The Madness of Crowds

by Douglas Murray

  Saying ‘Kill All Men’ might have been an over-zealous way to call for female suffrage at a time when women did not have the vote. 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.

  Nor is this campaign limited to Twitter hashtaggery. Over the last decade we have seen the entry into everyday public discussion of a range of slogans such as ‘male privilege’. Like most slogans it is easy to spout but hard to put a finger on. 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.

  Other forms of the new misandry present themselves as more lighthearted. For instance, there is the term ‘mansplaining’ to decry any occasion when a man can be said to have spoken to a woman in a patronizing or supercilious manner. Certainly everybody can think of examples when they have heard men speak in precisely such a tone of voice. But most people can also think of times when a woman has spoken to a man in the same way. Or indeed when a man has spoken patronizingly to another man. So why does only one of these circumstances need its own term? Why is there no term for – or wide usage of – a word like ‘womansplaining’? Or any idea whether a man can ‘mansplain’ to another man? What are the circumstances under which a man can be said to be talking down to a woman because she is a woman as opposed to a man talking down to a woman because she is talking down to him? At present there is no mechanism to work any of these things out, merely a projectile that can be launched at any stage by a woman.

  Then there is the concept of ‘the patriarchy’ – the idea that people (largely in Western capitalist countries) live in a society which is rigged in favour of men and with the aim of suppressing women and their skills. This concept has become so ingrained that when it is mentioned it now floats by as though the idea that modern Western societies are centred around – and run solely for the comfort of – men is not even something most people would bother to dispute. In a 2018 article, commemorating the centenary of women in Britain over the age of 30 gaining the right to vote, a piece in the popular women’s magazine Grazia said, ‘We live in a patriarchal society, that much we know.’ The reasons it gave as evidence were ‘the objectification of women’ and ‘unrealistic beauty standards’, as though men are never objectified or held to any standards in their appearance (a claim that men who have been surreptitiously photographed on trains by strangers and had their photos uploaded to ‘Hot dudes reading’ on Instagram might dispute). ‘For us, the patriarchy is hidden’ according to Grazia, though other visible symptoms were ‘a lack of respect that amounts to a gender pay gap and snatched career opportunities’.34 Men’s magazines seem perfectly happy to adopt the same presumptions. Reflecting on the events of 2018, the men’s magazine GQ was happy to editorialize approvingly that during that year ‘For the first time in history, we’ve all been called to account for the sins of the patriarchy.’35

  Worst among the new lexicon of anti-male slogans is that of ‘toxic masculinity’. Like each of these other memes, ‘toxic masculinity’ started out on the furthest fringes of academia and social media. But by 2019 it had made it into the heart of serious organizations and public bodies. In January the American Psychological Association released its first ever guidelines for how its members should specifically deal with men and boys. The APA claimed that 40 years of research showed that ‘traditional masculinity – marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression, is undermining men’s well-being’. To tackle these ‘traditional’ aspects of masculinity the APA had produced its new guidelines in order to help people in practice ‘recognize this problem for boys and men’. The APA went on to define traditional masculinity as ‘a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.’36 It was just one of the inroads that the concept of ‘toxic masculinity’ has made into the mainstream.

  It did so, again, with no suggestion that any such problem is mirrored on the female side. For instance, does a form of ‘toxic femininity’ exist? If so, what is it and how can it be permanently excised from women? Nor is there any sense before the concept of ‘toxic masculinity’ is embedded of whether or how it might work even on its own terms. For instance, if competitiveness is indeed an especially male trait – as the APA would appear to be suggesting – when is that competitiveness toxic or harmful, and when is it useful? Might a male athlete be allowed to use his competitive instincts on the racetrack? If so how can he be helped to ensure that off the track he is as docile as possible? Might a man facing inoperable cancer with stoicism be criticized for doing so, and helped out of this harmful position into a situation in which he demonstrates less stoicism? If ‘adventure’ and ‘risk’ are indeed male traits then when and where should men be encouraged to drop them? Should a male explorer be encouraged to be less adventurous, a male firefighter be trained to take fewer risks? Ought male soldiers be encouraged to be less connected to ‘violence’ and be keener to show an appearance of weakness? If so when? What would the mechanism be by which male soldiers were reprogrammed to use their very useful traits and skills in certain dangerous occasions when society badly needs them, but that this should be trained out of them the rest of the time?

