The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

As the mood of rebellion across campus grew, Evergreen students persuaded themselves and each other that they were facing an openly racist professor and an overtly racist institution. Soon a gang of students wielding baseball bats and other weapons were found prowling the campus, chasing, assaulting and intimidating people and apparently planning to do harm to Professor Weinstein and his family who were then living opposite the college. The threat of violence became so great that the campus went into lockdown for days. The police were forbidden to enforce the law and locked themselves inside the police station, though they called Weinstein and told him to stay away from the campus and move his wife and children into hiding for their own safety. The day after the scene outside his classroom, the police told Weinstein that protestors were searching from car to car in the area and asking for ID documents of the occupants because they were looking for him. His own students – and others suspected of holding divergent opinions – were themselves stalked and harassed by mobs.

To say that Evergreen became race-obsessed during this period is grossly to understate things. At a subsequent meeting of the college’s Board of Trustees one white student recounted, ‘I’ve been told several times that I’m not allowed to speak because I’m white. This school seems to focus so much on race that it is actually becoming more racist in a different sort of way.’

As it happened, Weinstein never taught at Evergreen again. Only one of his or his wife’s academic colleagues at Evergreen ever came out publicly in support of his right to take the stand he took. After a period of some months he and his wife negotiated a settlement with the college and left their positions.

Aside from drawing attention to things nobody could have remembered, there was something else strange in all of this. Almost any student of history is familiar with the truth summed up in the opening line of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ It requires a level of naivety to imagine that a piece from a magazine published in 1916 would meet the precise social criteria of 2018. In 1916 women in Britain and America did not have the right to vote, you could still be sentenced to hard labour in prison for being gay, and an entire generation of young men were being gassed, blown-up, shot at and shelled in the fields of Flanders and France. Things were different then.

A lesson that might have been learned was that in any event the apology from National Geographic did not satisfy. In The Guardian the historian David Olusoga declared the apology ‘well meant but slow in coming’.

Over the northern border it turned out that Canadians were not even able to die without demonstrating systemic racism. In April 2018 a terrible bus crash occurred in Saskatchewan in which 16 young people were killed and another 13 injured. The tragedy was only made greater when it was discovered that the bus involved in the collision had been filled with the Humboldt Broncos. In a hockey nation the death of so many people in their late teens was a source of unprecedented national mourning. Canadians left their hockey sticks outside their front doors as a mark of respect and a campaign to raise funds in memory of the young men yielded a record-breaking amount of money. But even this tragedy was not immune from the new racialization of absolutely everything. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy the Quebec City writer and self-described ‘activist’ Nora Loreto took to social media to complain about the attention paid to the dead hockey team by proclaiming, ‘The maleness, the youthfulness and the whiteness of the victims are . . . playing a significant role.’

Take the controversy surrounding the tennis champion Serena Williams in September 2018. During the US Open final she was issued with a code violation and then a penalty point after she broke her racket. Williams lost her temper spectacularly with the umpire, in a way that happens but is still frowned upon in the genteel-ish sport of tennis. But Williams really went for the umpire – calling him, among other things, a ‘thief’. Williams was fined $17,000, which given that the prize for winning the Open is just under four million dollars and the prize for the runner-up almost two million, is small change for Williams. But the issue could not stop there. Because Williams is a woman the Women’s Tennis Association decried the referee as ‘sexist’. Because she is black the matter headed straight into a full-on race dispute.

In 2017 there was the case of a couple who opened a food truck selling burritos. According to the new local rules, this couple were guilty of cultural appropriation – specifically of ‘stealing’ Mexican culture by selling burritos while not being Mexican. The owners of the food truck ended up receiving death threats and had to close all social media accounts and eventually their business. To say that victories like this embolden people is to understate matters. In the aftermath of the burrito van victory a list was compiled and circulated by local Oregon activists titled ‘Alternatives to white-owned appropriative restaurants in Portland’. Suggestions of restaurants owned by ‘people of colour’ were given instead.

In 2016 when Peter Thiel endorsed Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland he immediately became a non-gay in the eyes of the most prominent gay magazine in America. To have gone to the right – and to the Donald Trump right at that – was such an egregious fault that Advocate excommunicated Thiel from the church of gay.

It suggests that you are only a member of a recognized minority group so long as you accept the specific grievances, political grievances and resulting electoral platforms that other people have worked out for you. Step outside of these lines and you are not a person with the same characteristics you had before but who happens to think differently from some prescribed norm. You have the characteristics taken away from you. 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.

Over at its LSE Review of Books page in May 2012 a review appeared of a new book by Thomas Sowell. Intellectuals and Society had come out two years earlier, but in the world of academia intellectual drive-by shootings often happen at a more leisurely pace than in the rest of society.

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.

