The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

The unbelievable speed of this process has been principally caused by the fact that a handful of businesses in Silicon Valley (notably Google, Twitter and Facebook) now have the power not just to direct what most people in the world know, think and say, but have a business model which has accurately been described as relying on finding ‘customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behaviour’.

The attractions of this new set of beliefs are obvious enough. It is not clear why a generation which can’t accumulate capital should have any great love of capitalism. And it isn’t hard to work out why a generation who believe they may never own a home could be attracted to an ideological world view which promises to sort out every inequity not just in their own lives but every inequity on earth.

The results can be seen in every day’s news. It is behind the news that the American Psychological Association feels the need to advise its members on how to train harmful ‘traditional masculinity’ out of boys and men.7 It is why a previously completely unknown programmer at Google – James Damore – can be sacked for writing a memo suggesting that some jobs in tech appeal more to men than they do to women. And it is why the number of Americans who view racism as a ‘big problem’ doubled between 2011 and 2017.

Among the first was anything to do with homosexuality. In the latter half of the twentieth century there was a fight for gay equality which was tremendously successful, reversing terrible historic injustice. Then, the war having been won, it became clear that it wasn’t stopping. Indeed it was morphing. GLB (Gay, Lesbian, Bi) became LGB so as not to diminish the visibility of lesbians. Then a T got added (of which much more anon). Then a Q and then some stars and asterisks. And as the gay alphabet grew, so something changed within the movement. It began to behave – in victory – as its opponents once did. When the boot was on the other foot something ugly happened. A decade ago almost nobody was supportive of gay marriage. Even gay rights groups like Stonewall weren’t in favour of it. A few years down the road and it has been made into a foundational value of modern liberalism.

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.

A relatively unflustered Davidson asked Morgan for evidence that people are born gay, pointing out that neither the American Psychological Association nor the Royal College of Psychiatrists believe that homosexuality is innate and unchangeable. At which point his interviewer ordered him to ‘stop talking for a moment’ and ‘stop banging on about whacky-backy scientists in America’. Morgan then continued to shout at his guest, ‘Shut up you old bigot’, before he brought the whole interview to a close with the words ‘I’ve had enough of him. Dr Michael, shut up.’1 And so it finished. ITV had sent a car to a guest’s home in the early morning to bring him to a national television studio only for him to be told during his interview to shut up.

And Pink News and others who celebrate their victory in chasing Voices of the Silenced a mile down the road one February night seem very ready to wield such power over a private event. 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.

In recent years the accepted opinion on gay rights in America, Britain and most other Western democracies has shifted unimaginably, and for the better. But it has moved so swiftly that it has also seen the replacement of one dogma with another. A move from a position of moral opprobrium to a position of expressing opprobrium to anyone whose views fall even narrowly outside the remit of the newly adopted position. The problem with this is not just that we are at risk of being unable to hear positions that are wrong, but that we may be preventing ourselves from listening to arguments that may be partially true.

Of some interest is the fact that in May 2013 Morgan had voted against the law introducing gay marriage into the UK. One year later, in 2014, she said that she now supported gay marriage and would vote for it if it had not already become law. Another year later, in 2015, she was declaring views such as those she herself had held two years earlier as not merely evidence of ‘extremism’ but fundamentally un-British.

In the 1990s Hillary Clinton supported her husband’s ‘defence of marriage act’ which sought to prevent gay marriage from becoming possible in the United States. She watched as he backed the policy of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ for gays in the US military, meaning that any gay soldier who told even one other person about their sexuality could immediately be dismissed from the armed forces. As Robert Samuels wrote in the Washington Post, ‘Hillary Clinton had the chance to make gay rights history. She refused.’

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.

Some sensitivity over this whole subject is naturally understandable. After all, it was only in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association decided that there was no scientific evidence for continuing to treat homosexuality as a disorder. That year they removed it from the APA’s glossary of mental disorders (a rare example for that ever-growing tome of something being taken out). The World Health Organization performed the same task in 1992.

In 2014 the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) in London issued a fascinating ‘statement on sexual orientation’. They were commendably adamant in their condemnation of anything that seeks to stigmatize people who say they are gay. And they explained that in any case the RCP does not believe that therapies to alter anyone’s sexual orientation could work in either direction. The RCP could no more make a homosexual straight than they could make a heterosexual gay. And yet they do make a fairly important acknowledgement, which is that ‘The Royal College of Psychiatrists considers that sexual orientation is determined by a combination of biological and postnatal environment factors.’ They cite a set of sources to back up this statement,10 and they follow it up again with the reassertion that ‘There is no evidence to go beyond this and impute any kind of choice into the origins of sexual orientation.’

