertheless, it is interesting that in this exercise (which I generated authentically while drafting this post - you’ll have to take my word for it, I guess!), I begin with the idea of populism and conclude with the idea of power. Thus, at the risk of taking a page right out of critlib, my identification as an epistemic populist seemingly has roots in the relationship I perceive between information and power, rather than merely in my perception of experts - which itself may be a symptom of what I perceive to be the power dynamics of information.

The next time you find yourself (or someone else) espousing an identity-laden belief, pause to ask yourself why. (And why, and why, and why, and why!)

You should come to understand the root cause of this belief more clearly.

You might also recognize how a difference in one answer to the chain of whys could impact the belief statement, and thereby appreciate the fallibility or incompleteness of your stance, thus gaining a greater appreciation for intellectual humility and the perspectives of others.

You may also come to decide that the belief warrants further consideration, or even updating.

In any case, I have a counter-proposal for Galef:

Rather than hold our identities lightly, let’s start by understanding them better.

Let’s hold our identities up to the light.

Heterodoxy in the Stacks

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