No sensible person or movement hoping to pull together a coalition to create a viable rights movement to defend trans people would make such a claim. They would not routinely claim that trans people are simply trans when they say they are. They would not say that a bearded man is no problem for them in the changing room because ‘I dare say that some women have beards’. And they would not claim to be able to see into someone’s soul and there recognize whether that person is a man or a woman. These are deranged claims and – like so many claims in the trans debate – they go on to derange anyone who has to listen to them, let alone those pushed to go along with them or assume that they are true.
A movement that sought to advance trans claims would start with intersex and from there move with enormous care along the spectrum of trans assertions, analyzing them with scientific precision in the process. It would not go straight to the hardest part of the claim and insist it is true and that everyone else must believe it is true too. That is not what you do if you are trying to build a coalition or a movement. It is what you do if you do not want to create a consensus. It is what you do if you are seeking to cause division.
Once you notice this counter-intuitive play you can see it going on with each issue. For instance, a number of wage gaps exist. There is, for example, as Jordan Peterson has pointed out, a pay gap that exists between people who are agreeable and people who are disagreeable. But this is a gap that exists across both men and women. A disagreeable woman will have a pay advantage over an agreeable man. And vice versa. So if anyone is worried about pay gaps why would that one not be something to linger on? Why would there not be an endless and retributive campaign calling for agreeable people to be paid more in the workplace and for disagreeable people to step back? Because that wouldn’t fit the aim, which is not to advance women’s rights or women’s pay situation, but to use women as a wedge to do something else.
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. In this again the last part of a Marxist substructure can be glimpsed. If you cannot rule a society – or pretend to rule it, or try to rule it and collapse everything – then you can do something else. In a society that is alive to its faults, and though imperfect remains a better option than anything else on offer, you sow doubt, division, animosity and fear. Most effectively you can try to make people doubt absolutely everything. Make them doubt whether the society they live in is good at all. Make them doubt that people really are treated fairly. Make them doubt whether there are any such groupings as men or women. Make them doubt almost everything. And then present yourself as having the answers: the grand, overarching, interlocking set of answers that will bring everyone to some perfect place, the details of which will follow in the post.
Perhaps they will have their way. Perhaps the advocates of the new religion will use gays and women and those of a different skin colour and trans individuals as a set of battering rams to turn people against the society they have been brought up in. Perhaps they will succeed in turning everyone against the ‘cis white male patriarchy’ and they will do it before all of their interlocking ‘oppressed, victim groups’ have torn each other apart. It is possible. But anyone interested in preventing that nightmarish scenario should search for solutions.
Solutions
Many people will have already found their way to deal with the current of the times and developed more or less clever ways to navigate it. There are options open to people. Whilst writing this book I learned about the behaviour of a type of cuttlefish which hides its intentions, thus making the mating game more complex even than it already is. The cuttlefish is among the creatures most adept at sexual mimicry. The giant Australian cuttlefish, Sepia apama, has a tricky male-to-female operational sex ratio, able to reach as high as eleven males to each female. Since female cuttlefish reject 70 per cent of male advances the competition among the males is especially high, and made higher by the trend of consort guarding. Consort males achieve around 64 per cent of the matings. For this reason the other male cuttlefish have a range of strategies at their disposal to have any chance of impregnating a female, and one of them is to mimic the behaviour of female cuttlefish. Smaller male cuttlefish hide their sexually dimorphic fourth arm, develop the skin pattern of their intended mate and even move their arms to imitate the pose of an egg-laying female. The strategy has been shown to be enormously effective. In one observed case, out of five male cuttlefish who used this method only one was turned away. Another was caught in the act by the consort male cuttlefish. But the other three cuttlefish successfully had their way.32
The cuttlefish prompted in me a flash of recognition, specifically about the many men who are adopting similar tactics. The day after the inauguration of President Trump in January 2017 there were large demonstrations in Washington, DC, and other cities. This ‘Women’s March’ focused on the president’s past remarks about women and included large numbers of protestors who wore pink ‘pussy hats’. Banners bore legends like ‘Don’t DICKtate to my pussy’. At one after-march party in Washington a journalist colleague noticed the behaviour of some of the men who were present. Amid the bands, beer and plastic cups the girls stood around talking excitedly about the Women’s March and their role in it. The young men present all strongly stressed their support for the march and all explained that they were feminists too. One young man ‘nodded’ gravely’ as one attractive young woman recited all the correct beliefs of a modern feminist. After she briefly left he turned to his friend and whispered ‘Dude, this is awesome! All these drunk, emotional girls in one city!’33 Whether the tactic worked in his case is not known. But he cannot be the only young man developing a cuttlefish strategy in order to get through the period in which he finds himself. Yet cuttlefish strategies, among others, are ways to survive in a horrible natural environment. A better ambition would be to try to change that environment.
