Published in the early months of the Johnson government, ‘The Madness of Crowds’ reads now like a survey of lines of trenches and barbed wire on the eve of the culture war. Its author, Douglas Murray, is conscious of this. He describes the book as performing the same function as the flailing arms of a minefield clearer. It is an early sortie which will be followed by a larger incursion into the territory held by the ‘woke’. However, rather than engaging in a surgical attack on the ideology of would be autocrats, Murray ends up wandering around the foothills of issues like gay rights, feminism, racism, and trans rights. When he is not taking pot shots at the doings of university students and the idiocies of corporate fads like implicit bias training, Murray tries to knit the eclectic examples he finds into an argument that progressive politics is at the very least misguided, if not downright sinister.
Murray’s skill lies in assembling, suitably distorted, examples of ‘woke’ absurdities. Like many working within the genre, Murray finds college campuses particularly fruitful, as well as the vulgarities of the ‘anti-bias’ trainings that have swept the corporate world. However, sometimes he is not so successful. In a particularly bizarre interlude, for example, Murray reels off the results of various internet searches. Apparently we are to believe that the gods of Silicon Valley are engaged in a spiteful exercise of recasting world history through the means of the google image search.
Leaps like this are justified in some part by an intellectual genealogy that supposedly permeates the left. In Murray’s telling, Foucault represents a natural extension of Marx, and the highly contested ‘Post-Marxism’ school characterises the left generally. Any passing acquaintance with the details of these claims is enough to discount them, but I do not think this is the point. By arranging such disparate schools of thought in this way, Murray, along with others who parrot phrases like ‘cultural Marxism’ (a term that, whilst mercifully not appearing here, represents a related constellation of ideas) cloud a myriad of other social relationships. For example, the power tech firms have over even the most mundane details of our lives becomes not a problem of monopoly power, but of the fact that the companies are somehow too ‘woke’. Presumably if Facebook and Twitter could be a little less beholden to the ideas of Derrida, we could live with the fact that the public sphere exists essentially as the private property of Mark Zuckerberg. Similarly, we are told we should be outraged by an employee getting fired for posting some ill-advised tweets, and ignore the fact that a company holds the power to reduce someone to destitution in the first place. As is often the case, the miasma of ‘cultural Marxism/ cancel culture’ exists for Murray as a way of explaining these types of injustices without offending his fondness for the status quo.
Throughout the book, Murray adopts the position of the weary but tolerant interlocuter who is, first and foremost, concerned about things moving too fast and too quickly. The evidence for this disquieting rush into the future comes in Murray’s distinction between ‘hardware’ and ‘software’. Hardware- the quantifiable, apparently objectively knowable things about us, marks the bounds of acceptable change. Issues of software are a matter of an individual’s choice, and, floating on the currents of fashion, are liable to lead to some sort of unspecified anarchy.
Amongst other things, Murray uses this distinction to plot a history of progressive activism. Early campaigners argued against anti-homosexuality laws on the grounds of homosexually being biologically real. Of course, it makes a kind of sense to rebut claims of homosexuality being unnatural with evidence of its naturalness. We can of course also say that the choices made by two consenting adults need no justification, biological or otherwise. Murray does briefly entertain this concept of sexual fluidity before seeming to recognise that it is far more sensible than notions of ‘authentic’ sexuality.
This is not surprising: ideas of an ‘authentic self’ are notoriously thorny, and Murray is entertaining in discussing the inconsistencies of them. Throughout it all, however, there is a lingering impression that these florid discussions of Lady Gaga’s song ‘Born This Way’, Christian conversion therapy, and Tom Daley distract from a potentially dangerous idea. Namely, that we should trust that people have good reasons to fall in love with someone, and that it is slightly strange to insist on things like proof of a ‘gay gene’ to believe them.
Having been left lying on stage in the first act, convention dictates that a device such as the hardware/software distinction must go off by the last. And so, in the final section, it is scooped up and wielded with aplomb. Murray insists that trans people are intent on denying biology, a claim bolstered by a brief exposition on the issue of intersex (important as it relates to ‘hardware’), and an implication the transgenderism moves in the same system as autogynephilia (suspicious as it is entirely ‘software’.)
Society, for Murray, has chosen to tackle the more difficult end of the spectrum in its obsession with transgenderism. More sensible would be to begin with intersex (a clear-cut issue of ‘hardware’.) Not considered in any of this is the possibility that these are three areas that have little to nothing to do with each other. No transperson, as one commentator has remarked, will argue that biology isn’t real. Murray has to conflate these three points if he is to convince the reader that the existence of trans people pose a threat. Trans becomes a radical ideology (they’re trying to change the biological differences between men and women!) with suspiciously sexual undertones (they get their kicks wearing women’s clothing!)
Murray proves to be adept at marshalling both exotic examples of ‘woke’ absurdities (these are often distorted: for instance, a complex case involving depression, gender dysphoria, and state assisted euthanasia becomes ‘Belgium changed a women to a man, and killed him when that failed.’) and well-worn tropes (the beautiful, Amazonian transwoman makes an appearance, for instance.) He makes great use of the medical aspects of transgenderism: these efforts are helped by the fact that with the right terminology even the most mundane procedures sound terrifying. ‘Hormone treatments’ are less scary when you realise these consist of the same drugs balding men use to get their hair back.
Of course, if Murray’s readers look past the entertaining prose to the world it is trying to describe, they will perhaps be disappointed not to be confronted by such a raucous cavalcade of flamboyant creatures. Instead, they will see human beings struggling to make sense of themselves from the language and practices given by society.