In 2014 a group called ‘Students for Fair Admissions’ filed a lawsuit against Harvard. The group represented Asian-Americans who argued that the university’s admissions policies had shown a pattern of discrimination going back decades. Specifically they alleged that in the name of ‘affirmative action’ Harvard had been routinely and systematically biased against Asian-American applicants. The university fought hard to prevent the release of documents revealing information on its application criteria, arguing that these were effectively Harvard’s trade secrets. But the university – which claimed not to discriminate against applicants ‘from any group’ in its admissions process – was eventually forced to reveal these secrets.62 It is no wonder that they had tried to keep them hidden.

In August 2018 Lilly Diabetes announced that they were withdrawing from their sponsorship arrangement with the professional racecar driver Conor Daly just before the 26-year-old was about to make his NASCAR racing debut. This time the scandal was not about something Daly himself had said. The sponsors withdrew their support because a story surfaced from the 1980s. That decade – before Conor was born – his father had given an interview to a radio station in which he had used a derogatory term to refer to African-Americans. Daly senior declared himself ‘mortified’ and said that the term had a different meaning and connotation in his native Ireland and that he had only just moved to the US at the time. He expressed shame and regret and asked for forgiveness for the offence. But his son still lost the sponsorship deal.

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.

So we live in this world where everyone is at risk – like Professor Tim Hunt – of having to spend the rest of their lives living with our worst joke.

The life that Nathan had clearly hoped for had not come about, and depression soon followed. So in September 2013, at the age of 44 – only a year after the last sex-change procedure – Verhelst was euthanized by the state. In his country of birth euthanasia is legal and the relevant medical authorities in Belgium agreed that Verhelst could be euthanized due to ‘unbearable psychological suffering’. A week before the end he held a small party for some friends. Guests reportedly danced and laughed and raised glasses of champagne with the toast ‘To life’. A week later Verhelst made the journey to a university hospital in Brussels and was killed by lethal injection. ‘I do not want to be a monster,’ he said just before he died.

The debate around gay rights moved too swiftly for some people, but it still took decades to go from acceptance that homosexuality existed and might need to be accommodated to the position where gay marriage was legalized. By contrast trans has become something close to a dogma in record time.

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.

During and after the ESPYs the American Football quarterback Brett Favre was lambasted first on social media and then in the rest of the media for not clapping Jenner enthusiastically enough. 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’.

Shapiro had not lost his temper during any of this. He had not ‘trolled’ Tur. After she had threatened to send him home in an ambulance he had not said, ‘That’s not very ladylike behaviour.’ He had not waited for her to punch him and then told her ‘Gosh you punch like a man.’ He had not even pointed out how strange it was for somebody who had done what Tur had done to their body to now be trying to emasculate him by denigrating his size. Shapiro had simply stuck to a point about the significance of biology that would have been uncontroversial even a few years earlier but which was now held with such widespread opprobrium among the media and celebrity classes that they would rather defend a threat of physical assault than someone who had not been ‘polite to the pronouns’.

There was something else which made James begin to wonder whether this was really something that he wanted. As he and others in his circle were well aware, anyone who takes hormones for a period of years will eventually notice effects which are irreversible. These happen after around two years of anti-androgen treatment. And as James approached his second year on anti-androgens he began to feel nervous. The NHS had no emergency appointments for him to consult with a doctor because they were so overwhelmed with people coming to them to consult on gender reassignment.

Listening to James’s story – which resembles those of many others – one of the things that stands out is how much we pretend to know, but how little we know. How fast we appear to be landing on solutions to questions we haven’t answered yet. But another thing that stands out is the way in which trans just keeps invading so many of the other controversy-laden subjects of our time.

At Wellesley College in 2014 there was a fascinating case where a student arriving at the all-female college announced that she was a ‘masculine of centre genderqueer person’ who wanted to be known as ‘Timothy’ and expected people to use male pronouns. Despite having applied to Hillary Clinton’s alma mater as a girl, the other students reportedly had no problem in particular with their male-identifying contemporary. That is, until Timothy announced that he wanted to run for the position of multicultural affairs coordinator: the purpose of this role being to promote a ‘culture of diversity’ on the university campus. It might have been expected that a ‘masculine of centre genderqueer person’ might have the perfect scorecard for the position. Except that students at Wellesley reportedly felt that having Timothy in such a position would perpetuate the patriarchy at the college. A campaign got under way to abstain in the election. One student behind the ‘campaign to abstain’ said, ‘I thought he’d do a perfectly fine job, but it just felt inappropriate to have a white man there.’

Allowing people to live their lives the way they wish is an idea which reveals some of the most cherished attainments of our societies – attainments which are still disturbingly rare worldwide. There remain 73 countries in the world where it is illegal to be gay, and eight in which being gay is punishable by death.1 In countries across the Middle East and Africa women are denied some of the most basic rights of all. Outbursts of inter-racial violence occur in country after country.

Nowhere in the world are the rights of trans people to attempt to live their lives the way they wish more protected in law than in the developed West. All of these things can be celebrated as achievements that have come about because of the system of law and the culture of rights. But there is a paradox here: that the countries which are most advanced in all of these attainments are the ones now presented as among the worst.