  Of course if there are toxic traits within masculinity the likelihood is that they are so deep (that is, they exist across all cultures irrespective of situational differences) that they are ineradicable. Or it could be that there are specific aspects of some male behaviour which in certain times and places are undesirable. If the latter is the case then there are almost certainly specific ways in which to tackle the problem. But in either case inventing concepts like ‘male privilege’, ‘the patriarchy’, ‘mansplaining’ or ‘toxic masculinity’ would not get near to addressing the problem, proving either too little or too much for the diagnosis at hand. 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.

  Why would that be? Why would the war and the rhetoric become so heated when the standards of equality have so much improved? Is it because the stakes are low? Because people are bored and want to assume the heroic posture amid a life of relative safety and comfort? Or is it simply that social media – the challenge of speaking to yourself or possibly to the entire planet – is making honest discussion impossible?

  Whatever the cause, the impact this is having on the reputation of feminism is clear. The misandry is damaging. In 2016 the Fawcett Society surveyed 8,000 people to find out what proportion of people identified themselves as a ‘feminist’. The survey found that only 9 per cent of British women used the word ‘feminist’ to describe themselves. Only 4 per cent of men did. The vast majority of people surveyed supported gender equality. In fact a larger number of men than women supported equality between the sexes (86 per cent versus 74 per cent). But the vast majority also resisted the ‘feminist’ label. For their part the Fawcett Society managed to put a positive spin on what for a feminist organization must have appeared to be a disappointing finding. Britain was a nation of ‘hidden feminists’, the group’s spokeswoman said. Explaining why
the vast majority of the public didn’t identify with the feminist label, she said, ‘The simple truth is that if you want a more equal society for women and men then you are in fact a feminist.’37 Yet when asked what words popped into respondents’ heads first when they heard the word ‘feminist’, the single most popular word that came to them – indeed to more than a quarter of respondents – was ‘bitchy’.38

  It is a similar story in the US. Asked in 2013 whether men and women should be ‘social, political and economic equals’, the vast majority of Americans (82 per cent) said ‘yes’. But when asked whether they identified themselves as ‘feminists’ there was a recognizable fall-off. Only 23 per cent of women and 16 per cent of men in the US identified themselves as ‘feminists’. A clear majority (63 per cent) said that they were neither feminist nor anti-feminist.39

  Whatever the cause may be, it isn’t wholly clear how men are supposed to react to this. The likelihood of reprogramming the natural instincts of all men and all women is a remote one. For three years between 2014 and 2017 academics in the UK carried out a study about the images of men that women found attractive. The results, published in Feminist Media Studies, discovered a disturbing trend. Newsweek summed up the shocking findings in a headline, ‘Men with muscles and money are more attractive to straight women and gay men – showing gender roles aren’t progressing.’40 Indeed. ‘Progress’ will only be achieved when women find men attractive who they don’t think are attractive. What could be unachievable in that?

  Hardware Trying to be Software

  When it comes to differences between men and women – and how to bring some order to relations between them – there remains a huge amount that we do not know. But there is a lot that we do know. Or did know. And as the snapshots of popular culture above demonstrate, this was not niche knowledge but knowledge just about as widely held as any knowledge can be. Yet something happened. At some point some scrambling device was imposed on the whole issue of relations between the sexes. Something caused this massive upsurge of rage and denial just at the point the issue should have reached a consensus and settlement.

  Without doubt the scrambling device laid over the issue of the sexes is among the most deranging aspects of all. It involves a set of unbelievable mental leaps to try to play along with it, and even then it cannot be even attempted without causing unbelievable personal and societal pain.

  It comes down to this. Gay campaigners spent the 1990s onwards hoping to persuade the world that homosexuality was a hardware issue, and as we saw above it may be or it may not be. But the drive to make it so was obvious. Hardware was good because hardware protected your status. But something happened at the same time as that fight was going on in gay rights which is truly staggering. Thanks to the work of a number of people – including people who were mistakenly thought to be arguing for feminism – the direction of travel for women simultaneously went in exactly the opposite direction.

