Douglas Murray moves onto safer territory in ‘The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity’, a superbly reviewed book in which he examines identity politics. As this examines four different identities, gay, women, race and trans,[1] his writing is better able to stand the strain here; his skills of argumentation do not have to be quite so sustained and hold up rather more seamlessly than in his earlier work. Indeed, so skilled is his writing that he manages the impossible at one point – and this is a sentence I never thought any writer would be capable of prompting me to write – he manages to cause the profoundly morally uncomfortable experience of a reader catching themselves laughing aloud at a story about rape. To say he is a gifted writer is to damn Mr Murray with faint praise, and his sense of humour makes Gove’s occasional waspish turn appear a far blunter tool. He references ballet as being “tedium enacting,”[2] and his dismantling of the lyrics of Nicky Minaj’s ‘Anaconda’[3] is a strong candidate for the funniest paragraph I have read in any book in the last decade. In pointing out that there is something of an irony in gay rights marches featuring people clad in fetish wear and leather chaps while campaigning for equality, in that this clothing is unlikely to appeal to mainstream political opinion, he is the driest martini taken in the mid-Sahara. Also, as a gay man, he questions what he considers some of the ‘absurdities’ of the continued fight for gay rights from an insider’s perspective. I couldn’t comment on the rectitude of the following claim about gay people that they seek equality that comes with a “little gay bonus”[4] but, whatever the truth of it, it is funny. 

Unsurprisingly, Murray, as an old Etonian, isn’t altogether fond of Marxism. He states, in his attack on Foucault’s view of the way society is organised and how power works, that society is a complicated web of “trust and traditions”[5], which is an interesting point, and it is easy to agree with the second of these alliterative abstract nouns. Focusing on the earlier of the two, however, one might ponder whether trusting a deadly poisonous snake might be an unwise act: snakes are gonna snake; sharks are gonna shark. He regards Foucault’s focus on power relationships as being dishonest[6] and preaches, instead that we practise “charity, forgiveness and love.”[7] And who could argue with that? Perhaps only those with nothing to ask forgiveness for who have been subject to the need for charity from those in power and found it absent. Murray doesn’t acknowledge the weight of his own privilege or show any real awareness of the fact that privilege tends to protect its own and that that is exactly what he is doing. When he does acknowledge there is such a concept, the word is occasionally confined within single inverted commas. The irony in his well-drawn and intelligent sentence about privilege that we tend to be able to view it in others but fail to see it in ourselves[8] is rather crushing. 

The pre-eminence of the individual (as opposed to any form of collective) is alive in his prose. This remains a favoured technique to redirect the least educated members of the working-class from understanding that it is only through collective action that any positive change in their conditions has ever taken place. He equates talent with going to Eton and describes some early feminist texts as “deranged”.[9]

He moves onto controversies in academia and, here, locates the sweet spot for conservative arguments against any form of protest based on identity, perceptions of unfairness and desire for equal treatment. The argument here is ‘common’: the worst excesses of behaviours in academic environments are, in fact, the mainstream. He stereotypes university sections as being department for “grievance studies.”[10] He is more articulate than the not altogether inarticulate Toby Young but makes similar arguments. Look at this left-wing excess over here, on the margins of the far left. Isn’t it ridiculous? Aren’t they loonies? And don’t they have terrible manners? He uses the same technique with feminists: pick an extremist and draw the false correlation that, because of this person’s existence and public expressions, feminism itself is guilty of a certain madness.

He also has a go at a particular bêBete noire of mine: the weak conservative satire of sociology (as it seeks to point out how society is structured and is, therefore, to the conservative intellectual, risible). He draws a number of possibly false conclusions based on ridiculous evidence: because there are some easily satirised outposts in, predominantly American, academia, oppression does not exist.

