Douglas Murray and His Continuing Fight against the "Madness of Crowds”

The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray — slay the dragon, then stop

 

A robust critique of progressives fails to explore their impact on populism

 

Eric Kaufmann OCTOBER 11 2019

https://www.ft.com/content/f79a4b38-d961-11e9-9c26-419d783e10e8

 

“Kill all men” and “cancel white people” are harmless satire, but “America is a colour-blind society” is racist. Gender and race are social constructs, so changing gender is great. Changing your race, however, is a no-no — one of many contradictions in the social justice religion. Get it wrong and you wind up Twitter-mobbed or fired.

 

Douglas Murray’s new book reports from the front lines of the “culture wars”, the battle to define the core values of western societies. The deepening cultural divide between progressives and conservatives is reshaping politics, displacing the left-right economic cleavage of the past century. But economic interests are easier to reconcile than sacred values: if we fail to make cultural peace, our future looks bleak.

 

Murray is a prominent British member of the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW) of countercultural intellectuals — such as Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson — who openly contest the sacralisation of disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identities. The IDW’s willingness to transgress the speech rules of the progressive twitterati marks them out as heretics who violate the sensibility of academia, Hollywood and parts of the media.

 

How did our societies become so insane? In The Madness of Crowds, Murray argues that it’s because highly educated people cling to a new religion known variously as “social justice”, “identity politics” or “intersectionality”. Essentially this is the old Marxist faith poured from the class bottle into the race-sex-gender one. Meaning is realised through struggle against those who commit wrongthink.

 

Identity politics helped reduce prejudice but, having vanquished its foe, began manufacturing phantom enemies. Murray, following the late conservative political theorist Kenneth Minogue, dubs this “St George in retirement” syndrome. Having slain the dragon, he charges off in pursuit of ever-smaller ones and ends by “swinging his sword at thin air, imagining it to contain dragons”.

 

Murray’s tone, as in his previous book on immigration, The Strange Death of Europe, is often contemplative. As a gay man, he captures the way identity politics flattens the complexity of the homosexual experience. Ignoring the literary tradition of gays as privy to the mysteries each sex holds for the other, it reduces them to moral ciphers, what Bret Easton Ellis terms “The Gay Man as Magical Elf . . . some kind of saintly ET” who symbolises how tolerant we are.

 

Murray’s analytical frame turns on his distinction between identity as “hardware” or “software”. That is, whether race, sexuality and gender are hard-wired by nature or learned through nurture. Science tells us a great deal about these questions. But faith, not science, guides radical progressivism. Gender is held to be socially constructed, hence the vitriol directed at TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) such as Germaine Greer, who question the bona fides of trans women. Homosexuality, however, is a genetic characteristic that only a religious fundamentalist would suggest is learned.

 

The new sensibility tells us when race is, or isn’t, biological. “Whiteness” is a social construct designed to divide the workers and bolster caste privilege. However, Murray notes that when Rachel Dolezal, a white woman, passed herself off as black, she was attacked as an interloper. And when philosopher Rebecca Tuvel asked whether, since transgenderism is possible, transracialism should be, all hell broke loose. Radical progressives penned an open letter and both Tuvel and the journal she published in prostrated themselves before the Twitter authorities. The journal apologised and its editors resigned. As hoax papers by academics Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay later revealed, “grievance studies” fields like feminism or critical race studies are anchored by holy writ, not logic and evidence.

 

 Murray catalogues the injustice of the progressive mob — reputations trashed, careers ruined — and their illiberal stifling of intellectual freedom. But such concerns can appear distant for some. Murray might therefore have explored how these ideas fuel the polarisation and populism of our time. He hints at these effects, but studies show that hostility to political correctness powered the Trump vote, while Murray’s “tripwires” establishing boundaries of acceptable debate shut down discussion of immigration. This allowed populists to own the issue and flourish. The book could also have drawn on data to establish the parameters of the problem and propose policy solutions.

 

The “madness” of the title points to the way radical progressivism weaponises norms that allow for civilised societies. Norms are the control mechanism in systems like herds: if a few activist sheep command, everyone follows out of fear. Disrupting the herding taking place in cultural institutions is one of our great challenges. At its heart, the problem is how to moderate cultural egalitarianism, balancing it against competing aims like liberty, reason and community. We accept limits on economic levelling but have yet to reject the misguided idea that all race and gender groups must have equal outcomes.

 

Murray’s book performs a great service in exposing the excesses of the left-modernist faith. Let’s hope we find a way to slay this dragon.