The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

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?

Our public life is now dense with people desperate to man the barricades long after the revolution is over. Either because they mistake the barricades for home, or because they have no other home to go to. In each case a demonstration of virtue demands an overstating of the problem, which then causes an amplification of the problem.

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

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.

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?’

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.2

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 waters and not plunging into them.

After writing the watershed gay drama Queer as Folk in the late 1990s, the screenwriter Russell T. Davies followed this up with another television series called Bob and Rose (2001). It told the story of a gay man who falls in love with a woman. It was provoked, as Davies told the press at the time, by the recognition that gay men who went straight often received more resentment from their circle of friends than a straight man who came out as gay.8 Perhaps that is one reason why the whole direction of traffic is so little addressed.

For the time being, the generations above Millennials – as well as an ongoing majority among them – retain the idea of at least some fixed points of sexual identity. Perhaps not least because knowing where other people stand imposes at least some clarity on relationships and potential relationships. But the fact that all this can change from one fixed identity to another, and from there to fluidity, points to more than a leap around from one dogma to another. It suggests a deep uncertainty about one underlying and rarely mentioned fact, which is that we still don’t have much or any idea as to why some people are gay. After decades of research this is a huge – and potentially destabilizing – question to remain unresolved on an identity question which has arrived at the very forefront of our purported values.

Yet from an acceptance that being gay is not a mental disorder it does not follow that it is a wholly inbuilt and immovable state of being.

But since very few people will be systematically lying into their search engines, the information gleaned on homosexuality from Big Data is considerable. The former Google data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz revealed that about 2.5 per cent of male Facebook users register an interest in members of the same sex.

Big Data is the place that answers most statistical questions about human desires. When people are alone with their search engine of choice, it is very easy to see what they want/desire.

US. For instance, while there are twice as many gay Facebook users in Rhode Island than there are in Mississippi (a fact that can partly be explained by gay migration), internet pornography searches are remarkably consistent. So while around 4.8 per cent of searches for pornography in Mississippi are for gay porn, in Rhode Island the figure is 5.2 per cent. With all the necessary caveats (people looking out of curiosity, for instance) Stephens-Davidowitz comes to the Conclusion that a fair estimate of the gay population in America is around 5 per cent.15

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 against them.

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 are.

The heat which surrounds every aspect of the genetics on this matter is one reason why so little study has been done on other aspects of homosexuality. For instance there has been very little work done on what role, if any, homosexuality might play in evolutionary terms.

What is interesting is that studies of what evolutionary role homosexuality may or may not play, what evolutionary justification there might be for homosexuality and what evolutionary justification there might therefore be for some suspicion of homosexuality have evaporated in respectable biological debate.

Although his disciples seem to have decided otherwise – and although Foucault didn’t go into this in depth – it would seem that even Foucault noticed what an unstable thing sex or even sexuality is to base an identity on.

But it is worth bearing these internal frictions and contradictions in mind when people talk about the LGBT community, or try to co-opt it for any political purpose. It barely exists even within each letter of its constituent parts. And each has little in common with the others. Before decriminalization of homosexuality in the 1960s things were arguably slightly different. But the L’s don’t need the G’s today, and the G’s don’t much care for the L’s and almost everybody can be united in suspicion of the B’s. And there is tremendous dispute over whether the T’s are the same thing as everybody else or an insult to them. Still nobody is any the wiser about where any or all of this comes from. And yet it remains the means by which people are willing to identify vast swathes of the population, and build one of the defining justifications and bases for the liberal society.

It comes down to the unresolved question of whether gays are exactly like everybody else other than in one single characteristic. Or whether that single characteristic makes gays utterly unlike the rest of society. It is a divide which falls into two broad camps.

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.

Because although by then there was considerable agreement that men could not objectify women, it appeared that an exemption clause existed for celebrity lesbians.

In fact the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June 2016 had been carried out by a young Muslim who swore allegiance to Islamic State (ISIS). Yet this detail didn’t detain Advocate or the Gay Pride march in New York later the same month. On that occasion the parade led with a huge rainbow banner emblazoned with the words ‘Republican Hate Kills!’, clearly forgetting that Omar Mateen had not been a member of the Republican Party.

At its outset this new ideology was not taken especially seriously by its opponents. Some of its claims seemed so laughable, and its inherent contradictions so clear, that coherent criticism was almost absent. This was a mistake. It is an ideology with very clear ideological precursors, but still an ideology that – whatever else may be said for it – provides a lens for understanding the world and a purpose for an individual’s actions and life within the world.

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. Again in this they were following a strain which went right back to Marx through Nikolai Bukharin, Georgi Plekhanov and the Second International. In all of these cases claims were presented as though they were scientific when they were, in fact, not even politics, but more like magic. This was make-believe, masquerading as science.

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.

Over several pages he listed just some of the biological differences that exist between men and women, such as the fact that while men have ‘larger brains with more neurons (even correcting for body size)’, women ‘have a higher percentage of gray matter’ and that many of the psychological differences between the sexes are exactly what an evolutionary biologist would predict (males being larger than females on average because of an evolutionary history rife with violent competition for mates).1 And treading close to what was soon to be a whole other issue, he also noted the divergence in development between the brains of boys and girls and the effects on the brain of testosterone and androgens. It is a stimulating scientific riposte to the people claiming that biological differences between the sexes do not exist.

