The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

‘The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.’ G. K. Chesterton

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.

Having begun to view everything through the new lenses we have been provided with, everything is then weaponized, with consequences which are deranged as well as dementing. It is why The New York Times decides to run a piece by a black author with the title: ‘Can my Children be Friends with White People?’9 And why even a piece about cycling deaths in London written by a woman can be framed through the headline: ‘Roads Designed by Men are Killing Women’.

Rather than showing how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren’t very good at living with each other.

the odd, apparently improvisatory value system of our time.

It is an extension of a well-known problem in liberalism which has been recognized even among those who did once fight a noble fight. It is a tendency identified by the late Australian political philosopher Kenneth Minogue as ‘St George in retirement’ syndrome. After slaying the dragon the brave warrior finds himself stalking the land looking for still more glorious fights.

If we fail, then the direction of travel is already clear. We face not just a future of ever-greater atomization, rage and violence, but a future in which the possibility of a backlash against all rights advances – including the good ones – grows more likely. A future in which racism is responded to with racism, denigration based on gender is responded to with denigration based on gender. At some stage of humiliation there is simply no reason for majority groups not to play games back that have worked so well on themselves.

While Downs conceded that Thiel is ‘a man who has sex with other men’, he questioned whether he was in any other way actually ‘gay’.‘That question might seem narrow,’ the author admitted. ‘But it is [sic] actually raises a broad and crucial distinction we must make in our notions of sexuality, identity, and community.’

Although Thiel had said that he didn’t agree with ‘every plank in our party’s platform’, he did state that ‘fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline’. As he went on, ‘When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom.

It is demonstrably the case that more people are worried about the economy than are worried about bathroom access.

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.

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.

And what Foucault and his admirers seek to explain in personal relations they also attempt to explain on a grand political level. For them absolutely everything in life is a political choice and a political act.

To ‘deconstruct’ something is as significant in academia as ‘constructing’ things is in the rest of society. 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.

Nevertheless, McIntosh urges people to ‘raise our daily consciousness’ on the nature of privilege and attempt to use ‘our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader basis’. This suggests that McIntosh is not against power, just in favour of some redistribution of it along different lines.

To what extent has it become necessary to modify the notion of class struggle, in order to be able to deal with the new political subjects – women, national, racial and sexual minorities, anti-nuclear and anti-institutional movements etc – of a clearly anti-capitalist character, but whose identity is not constructed around specific ‘class interests’?

Anyone who finds it useful to argue that gender or race are social constructs can cite a whole library of material to bolster their claim and cite endless numbers of tenured academics who can ‘prove’ it. A god is made of X, who is then the subject of study by Y, and before long Z comes along to write on the rearticulation of temporality demonstrated by any Althusserian comparison of their work. 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.

When people talk about ‘questioning’ things through the application of unconscious bias training they do not seem to mean ‘questioning’ people. They mean ‘changing’ them.

In The Beauty Myth she famously tried to claim that in America alone around 150,000 women a year were dying from anorexia-related eating disorders. As a number of scholars including Christina Hoff Sommers subsequently showed, Wolf had exaggerated the actual figures by several hundred times.30 Exaggeration and catastrophism became the regular currency in which feminists were encouraged to deal.

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.

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? If ‘adventure’ and ‘risk’ are indeed male traits then when and where should men be encouraged to drop them? Should a male explorer be encouraged to be less adventurous, a male firefighter be trained to take fewer risks? Ought male soldiers be encouraged to be less connected to ‘violence’ and be keener to show an appearance of weakness? If so when? What would the mechanism be by which male soldiers were reprogrammed to use their very useful traits and skills in certain dangerous occasions when society badly needs them, but that this should be trained out of them the rest of the time?

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? If ‘adventure’ and ‘risk’ are indeed male traits then when and where should men be encouraged to drop them? Should a male explorer be encouraged to be less adventurous, a male firefighter be trained to take fewer risks? Ought male soldiers be encouraged to be less connected to ‘violence’ and be keener to show an appearance of weakness? If so when? What would the mechanism be by which male soldiers were reprogrammed to use their very useful traits and skills in certain dangerous occasions when society badly needs them, but that this should be trained out of them the rest of the time?

For three years between 2014 and 2017 academics in the UK carried out a study about the images of men that women found attractive. The results, published in Feminist Media Studies, discovered a disturbing trend. Newsweek summed up the shocking findings in a headline, ‘Men with muscles and money are more attractive to straight women and gay men – showing gender roles aren’t progressing.’40 Indeed. ‘Progress’ will only be achieved when women find men attractive who they don’t think are attractive. What could be unachievable in that?

