The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity - Review by Stephen Portlock
Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds opens with two epigraphs. The first is from GK Chesterton:
“The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical but that it is dogmatic without knowing it”.
The second is from Nicki Minaj:
“Oh my gosh look at her butt, oh my gosh look at her butt, oh my gosh look at her butt, look at her butt, look at, look at, look at, look… at her butt”.
From these two epigraphs we can deduce, firstly, The Madness of Crowds is a surprisingly religious book. Murray may be an atheist but he has an avowed fondness for Christianity – a source of frustration to Evangelicals who frequently wish he would cross the line and join the fold.
Not many public intellectuals would include the second epigraph, but Murray’s default writing style has that very English sense of deadpan bemusement that carries beneath it very real anger, even rage.
The recurrent idea throughout Murray’s writing career has been that Europe has undergone a severe identity crisis in which it no longer knows what it believes. In The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam the threat came from religion with its deep ambivalence to liberal values. Yet, those liberal values were sliding precariously, even in 2017, which meant that one could hardly blame Muslims for this sentiment, especially as Murray appeared to agree in part.
The Madness of Crowds feels like an audacious venture. Specifically, he takes on the aggressively dogmatic forces of Social Justice – forces that under a cloak of compassion are only too happy to (thankfully, metaphorically) take down anyone who disagrees with them, even in part.
Like James Bond, Murray heads straight for his enemy, which, in this instance, means the four main planks on which Social Justice activism are situated and gives a chapter to each: ‘gay’, ‘women’, ‘race’ and ‘trans’. Of them all, the first is probably the best because of its apparently effortless structure.
It opens with a group of protesters outside a London cinema brandishing posters saying ‘SILENCED’. A passing couple assume they are UKIP protesters, but in fact they are Christians who were originally planning to attend a film screening of ‘Voices of the Silenced’, only to be silenced. Pink News got word of the planned event, caused a stink and so the cinema pulled out of showing this documentary on gay conversion therapy. Transferred to the Emmanuel Centre, Murray (himself, gay) joined the audience. Unsurprisingly, disagreeing but not particularly offended by the film, Murray then spends the remainder of the chapter exploring the various ramifications and contradictions inherent in gay politics.
The key problems inherent in all these groups are remarkably similar, namely a problem better defined as ‘hardware’ or ‘software’. In other words, are homosexuality, femininity and Blackness innate characteristics, or ones that can be put on or removed like a jacket? Are they based around lifestyle or upon beliefs? The answers to these questions should be self-evident to most people until they consider the case of Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, who was declared in 2016 by Advocate magazine to be “a man who has sex with other men but not a gay man” after he endorsed Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Anyone thinking ‘only in America’ should recall Sir Ian McKellen’s observation on Brexit that “if you’re a gay person, you’re an internationalist”.
Returning to the US, a similar excommunication was passed in 2018 by Ta-Nehisi Coates on Kanye West after the latter praised both Donald Trump and the Black conservative commentator and activist Candace Owens. In an essay in The Atlantic “I’m not Black, I’m Kanye”, Coates claimed that Kanye was championing “a kind of freedom–a white freedom”. As for the question of what a woman is, feminists have a real reason to fear when trans-activists insist that gender rather than biological sex is of primary importance. Parents also have very real reasons to fear lest they show insufficient enthusiasm when their seven-year-old declares that he wishes to transition into a girl.
So how has all this extraordinary confusion come about? To Douglas Murray all our grand narratives, be they religious or political, have collapsed. Enter Social Justice - a deeply destructive meeting between social media and postmodern thought. The latter for Murray is exemplified in the ideas of Michel Foucault who was less interested in truth claims than in the power dynamics that lay behind them. Murray roots Foucault’s thinking in Marxism.
What is indisputable is that one way or another there has been a distrust, even politicisation of objective truth, as reflected by a comment in a 2018 article for a black community magazine, The Root: “Diversity of thought is just a euphemism for white supremacy,”. The accelerator for such bad ideas has been social media and a significantly left of centre Silicon Valley committed to activism. “If someone who is a man says that they are a woman and would like you to refer to them as a woman then you can weigh up your options. On the one hand you could just pass the test and get on with your life. On the other hand, you could get labelled a ‘phobe’ and have your reputation and career destroyed”. Under the circumstances, the increased anxiety, depression, and mental illness in young people is not ‘snowflakeism’ but rather is perfectly understandable.
Murray’s diagnosis of our current predicament, seems pretty sound, yet to me, The Madness of Crowds is frequently brilliant but also deeply frustrating, even just slightly disappointing. Like Cynical Theories, the similarly themed work by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, The Madness of Crowds fails to ask the question that just may point the way out of our current nightmare; Why Social Justice has focused so specifically on the areas of race, gender, and sexuality at the expense of other demographics whose lives are as hard if not worse in some instances such as the elderly and disabled?
Some may recoil and suggest that the last thing we need are more groups stamping their feet and making unreasonable, crazy demands, but it is quite clear that Murray does not see identity politics per se as the problem. On the contrary, a point he makes passionately is that we should be focusing less on very unstable software issues, like trans-issues, and more on hardware issues, such as intersex.
Woke activism does seem to represent a rejection of astonishingly radical Christian theology in which ‘the last shall be first’ in favour of something much less challenging. Scott Alexander in Slate Magazine sees an umbilical link from New Atheism to Social Justice and Murray describes the latter as “a religion”. Secondly, senior citizens and disabled people call into question the automatic association of worth with productivity.
Murray correctly views the idea of ‘white privilege’ as vastly over-simplistic, considering the vicissitudes of life which include the possibility of natural disability. On the other hand, viewed through a disability prism, some of his other claims are a tad questionable. He is right to distrust unconscious bias training, but his case would have been stronger had he chosen a better example.
So, what is the real danger? As Murray points out, if we have come to the conclusion that talking and listening respectfully are futile, then the only remaining tool is violence. As things stand, there seems to be a rejection of Martin Luther King Jr’s call in 1967 from Atlanta, Georgia: “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”. Instead, in 2016 The Atlantic magazine asked, ‘Are Jews white?’. In other words, do they benefit from ‘white privilege’? At the University of Illinois, the following year an answer was provided. Leaflets turned up on campus informing readers that ending white privilege starts with ending Jewish privilege.
All this is very worrying, and as stated earlier, for Murray the roots of our current nightmare lie in left-wing thinkers such as Michel Foucault. Yet one might recall Margaret Thatcher’s observation that there is no such thing as society, only men, women and families. In fact the conclusions she was drawing are strikingly similar to those of Murray, that not everything should be politicised. Yet they have been in spite of, or possibly because of her massive impact on society as a whole. memes take on a life of their own and so a good case could be made for characterising the eighties as an era of aggressive self-interest, even selfishness, and, to put it mildly, that legacy has not entirely gone away.
Buy The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity here
