The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

Indeed, it is one curiosity of academia in recent decades that it has found almost nothing it does not wish to deconstruct, apart from itself.

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

It is in the European languages that these strange results come up. And it is in English that the results are most pointedly, clearly, in-your-face just not what you asked for.

Or perhaps he was reduced to a weeping wreck because he was beginning to feel that there was absolutely nothing he could say that his colleague would not end up interpreting as an act of racism.

Thiel is no longer gay once he endorses Trump. And Kanye West is no longer black when he does the same thing. This suggests that ‘black’ isn’t a skin colour, or a race – or at least not those things alone. It suggests that ‘black’ – like gay – is in fact a political ideology. This presumption goes so deep – and is so rarely mentioned – that it is generally simply assumed.

But it is a curiosity of the age that, after the situation appears at the very least to be better than it ever was, it is presented as though it has never been worse.

To view the past with some degree of forgiveness is among other things an early request to be forgiven – or at least understood – in turn. Because not everything we are doing or intend to do now will necessarily survive this whirlwind of retribution and judgement. Can such an attitude of forgiveness be applied to the personal as well as the historical? To the people going through history with us?

One of the ways to distance ourselves from the madnesses of our times is to retain an interest in politics but not to rely on it as a source of meaning.

Using ourselves up on identity politics, social justice (in this manifestation) and intersectionality is a waste of a life.