The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

When students starting out on campuses across the US wonder whether making insincere claims and catastrophizing minute events can be rewarding, they can look to Coates and know that it is.

Equality in the eyes of God is a core tenet of the Christian tradition. But it has translated in the era of secular humanism not into equality in the eyes of God but equality in the eyes of man. 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.

Although the university denied the allegations in court, its own records showed that over a period of years Harvard had been routinely downgrading Asian-American applicants. In particular it was downgrading them on personality traits including ‘positive personality’, kindness and likeability. Unfortunately for Harvard, during the disclosure stage it transpired that the downgrading of Asian-American students was happening without Harvard having necessarily had any interview or meeting with the applicants. It looked like a deliberate policy of downgrading Asian-Americans on their character scores without even meeting them.

if Harvard did not deliberately disadvantage certain groups and advantage others in its commitment to ‘affirmative action’ policies and diversity criteria in general, the products of Harvard might be worryingly non-diverse. Specifically they might have a student body which disproportionately or even largely consisted not of white Americans or black Americans, but of Asian-Americans and Ashkenazi Jews. Here we get a glimpse of the world’s ugliest landmine.

The teachings of our day are that everybody is equal and that race and gender and much else besides are mere social constructs; that given the right encouragement and opportunity everybody can be whatever they want to be; that life is entirely about environment, opportunity and privilege. This is why when even the tiniest fragment of the argument crops up – as with Asian admissions at Harvard – it causes such extraordinary pain, confusion, denial and rage.

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.

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.

How will what we are doing now look in 20 years?

Just as the only tool to protect against unpredictability is some ability to make and keep promises, so Arendt says only one tool exists to ameliorate the irreversibility of our actions. That is ‘the faculty of forgiving’. These two things necessarily go together – the ability to bind together through promises and the ability to stay bound through forgiveness. Of the latter Arendt writes: Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victim of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell.

Hannah Arendt on forgiveness.

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.

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.

In some manner with which we still haven’t even begun to wrestle, we have created a world in which forgiveness has become almost impossible, in which the sins of the father can certainly be visited upon the son. And we remain remarkably unconcerned to create any mechanisms or consensus over how to address the resulting conundrum.

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.

Among all the subjects in this book and all the complex issues of our age, none is so radical in the confusion and assumptions it elicits, and so virulent in the demands it makes, as the subject of trans.

The correct idea for people to currently hold is that trans people get absolutely no sexual thrill from the idea of being trans. They positively hate it. Nothing could be more boring.

Although Favre joined the standing ovation for Jenner he controversially took his seat again before everyone else in the audience had taken theirs, and this was caught on camera. For this behaviour the New York Post denounced the culprit’s insufficient enthusiasm with a piece headlined ‘Brett Favre makes the ESPYs uncomfortable for everyone’.28 Nobody seemed certain precisely how many seconds of standing ovation it was correct to give a trans woman receiving an award for courage. Some attention to the etiquette in the Soviet Politburo might have helped. The only lesson unarguably imparted was that if everyone is applauding a trans person you should make sure that you are the last person to resume your seat.

But he also came to think that people who said that they had been born in the wrong body took a very egocentric view of things, as though this was ‘a challenge that had been given to them’. If the whole universe was a coincidence, ‘Why do so much so drastically for the sake of changing myself?’

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.

‘I don’t have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women, in the same way that shoving a bit of vacuum hose down your 501s does not make you a man.’

Greer also put her finger on something that very few other people noticed, but which parents of children claiming to suffer from gender dysphoria soon began to worry about: the fact that the transsexual ‘is identified as such solely on his/her own script, which can be as learned as any sex-typed behaviour and as editorialized as autobiographies usually are’.

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.

This is the largest transgender youth clinic in the US and is one of four recipients of a taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health grant for a five-year study on the impact of puberty blockers and hormones on children. A study for which, as it happens, there is no control group.

Despite the fact that the guidelines of the Endocrine Society (the world’s oldest and leading organization in the field of endocrinology and the study of metabolism) state that there is ‘minimal published experience’ about hormone treatment for people ‘prior to 13.5 to 14 years of age’,56 Olson-Kennedy and other colleagues seem extraordinarily confident about what they are doing, for example in her extraordinary dismissal not just of her opponents but of the irreversibility of the actions she is encouraging children to take.