  Until the last decade or so, sex (or gender) and chromosomes were recognized to be among the most fundamental hardware issues in our species. Whether we were born as a man or a woman was one of the main, unchangeable hardware issues of our lives. Having accepted this hardware we then all found ways – both men and women – to learn how to operate the relevant aspects of our lives. So absolutely everything not just within the sexes but between them became scrambled when the argument became entrenched that this most fundamental hardware issue of all was in fact a matter of software. The claim was made, and a couple of decades later it was embedded and suddenly everybody was meant to believe that sex was not biologically fixed but merely a matter of ‘reiterated social performances’.

  The claim put a bomb under the feminist cause with completely predictable consequences for another problem we’ll come to with ‘trans’. It left feminism with almost no defences against men arguing that they could become women. But the whole attempt to turn hardware into software has caused – and is continuing to cause – more pain than almost any other issue for men and women alike. 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.

  INTERLUDE

  The Impact of Tech

  If the foundations of the new metaphysics are precarious and the presumptions that we are being asked to follow seem subtly wrong, then it is the addition into the mix of the communications revolution that is causing the conditions for a crowd madness. If we are already running in the wrong direction then tech helps us to run there exponentially faster. It is this ingredient that is causing the sensation of the treadmill running faster than our feet can carry us.

  In 1933 James Thurber published ‘The Day the Dam Broke’, recalling his memories of 12 March 1913 when the whole of his town in Ohio went for a run. Thurber recalled how the rumour began that the dam had broken. Around noon ‘Suddenly somebody began to run. It may be that he had simply remembered, all of a moment, an engagement to meet his wife, for which he was now frightfully late.’ Soon somebody else began to run, ‘perhaps a newsboy in high spirits. Another man, a portly gentleman of affairs, broke into a trot’:

  Inside of ten minutes, everybody on High Street, from the Union Depot to the Courthouse, was running. A loud mumble gradually crystallized into the dread word ‘dam’. ‘The dam has broke!’ The fear was put into words by a little old lady in an electric, or by a traffic cop, or by a small boy: nobody knows who, nor does it now really matter. Two thousand people were abruptly in full flight. ‘Go east!’ was the cry that arose – east away from the river, east to safety. ‘Go east! Go east! Go east!’

  As the whole town stampedes to the east nobody stops to consider that the dam is so far away from their town that it could not cause a trickle of water to flow across the High Street. Nor does anybody notice the absence of water. The faster residents, who have put miles of distance between themselves and the town, eventually return home, as does everybody else. As Thurber says:

  The next day the city went about its business as if nothing had happened, but there was no joking. It was two years or more before you dared treat the breaking of the dam lightly. And even now, twenty years after, there are a few persons . . . who will shut up like a clam if you mention the Afternoon of the Great Run.1

  Today our societies seem always on that run, and always risking extraordinary shame over not just our own behaviour but the way in which we have treated others. Every day there is a new subject for hate and moral judgement. It might be a group of schoolboys wearing the wrong hats in the wrong place at the wrong time.2 Or it could be anybody else. As the work of Jon Ronson and others on ‘public shaming’ has shown,3 the internet has allowed new forms of activism and bullying in the guise of social activism to become the tenor of the time. 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.

  The Disappearance of Private Language

  There is a phrase variously attributed to the Danish computer scientist Morten Kyng or the American futurist Roy Amara, that the one thing we can say with certainty about the advent of new technologies is that people overestimate their impact in the short term and underestimate their impact over the long term. There is little doubt now, after the initial excitement, that we all massively underestimated what the internet and social media would do to our societies.

  Among the many things that was not fo
reseen but can now be recognized is that the internet, and social media in particular, have eradicated the space that used to exist between public and private language. Social media turns out to be a superlative way to embed new dogmas and crush contrary opinion just when you needed to listen to them most.

  We have spent the first years of this century trying to understand a communications revolution so huge that it may yet make the invention of the printing press look like a footnote in history. We have had to try to learn how to live in a world where at any moment we may be speaking to one other person or to millions around the world. The notion of private and public space has eroded. What we say in one place may be posted in another, not just for the whole world but for all time. And so we are having to find a way to speak and act online as though we may be speaking and acting in front of everyone – with the knowledge that if we slip up our error will be accessible everywhere and always.