Depoliticize our lives
The aim of identity politics would appear to be to politicize absolutely everything. To turn every aspect of human interaction into a matter of politics. To interpret every action and relationship in our lives along lines which are alleged to have been carved out by political actions. The calls to spend our time working out our own place and the places of others in the oppression hierarchy are invitations not just to an era of navel-gazing, but to turn every human relationship into a political power calibration. The new metaphysics includes a call to find meaning in this game: to struggle, and fight and campaign and ‘ally’ ourselves with people in order to reach the promised land. In an era without purpose, and in a universe without clear meaning, this call to politicize everything and then fight for it has an undoubted attraction. It fills life with meaning, of a kind.
But of all the ways in which people can find meaning in their lives, politics – let alone politics on such a scale – is one of the unhappiest. Politics may be an important aspect of our lives, but as a source of personal meaning it is disastrous. Not just because the ambitions it strives after nearly always go unachieved, but because finding purpose in politics laces politics with a passion – including a rage – that perverts the whole enterprise. If two people are in disagreement about something important, they may disagree as amicably as they like if it is just a matter of getting to the truth or the most amenable option. But if one party finds their whole purpose in life to reside in some aspect of that disagreement, then the chances of amicability fade fast and the likelihood of reaching any truth recedes.
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. The call should be for people to simplify their lives and not to mislead themselves by devoting their lives to a theory that answers no questions, makes no predictions and is easily falsifiable. Meaning can be found in all sorts of places. For most individuals it is found in the love of the people and places around them: in friends, family and loved ones, in culture, place and wonder. A sense of purpose is found in working out what is meaningful in our lives and then orientating ourselves over time as closely as possible to those centres of meaning. Using ourselves up on identity politics, social justice (in this manifestation) and intersectionality is a waste of a life.
We may certainly aim to live in a society in which nobody should be held back from what they can do because of some personal characteristic allotted to them by chance. If somebody has the competency to do something, and the desire to do something, then nothing about their race, sex or sexual orientation should hold them back. But minimizing difference is not the same as pretending difference does not exist. To assume that sex, sexuality and skin colour mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything will be fatal.
Acknowledgements
This is my second book with Bloomsbury, and once again it has been an enormous pleasure to work with everybody there. I have particularly benefited from the support, advice and editorial guidance of Robin Baird-Smith, and also from Jamie Birkett among others in the London office. I would particularly like to thank my agent, Matthew Hamilton of The Hamilton Agency.
The title of this book comes from a work by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I hope he would have allowed the theft, given the disappointing prevalence of the phenomenon he described 180 years ago.
Several books back I learned to be wary of acknowledging any, let alone all, of the people who had any input into my work. Not because I am not grateful to them, but because I am reluctant to compile a list of people who might subsequently be accused of being guilty parties. That is especially the case with this book. Nevertheless, I have been enormously grateful for the vast number of conversations I have had with people across four continents during the research and writing of this book. And I would like to thank very sincerely all of my wonderful family and friends.
Yet there is one person I will name, because as well as appearing several times in this book, a number of the ideas featured have been best honed by their testing on his extraordinary mind. Of all the people from whom I have benefited when discussing these subjects, no one has opened my mind more often than Eric Weinstein. I am happy to credit any of my better ideas and observations to him, while insisting that any of the worst are original.
Douglas Murray
July 2019
Notes
Introduction
1 See Jean-Francois Lyotard (trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, 1984, pp. xxiv and 37.
2 Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Henry Holt, 2018, p. 26.
3 Coleman Hughes in conversation with Dave Rubin, The Rubin Report, YouTube, 12 October 2018.
4 ‘Hunger strikers died for gay rights, claims Sinn Fein senator Fintan Warfield’, Belfast Telegraph, 15 August 2016.
5 See chart at https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1066934424804057088
6 See Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting up a Generation for Failure, Allen Lane, 2018, pp. 5–7ff.
7 APA Guidelines for psychological practice with men and boys, August 2018: https://www.apa.org/about/policy/boys-men-practice-guidelines.pdf
8 See ‘Views of racism as a major problem increase sharply, especially among Democrats’, Samantha Neal, Pew Research Center, 29 August 2017.
9 Ekow N. Yankah, The New York Times, 11 November 2017.
10 Helen Pidd, ‘Women shun cycling because of safety, not helmet hair’, The Guardian, 13 June 2018.
11 Tim Hunt interview by Robin McKie, ‘I’ve been hung out to dry’, The Observer, 13 June 2015. What got him into trouble were these words: ‘Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.’
12 See the exchange between Senator Katy Gallagher and Senator Mitch Fifield in the Australian Senate on 11 February 2016.
