W
E arE going through a great
mass derangement. In public
and in private, people are
behaving in ways that are
increasingly irrational, fever-
ish, herd-like and unpleasant.
The news is filled with the
consequences. Yet while we see the symptoms
everywhere, we don’t see the causes.
Various explanations have been given, usually
involving Donald Trump, Brexit, or both. But these
explanations don’t get to the root cause of what
is happening. For beneath all the day-to-day mad-
nesses – over race, sex, sexuality, gender and the
rest – are much greater movements and much
bigger events. Even the origin of this mass derange-
ment is rarely acknowledged. This is the simple fact
that we have been living through a period of more
than a quarter of a century in which all our grand
narratives about our existence have collapsed.
religion went first, falling away from the 19th
Century onwards. Then, over the past century,
the secular hopes held out by all political ideolo-
gies followed. In the latter part of the 20th Cen-
tury, we entered the post-modern era, defined by
its suspicion towards grand narratives.
However, nature abhors a vacuum. People in
today’s wealthy Western democracies could not
simply remain the first people in recorded history
to have no explanation for what we are doing here
and no story to give life purpose.
The question of what exactly we are meant to do
now – other than get rich and have fun – was going
to have to be answered by something. The answer
that has presented itself in recent years has been
to live in a permanent state of outrage. To find
meaning by waging constant war against anybody
who seems to be on the wrong side of a question to
which the answer has only just been altered.
The bewildering speed of this process has been
principally caused by the Silicon Valley giants
(notably Google, Twitter and Facebook). They have
the power not just to direct what most people in
the world know, think and say, but have a business
model which has accurately been described as
relying on finding ‘customers ready to pay to
modify someone else’s behaviour’.
But today’s wars of ideas are not
random – they are consistently
being fought in a new and par-
ticular direction. and that direction
has a purpose that is vast. The
purpose – unwitting in some people,
deliberate in others – is nothing
less than to embed a new religion
into our societies.
t
HouGH the founda-
tions had been laid
over several decades,
it is only since the
financial crash of 2008
that there has been a
march into the main-
stream of ideas that were previ-
ously known solely on the obscurest
fringes of academia.
The interpretation of the world
through the lens of ‘social justice’
and ‘identity group politics’ is
probably the most audacious and
comprehensive effort since the
end of the Cold War at creating a
new ideology.
To date, ‘social justice’ has run the
furthest because it sounds – and
in some versions is – attractive.
Even the term is set up to be impos-
sible to argue with. ‘You’re opposed
to social justice? What do you want,
social injustice?’
The attractions are obvious. after
all, why should a generation which
can’t accumulate capital have any
great love of capitalism? and it
isn’t hard to work out why a genera-
tion who believe they may never
own a home could be attracted to
an ideological world view which
promises to sort out every inequal-
36
With bewildering speed, a whole new
dogma has sprung up, turning beliefs
that once seemed common sense into
hate crimes. Say the ‘wrong’ thing on
race, gender or sexuality and you’ll
be thrown to the wolves. How did this
happen? in a vital book, one writer
who refuses to be cowed reveals...
departments of the universities
from which it originated into the
mainstream. It’s now taken seri-
ously by millennials and has
become embedded via employment
law (through a ‘commitment to
diversity’) in all major corporations
and governments.
The speed at which the ‘social
justice’ causes have taken over
everyday life is staggering. once-
obscure phrases such as ‘LGBTQ’,
‘white privilege’, ‘the patriarchy’
and ‘transphobia’ are suddenly
heard everywhere – even though
in the words of mathematician
Eric Weinstein, they were ‘all made
up about 20 minutes ago’. The polic-
ing of these issues is an even more
recent phenomenon. researchers
found that phrases like ‘triggered’
and ‘feeling unsafe’ only spiked in
usage from 2013 onwards.
It is as though, having worked out
what it wanted, the new religion
took a further half-decade to work
out how to impose its credo on non-
believers. But it has done so with
frightening success.
The maddening results can be
seen on a daily basis. It’s why a
British academic study which
found muscular, wealthy men are
more attractive could be headlined
by Newsweek magazine as: ‘Men
with muscles and money are more
attractive to straight women andgay men – showing gender roles
aren’t progressing.’
It’s why a previously completely
unknown programmer at Google
could be sacked for writing a memo
suggesting some tech jobs appeal
more to men than women. It is why
The New York Times ran a piece by
a black author with the title: ‘Can
my children be friends with white
people?’ and it’s why a piece about
cycling deaths in London written
by a woman was framed through
the headline: ‘roads designed by
men are killing women.’S
uCH rhetoric exacer-
bates existing divisions
and creates new ones.
F o r w h a t p u r p o s e?
rather than showing
how we can all get along
better, the lessons of the
last decade appear to be exacerbat-
ing a sense that in fact we aren’t
very good at living with each other.
For most people, awareness of
this new religion has become clear
not so much by trial as by public
error. Because one thing that every-
body has begun to sense in recent
years is that a set of tripwires have
been laid across the culture. among
the first tripwires was anything to
do with homosexuality. In the
latter half of the 20th Century,
there was a fight for gay equalitywhich rightly succeeded in revers-
ing a terrible historic injustice.
Then, the war having been won, it
didn’t stop. Indeed it began mor-
phing. GLB (Gay, Lesbian, Bi)
became LGB so as not to diminish
lesbians. Then a T for ‘trans’ and a
Q for ‘queer’ or ‘questioning’ got
added. Then the movement behaved- in victory – as its opponents once
did, as oppressors.
When the boot was on the other
foot, something ugly happened.
a decade ago, almost nobody was
supportive of gay marriage. Even
gay rights group Stonewall wasn’t
in favour. Now it’s a central tenet of
modern liberalism. To fail the gay
marriage test – only years after
almost everybody failed it – is to
put yourself beyond the pale.
People may agree with or dis-
agree with gay marriage. But to
shift mores so fast needs to be done
with sensitivity and deep thought.
Yet we engage in neither.
other issues followed a similar
pattern. Women’s rights had also
been steadily accumulated through-
out the 20th Century. They too
appeared to be arriving at some
sort of settlement. Then, just as the
train appeared to be reaching its
desired destination, it filled with
steam again and went roaring off
into the distance. What had been
barely disputed until yesterday
became a cause to destroy some-
one’s life today. Whole careers were
scattered and strewn as the train
careered along its path.
Careers like that of the 72-year-
old Nobel Prize-winning uCL
ity. The place where social justice
finds its warriors is identity poli-
tics. This atomises society into
different interest groups according
to sex (or gender), race, sexual
preference and more. It presumes
that such characteristics are the
main, or only, relevant attributes
of their holders and that they bring
an added bonus. as the american
writer Coleman Hughes has put
it, it assumes there is ‘a heightened
moral knowledge’ that comes
with being black or female or gay.
It’s why people start statements
with ‘Speaking as a ...’. and this new
religion is something that people
both living and dead must be on the
right side of.
That’s why there are calls to pull
down statues of historical figures
viewed as being on the wrong side
and it is why the past needs to be
rewritten to suit any interest group
you wish to champion.
Identity politics is where minor-
ity groups are encouraged to
simultaneously atomise, organise
and go on the attack. Tied into this
is something social justice war-
riors call ‘intersectionality’ – the
notion that there is a hierarchy of
oppressed minorities and society
should organise itself around cor-
recting this.
Today, intersectionality has bro-
ken out from the social scienceHoW t He World
loSt itS marbleS
Today our public life is dense with people who
are desperate to slay imagined dragons
(^) The Mail on Sunday September 1 • 2019
by douglaS
murray