The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

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.

As anyone who has lived under totalitarianism can attest, there is something demeaning and eventually soul-destroying about being expected to go along with claims you do not believe to be true and cannot hold to be true.

If we have decided what the answers cannot be – or what answers we could not cope with – then there seems little point, beyond a fondness for truth, in asking the questions.

For example, if gays have achieved the same rights as everyone else, should they be subjected to the same standards as everybody else? Or is there built into gay equality some kind of opt-out?

Nevertheless for a certain type of person who is intent on finding blame rather than forgiveness in the world, Foucault helps to explain everything.

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.

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.’2

Of all the things that are deranging our societies, everything to do with the sexes – and particularly relations between the sexes – are perhaps the most deranging of all.

Knowingly or otherwise these women have all imbibed the Foucauldian world view in which power is the most significant prism for understanding human relationships.

What is striking is not just that everyone seems to have paid lip-service to this, but that these women are focused only on one sort of power. This is a sort of power which – it is presumed – has historically been held solely by mainly old, mainly rich, always white men.

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.

The more obvious explanation from any outside analysis is that there seems to be a move less intended to improve men than to neuter them, to turn any and all of their virtues around on them and turn them instead into self-doubting, self-loathing objects of pity. It looks, in a word, like some type of revenge.

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.

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.

To speak in public is now to have to find a way to address or at least keep in mind every possible variety of person, with every imaginable kind of claim – including every imaginable rights claim.

Twitter has decided what does and does not constitute hateful conduct, and has decided that trans people need protecting from feminists, more than feminists need protecting from trans activists.

What appears to be happening is that something is being layered over a certain amount of MLF: it is MLF plus some human agency. And this human agency seems to have decided to ‘stick it’ to people towards whom the programmers or their company feel angry. This would explain why the searches for black couples or gay couples give you what you want whereas searches for white couples or straight couples are dominated by their opposites. It explains why people interested in searching for photos of Asian couples do not need to be aggravated or re-educated whereas the sort of people searching for ‘White couples’ do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just as women can be told that we live in a culture so rife with rape that it can fairly be described as a ‘rape culture’, so too people behave as though they live in a society teetering on the edge of Hitlerism. One oddity in both cases is that the most extreme claims are made in the places least likely to experience any such catastrophe.

Q

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.

Today, it has become wholly acceptable to suggest that the racial characteristics of an actor or performer are the most important characteristic when they are cast.

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.

bet a lot more black people would support Rachel Dolezal than would support, say, Clarence Thomas.’41 All of which suggested that ‘black’ was not to do with skin colour, or race. But only politics. So much so that a Caucasian wearing bronzer but holding the ‘right’ opinions was more black than a black Supreme Court Justice if that black Supreme Court Justice happens to be a conservative.

But he added that ‘As a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races”.’

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

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.

To view the past with some degree of forgiveness is among other things an early request to be forgiven – or at least understood – in turn.

Morris’s memoir of that transition, Conundrum (1974), remains one of the most persuasive and certainly the best-written accounts to date of why some people feel a need to transition across the sexes.

What is exceptionally hard – and what we currently have few means of knowing – is how to navigate the leap beyond biology into testimony. Intersex is biologically provable. Trans may in the years to come turn out to be psychologically or biologically provable.

Although there has been some pushback in the work of Anne A. Lawrence (a self-declared autogynephilic25 ) and others, the idea that transsexualism is in any way propelled by autogynephilia has become a considerable source of aggravation to trans campaigners. The reason for this sharp U-turn is obvious. And it takes us back to the hardware-software issue. If people have a particular sexual kink then it may be due either to hardware or to software. But it is hard to persuade society that it should change nearly all of its social and linguistic norms in order to accommodate those sexual kinks.

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.

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.

Everywhere, with a wearying predictability, the people who always complain about every aspect of the patriarchal, hegemonic, cis-supremacist, homophobic, institutionally racist, sexist state, decided to run with the trans issue.

With each of the issues highlighted in this book the aim of the social justice campaigners has consistently been to take each one – gay, women, race, trans – that they can present as a rights grievance and make their case at its most inflammatory. Their desire is not to heal but to divide, not to placate but to inflame, not to dampen but to burn.

The violent deaths range from almost 10 to 60 per cent of males. By contrast the percentage of males killed in violent conflict in the US and Europe in the twentieth century is a single-digit blip.35 If there is evidence that past societies would have been infinitely more tolerant of sexual and biological differences than we are in the twenty-first-century West, then it is incumbent on those making these claims to provide it.

Men of Roosevelt’s generation, he writes, ‘were expected to meet misfortune with a stiff upper lip. Fate was more capricious then. When everyone was a victim at one point or another, no one won sympathy by wearing victimhood as a badge.’36 Such reflections suggest the possibility that the extraordinary number of victimhood claims of recent years may not in fact indicate what the intersectionalists and social justice proponents think that they do. Rather than demonstrating an excess of oppression in our societies, the abundance of such claims may in fact be revealing a great shortage of it.

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.

Martin Luther King Jr gave one of his greatest speeches in Atlanta, Georgia. Entitled ‘Where do we go from here?’ it included a remarkable plea. ‘Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, “White Power!”, when nobody will shout, “Black Power!”, but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.’

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