The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

This is the simple fact that we have been living through a period of more than a quarter of a century in which all our grand narratives have collapsed. One by one the narratives we had were refuted, became unpopular to defend or impossible to sustain. The explanations for our existence that used to be provided by religion went first, falling away from the nineteenth century onwards. Then over the last century the secular hopes held out by all political ideologies began to follow in religion’s wake. In the latter part of the twentieth century we entered the postmodern era.

For while racial equality, minority rights and women’s rights are among the best products of liberalism, they make the most destabilizing foundations. Attempting to make them the foundation is like turning a bar stool upside down and then trying to balance on top of it. The products of the system cannot reproduce the stability of the system that produced them. If for no other reason than that each of these issues is a deeply unstable component in itself. We present each as agreed upon and settled. Yet while the endless contradictions, fabrications and fantasies within each are visible to all, identifying them is not just discouraged but literally policed. And so we are asked to agree to things which we cannot believe.

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.

One of the traits of Marxist thinkers has always been that they do not stumble or self-question in the face of contradiction, as anybody aiming at truth might. Marxists have always rushed towards contradiction. The Hegelian dialectic only advances by means of contradiction and therefore all the complexities – one might say absurdities – met along the way are welcomed and almost embraced as though they were helpful, rather than troubling, to the cause. Anybody hoping that intersectionality would dissolve amid its own inherent contradictions cannot have seen the myriad of contradictions a Marxist can hold in their head at any one time.

The spoofs carried out by Boghossian and his colleagues made a number of deadly serious points. Not just that these areas of academic study had become playgrounds for frauds, but that there was absolutely nothing that could not be said, studied or claimed so long as it fitted into the pre-existing theories and presumptions of the relevant fields and utilized its disastrous language. So long as people were willing to claim that we live in a patriarchal society, a ‘rape-culture’, a homophobic, transphobic and racist culture; so long as they indict their own society and scatter in a smattering of admiration for any other society (from an approved list), then almost anything can be said.

The fall-out of this and much else is toxic. Most people are not gay. Men and women have to find some ways of getting along. And yet the societal self-delusion over biological reality is just one in a whole series of such self-delusions that our societies have decided to engage in. 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. Of all the things that are deranging our societies, everything to do with the sexes – and particularly relations between the sexes – are perhaps the most deranging of all. Because the facts are there all the time, in front of our eyes. It is just that we are not meant to notice them, or if we notice them we are expected to stay silent.

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.

And yet privilege as an issue is repeatedly raised because it is assumed to be something that other people have.

So here is a whole area which has been insufficiently studied but has already been rolled out across government and business. Will its effects be benign, its only costs being the huge expense in recruiting experts to guide people in this inexpert discipline? Or will attempts to presume to rewire the brains of every single government employee and everybody in business have repercussions which nobody has yet dared to imagine? Who knows. But if implicit-bias training looks like a half worked-out theory turned into a fully worked-out business plan, the dogma under which it sits is a grade even beyond that.

Until the last decade or so, sex (or gender) and chromosomes were recognized to be among the most fundamental hardware issues in our species. Whether we were born as a man or a woman was one of the main, unchangeable hardware issues of our lives. Having accepted this hardware we then all found ways – both men and women – to learn how to operate the relevant aspects of our lives. So absolutely everything not just within the sexes but between them became scrambled when the argument became entrenched that this most fundamental hardware issue of all was in fact a matter of software. The claim was made, and a couple of decades later it was embedded and suddenly everybody was meant to believe that sex was not biologically fixed but merely a matter of ‘reiterated social performances’. The claim put a bomb under the feminist cause with completely predictable consequences for another problem we’ll come to with ‘trans’. It left feminism with almost no defences against men arguing that they could become women. But the whole attempt to turn hardware into software has caused – and is continuing to cause – more pain than almost any other issue for men and women alike. It is at the foundation of the current madness. For it asks us all to believe that women are different from the beings they have always been. It suggests that everything women and men saw – and knew – until yesterday was a mirage and that our inherited knowledge about our differences (and how to get along) is all invalid k...

