The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

We are going through a great crowd derangement. In public and in private, both online and off, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and simply unpleasant. The daily news cycle is filled with the consequences. Yet while we see the symptoms everywhere, we do not see the causes. Various explanations have been given. These tend to suggest that any and all madnesses are the consequence of a Presidential election, or a referendum. But none of these explanations gets to the root of what is happening. For far beneath these day-to-day events are much greater movements and much bigger events. It is time we began to confront the true causes of what is going wrong. Even the origin of this condition is rarely acknowledged. 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. An era which defined itself, and was defined, by its suspicion towards all grand narratives.1 However, as all schoolchildren learn, nature abhors a vacuu...

Yet although we are being aggravated by a tech world which is running faster than our legs are able to carry us to keep up with it, these wars are not being fought aimlessly. They are consistently being fought in a particular direction. And that direction has a purpose that is vast. The purpose – unknowing in some people, deliberate in others – is to embed a new metaphysics into our societies: a new religion, if you will.

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.

‘Identity politics’, meanwhile, has become the place where social justice finds its caucuses. It atomizes society into different interest groups according to sex (or gender), race, sexual preference and more. It presumes that such characteristics are the main, or only, relevant attributes of their holders and that they bring with them some added bonus. For example (as the American writer Coleman Hughes has put it), the assumption that there is ‘a heightened moral knowledge’ that comes with being black or female or gay.

The least attractive-sounding of this trinity is the concept of ‘intersectionality’. This is the invitation to spend the rest of our lives attempting to work out each and every identity and vulnerability claim in ourselves and others and then organize along whichever system of justice emerges from the perpetually moving hierarchy which we uncover. It is a system that is not just unworkable but dementing, making demands that are impossible towards ends that are unachievable. But today intersectionality has broken out from the social science departments of the liberal arts colleges from which it originated. It is now taken seriously by a generation of young people and – as we shall see – has become embedded via employment law (specifically through a ‘commitment to diversity’) in all the major corporations and governments.

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.

With each of these issues an increasing number of people, having the law on their side, pretend that both their issue and indeed all these issues are shut down and agreed upon. The case is very much otherwise. The nature of what is meant to be agreed upon cannot in fact be agreed upon. Each of these issues is infinitely more complex and unstable than our societies are currently willing to admit. Which is why, put together as the foundation blocks of a new morality and metaphysics, they form the basis for a general madness.

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

Specifically, about the story of Shunsuke Nakamura who recently used a morning meeting with fellow employees at his insurance company to come out as gay. This in a country where attitudes towards homosexuality have tended to be (as one professor at a Tokyo university is quoted as saying in the piece) ‘indifference rather than hate’. So The New York Times had chosen to splash a story over two pages, as their lead Business feature, about how a man had come out in a company with no negative consequences in a country that had no special problem with gays. Ordinarily it would have to be an exceptionally quiet day in the markets for such a story to be the most important story of the day in ‘Business’.

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.

In searches for internet pornography Stephens-Davidowitz comes closer to reaching a figure that includes people who are not so open about their sexuality. One striking thing about these figures is that they are fairly consistent across states in the 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.

Now that gay marriage exists should gay couples be expected to be monogamous just as heterosexual couples are expected to be? If they do not have children to bind them together does it make sense to expect two men or two women who meet in their early twenties to get married and then have sex solely with each other for the next six decades or more? Will they want to? If not, what are the social consequences? There must be consequences after all, mustn’t there? Among the first couples to get married in the US was one who immediately admitted to an interviewer that they were in an open relationship. What are other people – including heterosexuals – to think of gay marriage in such a situation? The question rumbles on, entirely unremarked upon.

If the emotional aim of intercourse is a total knowing of the other, gay sex may be, in its way, perfect, because in it, a total knowledge of the other’s experience is, finally, possible. But since the object of that knowledge is already wholly known to each of the parties, the act is also, in a way, redundant.