The American Psychological Association is in agreement on this. Its most up-to-date advice on the matter says: There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.

In 1977 just over 10 per cent of Americans thought that people were born gay. By 2015 around half of the US population believed this to be the case. Over the same period the number of Americans who agreed that being gay was ‘due to someone’s upbringing and environment’ halved from the 60 per cent who had agreed with that statement in 1977. Not coincidentally the moral attitudes of Americans towards homosexuality changed enormously in the same period. Gallup polls between 2001 and 2015 showed that gay and lesbian relationships were seen as ‘morally acceptable’ by 40 per cent of Americans in 2001 and 63 per cent in 2015. Those who thought they were ‘morally wrong’ in the same time period fell from 53 per cent to 34 per cent.17 The single factor which opinion polls showed to have changed public opinion on the matter was people knowing somebody – a family member, friend or work colleague – who is gay. This factor has significant implications for other rights movements. A second obvious factor in that change in attitude has been the increasing visibility of gays in public life.

The single factor that has most clearly helped to change public opinion about homosexuality in the West has been the decision that homosexuality is in fact a ‘hardware’ rather than a ‘software’ issue. Some people – mainly religious conservatives – continue to try to smuggle in their contrary view on this matter. For instance some of them still like to describe homosexuality as a ‘lifestyle choice’ – a phrase insinuating that homosexuals have chosen their own programming.

Some fascinating work has been done in epigenetics in order to locate a gene variation that may cause homosexuality. The latest work focuses on methyl groups which get added to gene molecules. In 2015 scientists at UCLA announced that they had discovered a form of DNA modification in parts of the genome which differed between gay and straight brothers. But the study relied on small samples and as a result was strongly disputed despite the resulting hopes and headlines. There have been a number of similar studies, all of which have proved inconclusive. For the time being the ‘gay gene’ remains elusive. Which is not to say that it won’t be found at some point. Only that the war that goes on around it is telling. In general, fundamentalist Christians and others want a ‘gay gene’ not to be found, for the discovery of such a gene would seriously harm one of the foundations of their own view of the world (‘God makes people gay?’) and would have to affect their own stance on the matter. People who are gay, on the other hand, have a clear bias in favour of finding the gene, as it has the potential to permanently get them off any and all software accusations. So the work goes on – centring on identical male twins, whose sexuality interestingly appears to be identical when they are.

In spite of all of this, today being gay has become one of the absolutely central building blocks of identity, politics and ‘identity politics’. LGBT is now one of the groupings which mainstream politicians routinely speak about – and to – as if they actually exist like a racial or religious community. It is a form of absurdity. For even on its own terms this composition is wildly unsustainable and contradictory. Gay men and gay women have almost nothing in common. It may be too pedestrian to even mention, but gay men and lesbians do not always form the warmest of relationships. Gay men often characterize lesbians as dowdy and boring. Lesbians often characterize gay men as silly and displaying a failure to grow up. Neither have very much use for each other, and almost none meet in any ‘communal’ spaces. There are places where gay men can hook up and places where gay women can hook up, but there have hardly been any places in the decades since gay liberation where gay men and women organize or assemble to be near each other on anything like a regular basis.

Gay men and gay women, meanwhile, have a famous amount of suspicion towards people who claim to be ‘bisexual’. The ‘B’ in LGBT is a source of occasional angst within the gay media. But bisexuals continue to be viewed not so much a part of the same ‘community’ as gays as some kind of betrayal from within its midst. Gay men tend to believe that men who claim to be ‘Bi’ are in fact gays in some form of denial (‘Bi now, gay later’).

But the L’s don’t need the G’s today, and the G’s don’t much care for the L’s and almost everybody can be united in suspicion of the B’s. And there is tremendous dispute over whether the T’s are the same thing as everybody else or an insult to them.

At almost any demonstration for gay rights today – most prominently the ‘gay pride’ marches which happen around the world – the call for legal equality (now achieved in most Western countries) is mixed in with things that would cause many homosexuals as well as heterosexuals to blush.

