The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

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. And it isn’t hard to work out why a generation who believe they may never own a home could be attracted to an ideological world view which promises to sort out every inequity not just in their own lives but every inequity on earth.

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.

New heuristics have been required to force people to ingest the new presumptions. The speed at which they have been mainstreamed is staggering. As the mathematician and writer Eric Weinstein has pointed out (and as a Google Books search shows), phrases like ‘LGBTQ’, ‘white privilege’ and ‘transphobia’ went from not being used at all to becoming mainstream. 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 Similarly, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have pointed out (in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind) how new the means of policing and enforcing these new heuristics have become. 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.6 It is as though, having worked out what it wanted, the new metaphysics took a further half-decade to work out how to intimidate its followers into the mainstream. But it has done so, with huge success.

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. 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’.10 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.

In the 1990s Hillary Clinton supported her husband’s ‘defence of marriage act’ which sought to prevent gay marriage from becoming possible in the United States. She watched as he backed the policy of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ for gays in the US military, meaning that any gay soldier who told even one other person about their sexuality could immediately be dismissed from the armed forces. As Robert Samuels wrote in the Washington Post, ‘Hillary Clinton had the chance to make gay rights history. She refused.’4 Yet in 2016 when she was campaigning for the Presidency for the second time and the views of wider society had shifted markedly, the LGBT community (as gays had now become) were one of the specific sections of the country whom Clinton claimed to be campaigning especially hard for.

It was rarely more openly displayed than in the ‘March on Washington’ on 25 April 1993. This march had been intended to do for gay rights what Martin Luther King’s march had done for the civil rights movement of three decades earlier. But the 1993 march was a mess, including ‘obscene comics’ and ‘fire-breathing radicals who spoke for only a tiny segment of the gay population’. It was, as Bawer said, ‘as if the march’s organisers were out to confirm every last stereotype about homosexuals’: I kept comparing the event with the 1963 March on Washington for black civil rights. On that occasion, Martin Luther King, Jr., had given the speech of his lifetime and had imbued not only his followers but every scrupulous American with a sense of the seriousness of his mission and the rightness of his cause. He hadn’t called for revolution or denounced American democracy or shared the podium with stand-up comics . . . On that day in 1963 he gave voice to a vision of racial equality that struck at the conscience of America, bringing out the best in his followers and speaking to the more virtuous instincts of his antagonists.29 And this is another aspect of the gay rights movement that has continued to fester. As another gay writer, Andrew Sullivan, noted in the 1990s, ‘Go to any march for gay rights and you will see the impossibility of organising it into a coherent lobby: such attempts are always undermined by irony, or exhibitionism, or irresponsibility.’30 At almost any demonstration...

Amid all the talk of ‘equality’ there isn’t anything like certainty that most gays actually want to be completely equal. Many would appear to want to be precisely equal but with a little gay bonus. When the American TV celebrity Ellen DeGeneres came out as lesbian in 1997 she took a considerable risk. The fact that it was a risk which paid off and significantly increased lesbian visibility made her an object of respect. But is it the remaining social capital accrued from that act or some type of lesbian advantage which allows her a kind of latitude that no straight man would be allowed? Such as the game ‘Who’d you rather’, where Ellen invites guests on her show (male and female) to look at pictures of two famous people at a time and say ‘Who’d you rather’. 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. Late in October, the month that Harvey Weinstein fell from grace, she posted to social media a picture of herself with Katy Perry. The pop star was wearing a noticeably figure-hugging dress which displayed her breasts to great effect. The photo showed DeGeneres with one arm around Perry, at eye-level with her breasts and ogling them with her mouth open. ‘Happy birthday Katy Perry!’ read the accompanying message on DeGeneres’s official Twitter account. ‘It’s time to bring out the big balloons!’32...

Any student wondering whether the world really works like this can be instantly presented with the library of intimidating evidence that the gobbledygook he is failing to comprehend is his fault and not the fault of the writer of the gobbledygook. 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. The claims made from the social sciences in recent years have become so unmoored from reality that when their walls have been assailed by genuine intruders it turns out that they have no defences to either detect or repel them. One of the most beautiful things to happen in recent years was ‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’. This was an academic paper published in 2017 which proposed that: The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.14 The claim was peer-reviewed and published in an academic journal called Cogent Social Sciences. The only problem was that it was a hoax carried out by two academics – Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay – who had immer...

It is a similar story in the US. Asked in 2013 whether men and women should be ‘social, political and economic equals’, the vast majority of Americans (82 per cent) said ‘yes’. But when asked whether they identified themselves as ‘feminists’ there was a recognizable fall-off. Only 23 per cent of women and 16 per cent of men in the US identified themselves as ‘feminists’. A clear majority (63 per cent) said that they were neither feminist nor anti-feminist.39 Whatever the cause may be, it isn’t wholly clear how men are supposed to react to this. The likelihood of reprogramming the natural instincts of all men and all women is a remote one. For three years between 2014 and 2017 academics in the UK carried out a study about the images of men that women found attractive. The results, published in Feminist Media Studies, discovered a disturbing trend. Newsweek summed up the shocking findings in a headline, ‘Men with muscles and money are more attractive to straight women and gay men – showing gender roles aren’t progressing.’40 Indeed. ‘Progress’ will only be achieved when women find men attractive who they don’t think are attractive. What could be unachievable in that?

