British cultural commentator and editor for The Spectator argues that amidst a series of swift and turbulent cultural changes, Western societies have landed on new, quickly fabricated narratives that have swiftly been adopted by the masses and become difficult to discuss in a civil, productive way.

It is easy to find evidence that there is a deepening rancor and cantankerousness to public and private discourse. Many people are quick to lay the blame at the feet of a politician or political process more generally (and even quicker to take offense), but these patterns of angry, herd movement have deeper roots than the most recent news cycle or political election.

The far more profound and troubling problem is a cultural one: We have been trying to thrive without an overarching narrative that can give unity and direction to society. These grand narratives are stories and assumptions about where we come from and where we’re going, how to live life well and what makes life meaningful. Since the 1800s, the grand narratives have been getting undercut, one after another. The first half of the 20th century saw a number of political ideologies gain prominence but fail to deliver. In the late 20th century, the postmodern ethos entered the cultural ether with great force, opposing any system of belief that presumes universality. One of the few grand narratives left is the need to dismantle grand narratives. What we have sown in “storylessness” we are now reaping in acrimony and discord.

Whatever the previously popular grand or metanarratives left to be desired, they did provide a sense of purpose to life. Without a grand narrative that unifies society, we have no heading. Where, then, will we go?

Rich democratic Western societies can’t simply remain “storyless” forever. No culture in history has managed it for very long. Making money where you can and finding pleasure as it presents itself haven’t managed to scratch the existential itch. As old grand narratives die out or are slashed to pieces, new ones inevitably spring up to fill the void that deceased narratives have left. People find themselves looking for a new cause. The most recent narrative that people are now flocking to is activism, while they clamor for justice.

Most recently, this has been embodied as people pitting themselves against anyone who disagrees with them personally or the causes they choose to attach to. The speed with which someone can be scrutinized and demonized for holding a contrarian point of view—or even making a remark that could be interpreted as such—is frightening. 

Tech companies manipulate this in profound ways, 1) by asserting significant control over the flow of information and kinds of information that people can see, and 2) by selling user data to shady customers hoping to refashion us in their image and modify our behavior.

This is not a small project. It is not an aimless project either. There is a new metaphysic being intentionally fabricated to create people with an entirely different ideological outlook. The new grand narrative that animates the conditioned crowds integrates “social justice,” “identity group politics,” and “intersectionality.” People are flocking to this banner in droves.

Social justice retains an air of respectability in part because it sounds lofty—if only in the abstract. Who wants to oppose something as noble as “social justice”? Identity politics is a harder sell because it involves clustering people based on one or a handful of characteristics: sexual preference, gender, or skin color, for example.

Intersectionality is an even less palatable part of this new grand narrative because it combines attributes into more and more niche categories of compounded oppression—oppression that will be remedied through activism. For example, one would examine not just someone’s being black or gay or female, but her social location at the intersection of black and gay and female.

The language of intersectionality is not just in the fringe corners of the humanities and social science departments. It’s mainstream jargon now and is being systematically adopted as a framework for running many government agencies and corporations. It probably hasn’t been long at all since you’ve heard “LGBT” or “transphobic” invoked in casual conversation.

This new grand narrative that combines social justice, group identity politics, and intersectionality is dangerous for many reasons. One is that the narrative is young and untested. Another reason is that it is divisive to the core. As some have pointed out, it is dangerous and rash to throw one’s full existential weight behind a paradigm that is so new. The intellectual roots are shallow, and the effects of adhering to it, and building laws and policy around it, are still being discovered. A few decades of theorizing are attempting to upend thousands of years of civilization built through the blood, sweat, and tears of experience.

Still, this new grand narrative (a religion, really) marches onward: bullying, shaming, and intimidating anyone who obstructs its rapid envelopment of society. Many of these movements began as legitimate, noble efforts to achieve badly needed reforms. But one after another, each of them has gone off the rails. Together they make up a new metaphysic that divides us instead of bringing us together. It teaches us to turn people’s words into weapons that can be held against them. Public life is becoming a minefield in which everyone is horribly afraid of making a rhetorical misstep. It would be difficult to create a more potent recipe for social upheaval.

In the United States and Great Britain, there have been remarkable strides toward acceptance of gays in the last decade. But the switch has been so drastic and so sudden that an old ideology has merely been replaced by a new one that introduced a different set of heroes and villains, saints and martyrs.

Politicians have altered their opinions fairly quickly on the subject of gay marriage and homosexuality more generally to accommodate the new dogma. Hillary Clinton, for example, pivoted hard on the issue of gay marriage. She stood stalwart at her husband’s side while he upheld the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. When she campaigned in the 2016 election, stalwart support for LGBT was a platform mainstay. Of course, politicians do change their minds. That’s not unusual. What is more unusual is how quickly and dramatically opinions on the issue of homosexuality have changed in recent years, and not just Hillary’s, but also many other politicians’. No politician would publicly claim he is against same sex marriage. It’s political suicide. Today’s politicians are trying to keep up with a cultural ground constantly moving beneath their feet.