The hardware/software distinction amounts to a loose retelling of the old conservative fable about prideful men and women remaking the world but forgetting the limits that an obstinate reality imposes. For Burke, reality comes in the form of culture and traditions: the revolutionaries sweeping aside the Ancien Régime supposed that they knew what traditions and institutions were worth keeping and those that were not: something that Burke himself was doubtful. For De Maistre (a thinker in whom Isaiah Berlin saw the embryonic beginnings of totalitarianism), it is the vegetal fonds of our base nature.
It is in this vein that Douglas Murray introduces the ‘The Bell Curve’. The main contention of ‘The Bell Curve’, for those unfamiliar, is that redistributive policies are misguided as nature sets hard limits on people’s abilities. A chapter of this (only one of many, as its defenders like to point out, as if this was an issue of quantity rather than quality) is devoted to the idea that disparities between white and blacks are due to IQ. As is custom with conservatives, Murray portrays the authors as objective scientists dispassionately searching for truth. These are men who have been vilified by the intolerant woke simply because their findings do not fit with the established leftist agenda. Evidently this custom continues despite almost thirty years of patient rebuttal, the substance of which need not be rehearsed here¹. (Generally speaking, criticism is directed both at the viability of IQ as a scientific concept, and at the suitability of ‘race’ as a stable empirical category.) It is worth reflecting on the fact that Murray invokes ‘The Bell Curve’ after dismissing charges of systemic racism as ‘catastrophism’. However coyly Murray dances around the subject (after all, the issues raised by the authors simply pose some challenging questions), his entertaining of ‘The Bell Curve’s’ arguments illustrates how easily someone who takes pains not to engage in more vulgar forms of bigotry slips into categories given by folk-devils and magical thinking. Far from being ‘cancelled’, one of the authors-Charles Murray- has been extraordinarily successful in popularising ‘underclass’ theories of social policy: it is against the racialised consequences of these BLM are fighting.
After running through this list, what does Murray leave us with? The stated aim of the book was to clear a way through the labyrinth of mines and trip wires laid by the partisans of the woke mob. Yet, after finishing it, we are left with the feeling that some pretty big explosives have been left untouched. The ‘Me Too’ movement was launched in response to a culture that normalises sexual assault. Murray neglects any mention of, for instance, the devastating effect austerity has had on women’s refuge services, or of Westminster ignoring the sexual transgressions (or, bluntly: assaults) by its members. His outrage extends as far as celebrities flashing their breasts to chat show hosts, but no further. Similarly, there is nothing of the murder of a black man that kicked off the recent round of BLM protests, nor the fact that black youths in the UK are more heavily policed than their white counterparts. Absent also is the fact that the status as citizens of some black sections of the population is at the mercy to the whims of the Home Office. The cumulative effect of this is, beyond the rhetorical guile, a strange emptiness.
Whereas the charge of ‘catastrophism’ thrown down by conservatives in previous decades might have been (at least superficially) convincing, today it is less so. Someone born in 1991 has experienced three financial crashes, all before they have turned 30. Unlike their parents, they will have had to pay for their higher education, which will now not even guarantee them a good job. They are increasingly unlikely to be employed on the type of contracts their parents and grandparents were- ones that guarantee paid holiday, maternity leave, and sick pay. Instead, they will have an exotic arrangement that sees them left with no guarantee of paid work, definitely no holiday pay and limited, if any, sick pay (see, for example, the section on zero-hour contracts here.) Houses, having become a financial asset rather than a home, will remain unaffordable for most. Around them, the drive for profit continues to chew threw the earth’s life support systems, and even what political will that has been scraped together seems pathetically unsuited to the task of stopping it. Throughout all this, establishment media eke out something resembling a profit by running variations of the headline ‘Millennials- The Entitled Generation’. Further, what was hitherto only suspected of the ruling class- that they exist primarily to enrich themselves rather than serve those that elected them- is now acknowledged fact. The government, having given up any pretence of addressing the material concerns of the vast bulk of society, are contenting themselves with jingoistic nationalism, xenophobia, and appeals to law and order (something I’ve written about here.) All this is without going into the different species of hate if you happen to be, for example, Muslim, a woman, or trans.
Catastrophe, I would venture, is quite apt.
Faced with this array of morbid symptoms, Douglas Murray does not offer much more in the way of analysis than vague theorising that ‘woke’ is a new religion. When he does come dangerously close to engaging with the issues, he manages to tack away just in time. A thoughtful discussion on the necessity of forgiveness in social life diverts into an anecdote of the cancellation of Rudyard Kipling. A company’s flagrant attempt to monetise women’s insecurities (by way of fake erect nipples) slips into an extended discussion of the contradictory demands made by the fairer sex. Lacking the tools to distinguish social justice from HR initiative, or to describe a tech platform that thrives off the anger of mobs, are we surprised that Murray forced to speculate about some kind of collective madness?
Consequently, a kind of cynicism pervades the book. Its source is perhaps this refusal to engage the issues in favour of wallowing in the ephemera that collects around them. Here, we can make out the same sort of shrouded suspicion that underly accusations of ‘virtue signalling’: both all too easily discount any motive save the (usually base) one assigned by the speaker. People cannot be sincere in espousing a desire for a more just world: they must be in the grip of either collective psychosis or trying to get into bed with the opposite sex. (We are told that this is a tactic adopted by both cuttlefish and weaker men of the woke left.) ‘The Madness of Crowds’ is ultimately testament to the need for serious analysis of society and the way demands for social justice are filtered through established interests. Without these, all that remains are gesticulations to the ‘Marxist woke mob’ and puffed-up confusion at a morass of perceived hypocrisies.
¹ For a good rebuttle of the central claims made by The Bell Curve, see: Reed Jr, A., 1994. Looking backward. The Nation, 259(18), pp.654–662.
For a wider discussion on Charles Murray: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/10/17182692/bell-curve-charles-murray-policy-wrong
