The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

one of the great gifts that the social media age has brought us, which is the opportunity to publish uncharitable and disingenuous interpretations of what other people have said.

The difficulty of talking about race, or even mentioning it as Cumberbatch did, points to a deep procedural problem which all public discourse is struggling to find a way to speak to. Hitherto any politician, writer or other public figure could proceed fairly well along one pre-agreed line. That line was that you should attempt to speak, write and even think aloud in a manner which no reasonable person could reasonably misinterpret. If somebody did unreasonably misinterpret your words then it reflected badly on them.

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Whereas a term that one person may use unwittingly can in some cases be levelled against them (Cumberbatch), in other cases extreme terms which people are using knowingly do not in fact count as being the words they have used.

Whereas some people unwittingly use the wrong term and can be castigated for it, other people use terms that are so wrong and so extreme and yet no especial castigation is due. Because of something. There are really only a couple of possibilities for what that ‘something’ might be. The first is that there is a scrambling device over all public pronouncements in relation to sex, race and much else and that an unscrambling device is required, but that not everybody has it.

The other explanation for this is that there is a far simpler scramble going on. Which is that it has nothing to do with words and nothing to do with intent, but solely to do with the innate characteristics of a particular speaker. So Cumberbatch is starting off from a place of the greatest unsafety. He is white, heterosexual and male. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time to stress his anti-racist credentials on Tavis Smiley. On the other hand, somebody making disparaging comments for years about another ethnic group might ordinarily be thought to be in serious trouble. Unless their identity happens to be correct.

Had Cumberbatch spent years tweeting about Asian people living in holes like goblins and how much he enjoyed making elderly Asian people cry he might not have got away with it. Jeong did but only because of her own racial identity (although Asian privilege is currently being weighed up in the social justice scales) and because of the race she was attacking.

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What matters above everything is the racial and other identity of the speaker. Their identity can either condemn them or get them off. This means that if words and their contents do still matter then they have become deeply secondary orders of business. It also means that rather than managing to ignore the issue of race we are going to have to spend the foreseeable future constantly focused on it, because only by concentrating on people’s race can we work out who we ought to allow ourselves to listen to.

‘Often, when I have attempted to speak to or confront a white woman about something she has said or done that has impacted me adversely, I am met with tearful denials and indignant accusations that I am hurting her.’

Equality in the eyes of God is a core tenet of the Christian tradition. But it has translated in the era of secular humanism not into equality in the eyes of God but equality in the eyes of man.

Say that to the christian whites who smashed capitol

And here there is a problem, which is that many people realize, fear or intuit that people are not entirely equal. People are not equally beautiful, equally gifted, equally strong or equally sensible. They are certainly not equally wealthy. They are not even equally lovable. And while the political left talks constantly of the need for equality and even equity (arguing, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and others do, that equality of outcome is not just desirable but possible), the political right responds with a call for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. In fact both claims are almost certainly impossible locally and nationally, let alone globally.

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Harvard – being smart – realized this, and had to find some way to get around the problem, specifically in order to try to increase the number of African-Americans who were attending the university. And so it decided to find ways to bias its ostensibly colour-blind entrance policy against one of the groups which was dramatically over-performing. Harvard turned a process that presented itself as intended to be race-blind, but which was actually set up to improve the chances for some, into a process that was race-obsessed.

The criticism of The Bell Curve demonstrated why almost nobody wanted to go over the evidence that suggests that intelligence test scores vary with ethnic group and that just as some groups score higher on intelligence tests, others must score lower.

Of course this appears in this book..

On reading the literature he said that he had come to realize that Murray was ‘perhaps the intellectual who was treated most unfairly in my lifetime’.68 Just for having him on his podcast and for having a respectful and insightful conversation (titled ‘Forbidden Knowledge’) about Murray’s work, various media attempted to tar Harris with the same brush.

I may vomit

Vox declared that such enquiry was not ‘forbidden knowledge’ but merely ‘America’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality’.69 This ignores – among other troubling things – the possibility that it could be both.

This guy can't be serious. Outright calling you coloured folks dumbos now.

It is written into all employment law and employment policies and embedded into all social policies that everybody is ‘the same above the neck’. Indeed, this assumption is so widespread that any subject which could be said to undermine it or run counter to it must be quashed with as much force as the Church at the height of its power was able to bring down on anybody who ran counter to its teachings.

The teachings of our day are that everybody is equal and that race and gender and much else besides are mere social constructs; that given the right encouragement and opportunity everybody can be whatever they want to be; that life is entirely about environment, opportunity and privilege. This is why when even the tiniest fragment of the argument crops up – as with Asian admissions at Harvard – it causes such extraordinary pain, confusion, denial and rage. In general the denial is systemic, but occasionally it fixes its gaze on a particular object or person, and then everything that can be thrown is thrown against the person who has even raised (or threatens to raise) the heresy.

For a long and disreputable period race was believed to be a hardware issue – the most hardware issue of the lot. And then in the wake of World War II, and far from unconnected with the horrors of that conflict, the consensus ran the other way. Race became, perhaps out of necessity, a social construct like everything else.