The ideological pivots encoded in politics and law have often been sharper and more clamorous than the turns made by Hillary and others in America. For example, right after Germany legalized same-sex marriage, acceptance of the pro-gay position became compulsory for citizenship in the state of Baden-Württemberg. These legal amendments are seen as progress by many, but what if they’re just part of a new, no-less-hostile orthodoxy replacing an older one?

Changes such as Baden-Württemberg’s new citizenship requirement have been confusingly swift. Even people and papers that now position themselves as “woke” have had to apologize for anti-gay statements made in earlier years, dug up courtesy of the mob. In 2018, MSNBC forced its own host Joy Reid to issue a public apology for making a statement against gay marriage 10 years earlier. What the angry mob forgets is that it wasn’t just poor Joy but the majority of people who opposed gay marriage at that time.

Businesses and governments seem anxious to atone for past sins by approving of the gay lifestyle. They are pushing it on employees and public servants in the same spirit as a mother makes her children take their medicine: “You need this. It’s good for you.”

BBC in 2018 began reporting gay headlines and giving them the same import of breaking news and front-page headlines. Below a report of an earthquake and tsunami that claimed hundreds of lives in Indonesia was a write-up on the diver Tom Daley, who came out as gay five years earlier and has been very candid about it since. Hardly news at all, but there it was right alongside news of a very recent and devastating natural disaster. This priority misplacement is not uncommon. One wonders if the growing frequency with which this kind of reporting is jammed into news cycles seems to communicate not just, “Take your medicine,” but, “Take that, bigot.” The spirit appears to be not just instructive intent, but vindictive. Maybe these are the reflections that only a gay man (like the author) can say without being de-platformed or canceled. 

The certitude with which journalists and politicians make claims about the nature of homosexuality is disconcerting, too, considering the short amount of time that these ideas have been around and debated. There has been little time or opportunity to evaluate these ideas rigorously, and those who propose alternative theories or question the new dogma take a serious risk—even if they are civil, reasonable, or modest in their position. The issue is so thorny that most don’t bother to say much for fear of being made a pariah.

Take the story of Dr. Michael Davidson as an example. After first inviting Dr. Davidson for an interview on Good Morning Britain and sending a car from the news outlet to fetch him, Piers Morgan proceeded to berate Davidson for believing he was gay and now is straight (and currently has a wife and kids), as well as for offering voluntary conversion services for those who come to him. Davidson remained calm and composed even while being scolded like a child. “Do you know what we call these people, Dr. Michael? We call them horrible little bigots, in the modern world.” What Morgan forgets about the modern world is how quickly things have changed. Important discussions about homosexuality remain to be had because they’re too thorny for most people to broach without being reproached—more than their being true beyond a shadow of a doubt. Whether someone is born gay, becomes gay, or can veer from one to the other are questions that haven’t percolated long enough to be shored up with such dogmatism.

Back in 2002, Steven Pinker wrote a book called Blank Slate, which addressed the growing contentiousness over gender questions. Pinker was confident that a scientific perspective would win out, and after listing numerous differences between boys and girls, he concluded that things aren’t looking good for the position that there are no significant differences between boys and girls other than genitalia. In our own time, it appears Pinker was overly optimistic about science winning out. It has become controversial to make such assertions, however empirically founded. Activism and social science have proven more persuasive.

The controversies about what it means to be a man or a woman have created a great deal of confusion about how women and women should interact with one another.

Before the Me Too movement and news about Harvey Weinstein broke, there were plenty of unsolicited sexual advances—and not just men toward women, but women toward men—sometimes on live television. Jane Fonda sat herself in Stephen Colbert’s lap and whispered titillating sweet nothings while Colbert uncomfortably made jokes about the interview not going how he’d expected. In the mid-1990s, a young Drew Barrymore bared her chest to David Letterman, and began switching between naughty schoolgirl and dominatrix. Mayim Bialik turned her back to the audience on The Late Late Show and exposed her breasts to Piers Morgan and James Corden, calling it a way of standing for feminism. Howls of laughter and approbation resounded in each instance. Periodicals’ op-eds had glowing reviews for each instance. It seems that women making advances—even and especially to the discomfort of men—is seen as empowering to women. The script changed in 2017 with Me Too, when unsolicited, unwanted sexual advances went from cheeky and cute to intolerable, but if it is a woman initiating, that seems to be fine. The definition of harassment should go both ways, but it doesn’t.

The point of bringing up these stories and the reactions they elicit is not to shame women, to tell them how to dress, or to blame victims. Let women do as they wish with their bodies. Let them expose themselves to men for a laugh if they like. But can we also agree that some women, especially prominent and celebrated women, are sending mixed messages? We must believe all women always…and there are also industries devoted to making women titillating.

