From: Roger Wright- Morris rogerwm07@gmail.comSubject: Fwd: Hate and Group Diktat

Date: 18 September 2019 at 07:48To: pete@printbridge.co.uk

Joseph Prezioso / AFP/ Getty

GROUPTHINK

How identity politics drove the worldmad

Douglas Murray's brave new book explores the madness of modern

discourse

ROGER SCRUTON@roger_scruton

6 MINS17 SEPTEMBER 2019

@roger_scruton

We thrive on disagreement, but only if we do not also feel threatened by

it. In every period of history, therefore, there have been opinions and

customs that are dangerous to question, since they provide the firm

foundations on which our disagreements rest. Whether religious or

political, these established ways of thinking and acting have been

protected by law, and embedded in the educational curriculum and the

daily customs of the people.

But our situation in Western democracies today is a novel one. There is no

shared religion, and the old customs have been torn asunder by a culture

of repudiation, which encourages people to shape their lives according to

an “identity” of their own. Socialisation no longer means joining or

obeying, but “becoming who you are”, regardless of the surrounding

norms. This novel situation, which advertises itself as a kind of liberation,

has instead produced in my lifetime a totally new kind of censorship and

intimidation.

Thirty years ago I naively assumed that, with the collapse of communism,

we would no longer see the persecution of dissidents or the imposition of

official doctrines, and so I have been as astonished as everyone else by the

mass denunciations and targeted character assassinations that enforce

prevailing orthodoxies today. They seem as frequent and comprehensive

here in Britain as they ever were in the world of totalitarian government.

True, you don’t go to the Gulag for your opinions; nor are there show-trials

of “deviationists”, Zionists or the running dogs of capitalism. Nevertheless,

you have to be careful what you say, and the punishments for saying,

thinking or implying the wrong thing, even if administered by private

enterprise and social media rather than by the state, are real, serious and

largely impossible to deflect.

SUGGESTED READINGThe truth about hate speech

BY DOUGLAS MURRAY

The archive of your crimes is stored in cyberspace, and however much you

may have confessed to them and sworn to change, they will pursue you for

the rest of your life, just as long as someone has an interest in drawing

attention to them. And when the mob turns on you, it is with a pitiless

intensity that bears no relation to the objective seriousness of your fault. A

word out of place, a hasty judgment, a slip of the tongue — whatever the

fault might be, it is sufficient, once picked upon, to put you beyond the

pale of human sympathy.

As Douglas Murray shows in his impressive and lively survey, The Madness of

Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, the emerging world of censorship is a

world without forgiveness, in which people are condemned for what they

are rather than what they do, and in which the real virtues and vices that

17 SEPTEMBER 2019

are rather than what they do, and in which the real virtues and vices that

govern our conduct are ignored altogether as irrelevant.

The crimes for which we are judged are existential crimes: through

speaking in the wrong way you display one of the phobias or isms that show

you to be beyond acceptable humanity. You are a homophobe, an

Islamophobe, a white supremacist or a racist, and no argument can refute

these accusations once they have been made.

You might, in your private life, have worked for the integration and

acceptance of your local Muslim community, or for a wider understanding

of the roots of Islamic philosophy. This will be irrelevant when it comes to

rebutting a charge of Islamophobia, just as your record in promoting

minorities in the workplace will do nothing to clear you of the charge of

racism, once the crucial words are out.

SUGGESTED READINGIs conservatism normalising the alt-Right?

BY ERIC KAUFMANN

For your accusers are not interested in your deeds; they are interested in

you, and in the crucial fact about you, which is whether or not you are

“one of us”. Your faults cannot be overcome by voluntary action, since

they adhere to the kind of thing that you are. And you reveal what you are

in the words that define you.

These words may be taken out of context, even doctored to mean the

opposite of what you said — as happened recently to me in an interview

given to the New Statesman — but this will not affect the verdict, since

there is no objective trial, no “case for the defence”, no due process. You

are accused by the mob, examined by the mob and condemned by the

mob, and if you have brought this on yourself, then you have only yourself

to blame. For the mob is by nature innocent: it washes its own conscience

in a flow of collective indignation, and by joining it you make yourself safe.

Such is the situation that the brave Murray confronts in his latest book, the

title of which (taken from a previous anatomy of human folly by Charles

Mackay) implies that it is crowd hysteria, rather than ignorance, that is

largely to blame. But, as Murray goes on to show, that suggestion is also

too simple. With admirable attention to detail he explores the ways in

which the spirit of the mob has entered not only the language of public

debate but also the sources of information and the institutions of decision

making.

