The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

This is the simple fact that we have been living through a period of more than a quarter of a century in which all our grand narratives have collapsed. One by one the narratives we had were refuted, became unpopular to defend or impossible to sustain.

It was inevitable that some pitch would be made for the deserted ground. People in wealthy Western democracies today could not simply remain the first people in recorded history to have absolutely no explanation for what we are doing here, and no story to give life purpose.

Interesting. Beliefs

The question of what exactly we are meant to do now – other than get rich where we can and have whatever fun is on offer – was going to have to be answered by something.

The unbelievable speed of this process has been principally caused by the fact that a handful of businesses in Silicon Valley (notably Google, Twitter and Facebook) now have the power not just to direct what most people in the world know, think and say, but have a business model which has accurately been described as relying on finding ‘customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behaviour’.

since the financial crash of 2008 that there has been a march into the mainstream of ideas that were previously known solely on the obscurest fringes of academia. The attractions of this new set of beliefs are obvious enough. It is not clear why a generation which can’t accumulate capital should have any great love of capitalism.

The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’, ‘identity group politics’ and ‘intersectionalism’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology.

‘Identity politics’, meanwhile, has become the place where social justice finds its caucuses. It atomizes society into different interest groups according to sex (or gender), race, sexual preference and more. It presumes that such characteristics are the main, or only, relevant attributes of their holders and that they bring with them some added bonus.

The least attractive-sounding of this trinity is the concept of ‘intersectionality’. This is the invitation to spend the rest of our lives attempting to work out each and every identity and vulnerability claim in ourselves and others and then organize along whichever system of justice emerges from the perpetually moving hierarchy which we uncover. It is a system that is not just unworkable but dementing, making demands that are impossible towards ends that are unachievable.

Unachievable?

Phrases like ‘triggered’ and ‘feeling unsafe’ and claims that words that do not fit the new religion cause ‘harm’ only really started to spike in usage from 2013 onwards.

2013

The results can be seen in every day’s news. It is behind the news that the American Psychological Association feels the need to advise its members on how to train harmful ‘traditional masculinity’ out of boys and men.

Hmm

Having begun to view everything through the new lenses we have been provided with, everything is then weaponized, with consequences which are deranged as well as dementing.

Main

Such rhetoric exacerbates any existing divisions and each time creates a number of new ones. And for what purpose? Rather than showing how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren’t very good at living with each other.

Wow

Phrases such as ‘toxic masculinity’ entered into common use. What was the virtue of making relations between the sexes so fraught that the male half of the species could be treated as though it was cancerous?

Key part here is toxic not masculinity

In a similar fashion the civil rights movement in America, which had started in order to right the most appalling of all historic wrongs, looked like it was moving towards some hoped-for resolution. But yet again, near the point of victory everything seemed to sour. Just as things appeared better than ever before, the rhetoric began to suggest that things had never been worse. Suddenly – after most of us had hoped it had become a non-issue – everything seemed to have become about race. As with all the other tripwire issues, only a fool or a madman would think of even speculating – let alone disputing – this turnaround of events.

Among the things these issues all have in common is that they have started as legitimate human rights campaigns. This is why they have come so far. But at some point all went through the crash barrier. Not content with being equal, they have started to settle on unsustainable positions such as ‘better’. Some might counter that the aim is simply to spend a certain amount of time on ‘better’ in order to level the historical playing field.

By stressing how ardent your desire is – whether you are a man or a woman – to bring down the patriarchy. And this creates an auditioning problem, where public avowals of loyalty to the system must be volubly made whether there is a need for them or not. It is an extension of a well-known problem in liberalism which has been recognized even among those who did once fight a noble fight. It is a tendency identified by the late Australian political philosopher Kenneth Minogue as ‘St George in retirement’ syndrome. After slaying the dragon the brave warrior finds himself stalking the land looking for still more glorious fights. He needs his dragons. Eventually, after tiring himself out in pursuit of ever-smaller dragons he may eventually even be found swinging his sword at thin air, imagining it to contain dragons.

If that is a temptation for an actual St George, imagine what a person might do who is no saint, owns no horse or lance and is being noticed by nobody. How might they try to persuade people that, given the historic chance, they too would without question have slain that dragon?

this point can lead to a lot of counters

In each case a demonstration of virtue demands an overstating of the problem, which then causes an amplification of the problem.

main. wow

With each of these issues an increasing number of people, having the law on their side, pretend that both their issue and indeed all these issues are shut down and agreed upon. The case is very much otherwise. The nature of what is meant to be agreed upon cannot in fact be agreed upon. Each of these issues is infinitely more complex and unstable than our societies are currently willing to admit. Which is why, put together as the foundation blocks of a new morality and metaphysics, they form the basis for a general madness. Indeed a more unstable basis for social harmony could hardly be imagined.

main

For while racial equality, minority rights and women’s rights are among the best products of liberalism, they make the most destabilizing foundations. Attempting to make them the foundation is like turning a bar stool upside down and then trying to balance on top of it. The products of the system cannot reproduce the stability of the system that produced them. If for no other reason than that each of these issues is a deeply unstable component in itself. We present each as agreed upon and settled. Yet while the endless contradictions, fabrications and fantasies within each are visible to all, identifying them is not just discouraged but literally policed. And so we are asked to agree to things which we cannot believe.