Even when it does not identify itself as such, the Marxist and post-Marxist trend on the political left can always be recognized by the set of thinkers whom it cites and reveres, and whose theories it tries to apply to any and all disciplines and walks of life. From Michel Foucault these thinkers absorbed their idea of society not as an infinitely complex system of trust and traditions that have evolved over time, but always in the unforgiving light cast when everything is viewed solely through the prism of ‘power’. Viewing all human interactions in this light distorts, rather than clarifies, presenting a dishonest interpretation of our lives. Of course power exists as a force in the world, but so do charity, forgiveness and love. If you were to ask most people what matters in their lives very few would say ‘power’. Not because they haven’t absorbed their Foucault, but because it is perverse to see everything in life through such a monomaniacal lens.

For example, after critical race theory and gender studies had done their work, was it not hard to explain why some things that seemed fixed (especially sex and race) were in fact social constructs whereas other things that may have seemed more fluid (not least sexuality) had become viewed as completely fixed? If these questions did detain anybody, they did not detain them for long. 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.

Their ideological children in identity politics and intersectionality seem content to inhabit an ideological space littered with contradiction, absurdity and hypocrisy. For example, one of the foundational notions of women’s studies and feminist studies was that victims of sexual abuse should be believed. Discussion of rape, abuse, domestic violence and inappropriately wielded power relations lay at the basis of all women’s and feminist studies. Yet when a student of Avital Ronell of New York University filed a Title IX complaint against her in 2017, accusing her of sexual harassment, the alleged harasser found Ronell’s academic colleagues coming out in support for her. Along with Slavoj Žižek and others, Judith Butler was among the signatories to a letter condemning the investigation of Ronell, testifying to her own character (‘the grace, the keen wit’) and attempting the equivalent of a drive-by shooting against the reputation of her male accuser. Specifically they demanded that Ronell ‘be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation’.10 All of which suggested that allegations of abuse are indeed always to be taken seriously, unless the victim is a man or the accused is a professor of feminist literary theory.

For the purpose of large sections of academia had ceased to be the exploration, discovery or dissemination of truth. The purpose had instead become the creation, nurture and propagandization of a particular, and peculiar, brand of politics. The purpose was not academia, but activism.

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.

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. So long as the pyramid of oppression is believed in and propagated to others, almost anything can find its way into the canon of unreadable and largely uncited academic work.

One reason why anybody might be confused by the messages being pumped all around the world by the entertainment industry is that it is itself highly confused about what is going on. Only a couple of decades ago there was still some awareness of the complexity of male–female relations. There is a famous scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, released in 1989. At an early stage in the film Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford, is in his classroom teaching basic archaeology to a class full of young women. Most of the class seem to be staring rather dreamily at him, and among them is one of their number who throws Professor Jones off his train of thought because she has written ‘Love’ on one eyelid and ‘You’ on the other. And she keeps blinking at him, slowly and meaningfully so that he can read the words and presumably absorb the intention behind them. There are two memes in this scene that were perfectly familiar until we recently pretended that they weren’t. The first is that the teacher–student relationship in learning can have an undercurrent of sex. The ancient Greeks knew this, though there was then, as there is now, a knowledge that any sexual current must always be resisted. Yet it can be there. And the second theme – more important to our purpose here – is that of the predatory, even vampish younger woman preying on the older, more vulnerable, possibly even helpless male. This was a recognized motif throughout most of history and at least as recently as 1989....

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.

The belief that it is possible to be sexy without being sexualized is just one of the contradictory settlements that we have landed on. But there are plenty of others in the air. For instance, there is the one that simultaneously insists that women are in every meaningful way exactly the same as men, possessing the same traits and competencies and able to challenge them on the same turf at any time. Yet simultaneously, magically, they are better than men. Or better in specific ways. All this seems perfectly capable of being held in the same head – contradictory though it all is. So that the current accepted way of regarding women is: the same as men, but different where it’s useful or flattering.

Among other types of power that women wield almost exclusively, the most obvious is this. That women – not all women, but many women – have an ability that men do not. This is the ability to drive members of the opposite sex mad. To derange them. Not just to destroy them but to make them destroy themselves. It is a type of power which allows a young woman in her late teens or twenties to take a man with everything in the world, at the height of his achievements, torment him, make him behave like a fool and wreck his life utterly for just a few moments of almost nothing.

