The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

‘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. For example (as the American writer Coleman Hughes has put it), the assumption that there is ‘a heightened moral knowledge’ that comes with being black or female or gay.

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.

As he wrote about the graph that results from this, the ‘woke stuff’ that Millennials and others are presently using ‘to tear apart millennia of oppression and /or civilization . . . was all made up about 20 minutes ago’. As he went on, while there is nothing wrong with trying out new ideas and phrases, ‘you have to be pretty damn reckless to be leaning this hard on so many untested heuristics your parents came up with in untested fields that aren’t even 50 years old’.5

It is why The New York Times decides to run a piece by a black author with the title: ‘Can my Children be Friends with White People?’9 And why even a piece about cycling deaths in London written by a woman can be framed through the headline: ‘Roads Designed by Men are Killing Women’.

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.

It began to behave – in victory – as its opponents once did. When the boot was on the other foot something ugly happened.

They too appeared to be arriving at some sort of settlement. Then just as the train appeared to be reaching its desired destination it suddenly picked up steam and went crashing off down the tracks and into the distance. What had been barely disputed until yesterday became a cause to destroy someone’s life today. Whole careers were scattered and strewn as the train careered along its path.

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? Or the development of the idea that men had no right to talk about the female sex? Why, when women had broken through more glass ceilings than at any time in history, did talk of ‘the patriarchy’ and ‘mansplaining’ seep out of the feminist fringes and into the heart of places like the Australian Senate?

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.

Check out this quote.

Our public life is now dense with people desperate to man the barricades long after the revolution is over.

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.

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

Always there is the sense that once they are unpicked then something wonderful might happen, though, as is common with utopians, the map of utopia is not included in the plan.

All of which suggested that allegations of abuse are indeed always to be taken seriously, unless the victim is a man or the accused is a professor of feminist literary theory. In all matters, such contradictions merely have to be got over.

Throughout the decades in which the social sciences were producing the bases of intersectionality they consistently presented their claims as though the ‘social’ wasn’t in their title and the ‘science’ was real.

Their writing has the deliberately obstructive style ordinarily employed when someone either has nothing to say or needs to conceal the fact that what they are saying is not true.

Prose this bad can only occur when the author is trying to hide something.

Of course sometimes when it is nearly impossible to tell what is being said, almost anything can be said and exceptionally dishonest arguments can be smuggled in under the guise of complexity. This is one of the reasons why Butler and others write so badly. If they wrote clearly they would attract more outrage and ridicule. It is also one reason why this field finds it so hard to detect what is sincere and what is satire.

This is not about mishearings or misunderstandings. It is more likely an example of people deliberately and lazily adopting simplified misrepresentations of what other people are saying in order to avoid the difficult discussion that would otherwise have to take place.

All this suggests our societies have arrived at a stage of seemingly industrial-strength denial. We have decided to forget or completely edit out things that were recognized to be valid the day before yesterday. And we seem to have decided that the individual complexities which actually exist not just between women and men but within men and within women can simply be pushed to one side with the assumption that they have all been overcome.

All this seems perfectly capable of being held in the same head – contradictory though it all is. So that the current accepted way of regarding women is: the same as men, but different where it’s useful or flattering.

Women are exactly the same as men – as capable, as able, as suited to the same array of tasks. And also better. Exactly how this is the case is ill defined because it is ill thought through.

A benign reading of this could view it as imitation, and the sincerest form of flattery. But whatever else they are known for, professors of post-colonial studies have never been known for reading things in a benign way.

If only this liberalism could allow a dose of humility to be injected where the certainty has prevailed.

After all it is not clear that majority populations will continue to accept the claims they are being told to accept and continue to be cowed by the names that are thrown at them if they do not.

From some of the most famous women on the planet we have heard the demand that women have the right to be sexy without being sexualized. Some of the most prominent cultural figures in the world have shown us that to oppose racism we must become a bit racist.

On that occasion Lilla provided an insight into one of the other central conundrums of our time. He said, ‘You cannot tell people simultaneously “You must understand me” and “You cannot understand me”.’ Evidently a whole lot of people can make those demands simultaneously. But they shouldn’t, and if they do then they should realize that their contradictory demands cannot be granted.

Perhaps we could get out of this mania by treating people as individuals based on their abilities and not trying to impose equity quotas on every company and institution?

But the other reason why contradiction is not enough is because nothing about the intersectional, social justice movement suggests that it is really interested in solving any of the problems that it claims to be interested in.

My generation was brought up to be colour blind. Now we are told that not focusing on race all the time makes us racists. This does not seem to me to be progress.