It is the central cause of the ugliness of both online and real-life discussion. For we are being asked to perform a set of leaps and jumps which we cannot, and are perhaps ill-advised to make. We are asked to believe things that are unbelievable and being told not to object to things (such as giving children drugs to stop them going through puberty) which most people feel a strong objection to. The pain that comes from being expected to remain silent on some important matters and perform impossible leaps on others is tremendous, not least because the problems (including the internal contradictions) are so evident.

what like gender equality? when women weren't allowed to work or vote? like racial equality? when black people were even allowed in certain places? this logic is a bit funny. or at least the words.

As anyone who has lived under totalitarianism can attest, there is something demeaning and eventually soul-destroying about being expected to go along with claims you do not believe to be true and cannot hold to be true. If the belief is that all people should be regarded as having equal value and be accorded equal dignity, then that may be all well and good. If you are asked to believe that there are no differences between homosexuality and heterosexuality, men and women, racism and anti-racism, then this will in time drive you to distraction. That distraction – or crowd madness – is something we are in the middle of and something we need to try to find our way out from.

I grew up in communism China I admit can feel a lot of unnecessary bullshit/propaganda going on everyday but I didn't feel detested because I feel life is at least everything was going smoothly and peacefully.

If we fail, then the direction of travel is already clear. We face not just a future of ever-greater atomization, rage and violence, but a future in which the possibility of a backlash against all rights advances – including the good ones – grows more likely. A future in which racism is responded to with racism, denigration based on gender is responded to with denigration based on gender. At some stage of humiliation there is simply no reason for majority groups not to play games back that have worked so well on themselves.

Towards the film’s end an Irish pastor sums up a part of the film’s point. He explains that he doesn’t mind people holding out the view that homosexuality is inherent and unchangeable. He just wants to be allowed to be able to hold his view. As Dr Baskerville reiterates, only one position on this matter appears to be able to be held in academia and the media, and that is ‘promotion’ of homosexuality. ‘Sexuality is being politicized,’ we are told in the final moments. And then, after another inexplicable reference to the Ancient Jews, the film ends with the dramatic yet careful line: ‘It is time to accept difference.’

The manner in which people and movements behave at the point of victory can be the most revealing thing about them.

well said

Do you allow arguments that worked for you to work for others? Are reciprocity and tolerance principles or fig-leaves? Do those who have been censored go on to censor others when the ability is in their own hands? Today the Vue cinema is on one side. A few decades ago they might have been on the other. And Pink News and others who celebrate their victory in chasing Voices of the Silenced a mile down the road one February night seem very ready to wield such power over a private event. In doing so they contradict the claims made by gay rights activists from the start of the battle for gay equality, which is that it should be no business of anyone else what consenting adults get up to in private. If that goes for the rights of gay groups then surely it ought to apply to the rights of Christian fundamentalists and other groups too.

point

There are two other things. The first is that in order to fear what was happening that evening you would have to extrapolate from it. You would have to suspect that, when Davidson says he only wants to deal with people who come to him seeking help, this is a mere cover-story. You would have to believe that this is in fact just a front – the first part of a wider plan to turn something voluntary into something compulsory and from something compulsory for some people into something compulsory for all. And that would be to trample all over one of the bases of political tolerance. It would be to award yourself the right not just to come to your own conclusions about people, but to attribute motives to others that you cannot see but which you suspect. Which leads to a question that everybody in genuinely diverse and pluralistic societies must at some point ask: ‘Do we take other people at face value, or do we try to read behind their words and actions, claim to see into their hearts and there divine the true motives which their speech and actions have not yet revealed?’

intension

In On Liberty, first published in 1859, John Stuart Mill famously laid out four reasons for why free speech was a necessity in a free society: the first and second being that a contrary opinion may be true, or true in part, and therefore may require to be heard in order to correct your own erroneous views; the third and fourth being that even if the contrary opinion is in error, the airing of it may help to remind people of a truth and prevent its slippage into an ignorant dogma which may in time – if unchallenged – itself become lost.

In recent years the accepted opinion on gay rights in America, Britain and most other Western democracies has shifted unimaginably, and for the better. But it has moved so swiftly that it has also seen the replacement of one dogma with another. A move from a position of moral opprobrium to a position of expressing opprobrium to anyone whose views fall even narrowly outside the remit of the newly adopted position.

The problem with this is not just that we are at risk of being unable to hear positions that are wrong, but that we may be preventing ourselves from listening to arguments that may be partially true.

five years after Daley had come out. He had not been silent about his private life in the interim period. And yet this human interest story was a lead item on the BBC’s website just beneath news of an earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia which had killed more than 800 people.

Petty

This goes beyond ‘This will be good for you’ and nearer to the realm of ‘See how you like this, bigot.’ There are days when you wonder how heterosexuals feel about the growing insistence with which gay stories are crow-barred into any and all areas of news.