Not least among the oddities of this discussion whenever it arises – and this is very common today – is the fact that privilege is an unbelievably hard thing to define. It is also very nearly impossible to quantify. One person may have ‘privilege’ from inheriting money. For another person this same privilege may be a curse, giving them too much too early and disincentivizing them from making their way in the world. Is a person with inherited wealth but who has a natural disability more privileged or less privileged than a person without any inherited wealth who is able-bodied? Who can work this out? Who would we trust to work it out?

But since the fourth millennium BCE, French informs her readers, men began to construct ‘the patriarchy’, a system she defines as ‘male supremacy backed by force’. For women ‘it has been downhill ever since’. We are informed that women were ‘probably’ the first slaves and have since then been ‘increasingly disempowered, degraded and subjugated’. For the last four centuries, French says, this has got completely out of control, with men (‘mainly in the West’) attempting to ‘tighten their control of nature and those associated with nature – people of color and women’.

One of the previous popular hashtags used on Twitter by feminists was ‘Kill All Men’. Fortunately the journalist and commentator Ezra Klein was available at Vox to decode this one. Whilst conceding that he had not enjoyed seeing the hashtag ‘Kill All Men’ or the moment when this phrase leaked out from the virtual world into the real one, the words did not mean what they appeared to mean. As Klein explained, when people he knew and ‘even love[d]’ began to use the term in casual conversation, he at first recoiled and felt defensive. But he explained that he came to realize ‘that wasn’t what they were saying’ (italics in original). He realized that not only did they not want to kill him or kill any men. In fact it was better than that. ‘They didn’t hate me, and they didn’t hate men.’ Klein’s discovery was that ‘Kill All Men’ was merely ‘another way of saying “it would be nice if the world sucked less for women”’. A hell of a way to say it, but Klein went on, ‘It was an expression of frustration with pervasive sexism.’

It did so, again, with no suggestion that any such problem is mirrored on the female side. For instance, does a form of ‘toxic femininity’ exist? If so, what is it and how can it be permanently excised from women? Nor is there any sense before the concept of ‘toxic masculinity’ is embedded of whether or how it might work even on its own terms. For instance, if competitiveness is indeed an especially male trait – as the APA would appear to be suggesting – when is that competitiveness toxic or harmful, and when is it useful? Might a male athlete be allowed to use his competitive instincts on the racetrack? If so how can he be helped to ensure that off the track he is as docile as possible? Might a man facing inoperable cancer with stoicism be criticized for doing so, and helped out of this harmful position into a situation in which he demonstrates less stoicism?

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 knowledge. All the rage – including the wild, destructive misandry, the double-think and the self-delusion – stem from this fact: that we are being not just asked, but expected, to radically alter our lives and societies on the basis of claims that our instincts all tell us cannot possibly be true.

Among the many things that was not foreseen but can now be recognized is that the internet, and social media in particular, have eradicated the space that used to exist between public and private language. Social media turns out to be a superlative way to embed new dogmas and crush contrary opinion just when you needed to listen to them most.

If there was a genuine chance of diminishing racism, sexism or anti-gay sentiment, who would not wish to seize it with every tool and engine at their disposal? 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.

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.

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.

A headline might describe someone famous being ‘lambasted’ for something they have said only for it to turn out – when reading down the story – that the ‘lambasting’ came from a couple of members of the public who the journalist has spotted on Twitter. It is the reason why politicians look so terrified when anyone tries to lead them on to any rocky terrain.

Here is a magnificent spur for madness. If Benedict Cumberbatch and Sarah Jeong can both end up in ‘race rows’ it would ordinarily mean that they would have been guilty of similar provocations. And yet they were not. Cumberbatch got into a ‘race row’ because he used an outmoded term. Jeong got into a race row because over a period of years she had repeatedly used the same racial epithets in a derogatory way, and appeared to have enjoyed doing so. What is worse is that motive can be assigned without reference to the severity of the words. Whereas a term that one person may use unwittingly can in some cases be levelled against them (Cumberbatch), in other cases extreme terms which people are using knowingly do not in fact count as being the words they have used. This is the explanation that Klein, El-Wardany and others have given. Whereas some people unwittingly use the wrong term and can be castigated for it, other people use terms that are so wrong and so extreme and yet no especial castigation is due. Because of something.

