In the wake of every modern social movement comes a moment when we think that movement has found its end.
For example, America and much of Europe have instituted same-sex marriage. Where else can the new social line go? Yet it keeps moving.
It shifts to a Big Brother effort to get everyone on board. To make us all believe the same thing about same-sex marriage, about white privilege, about the evils of the patriarchy that wields power unjustly, holding women down. Justice never happens because the line to fairness keeps moving.
In such times, it’s rare to find a book that, to mix my metaphors, puts a finger on the pulse of the constantly moving line in a way no other author has. We see the “great crowd derangement,” Douglas Murray describes, but “we do not see the causes.” He shows us the causes.
I usually wait to comment on books until I’ve finished reading them. But Murray’s book contains a message that is cogent, urgent–and surprising, considering its source.
The perspective in The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity is distinctly liberal but at the same time very conservative.
Douglas Murray is gay. He believes the line has gone too far. And there may not be a way to pull it back.
He is honest about his fear that “We face not just a future of ever-greater atomization, rage and violence, but a future in which the possibility of backlash against all rights advances–including the good ones–grows more likely.”
Murray says, “Our public life is now dense with people desperate to man the barricades long after the revolution is over.”
When Obergefell came down, I thought–albeit briefly–They have what they want now. We will stay in this place. We did not.
Instead, we see lawsuits over wedding cakes, photos, and flowers.
We see, as Murray puts it, that once the “boot is on the other foot” the victors treat the losers the way the losers once treated the now victors.
Murray implicitly makes a case for the Golden Rule and pulls back the curtain on the “gobbledygook” that has filtered into society from liberal academia.
I’m not sure I’ve ever read a secular book with more wisdom from someone whose worldview is so vastly different from my own.
I can’t wait to keep reading.