As a result, since Pinker wrote The Blank Slate our societies have doubled-down on the delusion that biological difference – including aptitude differences – can be pushed away, denied or ignored. A similar process has occurred in social differences.

Worse is that we have begun trying to reorder our societies not in line with facts we know from science but based on political falsehoods pushed by activists in the social sciences.

suit. And moments like this are interesting. Because if somebody says that opening this discussion up does not mean women shouldn’t dress how they like, and yet still a lot of people hear (or claim to hear) that this is exactly what Peterson is saying, and what’s more that he is excusing sexual assault, then something is clearly going badly wrong. 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.

How are they to reconcile the information that women must always be believed with the fact that there are entire industries set up to help women fool men? Or – to put the most positive spin on it – to entice them. After all, what are all those summer advertising campaigns about that invite women to ‘turn heads this summer’? Whose heads are they being invited to turn? Any and all passing women, hoping to purchase, say, the same dress or bikini? Or men?

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.

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 societies as we can possibly manage.

This was not a point which was received warmly in the room. This was very definitely not what attendees wanted to hear.

colleague. If the etiquette of the workplace is so easy to work out it is surprising that it is so complex.

Saying ‘Kill All Men’ might have been an over-zealous way to call for female suffrage at a time when women did not have the vote. First-wave feminists campaigning for equality by saying ‘Kill All Men’ would have been a deranged way to try to get people on their side. But a century later it appeared to have become normal and indeed acceptable for women born with all the rights their forebears had fought for to react with more violent language than had been employed when the stakes were infinitely higher.

Difficult and contentious issues demand a great amount of thought. And a great amount of thought often necessitates trying things out (including making inevitable errors). Yet to think aloud on the issues which are most controversial has become such a high risk that on a simple risk/reward ratio there is almost no point in anyone taking it.

It was Dr King’s great central moral insight that in the future about which he dreamed his children should ‘one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character’. Although many people have attempted to live up to that hope and many have succeeded, in recent years an insidious current has developed that has chosen to reject Dr King’s dream, and insist that content of character is nothing compared to the colour of someone’s skin. It has decided that skin colour is everything.

Almost any student of history is familiar with the truth summed up in the opening line of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ It requires a level of naivety to imagine that a piece from a magazine published in 1916 would meet the precise social criteria of 2018. In 1916 women in Britain and America did not have the right to vote, you could still be sentenced to hard labour in prison for being gay, and an entire generation of young men were being gassed, blown-up, shot at and shelled in the fields of Flanders and France. Things were different then.

And so the fall-back position for refusing to engage with the evidence on IQ differentials is to say that even if the facts are there, and even if they are very clear, it is morally suspicious to want to look into them and that they in any case present us with ethical and moral problems so vast and complex that there is nothing at all that can be done with them.

To her audience in Boston she also explained how white people who see people as individuals rather than by their skin colour are in fact ‘dangerous’.70 Meaning that it took only half a century for Martin Luther King’s vision to be exactly inverted.

Indeed, 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 with joining in the punishment of a transgressor. Even (perhaps especially) if their transgression is for a sin we ourselves have committed.

Nobody would defend Young’s tweets about women’s breasts. Plenty of people would question the judgement of anyone tweeting out self-confessedly ‘sophomoric’ humour as an adult.11 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? It is time we at least tried.

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.

Trans has – just in recent decades – been used to describe a range of individuals, from people who occasionally dress as a member of the opposite sex to those who have undergone full-blown gender-reassignment surgery. And just one early confusion about all of this is that some aspects of trans are far more familiar than others.

And in the early 1960s, long before the revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini published a ruling on the permissibility of sex-change operations. Indeed, since the 1979 revolution the Iranian state has disturbingly as a consequence become a leader in the region in sex-realignment surgery, in large part because undergoing it is one of the only ways in which people who are found to be gay can avoid punishments worse even than unwanted surgery.

Just one of the strange things about all of this, from the audience reaction at the USPATH conference, is that Olson-Kennedy is not speaking at a meeting of ‘professionals’ but to a congregation. A fixed set of ideas are being discussed. A fixed set of virtues are being celebrated. And a fixed set of propositions are being set up, laughed at and dismissed. The audience does not sit, listen and then ask questions as at an academic or professional conference. They cheer, laugh, snort and applaud in a manner which more than anything else resembles a Christian revival meeting.

Perhaps it is just a version of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s dictum on human rights: that claims of human rights violations happen in exactly inverse proportion to the numbers of human rights violations in a country. You do not hear of such violations in unfree countries. Only a very free society would permit – and even encourage – such endless claims about its own iniquities.

I do not especially like (Dr) Michael Davidson’s ideas about being gay, but if I decided that he and his ‘Voices of the Silenced’ should be viewed only in the most negative possible light then I would not merely have no need to listen to him. I would not want to live in the same society as him. Yet we do live in the same society, and we have to find some way to get along together. It is the only option we have because otherwise, if we have come to the Conclusion that talking and listening respectfully are futile, the only tool left for us is violence.

If two people are in disagreement about something important, they may disagree as amicably as they like if it is just a matter of getting to the truth or the most amenable option. But if one party finds their whole purpose in life to reside in some aspect of that disagreement, then the chances of amicability fade fast and the likelihood of reaching any truth recedes.