As though the whole business could not get any more complex, both Olson-Kennedys are also registered consultants with Endo Pharmaceuticals, which – among other things – are makers of testosterone.

At the end of 2018 a private gender clinician in Wales was convicted in court of illegally providing healthcare services. Her clinic was providing sex-change hormones to children as young as 12.

Anyone mentioning the drawbacks or concerns about going trans is said to be hateful and either encouraging violence against trans people or encouraging them to do themselves harm. This suggests that the only thing that non-trans people can do is stay silent on the issue and never speak about it unless what they have to say is affirming. This stance has already led to the invention of new concepts which flow out from parts of the feminist and trans movements – such as the idea that some people are ‘non-binary’ and ‘gender-fluid’.

To raise the plight of women, gays, people of different racial backgrounds and those who are trans has become not just a way to demonstrate compassion but a demonstration of a form of morality. It is how to practise this new religion. To ‘fight’ for these issues and to extol their cause has become a way of showing that you are a good person.

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.

Even before this, something had been going wrong in the language of human rights and the practice of liberalism. It is as though the enquiring aspect of liberalism was at some stage replaced with a liberal dogmatism: a dogmatism that insists questions are settled which are unsettled, that matters are known which are unknown and that we have a very good idea of how to structure a society along inadequately argued lines.

The metaphysics that a new generation is imbibing and everyone else is being force-fed has many points of instability, is grounded in a desire to express certainty about things we do not know, and to be wildly dismissive and relativistic about things that we actually do know. The foundations are that anyone might become gay, women might be better than men, people can become white but not black and anyone can change sex. That anyone who doesn’t fit into this is an oppressor. And that absolutely everything should be made political.

The claims of gender experts about those who are pop tarts in the wrong packaging may themselves be the ones whose packet-reading abilities are all wrong.

In the aftermath of the Rachel Dolezal affair the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia ran a piece by an untenured academic called Rebecca Tuvel. She raised a most interesting question. Comparing the treatment of Rachel Dolezal with the treatment of Caitlyn Jenner, she questioned whether if we ‘accept transgender individuals’ decision to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ decisions to change races’. This argument did not go down well.

in the sporting world, being discovered to have taken testosterone is ordinarily grounds to prevent someone from competing – unless, it turns out, the person is taking testosterone to transition to the opposite sex. In which case sensitivity overrides science.

In February 2018, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was addressing students and answering questions at MacEwan University in Edmonton, a young woman politely asked a question in which she referred in passing to ‘mankind’. The Canadian Prime Minister interrupted her, waving his hand dismissively. ‘We like to say people-kind, not necessarily mankind, because it’s more inclusive,’ he explained, getting a roar of applause from his audience. But nobody subsequently pointed out why a powerful white male embarrassing a young woman in this way was not ‘mansplaining’.

‘You cannot tell people simultaneously “You must understand me” and “You cannot understand me”.’ Evidently a whole lot of people can make those demands simultaneously. But they shouldn’t, and if they do then they should realize that their contradictory demands cannot be granted.

nothing about the intersectional, social justice movement suggests that it is really interested in solving any of the problems that it claims to be interested in. The first clue lies in the partial, biased, unrepresentative and unfair depiction of our own societies. Few people think that a country cannot be improved on, but to present it as riddled with bigotry, hatred and oppression is at best a partial and at worst a nakedly hostile prism through which to view society. It is an analysis expressed not in the manner of a critic hoping to improve, but as an enemy eager to destroy. There are signs of this intention everywhere we look.

a Marxist substructure can be glimpsed. If you cannot rule a society – or pretend to rule it, or try to rule it and collapse everything – then you can do something else. In a society that is alive to its faults, and though imperfect remains a better option than anything else on offer, you sow doubt, division, animosity and fear. Most effectively you can try to make people doubt absolutely everything. Make them doubt whether the society they live in is good at all.

To assume that sex, sexuality and skin colour mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything will be fatal.