Markers of identity like race have often cleaved the world into in-group and out-group. And so it should not come as a surprise that many of the worst wars and injustices have pitted members of different racial or religious groups against each other. And yet the identities we are born with aren’t everything. For at other times, the most salient groups have been formed on the basis of categories that advocates of the identity synthesis tend to neglect. These include economic categories like class; theological considerations such as disputes about who should be regarded as the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad; and ideological considerations such as whether a country should be ruled by a monarch or by elected representatives.
All of this makes philosophical liberals, like me, skeptical of any conception of what truly matters in human affairs that focuses on a single dimension. We agree with advocates of the identity synthesis that it is impossible to understand many fundamental aspects of human life without paying due attention to categories of group identity such as race, gender, and sexual orientation. But we also agree with many Marxists that it is impossible to understand other fundamental aspects of human life without paying due attention to economic categories such as social class; with nationalist historians that it is impossible to understand still other fundamental aspects of human life without paying due attention to ideological categories such as patriotism; with religious historians that it is impossible to understand still other fundamental aspects of human life without paying due attention to theological categories such as the beliefs that people hold about the nature of their religious duties; and so on.
Our understanding of our own societies owes much to scholars who rigorously demonstrate the ways in which they are shaped by forces like ethnic competition and racial discrimination. But other categories, from economic class to political ideology, are equally important. To make sense of our world–from everyday social interactions to the causes of major political events–we must be attuned to the potential importance of this much broader set of considerations, letting the specific facts of each situation guide us toward the appropriate prism for understanding it.
— Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap
Bologna 