The one overwhelming problem with this attitude is that it sacrifices truth in the pursuit of a political goal. Indeed, it decides that truth is part of the problem – a hurdle that must be got over. So where diversity and representation are found to have been inadequate in the past, this can be solved most easily by changing the past. Some users of the world’s most popular search engine will have noticed some of this. Some may have noticed all of it. But for most people on a day-to-day level, whether using Google, Twitter or any of the other big tech products, there may simply be a sense that something strange is happening: that they are being given things they didn’t ask for, in line with a project they didn’t sign up for, in pursuit of a goal they may not want.

As with feminism, after black studies had reached something like the point of victory, so a newly fervent rhetoric and set of ideas entered the discipline just as racial equality was looking better than ever. Just as a popular strand of feminism turned from celebrating women to vilifying men, so a portion of black studies started attacking people who were not black. A discipline intended to de-stigmatize began to re-stigmatize.

The aim of ‘whiteness studies’, as Applebaum proudly states, is that it is ‘committed to disrupting racism by problematizing whiteness’. This is to be done ‘as a corrective’. So whereas every other field of race studies is performed in a spirit of celebration the aim of this one must be to ‘problematize’ hundreds and hundreds of millions of people.

By 2018 it seemed as though whether you looked forward or backward, in tragedy or in comedy, always the same lens was looked through: the lens of race.

At some point minority political grievances transformed into minority political activism and from there moved into being just politics. Claiming the existence of voting blocs along minority group lines benefits certain politicians looking for voter blocs and it can benefit professional middle men who present themselves as speaking for an entire community in order to gain their own forms of preferment. But this is an exceptionally dangerous juncture, and one that each rights issue in turn has arrived at.

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.

DiAngelo specialises in ‘whiteness studies’ and has written a book, White Fragility. Since DiAngelo is herself white she has to do a certain amount of self-abasement to earn the trust of her audiences. She does so by assuring them that she is aware that just by standing on a stage and speaking she is ‘reinforcing whiteness and the centrality of the white view’. She asks for forgiveness by stating, for instance, that, ‘I’d like to be a little less white, which means a little less oppressive, oblivious, defensive, ignorant and arrogant.’ 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.

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.

This heaps problem upon problem. Nobody likes recalling the time when gay people were told ‘it’s just a phase’, but what if trans is (even on occasion) just a phase? And what if that phase is realized only too late? These questions are not primarily ‘transphobic’ but rather child-centric, and the attempt to pathologize such concern has made this tripwire far uglier than it needs to be.

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.

Despite the vilification that a particular generation of feminists has received for not getting on the trans train, it is never explained why they should. Their language may be colourful when they attack this target – as when they attack other targets – but the accusations of being hateful, dangerous, encouraging violence and even of not being feminists sidestep the legitimate questions they raise. Why should certain feminists feel entirely fine about men who become women only then to either flaunt their perfect breasts, ape the royal family or take up knitting?

Far more serious is the demand that children be encouraged towards medical intervention over a matter that is so incredibly unclear – and the age at which such children will be encouraged in this way will only keep going down.

With each of the issues highlighted in this book the aim of the social justice campaigners has consistently been to take each one – gay, women, race, trans – that they can present as a rights grievance and make their case at its most inflammatory. Their desire is not to heal but to divide, not to placate but to inflame, not to dampen but to burn.

One way to start might be to ask more regularly and more assiduously, ‘Compared to what?’ When people attempt to sum up our societies today as monstrous, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic patriarchies the question needs to be asked. If this hasn’t worked or isn’t working, what is the system that has worked or does work? To ask this is not to say that elements of our society cannot be improved, or that we should not address injustice and unfairness when we see them. But to talk about our societies in the hostile tone of judge, juror and executioner

demands some questions to be asked of the accuser.