For the fact is that, while it is significantly easier for gay women, two gay men will find it exceptionally difficult to have a biological baby, and even if they do it will only carry the biological imprint of one of the parents – setting up questions and potential tensions of its own not very far down the road. The even plainer part of the lie is that even this situation – in which two gay men produce a child with the DNA of one of them – is not available to most gays. It is available only to very rich gays. Egg and surrogacy procedures do not come cheap.

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.

It is a stimulating scientific riposte to the people claiming that biological differences between the sexes do not exist. As Pinker said, ‘Things are not looking good for the theory that boys and girls are born identical except for their genitalia, with all other differences coming from the way society treats them.’

But in Hollywood it was still all part of the entertainment. In a profession in which nudity is normal and for which ‘the casting couch’ was coined, the boundaries were never easy to discern. This is one reason why Hollywood might be a bad place to base either a set of ethics to aspire to or a set of ethics which should be regarded as particularly emblematic of anything beyond the entertainment industry.

Different standards always operated in Hollywood. It was the only industry in the twenty-first century in which someone still on the run for child-rape could be applauded, revered and even viewed as something of a victim by their peers. Had an accountant, social worker or even a priest in their forties anally raped a 13-year-girl, then they might have got away with it as has Roman Polanski. They may have found friends to cover for them. But it would be inconceivable – even in the Catholic Church – for someone to be applauded on prime-time television as being at the top of their profession while still on the run from the law. Hollywood, and the audience of Polanski’s peers at the Academy Awards in 2003 in particular, felt no such restraining impulse.

Only in Hollywood would a famous director like Woody Allen separate from his wife because he has been caught having a relationship with her adopted daughter.

One of the few people in the entertainment industry to slightly buck the precise contours of the digging was the actress Mayim Bialik. In October 2017 when ‘MeToo’ broke she received a certain amount of backlash for an opinion piece in The New York Times in which she talked frankly about the industry she had first entered as (in her words) ‘a prominent-nosed, awkward, geeky, Jewish 11-year-old’. She described how she had ‘always had an uncomfortable relationship with being employed in an industry that profits from the objectification of women’. And she described how she had made ‘conservative’ choices as a young actress, and that guided by her first-generation American parents, she was always careful around people in the industry. This, along with her religious observance, meant that she was the sort of person who – as she explained – was unusual among women in Hollywood.

The impossible demand that cannot be met but which has been written into contemporary mores? It is that a woman must be allowed to be as sexy and sexual as she pleases, but that does not mean she can be sexualized. Sexy, but not sexualized. It is an impossible demand. And not just an unreasonable but a deranging demand to make on men. But nobody wants to explore it. Because to explore it would be to uncover a whole world of unremediable, unsolvable, complexity.

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.

And she used the opportunity to repeat what had been one of her favourite and most repeated mantras of the previous decade. ‘As I have said many times,’ she wrote, ‘if it had been Lehman Sisters rather than Lehman Brothers, the world might well look a lot different today.’12 This was not simply a reiteration of the problem of groupthink that had so contributed to the events of 2008. Lagarde was making a bigger point. Not only that women were needed in financial institutions. Almost nobody could doubt that. But that if women were more prominent in that workforce – or better still leading it – then the results and outcomes would be different. And Lagarde was not alone in making this claim. Indeed, versions of it ran throughout the decade following the financial crisis. And they centred on finance as in every other area of public life.

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.

An investigation by Bloomberg published in December 2018 looked at attitudes among senior figures in the world of finance, which is an undeniably male-dominated sector, with male majorities in each main area other than support staff.14 The attitudes of men at a senior level were striking. In interviews with more than 30 senior executives from the world of finance men admitted to no longer being willing to have dinner with female colleagues. They also refused to sit next to them on flights. They insisted on hotel rooms being booked on different floors from female colleagues and avoided any one-on-one meetings with women.

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? And how can the various stratas of this arrangement be flexible enough not just to include everybody in view but also take into account the comparative changes for the better and worse which will occur across every human life?

Another problem connected to privilege is that though we may be able to see it in others we may be unable or unwilling to recognize it in ourselves. By any stretch of the imagination the women in this room form the top percentile of people not just among those who ever lived but among those in their own countries, cities and neighbourhoods right now. They have significant salaries, considerable contacts and will have more opportunities in an average month than most white males will have in a lifetime. And yet privilege as an issue is repeatedly raised because it is assumed to be something that other people have.

