We don’t think this way anymore, and in fact thinking this way can get you into trouble. I guess the first step was the rise of perspectivism. This is the belief, often traced back to Nietzsche, that what you believe is determined by where you stand: Our opinions are not guided by objective truth, because there is no such thing; they are guided by our own spot in society.

Then came Michel Foucault and critical race theorists and the rest, and the argument that society is structured by elites to preserve their privilege. Beliefs and culture are part of the structure elites use to preserve that inequality. This led, in the common parlance, to the assumption that your beliefs are determined by your group’s privilege or lack of privilege, by where your group is within the power structure.

Now we are at a place where it is commonly assumed that your perceptions are something that come to you through your group, through your demographic identity. How many times have we all heard somebody rise up in conversation and say, “Speaking as a Latina. …” or “Speaking as a queer person. …” or “Speaking as a Jew. …”?

Now, when somebody says that I always wonder, What does that mean? After you’ve stated your group identity, what is the therefore that follows?

We’ve shifted from an emphasis on individual judgment toward a greater emphasis on collective experience. I notice that even in my own line of work. When I started, it was very important for opinion writers to never think of themselves as a Republican or a Democrat. We were individual inquirers, not polemicists for some political team. Over the years, many people stopped making that distinction.