Douglas Murray. Photograph: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images In The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray sets out to explain why societies are nowadays so characterised by dispute. “ In public and in individual, both on-line and off, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and just unpleasant. The day by day news program hertz is filled with the consequences. Yet while we see the symptoms everywhere, we do not see the causes. ” few would fail to recognise this as a start point. MPs and journalists are being harassed and threatened simply for doing their jobs. A university was recently forced out of Hungary by the government. The Home Office is growing increasingly anxious about the threat of reactionary extremists cooperating across Europe. But there is not indeed much as a sniff of these trends in The Madness of Crowds. alternatively, Murray organises his material into four themes : “ Gay ”, “ Gender ”, “ Race ” and “ Trans ”. You can see where this is heading. Murray ’ second stock in craft is a tone of civilized politeness. He writes graciously and wittily, in keeping with his demeanor as a clubbable button-down, who plainly wishes we could all good muddle through a little better. While never over-egging it, he proffers a kindly christian gospel of love and forgiveness, which he believes might rid us of the political and cultural toxins that have then polluted our lives. Scratch beneath the coat, though, and his history of late history is clear : authorised by leftwing academics, minority groups have been concocting conflict and hatred out of thin atmosphere, polluting an differently harmonious club, for their own gratification .
Murray is quick to celebrate struggles for racial, sexual and gay equality, but he’s adamant they have now been settled
His narrative is approximately as follows. The decline of ideologies at the end of the twentieth century created a vacuum of meaning, which was waiting to be filled. This coincided with the birth of a hale range of critical cultural theories, producing fields of sex studies, raceway studies and queer studies. Most damagingly of all, for Murray, was the rise of intersectional feminist movement, which assumes that unlike types of oppression ( particularly racial and patriarchal ) tend to “ intersect ” and reinforce one another. The bitterness irony, deoxyadenosine monophosphate far as Murray is concerned, is that these fresh theories of oppression rebel at the precise consequence in human history when actual racism, sexism and homophobia had evaporated. “ abruptly – after most of us had hoped it had become a dead letter – everything seemed to have become about race, ” he writes. This seems to bug him more than anything else : “ Among the many press down aspects of late years, the most trouble oneself is the relief with which race has returned as an exit. ”
history, consequently, is much as his boyfriend neoconservative Francis Fukuyama cheekily described it in 1989 : ended. Or rather, it could have ended, if it weren ’ t for troublemaking intellectuals and activists. Murray is flying to celebrate past struggles for racial, sexual and homosexual equality, but he is adamant that they have now been settled. Questions persist regarding the nature of sex, sex and unconditioned ability ( what belongs to our physical “ hardware ” and what to our cultural “ software ”, as he puts it ), but these are far well handled by biologists than political thinkers. The trouble, as he sees it, is that malicious, deceitful and resentful forces – emerging from universities – have refused to accept that justice has now been delivered .
The gender theorist Judith Butler … Murray decries her as a fraud. Photograph: Target Presse Agentur Gmbh/Getty Images The applaud sex theorist Judith Butler is held up as a malignant imposter who hides behind the complexity of her prose. The entire venture of social science is deemed corrupted by its insidious fixation on oppression. Murray turns to holocene fraud articles that were published in the academician journal Cogent Social Sciences ( a antic that he describes as “ one of the most beautiful things to happen in holocene years ” ) as evidence that social and cultural theory is all a fake. The lector is assured – falsely – that this is all a huge bolshevik project, aimed at sowing dissatisfaction and disagree. Murray presumably knows that Michel Foucault was not a marxist, but it ’ s significant to his arm of conservatism that this is brushed over. The M discussion serves as a code way of tying together the humanities, Marx himself and ( with a little jump of resource ) the Gulag. The fact that it is now illegal to teach sex studies in Hungary, as decreed by Viktor Orbán ( darling cerebral : Douglas Murray ), poses questions as to where the very threat to autonomy is coming from. But you won ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate find any discussion of that in The Madness of Crowds. We learn that the doctrine of intersectionality has now swept the world, even becoming embedded in the research algorithm written in Silicon Valley. Why ? Because technical school workers “ have decided to ‘ stick ’ it to people ” towards whom they “ feel angry ”. It ’ randomness for this reason, apparently, that Google image search throws up a disproportionate number of black faces. Intersectionality is being “ force-feed ” to people, encouraging them to seek “ revenge ” on white men, and that is why there is therefore a lot battle. Murray has no dearth of examples and anecdotes to back this up, many gleaned from the US. But it ’ s luminary that they about all operate at the degree of sermon, and largely in the media and social media. It ’ s not difficult to come up with absurd cases of “ sociable department of justice warriors ” saying unintelligent and hypocritical things online, specially when the Daily Mail appears to have an entire desk dedicated to unearthing them. And there are enough of long-familiar cases of people being shamed and sacked for things they ’ ve said, many of which are unfair and sadistic. One review of this would be that the logic of populace relations and credit military rank has now infiltrated every corner of our lives, such that we are constantly having to consider the effects of our words on our reputations. Another is that a global “ Marxist ” conspiracy has duped people into a fantasy of their own oppression. I know which I find more plausible.
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Whenever Murray strays excessively close to any actual oppression ( as opposed to the controversies surrounding it ), he quickly veers away. His chapter on gender refers to the “ ‘ MeToo ’ claims against Harvey Weinstein ”, but never to Weinstein or the baron structures he built. His chapter on raceway ( the longest in the book ) makes no citation to one of the most controversial campaigns in holocene US history, Black Lives Matter, presumably because it ’ s impossible to discuss without acknowledging what prompted it : black men being gunned down by patrol officers. Anger is ultimately a mystery to Murray, seeming to emanate ad lib from his political and ideological foes. He can come up with no better explanation for it than that bad people enjoy it, that “ their desire is not to heal but to divide, not to placate but to inflame ”. And yet when an author goes to such great lengths to assure you that others are degraded, and that “ we ” whiten, male conservatives just want to live in harmony, you have to wonder whom much of this anger sincerely belongs to . anxious States : How Feeling Took Over the World by William Davies is out in paperback book from Vintage. The Madness of Crowds : gender, Race and Identity is published by Bloomsbury ( £20 ). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. rid UK phosphorus & p over £15, on-line orders alone. phone orders min p & phosphorus of £1.99 .