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‘I’d like to be a little less white, which means a little less oppressive, oblivious, defensive, ignorant and arrogant.’

It appears able to cause catastrophes but not to heal them, to wound but not to remedy.

thought you didn't know Douglas

cases like Norton’s and Jeong’s invite the question: ‘What is a fair representation of a person in the internet age?’ What is a fair way to describe somebody? Norton, for instance, might henceforth be summed up as ‘The racist, homophobic tech journalist fired by The New York Times’. She might think a fairer version of her life would be ‘Writer and mother’. But then Jeong presumably does not think of herself as a racist either. So who gets to call it? If it is the mob then we are in trouble.

only the worst version of someone’s life contains the information that makes the internet stop and look.

It is pure gold for a network addicted to shaming and schadenfreude. We all know the glee at watching someone fall from grace; the righteous feeling that can come wit...

stories like those of Norton, Jeong and others is the question that the internet age has still not begun to contend with: how, if ever, is our age able to forgive? Since everybody errs in the course of their life there must be – in any healthy person or society – some capacity to be forgiven. Part of forgiveness is the ability to forget. And yet the internet will never forget. Everything can always be summoned up afresh by new people.

What court can be appealed to? Especially when the nature of the crimes, or what constitutes a crime, can vary almost from day to day. What is the correct way to refer to somebody who is trans today? Did you use this word as a joke or an insult? How will what we are doing now look in 20 years? Who will be the next Joy Reid, held to account for the ‘wrong’ view expressed at a time when everybody else was also expressing the ‘wrong’ view? If we do not know the answer to these questions then we have to try to ensure that we can predict the crowd-turns not just of the next year but of the rest of our lives. Good luck with that.

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towards the close of her lecture Arendt reflected on some of the consequences of being active in the world. Every human being’s life is able to be told as a story because it has a beginning and an end. But the actions between those two fixed points – what we do when we are ‘acting’ in the world – have consequences that are unbounded and limitless. The ‘frailty and unreliability of human affairs’ means that we are constantly acting into a ‘web of relationships’ in which ‘every action touches off not only a reaction but a chain reaction’. This means that ‘every process is the cause of unpredictable new processes’. A single word or deed could change everything. As a consequence, says Arendt, ‘we can never really know what we are doing’.

The connection is real you just don't know what the outcome would be. You can't predict.

Though we don’t know what we are doing when we are acting, we have no possibility ever to undo what we have done. Action processes are not only unpredictable, they are also irreversible; there is no author or maker who can undo what he has done if he does not like it or when the consequences prove disastrous.

As well as helping people to remember, the internet helps make people approach the past from a strange, all-knowing angle. This makes the past hostage – like everything else – to any archaeologist with a vendetta. Events that were scandals long ago but which have not been for generations can be brought to the surface again. How could we have forgotten about this crime committed over a hundred years ago? Should we not all know about it? Should we not feel shame? What does not knowing about it say about us now?

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Before the advent of the internet, people’s mistakes could be remembered within their communities or circles. Then being able to start a new life somewhere else in the world was at least a possibility. Today, people may be followed by their doppelgänger wherever they go in the world. And even after death the excavation and tomb-raiding will go on, not in a spirit of enquiry or forgiveness but in one of retribution and vengeance. At the heart of which attitude lies the strange retributive instinct of our time towards the past which suggests that we know ourselves to be better than people in history because we know how they behaved and we know that we would have behaved better.

There is a gigantic modern fallacy at work here. For of course people only think that they would have acted better in history because they know how history ended up. People in history didn’t – and don’t – have that luxury. They made good or bad choices in the times and places they were in, given the situations and shibboleths that they found themselves with.

But what the Young case, like all the other cases of public shaming, raises is the most important question of all. Is there any route to forgiveness? Could Young’s years of voluntary work helping disadvantaged children ever have the possibility of eradicating the sin of the boob tweets? If so, how many would be needed on each side, how many children helped in order to eradicate how many boobs? And what is a decent interval of time between an error and forgiveness? Does anybody know? Is anybody interested in working it out?

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As one of the consequences of the death of God, Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw that people could find themselves stuck in cycles of Christian theology with no way out. Specifically that people would inherit the concepts of guilt, sin and shame but would be without the means of redemption which the Christian religion also offered. Today we do seem to live in a world where actions can have consequences we could never have imagined, where guilt and shame are more at hand than ever, and where we have no means whatsoever of redemption. We do not know who could offer it, who could accept it, and whether it is a desirable quality compared to an endless cycle of fiery certainty and denunciation.

To date there are only two weak, temporary answers to this conundrum. The first is that we forgive the people we like, or the person whose tribe or views most closely fit our own, or at least aggravate our enemies. So if Ezra Klein likes Sarah Jeong he will forgive her. If you dislike Toby Young you will not forgive him. This is one of the surest ways imaginable to embed every tribal difference that already exists. A second temporary route that has been found is the route that another racing driver – Lewis Hamilton – recently took.