13 See for instance this thread: https://twitter.com/HarryTheOwl/status/1088144870991114241
14 CNN interview with Rep Debbie Dingell, 17 November 2017.
15 Kenneth Minogue, The Liberal Mind, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis edn, 2000, p. 1.
Chapter 1: Gay
1 Good Morning Britain, ITV, 5 September 2017.
2 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Penguin, 2006, pp. 60–1.
3 ‘Nicky Morgan says homophobia may be sign of extremism’, BBC News, 30 June 2015.
4 Robert Samuels, Washington Post, 29 August 2016.
5 ‘Desert Island Discs: Tom Daley felt “inferior” over sexuality’, BBC News website, 30 September 2018.
6 ‘Made in Chelsea’s Ollie Locke to become Ollie Locke-Locke’, BBC News website, 1 October 2018.
7 The New York Times (International Edition), 16 October 2017, pp. 15–17.
8 See for instance Russell T. Davies, ‘A Rose by any other name’, The Observer, 2 September 2001.
9 See ‘Generation Z – beyond binary: new insights into the next generation’, Ipsos Mori, 6 July 2018.
10 These are: B. S. Mustanski, M. G. Dupree, C. M. Nievergelt et al., ‘A genome-wide scan of male sexual orientation’, Human Genetics, 116 (2005), pp. 272–8; R. Blanchard, J. M. Cantor, A. F. Bogaert et al., ‘Interaction of fraternal birth order and handedness in the development of male homosexuality’, Hormones and Behavior, 49 (2006), pp. 405–14; J. M. Bailey, M. P. Dunne and N. G. Martin, ‘Genetic and environmental influences on sexual orientation and its correlates in an Australian twin sample’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78 (2000), pp. 524–36.
11 Royal College of Psychiatrists’ statement on sexual orientation, Position Statement PS02/2014, April 2014 (https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/pdf
/PS02_2014.pdf).
12 Ibid.
13 Website of the American Psychological Association, ‘Sexual Orientation & Homosexuality’ (http://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/orientation.aspx) accessed August 2018.
14 Bruce Bawer, A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society, Touchstone, 1994, p. 82.
15 Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 112–16.
16 ‘This is why straight men watch porn’, Pink News, 19 March 2018.
17 ‘Majority in U.S. Now Say Gays and Lesbians Born, Not Made’, Gallup, 20 May 2015.
18 See the discussion of this episode in Alice Dreger, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice, Penguin, 2016, pp. 182–3.
19 ‘Attitudes towards homosexuals and evolutionary theory’, in Ethology and Sociobiology. There is a useful summary of the Gallup–Archer exchange by Jesse Bering in Scientific American, 9 March 2011.
20 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 7, chs 5–6. Incidentally among recent translations, the Cambridge University Press edition (2014) goes with ‘sodomy’ while the Oxford University Press edition (2009) goes with ‘paederasty’.
21 See for instance ‘What are the most cited publications in the social sciences (according to Google Scholar)?’, Elliott Green, LSE blogs, 12 May 2016.
22 Michael Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 – The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, Penguin, 1998, p. 43.
23 David Halperin, ‘Historicising the sexual body: sexual preferences and erotic identities in the pseudo-Lucianic Erotes’, in Domna C. Stanton (ed.), Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS, University of Michigan Press, 1992, p. 261. See also Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality, Picador, 1996.
24 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 156.
25 Hunter Madsen and Marshall Kirk, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ’90s, Doubleday, 1989.
26 See Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968, W. W. Norton & Company Ltd, 1996, pp. 154–5.
27 Bawer, A Place at the Table, p. 191.
28 Ibid., p. 193.
29 Ibid., pp. 220–1.
30 Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality, Picador, 1996, p. 204.
31 Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias, pp. 160–1.
32 @TheEllenShow, Twitter, 25 October 2017, 5.53 p.m.
33 Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2018.
34 Stop Funding Hate, Twitter, 16 February 2018.
35 ‘Children of same-sex couples happier and healthier than peers, research shows’, Washington Post, 7 July 2014.
36 Sunday Morning Live, BBC1, 27 October 2010.
37 ‘Study identifies predictors of relationship dissolution among same-sex and heterosexual couples’, The Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, 1 March 2018.
38 Pink News, 25 March 2018.
39 Bawer, A Place at the Table, p. 188.
40 ‘Sir Ian McKellen: Brexit makes no sense if you’re gay’, Daily Telegraph, 10 June 2016.
41 Jim Downs, ‘Peter Thiel shows us there’s a difference between gay sex and gay’, Advocate, 14 October 2016.
42 ‘Bret Easton Ellis goes on Twitter rampage after GLAAD media awards ban’, Entertainment Weekly, 22 April 2013.
43 ‘How straight people should behave in gay bars’, Pink News, 30 November 2018.
