The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

The film Voices of the Silenced itself is less coherent than might have been hoped. The main point (as explained by Davidson himself in the film’s opening) is that ‘Ancient ideologies and modern ideologies are coming together.’ It is never quite clear how, and the whole thing feels like two different films awkwardly melded together at a late stage in the editing process. The first film is about the ancient world, with very scary apocalyptic images. The second film consists of some very specific testimony from doctors and patients talking about being gay and then not being gay any more. As well as Dr Davidson there is a Dr Stephen Baskerville and an expert from Texas named (I cannot stifle an audible laugh) David Pickup. So each time there

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.2 Abiding by Mill’s principles would appear to be hard for many people today. Harder, indeed, than simply changing dogmas. 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. As it happens, confused as their film-making was, and disagreeable though much of their world view might be, Davidson and his colleagues are onto something around the nature of sexual attraction. These are deep and toxic waters. But there is no point in identifying such

Perhaps that is one reason why the whole direction of traffic is so little addressed. For many gay men and women the idea that sexuality is fluid and that what goes one way may go another (what goes up must come down) is an attack on their person. And this isn’t a fear without basis. Plenty of gay people will hear in the suggestion some echo of those dread words ‘It’s only a phase.’ People who are gay find this suggestion enormously offensive, as well as destabilizing in their relationships with parents, family and others. So since the phrase ‘It’s only a phase’ is offensive for some people, the idea that it might actually be true for some people is unsayable.

Some sensitivity over this whole subject is naturally understandable. After all, it was only in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association decided that there was no scientific evidence for continuing to treat homosexuality as a disorder. That year they removed it from the APA’s glossary of mental disorders (a rare example for that ever-growing tome of something being taken out). The World Health Organization performed the same task in 1992. None of which is very long ago, and a good reason why there is some remaining suspicion of the language or practice of medicalization or psychiatry making its way into any discussion of homosexuality.

The American Psychological Association is in agreement on this. Its most up-to-date advice on the matter says: There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.

views on the matter. And their views have changed very significantly. In 1977 just over 10 per cent of Americans thought that people were born gay. By 2015 around half of the US population believed this to be the case. Over the same period the number of Americans who agreed that being gay was ‘due to someone’s upbringing and environment’ halved from the 60 per cent who had agreed with that statement in 1977. Not coincidentally the moral attitudes of Americans towards homosexuality changed enormously in the same period. Gallup polls between 2001 and

a learned behaviour to a belief that it is innate. A recognition of how important this was in the case of gays has significant implications for every other rights campaign. For here we can glimpse one of the most significant building blocks of contemporary morality: the fundamental recognition that it is wrong to punish, demean or look down on people for characteristics over which they have no control. This may seem like an obvious building block of morality, but it was not there for much of human history, when people’s unalterable characteristics were very often used

has begun to settle on a morality which roots itself in this dispute and which may be viewed as a hardware versus software question. Hardware is something that people cannot change and so (the reasoning goes) it is something that they should not be judged on. Software, on the other hand, can be changed and may demand judgements – including moral judgements – to be made. Inevitably in such a system there will be a push to make potential software issues into hardware issues, not least in order to garner more sympathy for people who may in fact have software, rather than hardware, issues. For instance, if a person is an alcoholic or a drug addict then people may regard them as having a failing over which they should be able to exercise some control. If they fail then it is a consequence of their own weakness, bad decision-making or

they cannot help their behaviour then they are not to be blamed but rather to be regarded as victims of circumstance and to be understood as such. An unrelenting drunk may be a pain to everybody around them, but if he is said to have been born with a proclivity towards alcoholism – or better still to have an ‘alcoholic gene’ – he may be viewed in a very different light. Instead of some degree of criticism he may be regarded with varying degrees of sympathy. Were his alcoholism a learned behaviour then he may be regarded as weak or even bad. In general we modern people are more sympathetic to behaviour which cannot be changed, but we can still be critical or questioning of a lifestyle which we think is a matter of choice – especially if the behaviour is inconvenient for anyone else. Homosexuality could (from a reproductive angle, among others) be said to be inconvenient to society, and the question of what it actually is therefore presents a perfectly legitimate question for society to be engaged with. The single factor that has most clearly helped to change public opinion about homosexuality in the West has been the decision that homosexuality is in fact a ‘hardware’ rather than a ‘software’ issue. Some people – mainly religious conservatives – continue to try to smuggle in their contrary view on this matter. For instance some of them still like to describe homosexuality as a ‘lifestyle choice’ – a phrase insinuating that homosexuals have chosen their own programming.

despite the resulting hopes and headlines. There have been a number of similar studies, all of which have proved inconclusive. For the time being the ‘gay gene’ remains elusive. Which is not to say that it won’t be found at some point. Only that the war that goes on around it is telling. 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. So the work goes on – centring on identical male twins, whose sexuality interestingly appears to be identical when they

human beings? And if a ‘gay gene’ was discovered would parents in time be allowed to edit the patterns in their children’s DNA to account for that? What would be the justifications for preventing them doing so?