The schemes themselves slightly differ, but all centre around versions of what at Harvard University has been developed as the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Since it went on the internet in 1998 more than 30 million people have taken the test on the Harvard website to discover whether or not they harbour unconscious bias.17 What the IAT attempts to work out is who individuals think of as being in an ‘in group’ and who they might see as being in an ‘out group’. Cited thousands of times in academic papers, it has undoubtedly become the most influential measure of ‘unconscious bias’.

What is more there is mounting evidence that none of this works in practice. For instance, that increasing the number of women on selection panels doesn’t increase the chances of a woman getting a job.

Pinpointing exactly which waves of feminism occurred when is complicated by the fact that they are recognized to have occurred at different times in different places. But it is widely accepted that the first wave of feminism was the one which began in the eighteenth century and continued, in some estimations, up to the franchise and by others right up to the 1960s.

For her part French declared at the outset of her book, ‘there is evidence’ that for around three and half million years the human species lived in a situation in which men and women were equal. In fact more than equal, for in those days women apparently enjoyed a higher status than men. Then for the last 10,000 or so years our species allegedly lived in ‘egalitarian harmony and material well-being’, with the sexes getting on pretty well. 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’.

For instance, it might be said that the preponderance of males in the position of Chief Executive Officer is an example of ‘male privilege’. But nobody knows what the preponderance of male suicides (according to the Samaritans, British men are three times more likely to commit suicide than women), deaths in dangerous occupations, homelessness and much more might mean. Is this a sign of the opposite of male privilege? Do they even each other out? If not, what are the systems, metrics or timespan for doing so? Nobody seems to know.

In 2016 the Fawcett Society surveyed 8,000 people to find out what proportion of people identified themselves as a ‘feminist’. The survey found that only 9 per cent of British women used the word ‘feminist’ to describe themselves. Only 4 per cent of men did. The vast majority of people surveyed supported gender equality. In fact a larger number of men than women supported equality between the sexes (86 per cent versus 74 per cent). But the vast majority also resisted the ‘feminist’ label.

It is a similar story in the US. Asked in 2013 whether men and women should be ‘social, political and economic equals’, the vast majority of Americans (82 per cent) said ‘yes’. But when asked whether they identified themselves as ‘feminists’ there was a recognizable fall-off. Only 23 per cent of women and 16 per cent of men in the US identified themselves as ‘feminists’. A clear majority (63 per cent) said that they were neither feminist nor anti-feminist.

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.’

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.

The notion of private and public space has eroded. What we say in one place may be posted in another, not just for the whole world but for all time. And so we are having to find a way to speak and act online as though we may be speaking and acting in front of everyone – with the knowledge that if we slip up our error will be accessible everywhere and always.

As anybody who has spent any time there will know, the political atmosphere in Silicon Valley is several degrees to the left of a liberal arts college. Social justice activism is assumed – correctly – to be the default setting for all employees in the major companies and most of them, including Google, put applicants through tests to weed out anyone with the wrong ideological inclinations. Those who have gone through these tests recount that there are multiple questions on issues to do with diversity – sexual, racial and cultural – and that answering these questions ‘correctly’ is a prerequisite for getting a job.

It is possible that there is some guilty conscience at work here, for the tech companies are rarely capable of practising what they are so willing to preach. For instance, Google’s workforce is only 4 per cent Hispanic and 2 per cent African-American. At 56 per cent, whites are not over-represented compared to the wider population. But Asians make up 35 per cent of Google staff and have been steadily reducing the number of white employees despite accounting for just 5 per cent of the US population.

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.

Yet the greatest backsliding on Dr King’s dream has not come from there. It has come from people who almost certainly believe themselves to be pursuing the same path as that which Dr King outlined on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. 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.

Oxford University’s Research Encyclopedia describes whiteness studies as: A growing field of scholarship whose aim is to reveal the invisible structures that produce white supremacy and privilege. Critical Whiteness Studies presumes a certain condition of racism that is connected to white supremacy. It certainly does ‘presume’ this, but the author of this entry – Syracuse University professor Barbara Applebaum – like others in her field also now makes a living from that presumption. In her 2011 book Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility and Social Justice Pedagogy (2011) Applebaum explains how even white people who are avowedly anti-racist may still be racist. It is just that they are often racist in ways that they have not yet realized. Among much else Applebaum calls for white students to learn how to listen to other people, admit their ‘complicity’ in racism and from there learn how to ‘build alliances’.