Advertisements tell us a lot about what really motivates women—whatever the lofty rhetoric of Twitter or awards ceremonies might be. Swimwear campaigns aim to make women alluring. Alluring to whom, one might wonder? To other women? Probably not. There are prosthetic stick-on nipples called Just Nips that show through shirts and dresses better. There’s camel toe underwear, designed to accentuate the labia. These products are often branded as products to help women feel better about themselves, but is it really just for women? Might there be other reasons that no one is allowed to talk about? Society is clearly in calcified denial about some things. If you’re curious, do two separate Google searches for “make him drool” and “make her drool.” The results are laughably different.

There is a difficult, confusing demand placed on a man: A woman can be sexy, tantalizing, and “make him drool” but the moment he responds to it, the woman can reject it and scold him for responding. The switch from seductress to severe schoolteacher is jarring and confusing. What exactly is the lesson to be taught here? If the rule here is that women can be as sexy and sensual as they wish toward men, but don’t you dare sexualize them...how realistic is that? Nicki Minaj’s music video for her song “Anaconda” presents the dilemma better than it intends, with Minaj shaking her bum seductively all over a man’s face, getting him worked up, and then rejecting his advance with an indignant slap on the hand and walking away. The man hangs his head, evidently ashamed of his bad behavior.

Or what about the schoolboy who attends compulsory classes with detailed etiquette lessons regarding boy-girl interactions, only to see on the walk home that the bestselling books and some of the bestselling movies are about women having fantasies about being raped and taming an abusive male? His mom and her friends might very well have these books on their shelves.

These incongruities, unfortunately, are never really talked about. The truth is far more complex than mad crowds can accommodate.

The greatest threat to Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream is no longer a lingering white supremacy, but anti-racism. King’s hope was that one day, color would no longer determine our treatment of one another, but color has recently become everything. The color of someone’s skin is a better metric than the content of someone’s character after all, according to an increasingly influential school of thought. Hence, the recent New York Times op-ed titled: “Can My Children Be Friends with White People?”

Black studies became an intellectual movement and special interest field in the 1960s that originally aimed to remove stigma. The idea was to emphasize black accomplishments and contributions to politics, law, culture, and literature. But instead of removing stigma, some programs have relocated it. In a similar way that some popular feminist movements have vilified men, so some black studies programs have begun bashing whites.

“Whiteness studies” is a new area of academic exploration. Ivy League institutions across the United States have incorporated it. University of Wisconsin in Madison offers a course called “The problem with Whiteness.” In Australia and England, universities are making whiteness studies and other intersectionality curricula mandatory for students, regardless of whether those students are majoring in critical theory or rocket science.

The ideal of color blindness has been replaced with a fierce preoccupation with race. The pendulum swing has been a swift and noisy one. Finding something inherently wrong with an entire group of people based purely on skin color is pretty racist, but this is what whiteness studies programs and publications push. If you are white you are not guilty as charged but guilty before charged. Whiteness is not one of numerous features that comprise a person's identity, but the central and problematic pillar.

In 2019, professor Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, told an audience of her longing “to be a little less white, which means a little less oppressive, oblivious, defensive, ignorant, and arrogant.” DiAngelo told those present that people who see others as individuals rather than by their skin color are “dangerous.” We are returning to an epoch in which rhetoric about racial differences is reaching a fever pitch, and we don’t realize the dangers it presents.

The Madness of Crowds launched and its author has survived. The reviews took the arguments seriously and were mostly positive, give or take some dampening words of caution.

But still, the backlash was not as severe as was expected, and perhaps that speaks to a growing groundswell of people who believe that woke culture at its extremes has missed something crucial.

The book’s reception is also a reminder that while many brace themselves for a horrible online onslaught if they dare to challenge the tenets of wokeness, we might find the recourse is not as bad as we braced for. So many worry about cancellation that no one asks what happens after it occurs. What if life goes on after the cancellation mob moves on? For some people, it has cost them a lot, and this is not to dismiss that, but it is to suggest that there are worse things.

It is also important we bear in mind that racial equality, women’s rights, and minority rights are some of the most remarkable achievements in Western society. Their pursuit began as laudable and necessary endeavors. These achievements are wonderful products of the culture that produced them, but they are abysmal foundations for a culture. Trying to rest a civilization on the products instead of the foundation is a lot like turning a barstool upside down and expecting it to yield better results.

You can’t take the products of a system and turn them into the basis for that system. Race, sexuality, and gender are complex and volatile issues. To make them form the basis of a society is to create an unstable society. There are numerous contradictions and contrivances in each issue that are not that difficult to discover, and many ideas remain open to debate, yet society has reached a point at which voicing them brings societal and sometimes legal repercussions. Maybe the presence and influence of woke culture is less pervasive than some imagine, but the presence of literal thought policing in many Western countries is unsettling to say the least.

In Western societies today, the emperor (or new grand narrative of social justice and activism for certain groups) has no clothes, but many people fear the consequences of pointing that out. The costs to reputation and career seem too high. But perhaps there truly are even more people who are willing to speak up and ask difficult questions than we imagined. Hopefully we can do so civilly. Hopefully, these questions that need to be asked on subjects of race, gender, and sexuality can lead us to concepts and principles that we can all agree on and that will bring unity.