Avital Ronell of New York University filed a Title IX complaint against her in 2017, accusing

show of sexually stalking her host. The fact that the movie she was promoting was about sexual abuse did not suggest to her that now might not be a good time to do what she did. Right at the start of the interview she climbed onto Colbert’s lap. She sat there throughout. And at one stage she proceeded to give him a full on-the-lips kiss and told him that she knew he fantasized about her. ‘It’s not exactly how I expected this interview to go,’ said the host. Colbert tried to change the subject several times, including to war-protesting. Hanoi Jane could not be diverted. She kept caressing Colbert, kissing his cheek and fondling him. She started talking about premature ejaculation. This went on interminably.

The manner in which marketing addresses women tells us a great deal about what women are actually motivated by when they think men aren’t watching. Consider the endless numbers of advertising campaigns and pieces in women’s magazines dedicated to motifs like ‘Make him drool’. If car advertisements or shaving products aimed at men were pushed with the suggestion that the object, if acquired, would make women drool, it would not just be condemned but might well fail to appeal to men. Google is a hive of assistance in this regard. Typing the words ‘Make him drool’ turns up reams of articles, adverts and online

is a song by Nicki Minaj which perhaps inadvertently sums up the deep confusions of the current settlement. The song is called ‘Anaconda’ and it was released in 2014. Anybody who hasn’t seen the video should join the hundreds of millions of people who have watched it online. To say that Minaj’s video is sexual is like saying that her lyrics are banal. These ones start with ‘My anaconda don’t, my anaconda don’t / My anaconda don’t want

So here is the first conundrum of the current presumption on the position of women as opposed to men in our societies. 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. Nevertheless we have decided to embed precisely such ill-thinking as deep into our

metaphysics are precarious and the presumptions that we are being asked to follow seem subtly wrong, then it is the addition into the mix of the communications revolution that is causing the conditions for a crowd madness. If we are already running in the wrong direction then tech helps us to run there exponentially faster. It is this ingredient that is causing the sensation of the treadmill running faster than our feet can carry us. In 1933 James Thurber published ‘The Day the Dam Broke’, recalling his memories of 12 March 1913 when the whole of his town in Ohio went for a run. Thurber recalled how the rumour began that the dam had broken. Around noon ‘Suddenly somebody began to run. It may be that he had simply remembered, all of a moment, an engagement to meet his wife, for which he was now frightfully late.’ Soon somebody else began to run, ‘perhaps a newsboy in high spirits. Another man, a portly gentleman of affairs, broke into a trot’:

fear was put into words by a little old lady in an electric, or by a traffic cop, or by a small boy: nobody knows who, nor does it now really matter. Two thousand people were abruptly in full flight. ‘Go east!’ was the cry that arose – east away from the river, east to safety. ‘Go east! Go east! Go east!’ As the whole town stampedes to the east nobody stops to consider that the dam is so far away from their town that it could not cause a trickle of water to flow across the High Street. Nor does anybody notice the absence of water. The faster residents, who have put miles of distance between themselves and the town, eventually return home, as does everybody else. As Thurber says: The next day the city went about its business as if nothing had happened, but there was no joking. It was two years or more before you dared treat the breaking of the dam lightly. And even now, twenty years after, there are a few persons . . . who will shut up like a clam if you mention

our societies seem always on that run, and always risking extraordinary shame over not just our own behaviour but the way in which we have treated others. Every day there is a new subject for hate and moral judgement. It might be a group of schoolboys wearing the wrong hats in the wrong place at the wrong time.2 Or it could be anybody else. As the work of Jon Ronson and others on ‘public shaming’ has shown,3 the internet has allowed new forms of activism and bullying in the guise of social activism to become the tenor of the time. The urge to find people who can be accused of ‘wrong-think’ works because it rewards the bully.4 The social media companies encourage it because it is part of their

the technology we create. Consider shoes again. A recent experiment asked people to draw a shoe for the benefit of the computer. Since most people drew some variation of a sneaker, the computer – learning as it went along – did not even recognize a high-heeled shoe as a shoe. This problem is known as ‘interaction bias’. But ‘interaction bias’ is not the only type of bias about which Google are worried. There is also ‘latent bias’. To illustrate this, consider what would happen if you were training a computer to know what a physicist looks like and in order to do so you showed

for ‘European Art’.

men’ the images that come up are all portrait photos of black men. Indeed, it takes more than a dozen rows of images before anybody who isn’t black comes up in the images. By contrast a search for ‘White men’ first throws up an image of David Beckham – who is white – but then the second is of a black model. From there every line of five images has either one or two black men in the line-up. Many of the images of white men are of people convicted of crimes with taglines such as ‘Beware of the average white man’ and ‘White men are bad’. As you begin to go down this rabbit hole the search results become increasingly absurd. Or at least they are absurd if you are expecting to get what you wanted from your search, though you can very soon work out which directions the misleading goes in. If you search on Google Images for ‘Gay couple’, you will get row after row of photos of happy gay couples. They are handsome, gay people. Search for ‘Straight couple’ by contrast and at least one to two images on each line of five images will be of a lesbian couple or a couple of gay men. Within just a couple of rows of images for