The racial equivalent of fourth-wave feminism came in the development of the growth of ‘whiteness studies’ – a discipline that is now taught at all of the Ivy League universities in the US, and at universities from England to Australia. This offshoot of critical race theory now sees the University of Wisconsin in Madison providing a course called ‘The Problem of Whiteness’, while at Melbourne University in Australia academics have pushed for ‘whiteness studies’ to be made a compulsory part of training in completely unconnected fields. Anyone who has been force-fed their intersectionality will recognize the argument in an instant.

the film Black Panther was released. In the run-up there had been a lot of comment about the predominantly black cast and the opportunity for the film to be a moment of hope for black Americans and others. A lot appeared to be riding on the critical and commercial success of the film. A senior editor called Emily Lakdawalla at something called The Planetary Society asked Twitter to help her with what was clearly a sincere question. When would be the appropriate moment for a white woman such as herself to go to see Black Panther? Obviously the opening weekend was inappropriate, but when could she go? The 42-year-old woman wrote on Twitter: ‘So I carefully did not buy Black Panther tickets for opening weekend because I did not want to be the white person sucking Black joy out of the theater. What’s the appropriate date for me to buy tickets? Is next weekend ok?’21 ‘Sucking Black joy’ has quite a ring to it, suggesting that white people are not just monsters and racists, but vaguely vampiric to boot.

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.

A concern which many people stifle in public arises precisely from this concern about irreversibility. News of an increase in the number of children claiming to be gender-dysphoric, and the growing evidence of a ‘cluster effect’ when such claims begin to be made (that is, that once a number of children in a school claim to be in the wrong body similar claims expand exponentially), means that parents and others are not wrong to be wondering and worrying about where this is all leading.

He began to wonder whether the answer to some of his questions didn’t lie in psychology rather than surgery. Specifically he began to look at ‘what I need to do to be content with my body, not change my body’. Of all the consultants he had spoken to, none had engaged him in questions like these. ‘I was never encouraged to look into it too deeply.’

But this spirit of accusation, claim and grudge has spread with a swiftness that is remarkable. And it has not only to do with the arrival of new technologies, even though we are only one decade into the era of the smartphone and Twitter. Even before this, something had been going wrong in the language of human rights and the practice of liberalism. It is as though the enquiring aspect of liberalism was at some stage replaced with a liberal dogmatism: a dogmatism that insists questions are settled which are unsettled, that matters are known which are unknown and that we have a very good idea of how to structure a society along inadequately argued lines.

The claims of gender experts about those who are pop tarts in the wrong packaging may themselves be the ones whose packet-reading abilities are all wrong. It has been estimated that roughly 80 per cent of children diagnosed with what is now called gender dysphoria will find that this problem resolves itself during puberty. That is, they will come to feel at ease with the biological sex they were identified as being at birth. A majority of these children will grow up to become gay or lesbian as adults.2

What if People aren’t oppressed? Perhaps instead of seeking out oppression and seeing oppression everywhere, we could start to exit the maze by noting the various ‘victim groups’ that aren’t oppressed or are even advantaged. For instance, studies have shown that gay men and lesbian women consistently earn more on average than their heterosexual counterparts.21 There are a variety of possible reasons, not least the fact that most of them won’t have children and can put in the extra hours at the office which benefits both them and their employer. Is this a gay advantage? At what stage can heterosexuals claim that they are unfairly disadvantaged in the workplace? Should there be a ‘stepping back’ by gay people to allow their straight contemporaries a better run at work opportunities?

Because the most extreme claims keep getting heard, there is a tendency for people to believe them and their worst-case scenarios. For example, a poll carried out in 2018 for Sky found that most British people (seven in ten) believed that women are paid less than men for performing exactly the same job. The ‘gender pay gap’ that does exist is between average earnings across a lifespan, taking into account differences in career, child-rearing and lifestyle choices made by men and women. But ‘the pay gap’ has become such a staple of discussion on the news and on social media that most people have interpreted it as evidence of a gap that does not exist as they have been led to believe it does. It has been illegal to pay women less for performing the same task as a man since 1970 in the UK, and since 1963 in the US. Just one result of this confusion is that even though seven in ten people in the poll thought women were paid less than men for performing precisely the same job, almost exactly the same percentage of the public (67 per cent) thought that feminism had either gone too far or as far as it should go.23 This finding might epitomize the confusion of our time. We see oppression where it doesn’t exist and have no idea how to respond to it.