Maybe you are a bigot thats why you are so offended. News shape opinions though. What else do you expect

There they would find the lead story in the ‘Business’ section to be ‘Gay in Japan and No Longer Invisible’. Perhaps the average reader of the business pages of The New York Times had never thought much about the visibility or otherwise of gay people in Japan.

Japanese cultural and historical background is the key point here?

That idea is just one curious place that our culture has arrived at. In society at large, when people come out as gay they are celebrated for having arrived at their natural end-point. For most people this is a decent recognition by society that there is no problem with them being who they are: they have arrived at the place that is natural and right for them. But one oddity of this position is that anybody who is gay and then subsequently decides they are straight will be the subject not just of a degree of ostracism and suspicion, but widespread doubt that they are being honest about their true selves. A straight who becomes gay has settled. A gay who has become straight has rendered himself an object of permanent suspicion. From being strongly inclined towards straight the culture has settled with a mild inclination towards gay.

not a bad point. one way street

In 2014 the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) in London issued a fascinating ‘statement on sexual orientation’. They were commendably adamant in their condemnation of anything that seeks to stigmatize people who say they are gay. And they explained that in any case the RCP does not believe that therapies to alter anyone’s sexual orientation could work in either direction. The RCP could no more make a homosexual straight than they could make a heterosexual gay. And yet they do make a fairly important acknowledgement, which is that ‘The Royal College of Psychiatrists considers that sexual orientation is determined by a combination of biological and postnatal environment factors.’

In general, fundamentalist Christians and others want a ‘gay gene’ not to be found, for the discovery of such a gene would seriously harm one of the foundations of their own view of the world (‘God makes people gay?’) and would have to affect their own stance on the matter. People who are gay, on the other hand, have a clear bias in favour of finding the gene, as it has the potential to permanently get them off any and all software accusations.

But if we are to take it that Aristotle is addressing the subject of homosexuality then it is striking that he essentially holds the same position in the third century BC as the American Psychological Association and the Royal College of Psychiatrists do in the twenty-first century. He sees it as a characteristic found in some men by nature and in others as a result of ‘habitation’.

Aristotle gives the example: ‘such as in those who have been abused from childhood’.

now this is just insult to philosophy ... He also claim brain is blood cooler for christs sake. Running out of points to use?

Foucault’s follower at MIT, David Halperin, famously said that there was ‘no orgasm without ideology’.

LGBT is now one of the groupings which mainstream politicians routinely speak about – and to – as if they actually exist like a racial or religious community. It is a form of absurdity.

So when a group of people gets the attention it is absurdity? .. Champions? Events? Governments? Celebrities?

Gay men often characterize lesbians as dowdy and boring. Lesbians often characterize gay men as silly and displaying a failure to grow up. Neither have very much use for each other, and almost none meet in any ‘communal’ spaces.

Showed character though no?

There are places where gay men can hook up and places where gay women can hook up, but there have hardly been any places in the decades since gay liberation where gay men and women organize or assemble to be near each other on anything like a regular basis.

Like in ordinary lives?

And the divide between the gays who wanted equality and those who wanted to use being gay merely as a first step to tearing down some other order or forming some new sort of society persisted.

you are using the passion of these groups to tear down what they've been building too

There is nothing wrong with people enjoying whatever kinks they like in the privacy of their homes. But you don’t have to be prudish to feel that the phalanxes of people at such protests dressed in fetish gear, in chaps and more, is off-putting to whatever cause they are hoping to advance. If the black civil rights movement had included a fetish section it would have been considerably easier to ignore its moral force.

Cant deny that i agree with this

The justification for this (put forward by the intersectional sociologist Arlene Stein among others) was that if gay people looked like everybody else then they would disappear. Only by being flagrant and visible could they ensure they did not.

At the start of the ‘MeToo’ scandal in 2017, any man who had not just ever inappropriately touched, but anyone who had ever objectified, a woman was in trouble. But it seemed that DeGeneres did not have to play by the same rules.

Sex between men dissolves otherness into sameness, men into de, in a perfect suspension: there is nothing that either party doesn’t know about the other. If the emotional aim of intercourse is a total knowing of the other, gay sex may be, in its way, perfect, because in it, a total knowledge of the other’s experience is, finally, possible. But since the object of that knowledge is already wholly known to each of the parties, the act is also, in a way, redundant. Perhaps it is for this reason that so many of us keep seeking repetition, as if depth were impossible.

when men have sex with women, they fall into the woman. She is the thing that they desire, or sometimes fear, but in any event she is the end point, the place where they are going. She is the destination. It is gay men who, during sex, fall through their partners back into themselves, over and over again.

Not just because being gay is an unstable component on which to base an individual identity and a hideously unstable way to try to base any form of group identity, but because gays will always present a challenge to something innate in the group that make up the majority in society.

In 1911 a famous poster appeared, entitled ‘Industrial Workers of the World’, depicting what it claimed to be the ‘Pyramid of the Capitalist System’.

Such a bad example it is almost laughable..