This clearly wasn’t enough. Some months later, in August 2018, readers of the men’s magazine GQ would find a picture of Lewis Hamilton on the cover, with a large interview and photo shoot inside. All of this – including the cover shot – was done in a skirt.

So this is the only other currently available mode for forgiveness. If you are rich enough and famous enough, you can use PR people and the front cover of a men’s magazine to dress in a skirt and prostrate yourself before the swiftly moving dogmas of the age. Perhaps it is no wonder that an increasing number of people are persuaded that they should simply go along with those same dogmas. No questions allowed. No questions asked.

unless we have any reason to think we are more reasonable, morally better or wiser than at any time in the past, it is reasonable to assume there will be some things we are presently doing – possibly while flushed with moral virtue – that our descendants will whistle through their teeth at, and say ‘What the hell were they thinking?’ It is worth wondering what the blind spots of our age might be. What might we be doing that will be regarded by succeeding generations in the same way we now look on the slave trade or using Victorian children as chimney sweeps?

No meaningful physiological differences have been shown to exist between trans and non-trans people. And though there has been some study of differences in brain function, nothing to date has shown that there is a clear hardware reason why some people want to change from the body of one sex into that of another.

weak point.. you can't see them doesn't mean they don't exist

Autogynephilia is the arousal that comes from imagining yourself in the role of the opposite sex. But – nobody will be surprised to learn – there are divisions even within this ‘community’ and concerns and disputes over one type of autogynephilia versus another. For the different varieties of autogynephilia may range from a man’s arousal at the idea of wearing an item of women’s clothing all the way to arousal at the idea of actually having the body of a woman.

If people have a particular sexual kink then it may be due either to hardware or to software. But it is hard to persuade society that it should change nearly all of its social and linguistic norms in order to accommodate those sexual kinks. Society may tolerate you. It may wish you well. But your desire to dress in lady’s knickers is no reason to force everyone to use entirely new pronouns. Or to alter every public bathroom. Or to bring up children with the belief that there is no difference between the sexes and that gender is a social construct.

If there is nothing genetically different about gay people then the only thing that signifies a difference is their behaviour. Gay people are gay when they say they are and when they do the things that show them to be gay. Likewise, perhaps, people are trans when they say they are, and no outward sign – or any biological signifier – need be there in the trans case any more than it is expected (or demanded) in the case of being gay.

Interesting point

A gay person who goes straight or a straight person who goes gay is doing nothing that is permanent or irreversible. Whereas the end-point of trans advocates is irreversible and life-altering. People expressing concern or urging caution in regard to transsexualism may not be ‘denying the existence of trans people’ or claiming that they should be treated as second-class citizens, let alone (the most catastrophizing claim of all) causing trans people to commit suicide. They may simply be urging caution about something which has not remotely been worked out yet – and which is irreversible.

Looking back, James is struck by a number of things. One is that he was never offered any counselling. How he said he thought he felt was just accepted. And there was another thing. ‘It was all a bit too nice,’ he says now. There was ‘never any pressure’. Never any ‘grilling’.

Sorry what

In one way Timothy had gone all the way around the oppression cycle. From woman, to trans, to white man and therefore to the personification of the white patriarchy. From minority to oppressor. Where female to male transitioners can create one pile-up, male to female transitioners produce another of their own – most obviously with people who have been born as women.

For if a significant amount of modern rights campaigning is based on people wishing to prove that their cause is a hardware issue, then trans forces other movements to go in precisely the opposite direction. Trans campaigners intent on arguing that trans is hardware can only win their argument if they persuade people that being a woman is a matter of software. And not all feminists are willing to concede that one.

Hmm

Even if there are some people who actually suffer from gender dysphoria, and even if for some of them life-changing surgery is the best possible option, how might they be differentiated from people who have such ideas suggested to them but who later turn out to have made the wrong decision for themselves?

Point. Not hardware

Yet elsewhere she has said that she has seen a small number of patients who have stopped treatment or have come to regret transitioning, but added that this should not influence attitudes to other people who wish to transition.

One problem – in her view – is that such important decisions have sometimes been taken by ‘professionals (usually cisgender) who determine if the young people are ready or not’. Olson-Kennedy believes that this is ‘a broken model’.

Olson-Kennedy points out that people get married when they are under 20 and choose colleges to go to, and that these are also ‘life-altering choices’ made in adolescence that mostly work out.

Point

This suggests that the only thing that non-trans people can do is stay silent on the issue and never speak about it unless what they have to say is affirming.

The advocates of social justice, identity politics and intersectionality suggest that we live in societies which are racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic. They suggest that these oppressions are interlocked and that if we can learn to see through this web, and unweave it, we can then finally unlock the interlocking oppressions of our time. After which something will happen. Precisely what that thing is remains unclear. Perhaps social justice is a state which once arrived at remains in place. Perhaps it requires constant attention. We are unlikely to find out.

the interlocking oppressions do not all lock neatly together, but grind hideously and noisily both against each other and within themselves.

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