In March 2019 Professor Robin DiAngelo of the University of Washington gave a speech at Boston University. 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.

The second thing that is important about stories like those of Norton, Jeong and others is the question that the internet age has still not begun to contend with: how, if ever, is our age able to forgive? Since everybody errs in the course of their life there must be – in any healthy person or society – some capacity to be forgiven. Part of forgiveness is the ability to forget. And yet the internet will never forget. Everything can always be summoned up afresh by new people. A future employer will always see Norton’s use of the ‘n’ word and wonder, context aside, whether this is the sort of person they would really want to hire. The controversial tweets of Norton and Jeong have been erased from their Twitter pages, but they have been captured for posterity by multiple other users. To see them online today can prompt a reaction as great as though they appeared not a few years ago, or a decade ago, but yesterday or today.

Before the advent of the internet, people’s mistakes could be remembered within their communities or circles. Then being able to start a new life somewhere else in the world was at least a possibility. Today, people may be followed by their doppelgänger wherever they go in the world. And even after death the excavation and tomb-raiding will go on, not in a spirit of enquiry or forgiveness but in one of retribution and vengeance. 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.

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.

What makes all of this even more complex is the fact that built into the actions of many trans people is something that surely demonstrates (as in the case of Jan Morris) that their desire to be in the body of the opposite sex surely cannot be a mere fantasy or kink. After all, it is hard to think of anything which demands more commitment from a person than the decision to have irreversible surgery that permanently transforms their body. Any man willing to have his penis cut off or flayed and then turned inside out can hardly be said to be taking matters lightly. Such a procedure might be considered the precise opposite of a hobby or lifestyle choice. Yet even this does not ‘prove’ that trans is a hardware issue. For there are almost no extremes that some people will not go to in order to satisfy something they believe to be true. The question becomes about whether what one person or even a lot of people believe to be true about themselves has to be accepted as true by other people or not.

The swiftness and near-completeness of the stampede in one direction may have had several causes. One (exemplified in the Time magazine cover) was the fear, suspicion or hope that trans is the new gay, women’s or civil rights and that anybody caught on the wrong side of the trans fence in this decade will look back as regretfully – and be looked upon as negatively – as society looks back on those who argued against those movements. And in some sense the similarity is there. If there is nothing genetically different about gay people then the only thing that signifies a difference is their behaviour. Gay people are gay when they say they are and when they do the things that show them to be gay. Likewise, perhaps, people are trans when they say they are, and no outward sign – or any biological signifier – need be there in the trans case any more than it is expected (or demanded) in the case of being gay. But there is one very significant difference. If a gay woman falls in love with a man or a gay man suddenly falls in love with a woman, or a straight man or woman suddenly falls in love with a member of their own sex, all of their existing biological hardware is still in place. A gay person who goes straight or a straight person who goes gay is doing nothing that is permanent or irreversible. Whereas the end-point of trans advocates is irreversible and life-altering. People expressing concern or urging caution in regard to transsexualism may not be ‘denying the existence of t...

The women who have tripped on the trans tripwire over recent years have a number of things in common, but one is that they have all been at the forefront of every women’s issue. And this makes perfect sense. 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.

Amid the no-platforming, threats and silencing, one question which is rarely asked is why feminists of a particular tradition should not object to elements – at least – of the emerging trans argument. The more women get chased away for treading on this terrain the clearer the point of contention becomes. Feminists like Bindel, Greer and Burchill come from the schools of feminism which remain concerned with matters of women’s reproductive rights, the rights of women to escape violent and abusive relationships and much more. They are also women who believed in breaking down the stereotypes over what a woman should be or could be. Perhaps the most obvious point of non-overlap with the trans movement is that in many ways trans does not challenge social constructs about gender, but reinforces them.