Douglas also takes a brave and principled stand against activist teachers. He was seen on BBC Politics Live around the time of the last election, bullying the teacher activist, Holly Rigby,[11] and was recently seen on Fox News calling out the teachers of Oakland for going on strike, stating, as Douglas, like Piers Morgan (whom he satirises) is able to do the cost–benefit analysis that comes from never being too scared of benefiting from stirring controversy, that, “if the teaching unions cared as much about proficiency in the basics as they do about whatever the latest ‘woke’ issue is, America’s children would be in a better place educationally.”[12]

On the issue of race, as Gove did with Gramsci, he plays the rhetorically brilliant card of turning Martin Luther King’s speech as a weapon to be used against elements of the American Black community. Though especially careful in this section, he is happy to speak in defence of ‘The Bell Curve’ and to address the ‘IQ issue’ regarding ‘race’. He perhaps feels as if he is grasping a particularly poisonous nettle and showing us his bravery in addressing the un-addressable (which is un-addressable for countless reasons, not the least of which is that we know where what Hannah Arendt calls ‘race-thinking’ leads. Arendt has observed that such thinking has penetrated every area of science).[13]

The key response a layman might have to Murray pointing out the alleged IQ differences is obviously “the figures are a consequence of multiple social factors”, the second which is “so what?” And the third of which is “what do you think is the use of these statistics? What are you proposing to do with them?” So regular are the flirtations with race-thinking, that ugly perversion of one’s consciousness of self, from intellectual conservatives and traditionalists that one might consider expressing an opinion: that the path to totalitarianism has always started with a racialised diagnosis that must be treated to cure all society’s ills and that, when you are seeking a cure, everything becomes permissible.

Conservative Intellectualism

So, this is an infinitesimally small sample of conservative thought, but these are two of the finest intellects conservative forces have to offer. Of course, the educational revolution predated the two Murray books discussed though Murray’s ‘Neoconservatism: Why We Need It” came out through Encounter Books, an American publishing house that publishes right-of-centre thinkers in 2006 and may have been an influence on the new government’s thinking: the Conservative Party always seem to have an intellectual wing who seem to be somehow regarded as hereditary geniuses and who provide the ideas that the more pragmatic but less obviously intelligent Tory politicians implement.

These two authors are representative of a certain intellectual tradition that has clearly influenced and implemented educational reform, certainly in terms of curriculum, over the last decade or so. I felt that it was important to look at the best of the other side’s argument, where it comes from and whether they could be met halfway.

The research undertaken to write this has left me unable to meet them halfway, left me unable to present as being, somehow, a moderate prepared to engage with both sides of an argument. Over the time of its writing, that research has forced me to have to confront the existence of such deeply serious issues that this I’ve become partial and have formed an opinion which has become vehement and impassioned. I am a little sorry for this, but the truth is ugly sometimes.

I accept Gove’s central point that Western democracy is the safest form of government and that Western societies have, at the very least, a strong case to present themselves as amongst the most pleasant and most egalitarian places on earth to live, but I’m unable to agree with the implied tenet that greater equality in society would lead to some unavoidable form of moral collapse and anarchy. This is a view that has been articulated for over two centuries, and it doesn’t seem to have happened yet! As far back as 1853, a gentleman by the name of Count Arthur de Gobineau in the first sentence of his charmingly titled ‘Essai sur L’Inegalite des Races Humaines’ (‘The Inequality of Human Races’) wrote “the fall of civilisation is most striking and, at the same time, the most obscure of all phenomena of history.”[14] Predictions of the fall of Western Civilisation have always been accompanied by claims that it is ‘racial degeneration’ that will cause it, but these pessimistic doctrines of imminent decay have been going on for quite some time without bearing much in the way of the rotted fruit of societal collapse.

This suggestion of some imminent collapse is part of the same tradition that Matthew Arnold was a part of: the rejection of any working class right to an equal share of resources articulated through highly educated sophistry. Arnold, who remains a hugely significant figure for the privately educated,[15] thought the working-class “an embryo”[16] who offered potential for anarchy as they were in danger of having recently lost their “strong feudal habits of subordination and deference.”[17] Whereas Arnold’s style is verbose and wordily reflexive, Murray’s is clarity itself. He has a wider and less rarefied audience, but their messages are similar:[18] that those clambering and protesting for a right to more of the country’s resources have some form of intellectual, moral or spiritual deficiency that should preclude them having any such thing.