Because the most extreme claims keep getting heard, there is a tendency for people to believe them and their worst-case scenarios. For example, a poll carried out in 2018 for Sky found that most British people (seven in ten) believed that women are paid less than men for performing exactly the same job. The ‘gender pay gap’ that does exist is between average earnings across a lifespan, taking into account differences in career, child-rearing and lifestyle choices made by men and women. But ‘the pay gap’ has become such a staple of discussion on the news and on social media that most people have interpreted it as evidence of a gap that does not exist as they have been led to believe it does. It has been illegal to pay women less for performing the same task as a man since 1970 in the UK, and since 1963 in the US. Just one result of this confusion is that even though seven in ten people in the poll thought women were paid less than men for performing precisely the same job, almost exactly the same percentage of the public (67 per cent) thought that feminism had either gone too far or as far as it should go.23 This finding might epitomize the confusion of our time. We see oppression where it doesn’t exist and have no idea how to respond to it.

But the other reason why contradiction is not enough is because 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.

In 2018 there was a debate in the House of Commons about trans issues. During it the case of Karen White came up. This was a man who was a convicted rapist but who now identified as a woman. Although he had not had gender reassignment surgery he asked to be put in a women’s prison, and (with his male body) proceeded to sexually assault four female inmates. During the debate one Liberal Democrat MP, Layla Moran, summed up the extreme of trans thinking perfectly. Asked whether she would be happy to share a changing room with somebody who had a male body, Moran replied, ‘If that person was a trans woman, I absolutely would. I just do not see the issue. As for whether they have a beard [a matter that had also been raised] I dare say that some women have beards. There are all sorts of reasons why our bodies react differently to hormones. There are many forms of the human body. I see someone in their soul and as a person. I do not really care whether they have a male body.’31 No sensible person or movement hoping to pull together a coalition to create a viable rights movement to defend trans people would make such a claim.

One way to start might be to ask more regularly and more assiduously, ‘Compared to what?’ When people attempt to sum up our societies today as monstrous, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic patriarchies the question needs to be asked. If this hasn’t worked or isn’t working, what is the system that has worked or does work? To ask this is not to say that elements of our society cannot be improved, or that we should not address injustice and unfairness when we see them. But to talk about our societies in the hostile tone of judge, juror and executioner demands some questions to be asked of the accuser.

To be a victim is in some way to have won, or at least to have got a head start in the great oppression race of life. At the root of this curious development is one of the most important and mistaken judgements of the social justice movements: that oppressed people (or people who can claim to be oppressed) are in some way better than others, that there is some decency, purity or goodness which comes from being part of such a group. In fact, suffering in and of itself does not make someone a better person. A gay, female, black or trans person may be as dishonest, deceitful and rude as anybody else.

For example, there is no reason to assume that if all social injustices were ironed out and every employer finally had the correct diversity of people in their companies (as broken down by gender, sexual orientation and race) that all the Chief People Officers would stand down from their roles.

More likely is that a salaried class know that this puzzle is unsolvable and that they have got themselves jobs for life. They will remain in those roles for as long as they can until such a time as it is recognized that their solution to society’s ills offers no solution at all, but only an invitation to madness on a vast and costly scale both to the individual and to society as a whole.

For instance, who would have expected even a generation ago that it would be acceptable for a liberal magazine to pose the question, ‘Are Jews white?’ This wasn’t National Geographic a century ago, but The Atlantic magazine in 2016.40 The question arose because of the dispute over where Jews might come in the oppression hierarchy that is being assembled. Should Jews be regarded as being high up in the oppression stakes, or can they be seen as benefiting from some privileges of their own? Do they benefit from white privilege or not? Once such questions start to get asked is it surprising that some people will come up with ugly answers? At the University of Illinois in Urbana some leaflets turned up on campus in 2017 which offered their own answer. They presented a hierarchical pyramid, at the bottom of which were the ‘99 per cent’ who were oppressed by the alleged top 1 per cent. But the leaflets asked whether the top 1 per cent oppressing everyone else were ‘straight white men’ or ‘is the 1 per cent Jewish?’ The authors seemed to know the answer, arguing that Jews were the primary holders of ‘privilege’, concluding that ‘Ending white privilege starts with ending Jewish privilege.’

But of all the ways in which people can find meaning in their lives, politics – let alone politics on such a scale – is one of the unhappiest. Politics may be an important aspect of our lives, but as a source of personal meaning it is disastrous. Not just because the ambitions it strives after nearly always go unachieved, but because finding purpose in politics laces politics with a passion – including a rage – that perverts the whole enterprise.

One of the ways to distance ourselves from the madnesses of our times is to retain an interest in politics but not to rely on it as a source of meaning. The call should be for people to simplify their lives and not to mislead themselves by devoting their lives to a theory that answers no questions, makes no predictions and is easily falsifiable. Meaning can be found in all sorts of places. For most individuals it is found in the love of the people and places around them: in friends, family and loved ones, in culture, place and wonder. A sense of purpose is found in working out what is meaningful in our lives and then orientating ourselves over time as closely as possible to those centres of meaning. Using ourselves up on identity politics, social justice (in this manifestation) and intersectionality is a waste of a life.