44 ‘In the reign of the magical gay elves’, Bret Easton Ellis, Out, 13 May 2013.
45 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 60–1.
46 Daniel Mendelsohn, The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, pp. 73–5.
Interlude: The Marxist Foundations
1 ‘The social and political views of American professors’, a working paper by Neil Gross (Harvard) and Solon Simmons (George Mason), 24 September 2007.
2 See https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf
3 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, ‘Socialist strategy: Where next?’, Marxism Today, January 1981.
4 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (second edition), Verso, 2001, p. 133.
5 Ibid., p. 141.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., pp. 159–60.
8 Laclau and Mouffe, ‘Socialist strategy: Where next?’
9 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 1.
10 ‘What happens to #MeToo when a feminist is the accused?’, The New York Times, 13 August 2018.
11 Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Penguin, 2003, p. x.
12 Judith Butler, ‘Further reflections on conversations of our time’, Diacritics, vol. 27, no. 1, Spring 1997.
13 Consider, for instance, Sheldon Lee Glashow, ‘The standard mode’, Inference: International Review of Science, vol. 4, no. 1, Spring 2018.
14 https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/conceptual-penis-social-contruct-sokal-style-hoax-on-gender-studies
15 ‘Hoaxers slip breastaurants and dog-park sex into journals’, The New York Times, 4 October 2018.
16 ‘American Psychological Association guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men’, APA, August 2018, p. 10.
Chapter 2: Women
1 Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Penguin, 2003, pp. 346–50.
2 Ibid., p. 350.
3 AccessOnline.com video, ‘Rosario Dawson talks grabbing Paul Rudd’s “package” onstage at the 2011 Independent Spirit Awards’, 27 February 2011.
4 The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, CBS, 20 March 2018.
5 Huffington Post, 11 May 2007.
6 RSA Conference, 28 February 2014.
7 Mayim Bialik, ‘Being a feminist in Harvey Weinstein’s world’, The New York Times, 13 October 2017.
8 The Late Late Show with James Corden, CBS, 8 February 2016.
9 See ‘Loud and proud! Brand releases sets of $9.99 plastic stick-on NIPPLES that are sold in two sizes – “cold” and “freezing”’, Mail Online (FeMail), 4 April 2017.
10 ‘The hottest new trend is camel toe underwear and we’re all over it’, Metro, 24 February 2017.
11 VICE News interview with Dr Jordan Peterson, 7 February 2018.
12 Christine Lagarde, ‘Ten years after Lehman – lessons learned and challenges ahead’, IMF blog, 5 September 2018.
13 BBC Question Time, 19 March 2009.
14 ‘When women thrive’ report, Mercer, October 2016.
15 ‘Wall Street rule for the MeToo era: avoid women at all costs’, Bloomberg, 3 December 2018.
16 United States Office of Personnel Management, ‘Government-wide Inclusive Diversity Strategic Plan’, July 2016.
17 See https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit.
18 See ‘Can we really measure implicit bias? Maybe not’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 January 2017; ‘Unconscious bias: what is it and can it be eliminated?’, The Guardian, 2 December 2018.
19 See, for instance, Odette Chalaby, ‘Your company’s plan to close the gender pay gap probably won’t work’, Apolitical, 22 May 2018.
20 ‘Smaller firms should publish gender pay gap, say MPs’, BBC News, 2 August 2018.
21 Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, Vintage, 1992, pp. 16–17.
22 Marilyn French, The War Against Women, Hamish Hamilton, 1992, pp. 1–2.
23 Ibid., pp. 5–6.
24 Ibid., p. 7.
25 Ibid., p. 9.
26 Ibid., p. 14.
27 Ibid., pp. 121–55.
28 Ibid., pp. 159 ff.
29 Ibid., pp. 210–11. Incidentally the ‘women as the embodiment of peace’ theme has a significant lineage. See for instance Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour (1911).
30 See, for instance, Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have B
etrayed Women, Simon & Schuster, 1995, pp. 11–12.
31 Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) on Twitter, 6 February 2018: https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/960777342275768320
32 Sama El-Wardany, ‘What women mean when we say “men are trash”’, Huffington Post, 2 May 2018.
33 Ezra Klein, ‘The problem with Twitter, as shown by the Sarah Jeong fracas’, Vox, 8 August 2018.
34 Georgia Aspinall, ‘Here are the countries where it’s still really difficult for women to vote’, Grazia, 6 February 2018.
35 GQ magazine foreword by Dylan Jones, December 2018.
36 ‘APA issues first ever guidelines for practice with men and boys’, American Psychological Association, January 2019.
37 ‘We are a nation of hidden feminists’, Fawcett Society press release, 15 January 2016.
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