Douglas Murray’s “The Madness of Crowds”

Douglas Murray’s previous book, The Strange Death of Europe (SDoE), was one of the reasons I decided to start writing about politics. Around the time it was published, I often found myself walking around bookshops looking for books that expressed my concerns and opinions — and it was the first time in my adult life I did that and came up short. I was looking for the type of book that I saw being churned out by the dozen every week for culturally left-wing or liberal people: considered and well-written and intellectually respectable. But instead of justifying the status quo, I wanted books questioning it, pointing out the absurdities that we lived with day in day out and asking where this was all going. If you searched you might find something by Pat Buchanan book mouldering on a shelf somewhere, maybe a classic academic outlier like The Clash of Civilizations. But given the seismic changes in the real world, the flood of books I expected wasn’t there. The existence of SDoE helped reassure me that it wasn’t impossible to push through, and encouraged me to contribute in my own small way.

One of the ways in which the cultural left succeeds in arguments is by producing books putting their case at its most comprehensive and convincing. They have a natural advantage because they have the cultural space to make their case unimpeded, and they have the academic world producing ammunition for writers. But if non-liberal, illiberal, right wing, dissident (whatever the term) people are going to win any arguments, or win more thoughtful people over to their side, then they’re going to have to start producing more books like SDoE — books that go deep on a single subject and are written in a thoughtful way.

The title of Murray’s latest book caused me to worry he had come down from these heights and written exactly the sort of thing we don’t need more of. To me, “The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, Identity” sounded dispiirtingly general, like a better version of the Jeremy Clarkson books that you see in charity shops, service station bins and left behind on airplanes. It’s nowhere near that bad, but having read it my fears were justified, at least a little.

Blurb:

In his devastating new book, Douglas Murray examines the twenty-first century’s most divisive issues: Sexuality, gender, technology and race. He reveals astonishing new culture wars playing out in our workplaces, universities, schools and homes in the name of social justice, identity politics and intersectionality.

In the book, he takes each of a range of contentious cultural issues in turn and gets your blood up by reviewing the most exasperating and insane events as they have played out in the media (mainly Twitter), with occasional colour commentary.

These kinds of culture war skirmishes are a blessing and a curse for a writer. They’re a blessing because there is so much to critically examine, and people in the respectable media aren’t willing to do that in a manner that goes against their priors. So the field is all yours. But they’re a curse because there is temptation for author and reader to spend the book rolling their eyes at each other at how crazy these libs are. The writer is mesmerised by the frothing water, and counting the bite marks rather than trying to kill the piranhas.

Examples: opening the book at random I land on page 150 (paperback edition). Over the next 10 pages he recaps the following:

• Lionel Shriver’s speech on Identity Politics at a festival in 2016
• National Geographic appointing an editor who apologised for the magazine’s “racist” past
• The brief Candace Owens/Kanye West crossover event of 2018 ft. Donald Trump and Ta-Nehisi Coates
• A reviewer at the LSE Review of Books snarking about Thomas Sowell under the impression Sowell was a white guy
• Rachel Dolezal
• Benedict Cumberbatch getting in trouble for saying “coloured people” instead of “people of colour” in 2015
• The racial invective of Sarah Jeong and the cover provided to her by the blue-check complex

I didn’t re-read the whole 10 pages, so there may be stuff in there that I missed. That’s a lot of evidence to support his thesis that the world is in an awful state. If you’ve spent a the last 5 years paying attention you will remember all of those in detail — none of it will come as a surprise and you won’t want to read about it again. Hey guys, do you remember Rachel Dolezal? Well — of course I do, who doesn’t? I think and talk about it all the time. What is this, a trip down memory lane? What we need is a conductor who can bring the disparate instruments together in harmony and tease out the hidden tune. But he mostly feels like he’s describing the noise rather than channelling it.

I’ve had expressed this reservation to a few people, and the general objection I get is that, at worst, the book provides a place to start for someone not used to thinking about these things. I think that’s a decent argument. I’ve had similar discussions in the past about other books. Politically aware people on the right might sneer at the idea of someone reading Steven Pinker, but Pinker’s book The Blank Slate was important for me and many others. Just because you subsequently found yourself further down the road, doesn’t mean that was the wrong place to begin. But the issue at the moment is there are already enough people providing basic entry level guides to the problems we’re all concerned about, or commentary on what happens on social media. A lot of these are authors, some are on Youtube (although giving platforming issues, increasingly fewer). What we are especially need of is people in the respectable press who can provide a detailed intellectual examination of what is going on, in long form.

There’s an older guy I know who is one of many people I use as a litmus test of which ideas are crossing over from my world to the normie world. This person is an ideal candidate for non-liberal ideas in that he’s reasonable, intelligent, empathetic but also temperamentally small-c conservative, respectful of rootedness with an innate allergy to post-modern bull. It was when I noticed that he had started reading Jordan Peterson that I knew that Peterson had broken the wall and was beginning to mean something to normal people. But he spends basically no time online and I know that he would be good-naturedly contemptuous of people who do (including me). That includes people who get wound up by every mirco-controversy. He sees them as being self-indulgent, narcissistic, juvenile, preoccupied with political gossip and trivialities. That’s a normal attitude to hear in the real world and frankly there’s something to it.

I know if he was to pick up Murray’s book he would dismiss it on that basis before he even got to the meaty stuff that I believe would concern him if he read it. (“Who is Nicki Minaj and why is this fella so interested in her? He needs to go for a walk”). For instance I have great trouble explaining digital deplatforming problems to him because his attitude is all that stuff happens amongst those vain shallow squabblers online. “So who cares?” Part of that is a function of his age. But it’s also how the activities of very online people appear to those who are not online. These are the things that we have to think about if we want to get through to people. The best approach is either to deal with subjects obliquely, or to go very deep on a big single subject so as to properly convey that it’s worth worrying about (as Murray did in SDoE).

Murray is very gifted and he can’t write badly, or on outrage-autopilot, for very long. So even in the sections I didn’t think are great, the real him shines through eventually. The best and most harrowing stuff in The Madness of Crowds is in the TG section. Murray has done a lot of research into the biological basis, philosophy and history of Trans, as well as interviewing or researching real cases the better to explain and his points and humanise his subjects. He succeeds in convincing you that what is happening with “Trans” children now is of a version of the 80s satanic panic except it’s verifiable, and the exact people who you would want to be panic aren’t. You never feel that you could come up with the chapter yourself if you spent a couple of months on twitter and a couple of hours on Wikipedia and Reddit. My feeling at the end of the section was — what I wouldn’t give for a full length Douglas Murray book on this topic.

Douglas Murray made a rod for his own back when he write SDoE because it was a book that was not just good in its own right but that filled a space in a desperately underserved market. Perhaps nothing he was going to write as a follow up was going to live up to that; my disappointment is probably causing me to criticise it unfairly. Perhaps right wing people get the books they want and deserve, and that they get proportionally fewer insightful books because they’re just dumber. I don’t think that’s true though. What Colonel Jessup says of with rage about himself, I say with sincerity about Douglas — we want him on that wall, need him on that wall. Maybe something a bit deeper next time.