Censorship begins in the media themselves, with the silicon valley elite

introducing “machine learning fairness” designed to eliminate “hate

speech”, and programmed to recognise as “hate” all those expressions of

opinion that violate some norm of political correctness. What Orwell so

vividly foresaw — the manipulation of language so as to make heresy

inexpressible — is now routine practice.

SUGGESTED READINGBroadcaster bias is destroying public trust

BY DOUGLAS MURRAY

The result, however, is not a culture of gentle conformity, in which

“niceness” is the norm. On the contrary, the clamour for recognition

involves a constant assault on those who are assumed to be preventing it.

These purveyors of “hate” are given no leeway on social media, and the

practice of mass denunciation on grounds of race, tribe, class or social

milieu is now an accepted weapon in the identity wars.

Murray gives riveting examples of the way in which whiteness has become a

moral fault in the eyes of identity warriors on the American campus. It is,

for example, now legitimate to condemn people for the colour of their

skin, leading some to try to apologise for being white.

Various devices facilitate the emergence of the censorship culture. Three

in particular come to the surface in Murray’s carefully constructed

argument. First, there is the art of taking offence. Whole sections of the

university curriculum are devoted to explaining to students that words,

arguments, comparisons, even questions, are “offensive”, regardless of the

intention with which they are used.

Invariably, the offence is given by the old majority culture, and is taken on

behalf of some privileged minority. Current concerns about Islamophobia

are relevant here: it is offensive, for example, to make jokes about the

burqa, but not offensive to appear in public with your face entirely

covered, even though the face-to-face encounter is at the root of our

shared way of life, as important in showing respect as taking off your shoes

when entering a mosque.

SUGGESTED READINGWhy conservatism is failing

BY MARY HARRINGTON

More important, from the intellectual point of view, is the attempt to

rewrite hardware as software. As Murray shows, identity politics, which

insists that everything relevant to our sense of self lies within our power,

so that nothing can be imposed on us without our consent, is at odds with

the facts of biology. To get round this problem, sex has been re-written as

gender, and gender defined as a social construct. In this way, hardware

becomes software, and fate becomes choice.

And the result is the “trans” lobby, determined to make all those areas

where one sex was hitherto privileged (for example, female sports or

female bathrooms) available to whoever wishes to appropriate that sex as

his own. The hardware/software confusion has now penetrated the

culture, and Murray shows the devastating effect that it has had on our

understanding of human difference.

Finally there is the new scourge of “intersectionality”, which encourages

people to explore all the ways in which they have lost out in the pursuit of

advantage, and to construct their identity accordingly. A kind of reverse

hierarchy of privilege emerges, as you come to see that you are

disadvantaged as gay man, and then as a black man, and then as a Muslim

man, and so on. The result of this scramble for “virtuous disadvantages”

occupies Murray over many partly amusing, partly distressing pages.

As he abundantly shows, the attempt to derive a positive philosophy from

this assemblage of negatives leads to absurdity and contradiction at every

turn. The problem, however, is that contradiction is not regarded by the

mob as an obstacle, but merely as further proof of the great conspiracy by

which we are surrounded — the conspiracy enshrined in the old majority

culture, which told us that we must accept human nature, find our

fulfilment within its bounds, and not engage in a futile metaphysical

rebellion.

SUGGESTED READINGHow I overcame my class stigma

BY ROGER SCRUTON

Murray’s comprehensive survey of the prevailing madness will not persuade

every reader. But it raises the real questions of our times, which are these:

can we reject the idea of a benevolent God and still hold on to our

inherited morality, founded on respect for the other and the absolute

authority of truth? Can we adopt the posture of forgiveness that Murray is

so keen to advocate, without turning to the supreme example that was

once given to us?

Can we re-learn the habits of polite disagreement, and address each other

as rational beings, capable of forming real communities in which

differences are respected and decencies honoured? I want to answer yes to

those questions. But as someone who has suffered more than most from

the prevailing madness I have my doubts.

My own solution — which is to ignore social media and to address, in my

writings, only the interest in the true and the false, rather than in the

permitted and the offensive — confines me within a circle that is

considerably narrower than the Twittersphere. But here and there in this

circle, there are people who do not merely see the point of truthful

discourse, but who are also eager to engage with it. And I cling to the view

that that is enough, as it was for the Irish monks who kept the lamp of

learning alight during the Dark Ages. They may have thought they were

losing, but they won in the end.

Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity is

published by Bloomsbury Continuum

Editor: concordanceout.eu is grateful for this excellent contribution.

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Editor: concordanceout.eu is grateful for this excellent contribution.