Ask ‘compared to what’?
One way to start might be to ask more regularly and more assiduously, ‘Compared to what?’ When people attempt to sum up our societies today as monstrous, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic patriarchies the question needs to be asked. If this hasn’t worked or isn’t working, what is the system that has worked or does work? To ask this is not to say that elements of our society cannot be improved, or that we should not address injustice and unfairness when we see them. But to talk about our societies in the hostile tone of judge, juror and executioner demands some questions to be asked of the accuser.
Very often dissection of our societal fall relies on the presumption of a prelapsarian age: an age before the invention of the machine, steam or the marketplace. These presumptions lie very deep, starting with the idea that we are born in a state of virtue from which the world has unfairly ripped us. Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously embodied this thinking in passages like this from Book II of Emile, or On Education (published in English in 1763) in which he writes: ‘The first movements of human nature are always right. There is no original perversity in the human heart. There is not a single vice to be found in it of which it cannot be said how and whence it entered. In relation to others, he must respond only to what nature asks of him, and then he will do nothing but good.’34 People who believe this strain of thought must find a culprit for their own failings and the failings of every other person around them, since they were born in such a state of grace. Inevitably such thinking spills out into a belief that simpler, older or earlier societies somehow provide an example of something worth going back to.
So, 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. There are an awful lot of unsupported assumptions among these beliefs. It is true that it is hard to quantify how much homophobia or racism would have been evident in various tribes. And perhaps there would have been more harmony and trans rights than we would suspect. But the facts often suggest the contrary. In his book War Before Civilisation: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage L. H. Keeley goes through the percentages of male deaths in conflict among a range of South American and New Guinean tribes. 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.
Of course it may be that it is not with any society in history but another society in the world today that the comparison is being made. There are people who act as apologists for the revolutionary regime in Tehran, who like to cite the levels of transsexualism in that country as a demonstration of the progressiveness of the regime. This of course requires the listener to be ignorant of the fact that this is a country where right up to the present in 2019 men found guilty of homosexual acts are publicly hanged – often from cranes so that the maximum number of people can see the killing. In which other countries today are human rights at a more advanced stage than in Britain and America? If they exist then there is no harm – and only gain for us all – in hearing about them. Perhaps one reason why people – especially neo-Marxists – are coy about the precise comparisons they are making is that the comparisons they would cite (Venezuela, Cuba, Russia) would reveal the deeper underbelly of their ideology and the true reasons for the negative accounting of the West.
But most often the question ‘Compared to what?’ will elicit only the fact that the utopia with which our society is being compared has not yet come about. If this is the case, and the monstrous claims about our societies are being made in comparison to a society that has not yet been created, then a certain amount of humility and a great deal of further questioning might be needed. Those who claim that our society is typified by bigotry but believe they know how to fix any and all societal ills better make sure that their route maps are well plotted. If they are not then there is reason for everyone else to be suspicious about a project whose earliest stages are being presented as rigorous science when they more closely resemble an advocacy of magic.
The Victim is not always right, or nice, deserves no praise – and may not be a victim
In his biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt (2000), H. W. Brands makes a passing point about the 32nd president’s polio. 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. If people were so oppressed would they have the time or inclination to listen to every person who felt the need to publicize that a talk by a novelist at a literary festival had upset them, or that it was intolerable to be sold a burrito by someone of the wrong ethnicity?
Victimhood rather than stoicism or heroism has become something eagerly publicized, even sought after, in our culture. To be a victim is in some way to have won, or at least to have got a head start in the great oppression race of life. 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. In fact, suffering in and of itself does not make someone a better person. A gay, female, black or trans person may be as dishonest, deceitful and rude as anybody else.
There is a suggestion in the social justice movement that when intersectionality has done its job and the matrix of competing hierarchies has finally been nixed, then an era of universal brotherhood will ensue. But the most likely explanation of human motivations in the future is that people will broadly go on behaving as they have done throughout history, that they will continue exhibiting the same impulses, frailties, passions and envy that have propelled our species up till now. For example, there is no reason to assume that if all social injustices were ironed out and every employer finally had the correct diversity of people in their companies (as broken down by gender, sexual orientation and race) that all the Chief People Officers would stand down from their roles. It seems at least possible that six-figure salaries will be as hard to come by on that happy day as they are now and that those who have managed to get them by presenting a hostile interpretation of society will not volunteer up their own salaries even if their work is done. More likely is that a salaried class know that this puzzle is unsolvable and that they have got themselves jobs for life. They will remain in those roles for as long as they can until such a time as it is recognized that their solution to society’s ills offers no solution at all, but only an invitation to madness on a vast and costly scale both to the individual and to society as a whole.
