The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

To date ‘social justice’ has run the furthest because it sounds – and in some versions is – attractive. Even the term itself is set up to be anti-oppositional. ‘You’re opposed to social justice? What do you want, social injustice?’

Those calling for equality will always include a contingent who mistake exhibitionism for activism,

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.

Everything that is good is female. Everything that is bad is male.

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.

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.

They must be given a giant, tech-sized ‘F- you’. All in the interests of fairness, obviously.

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,

So where diversity and representation are found to have been inadequate in the past, this can be solved most easily by changing the past.

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.

Christakis tried to explain his view that even if two people do not share exactly the same life experiences, exactly the same skin colour or gender, they can still understand each other.

‘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.

If people got things so wrong in the past, how can you be sure you are acting appropriately today?

That line was that you should attempt to speak, write and even think aloud in a manner which no reasonable person could reasonably misinterpret. If somebody did unreasonably misinterpret your words then it reflected badly on them.

But it is a curiosity of the age that, after the situation appears at the very least to be better than it ever was, it is presented as though it has never been worse.

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. Society may tolerate you. It may wish you well. But your desire to dress in lady’s knickers is no reason to force everyone to use entirely new pronouns. Or to alter every public bathroom. Or to bring up children with the belief that there is no difference between the sexes and that gender is a social construct.

This is why the products of rights are now presented as the bases of rights even though these bases form such unstable entities. If only this liberalism could allow a dose of humility to be injected where the certainty has prevailed.

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.

if people should be allowed to self-identify why should that right stop at the borders of race and not at the borders of sex?

Perhaps we could get out of this mania by treating people as individuals based on their abilities and not trying to impose equity quotas on every company and institution?

We see oppression where it doesn’t exist and have no idea how to respond to it.

apart from reasons of historical guilt, many Western people today find themselves imbibing the idea that ‘primitive’ societies had some special state of grace which we lack today – as though in a simpler time there would have been more female dominance, more peace and less homophobia, racism and transphobia.

War Before Civilisation: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage

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.

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

After all, if a university is going to encourage non-experts to judge experts and privileges people who do

In fact, my offer still stands of a cash reward for anyone who can satisfactorily tell me the difference between coming out as ‘non-binary’ and simply saying ‘look at me’.

My generation was brought up to be colour blind. Now we are told that not focusing on race all the time makes us racists.