Crowds

Against the ‘wokescenti’

The Madness of Crowds is a polemic against political correctness, which is not to say that its author is a fascist beast. Douglas Murray is a firm supporter of the rights of gay people, non-whites and women; it is just that he feels that they have now been largely achieved, leaving their advocates on university campuses with time on their hands to bully, censor, guilt-trip and generally kick up a fuss about exceedingly little. We have declined from the heroic period of Martin Luther King, he argues, to people who claim you can’t eat Thai food unless you are Thai, feminists who refer to men as trash and black activists who see whiteness as a form of disease.

Almost all of Murray’s examples are drawn from the United States, a society in which going over the top is a venerable tradition. There have indeed been excesses perpetrated in the name of identity politics, but Murray’s case would be a lot more convincing if he said rather more than he does about its momentous gains. As it stands, his book is equivalent to a history of conservatism which views it almost entirely through the lens of upper-class louts smashing up Oxford restaurants.
In any case, the narrative Murray has to deliver is seriously awry. “The revolution is over”, he announces, speaking of the struggle for women’s and minority rights, which is unlikely to ring very true in rape crisis centres or the Black Lives Matter movement. All the major battles for equality are now behind us, he claims, which those living on the south side of Chicago seem not to have acknowledged. There are also football crowds who appear obtusely unaware that racism is on the wane. In any case, we are told, identity politics is plagued with internal conflicts. Gay men and gay women have very little time for each other, while “queers” (as opposed to more conventional gay people) are wreckers intent on tearing down the social order, and most or even all heterosexuals are genuinely unnerved by gay people. In fact, they will always find them “strange and potentially threatening”. Perhaps Murray has never heard of Madonna.
Somewhere beneath the obsession with identity, Murray maintains, lurks Marxism – an odd claim, since Marxism has had notoriously little to say about those who feel patronized and humiliated because of their gender or skin colour. Academia, where post-Marxism is apparently rife (has Murray visited a university in the past twenty years?), “has found almost nothing it does not wish to deconstruct”, which might come as a surprise to the botanists and archaeologists on campus. How Murray knows this is something of a mystery, since he also tells us that the writings of what he contemptuously calls purveyors of social justice are without exception unreadable.
As for feminism, Murray suggests that unwanted sexual advances to women only became unacceptable in the public mind with the Harvey Weinstein affair, and that in certain contexts “unwanted sexual advances were still adorable” only a few years before. It also seems that the reason so many women wear lipstick and wear high heels is to arouse men sexually. For women to behave sexily but not expect men to drool over them is a “deranging demand” to place on these poor, easily dementable creatures. Indeed, many women “have the ability to drive members of the opposite sex mad … Not just to destroy them but to make them destroy themselves”. Who needs more social recognition when you have the capacity to blast half of the human species out of existence?
Murray is right that there has been major social progress for women and minorities, but alarmingly complacent to speak of the feminist train as having “pulled in at the station”. He might also have pointed out that identity is not an end in itself. What we should aim for is a situation in which nobody has to worry about who they are. The only good reason for being an activist is to get to the point where you no longer need to be. But that can’t be achieved by ignoring the reality of identity here and now. You need to feel your identity in order to be rid of it.
Whereas Murray tips his hat rather perfunctorily to feminism before proceeding to put the boot in, Meghan Daum’s The Problem with Everything is a middle-aged, passionately committed feminist’s lament over what has become of her convictions in the age of what she calls the “wokescenti”. If her critique of the more outré antics of US identity politics is more convincing than Murray’s, it is partly because it is always more effective to be censured by one’s sympathizers than by one’s adversaries. Daum strikes a balance on the question that seems to elude Murray. At its best, she writes, the new generation of cultural activists elicits greater awareness of issues of social justice. At its worst, it functions as the purity police, calling people out for the slightest transgression of a stiflingly self-righteous orthodoxy.
Because the US is a deeply parochial society, not much given to seeing itself from the outside, what seems obvious to an external observer – the fact that the more baroque forms of political correctness represent the latest outbreak of good old-fashioned American Puritanism – seems not to be much recognized at Yale or Columbia. Sectarianism, holier-than-thou-ism, the gulf between the reprobate and the elect, the scanning of words and actions for the least flicker of ideological impurity: all this has a history as old as the nation itself. There’s nothing new either about the claim that if my experience is radically different from yours, you are incapable of understanding me. It used to be known as middle-class individualism, and involves confusing sympathy with empathy, as well as making a fetish of immediate experience. Once upon a time, the self was hermetically sealed off from the selves around it; now it is cultures that are mutually incommensurable.
In this sense, a number of those who see themselves as political radicals are unwittingly in cahoots with the society they condemn. So in one respect is Daum’s excellent study. The #MeToo generation is also the MeMe generation, in which personal experience is taking over from truth. The Problem with Everything (she actually means in the States, not in Somalia or Swansea) has the subtitle My journey through the new culture wars (might we give the drearily clichéd metaphor of “journey” a rest for a few decades?), and traces the recent evolution of US feminism in terms of her own life. This, too, has a faint echo of Puritanism: only what is authenticated by lived experience can claim authority. What this means in practice is that we are given rather more information than we need about Daum’s love of the smell of swimming pools, the fact that in her early years she was dressed almost entirely in yellow, her childhood worship of Jodie Foster and the like. In confessional style, every detail must be recorded, since one never knows which may be a sign of salvation or damnation. As a result, the book, with its garrulous, inelegant prose, needs a little less matter and a trifle more art.

Even so, The Problem with Everything represents a brave, powerful intervention. Daum writes critically of a study that ranks the US among the ten most dangerous countries for women in the world. “The list”, she points out, “included places like India, where gang rapes occur in public routinely and women, including very young girls, have been raped and set on fire, and countries like Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, which are homes to honor killings, female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and any number of other atrocities imposed on women.” This is not an attempt to displace attention from problems at home. Daum believes that it is a burden to walk down a street, wherever it happens to be, in a female body. But, she suggests, there are also those who ought to get around a bit more.

Terry Eagleton is Distinguished Visiting Professor in English at Lancaster University. His latest book is Humour, published this year