Can we incline towards generosity?
When explaining the use of ‘KillAllMen’ and ‘white people’ in a derogatory way, Ezra Klein said that when reading such words he felt ‘inclined . . . towards generosity’. Hence he felt able to interpret ‘KillAllMen’ as meaning ‘it would be nice if the world sucked less for women’ and interpreted the use of ‘CancelWhitePeople’ as a criticism of ‘the dominant power structure and culture’.37 Why did he feel inclined towards generosity in such cases? It would seem – as we saw in the issue of ‘the speaker not the speech’ – that highly politicized people are willing to interpret even extreme remarks from their own political tribe in a generous and forgiving light while reading the remarks of those in any opposing camp in as negative and hostile a light as possible.
Can the spirit of generosity be extended any more widely? If people were able to feel some generosity in interpreting the remarks of others, even of those on an opposing side, then some lessening of the trench-digging might be possible. The problem is that social media does not encourage this. It encourages the precise opposite. Not being able to meet, and not having any need to meet, makes people double-down on positions (and attitudes) and ramp up their outrage. When someone is face to face with another person it is far harder to reduce them to one thing that they have said, or strip them of all characteristics except one.
On his travels in America in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville noticed the significance of assembly in the United States – specifically that face-to-face meetings of the citizenry allowed them to remedy problems often before any other authority was needed. In Democracy in America he attributes a great power to this ability to assemble and observes that face-to-face contestation is not only the best way to get to a solution but that in such interactions ‘opinions are deployed with the force and heat that written thought can never attain’.38 Although everything in the development of the new media is pulling people away from face-to-face encounters, it remains the best available forum in which to build confidence in others. To incline towards generosity you have to have a baseline presumption that your generosity will not be abused, and the best if not the only way to work that out is by personal interaction. Without it life will increasingly resemble a catalogue of easily searchable and eminently revivable historic grudges. So an inclination towards generosity not just among allies, but towards ostensible opponents, may be one of the first steps out of the madness. I do not especially like (Dr) Michael David
son’s ideas about being gay, but if I decided that he and his ‘Voices of the Silenced’ should be viewed only in the most negative possible light then I would not merely have no need to listen to him. I would not want to live in the same society as him. Yet we do live in the same society, and we have to find some way to get along together. It is the only option we have because otherwise, if we have come to the conclusion that talking and listening respectfully are futile, the only tool left for us is violence.
Recognize where we may be going
In 1967, just a year before his death, 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.’39 Among the many depressing aspects of recent years, perhaps the most troubling is the ease with which race has returned as an issue – bandied about by people who either cannot possibly realize the danger of the game they are playing or who do know precisely what they are playing at, which is unforgivable. Some of the inevitable end-points have already emerged and should have presented the clearest possible warning signals.
For instance, who would have expected even a generation ago that it would be acceptable for a liberal magazine to pose the question, ‘Are Jews white?’ This wasn’t National Geographic a century ago, but The Atlantic magazine in 2016.40 The question arose because of the dispute over where Jews might come in the oppression hierarchy that is being assembled. Should Jews be regarded as being high up in the oppression stakes, or can they be seen as benefiting from some privileges of their own? Do they benefit from white privilege or not? Once such questions start to get asked is it surprising that some people will come up with ugly answers? At the University of Illinois in Urbana some leaflets turned up on campus in 2017 which offered their own answer. They presented a hierarchical pyramid, at the bottom of which were the ‘99 per cent’ who were oppressed by the alleged top 1 per cent. But the leaflets asked whether the top 1 per cent oppressing everyone else were ‘straight white men’ or ‘is the 1 per cent Jewish?’ The authors seemed to know the answer, arguing that Jews were the primary holders of ‘privilege’, concluding that ‘Ending white privilege starts with ending Jewish privilege.’41 Are those who engage in endless assertions about ‘privilege’ absolutely sure that their movement and analysis will not stampede in directions like this? Are they certain that after not just releasing resentment but encouraging it, such a basic human sentiment will not run free? What are their crash barriers to prevent this? And if they haven’t got any such plans, perhaps we could return to Martin Luther King’s vision. Perhaps we could aim to take race out of every and any debate and discussion and turn our increasing colour obsession back into an aspiration for colour-blindness.
The Madness of Crowds Page 31