At some point some scrambling device was imposed on the whole issue of relations between the sexes. Something caused this massive upsurge of rage and denial just at the point the issue should have reached a consensus and settlement.

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.

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.

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 business model. But rarely if ever do the people in the stampede try to work out why they are running in the direction they are.

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.

In late 2018 Twitter’s ‘hateful conduct policy’ changed so that Twitter could permanently ban people from the platform if they were found to have ‘deadnamed’ or ‘misgendered’ trans people.

Why, just three lines down of images requested for ‘Straight couples’, is everyone gay?

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. In fact the oddity of the results for some of these searches in English is so extreme that it is clear that this isn’t just a machine trying to throw in a certain amount of diversity. This is not simply MLF.

It appears that Google wants to offer the service it prides itself as providing for some people, but not for anyone who might be searching for heteronormative or Caucasian couples; these people would obviously already be a problem and must be refused and frustrated in their attempts to access the type of material they are after. They must be given a giant, tech-sized ‘F- you’. All in the interests of fairness, obviously.

It seems that in order to strip computers of the sort of bias that human beings suffer from, they have been set off to create a new type of non-bias. Yet this turns up a skewed version of history plus a new layer of bias that has been deliberately injected into the system by people intent on attacking other people who they regard as having particular biases. In the interests of weeding out human biases, humans have laced an entire system with biases.

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.

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.

In pursuit of anti-racism these people turn race from one of many important issues into something which is more important than anything else. At the very moment when the issue of race might at long last have been put to rest, they have decided once again to make it the most important issue of all.

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.

For this does not appear to be a mere area of academic study. In Applebaum’s view – as she puts it in the Oxford Encyclopedia – it is an unabashed campaign, one with all the familiar hallmarks not of education but of re-education. It is like an ‘implicit bias test’ being run by someone who has already found you guilty.

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.

Of course it might be said that what will continue to ring even more true is that defining an entire group of people, their attitudes, pitfalls and moral associations, based solely on their racial characteristics is itself a fairly good demonstration of racism. For ‘whiteness’ to be ‘problematized’ white people must be shown to be a problem.

After watching the display at Yale most people who had not gone to the college might wonder how these students were going to get through life if they found it this hard just to get through Halloween.

Having watched a trailer of this children’s cartoon, Vice felt licensed to report to its adult readership that Disney’s remake of Dumbo appeared to be ‘cute and heartwarming and seemingly neither racist nor terrifying’.

Richard Wagner did not specify that Isolde should be black. But when Jessye Norman sang the music from Tristan and Isolde under the baton of Herbert von Karajan with the Vienna Philharmonic, nobody thought of ignoring the music and denouncing the casting for being racially inappropriate. We had all got used to this.

Boggess had been cast to play the role of Maria (a fictional character who is Puerto Rican) while herself being reported to be Caucasian. The fact that the whole thing was fiction – and a fiction whose lyrics and music were written by two Jews – was not a matter for consideration.

the same logic that saw Boggess off West Side Story can just as easily be used to insist that all future Prince Hals or Isoldes must be white. Casting can either be colour-blind or colour-obsessed, but it probably cannot be both.

This is an important cog in the crowd-maddening mechanism: the person who professes themselves most aggrieved gets the most attention. Anyone who is unbothered is ignored. In an age of shouting for attention on social media the mechanism rewards outrage over sanguinity.

On the one hand there is the programme which declares the world to be a place where a well-lived life consists of appreciating something from every culture and indeed making it easier to access those cultures. On the other hand we are running another programme at the same time which declares that cultural boundaries may only be crossed under certain conditions. Not only has this second programme not been finished, but the job of finishing writing it appears to be open to absolutely anybody who wants to take it over. There is also a programme which recognizes that race and culture are not the same thing. And yet another – running concurrently – that says they are so much the same thing that encroaching on somebody else’s culture is an act of racist aggression or ‘appropriation’.

So 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.

It is impossible to unscramble the different standards being applied simultaneously by the content of speech because speech itself has become unimportant. What matters above everything is the racial and other identity of the speaker. Their identity can either condemn them or get them off. This means that if words and their contents do still matter then they have become deeply secondary orders of business.

And just as Marilyn French and others became celebrated for the extremity of their claims, so in recent years the prize for being regarded as the most celebrated writer on race has not fallen to the most ameliorating or pacifying voice, but to the writer who more than perhaps any other has presented race in America in particular as being at a stage of unprecedented awfulness.