What we can conclude is that there appears to be a hierarchy of things that conservative intellectuals don’t seem to much care for and that these ‘biases’ may have had some effect on the curriculum:

1. Muslims.
2. Less traditional university departments and subjects.
3. Any push towards acknowledging there are inequalities based on race.
4. Any further improvements in gender equality.

Placing limits on pluralism and having the view of culture being only one thing has a darkness to it. In identifying that the ‘enemy’ already has his or her feet under the table and that the enemy is defined by only one thing, we seek to scapegoat the other, the alien, the danger. The enemy is Muslim, and all Muslims are the same; the enemy is less traditional academic pursuits as they are all equally stupid and pointless; the enemy is not necessarily black people themselves, but it is their constant whining about equalities; and the enemy is those ridiculous hairy feminists who, like all the above, are all the same with their equally boring demands. 

People who believe in the existence of ‘common sense’ find the constant squawking of these voices of dissidents and deviants to be an irritant, and what most of us would love is if they were just made to shut up, just made silent (as we will see later, this command for silence from traditionalists is toxic and dangerous). Oddly, the people to be silenced are silenced through the use of language – language that denudes them of their humanity. The enemy is defined by broad categories: Islamists, liberals.[19] The dehumanised enemy warrants nothing in the way of respect as they are not like us, not properly human, not properly deserving of human rights. 

Vaclav Havel is of the belief that human life, if left alone, tends towards pluralism, tends towards diversity, tends towards people motivating themselves to achieve freedom. Totalitarianism is the negation of these desires. Under totalitarianism, the system and human life are at odds with each other, and the system is, therefore, in part, a negation, not only of freedom, but of human life itself. The demand from power for conformity, obedience and uniformity is a denial of the human desire for freedom and, again, therefore, a denial, and stay with me here, of organic life itself. 

Whereas the animalistic ‘other’ is not worthy of tolerance in the realm of the conservative intellectual, there are things that they seem genuinely fond (or mainly tolerant) of:

1. Individualism.
2. Judging people by IQ.
3. Gay people (provided they don’t behave in any uninhibited manner that might embarrass and aren’t too public and stay away from our children).

It is not too difficult to argue that the author of the book you are holding is himself a risible cliche inhabiting a socially constrained position and spouting views that are merely well enough articulated inheritances, but you might also point the same spotlight on the two authors considered above.

 

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[1] These are the section titles.

[2] Murray, Douglas, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity p22.

[3] “To say that Minaj’s video is sexual is like saying her lyrics are banal.” Murray, Douglas, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity p78.

[4] Murray, Douglas, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity p40.

[5] Murray, Douglas, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity p53.

[6] Murray, Douglas, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity p53.

[7] Murray, Douglas, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity p53.

[8] Murray, Douglas, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity p87.

[9] Murray, Douglas, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity p95.

[10] Murray, Douglas, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity p54.

[11] BBC Politics Live, Douglas Murray Takes on Labour’s Spiky Holly Rigby Over Transgender Rights. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJGQdJh0WAg

[12] Fox Business News, Teachers are Failing at Their Most Basic Task: Douglas Murray (11th May 2023).

[13] Hannah Arendt, Imperialism, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin Random House UK: London 1966) p208.

[14] Translation quoted from ‘The Inequality of Human Races’, translated by Adrien Collins 1915 in Hannah Arendt, Imperialism, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin Random House UK: London 1966) p222.

 [15]He was quoted knowingly by Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail. In a piece headlined, “We’re facing REGIME CHANGE courtesy of the Left’, Hitchens wrote: “This time, as ignorant armies seek the final abolition of Britain, it is very frightening. I would not like to say where it will end.” “Ignorant armies” is a quotation from Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’.

[16]Arnold, Matthew Culture and Anarchy p50.

[17]Arnold, Matthew Culture and Anarchy p??.

[18] Gove’s published thought is less wide ranging than Murray’s and, it must be admitted, he has been at times very vocal about delivering better outcomes for children from the lower reaches and that it appeared to be a passionate motivator for him. 

[19] Michela Murgia, How to be a Fascist: A Manual (Pushkin Press: London, 2018) p36.