As regular readers of this blog will have realised, I’ve been away from the keyboard for a few days. Among the things I’ve been doing whilst I have been away, is attending a brilliant speaking gig at Jewish Book Week in London featuring Melanie Phillips in conversation with the author Douglas Murray on the subject of his most recent book ‘The Madness of Crowds’ (review of book from me later when I’ve finished it).
I’ve seen Ms Phillips speak in public before, I believe it was at another Jewish Book Week event a few years ago, she’s a brilliant writer whose book ‘Londonistan’ is I consider, one of those books that ‘red pilled’ me to the extent of and danger from Islamic extremism. But, I have never heard Mr Murray live before and I was not at all disappointed, on the contrary I was greatly enthused by his talk, even though at parts, his view of the future was somewhat pessimisitic unless we as Western societies, get away from the idea that truth is relative rather than an absolute.
The conversation opened with Ms Phillips introducing Mr Murray to the audience and mentioning both his previous best selling book, ‘The strange death of Europe’ and the affect it has had and asking Mr Murray to take the audience through the new book. Mr Murray said that in his previous book he had looked at Islam whereas in this book he wanted to look at other issues. These issues are he said ‘Gay’, ‘Women’, ‘Race’ and ‘Trans’, and which are key aspects of the ideas of intersectionality.
Mr Murray spoke about how intersectionality attempted to make complex issues more simple than they are and that there are a number of issues that the Social Justice Warriors treat as straightforward when they are not. He mentioned also that there are dissident voices beginning to be raised about the tendency of intersectionality to simplify issues that may be impossible to simplify.
Just after Mr Murray made this point the inevitable Leftist attempt to use the heckler’s veto occurred. A small group of young protestors, I assume students or similar types,unfurled a banner from the gallery that read: ‘Jewish Book Week – No To Islamophobia’. I presumed that this was a protest aimed at both Ms Phillips and Mr Murray who have both spoken and written negatively about Islam. They kept quiet for a bit, ignored by the speakers but attracting ‘tutting’ from the rest of the audience. However, when Mr Murray mentioned the tension between women’s rights and the rights of those claiming to be trans, the four or five protestors started shouting ‘no Islamophobia, solidarity with trans’. This group shouted for a few seconds, realising that the audience was not going to fall for their heclker’s veto (the audience was telling the protestors to ‘shut up’) they appeared to when spoken to by security, troop out of the hall on their own accord, followed by calls from the audience and stage to ‘stay, you might learn something’. Mr Murray added at this point that the protestors ‘have a low tolerance threshold for ideas that are not their own’. Following this strop by protestors who I treat as little more than adult toddlers, the rest of the event passed off without incident.
Ms Phillips and Mr Murray discussed where the sort of woke culture that the West suffers from at the moment came from. They both agreed, as to I, that this culture came from a good place, the desire to treat people equally no matter what their inherent characteristics, but has become somewhat ‘demented’. Mr Murray added that the whole idea of intersectionality is a terrible concept.
Mr Murray said that an obsession with vague and difficult to pin down concepts such as ‘privilege’ and identity politics itself has not brought togetherness but has only brought more hatred and especially hatred at those who are perceived by intersectionalists as having ‘privilege’. He added that Identity Politics is a ‘reductive position’ and as regards the whole idea that whole groups have unearned ‘privilege’ is one that should be rejected. Mr Murray said: ‘We should not play the dangerous game of ‘privilege’’ with the Left.
What I found interesting in particular was Mr Murray’s excoriation of an academia that has ceased to search for truth and instead promotes dogma, often dogma with poor foundations. Mr Murray told of one academic who is prominent in the fields of ‘grievance studies’ and who promotes the idea of implicit group privilege, whose actual published papers consisted of little more than poorly evidenced assertions. This backs up what I and some others think about intersectionality in academia being as shaky as a castle built on quicksand.
Mr Murray said that intersectionality had created a culture where nobody knows exactly where they are on a shifting scale of oppression. On this subject he told the story of a well known Female to Male transsexual model who, in the minds of the intersectionalists, gains oppression points for being trans and black but also loses oppression points for being male and for being attractive. For me this story told by Mr Murray sums up why intersectionality is so wrong and so destructive to any society that tries to live by the precepts of interesectionality. It is capricious in the extreme as a person can be ‘oppressed’ one day and for one aspect of themselves but an ‘oppressor’ in the eyes of the interesectionalists another day because of another aspect. It is not a solid foundation for a civilised and stable society it is a chasm of chaos.
Towards the end of the conversation, which took place over the course of one hour, both Mr Murray and Ms Phillips did appear to be pessimistic about the prospects of the future because of the damage done by interesectionality. However Mr Murray left me with a feeling that all is not lost. He said that increasingly young people, the Gen Z’s, are beginning to ‘intuit the lie’ about intersectionalism and are questioning whether it’s worth going to universities that have been corrupted by the far Left. After all would you get into enormous debt in order to attend a university which is going to lie to you? I would not. Mr Murray said that Gen Z are ‘seeking truth and they will realise that they’ve been told lies.’ I believe that it will be interesting to see what happens when the lie of intersectionalism is highlighted not just by Gen Z’ers, but also by the wider society?
I was absolutely delighted to be able to get hold of tickets for this event. I had to settle for quite a poor seat situation because the seats for the stalls sold out very quickly. I was lucky to even be able to get the side balcony seat that I got. This was a fabulous conversation between two of Britain’s intellectual giants, who have over many years, stood up against the sort of leftism that has morphed into an oppressive orthodoxy and now rules the United Kingdom. I was really sorry that this conversation was only one hour, I could easily have listened to Mr Murray and Ms Phillips for another hour at least. It’s also a shame that there was not more time for questions from the audience as those that were asked showed to me that there is in Britain’s Jewish community, some desire to see a challenge to the leftist orthodoxy that is increasingly oppressing Britain. This was not a potentially hostile audience as it might be at somewhere like the Hay Literary Festival, a place that always seems to me to be too Left wing in its style, its programming or its ethos. This was an audience that was eager to hear these dissident voices and learn from them.
To close: I had a stroke of luck after the talk, my wife and I were walking around a corner in the building when we saw Mr Murray coming out of a lift. By sheer luck I found myself standing by the book signing table and by a complete miracle thereby at the head of the queue for book signing. I was therefore able to not only shake the hand of Mr Murray, a man whom I’ve admired for many years, but also get my copy of ‘The Madness of Crowds’ signed by him.
Postscript:
It turns out that at least one of the protestors who disrupted the event was one of the lunatics who, a few years, held a ‘Kaddish for Gaza’ demonstration in Parliament Square. This demonstration attracted a lot of criticism in the Jewish community and many people were rightfully angry to see the Jewish memorial prayer used to memorialise the names of terrorists who desire a genocide of Jews.
Reports on the disruption of the Douglas Murray and Melanie Phillips event below:
