Michael Shermer Douglas Murray — The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity (Salon # 87)

About this episode:

Listen to the Science Salon Podcast # 87 (audio-only):

http://bit.ly/ScienceSalon87

In his devastating new book The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray examines the 21st century’s most divisive issues: sexuality, gender, technology and race. He reveals the astonishing new culture wars playing out in our workplaces, universities, schools and homes in the names of social justice, identity politics and intersectionality. We are living through a postmodern era in which the grand narratives of religion and political ideology have collapsed. In their place have emerged a crusading desire to right perceived wrongs and a weaponization of identity, both accelerated by the new forms of social and news media. Narrow sets of interests now dominate the agenda as society becomes more and more tribal — and, as Murray shows, the casualties are mounting. Readers of all political persuasions cannot afford to ignore Murray’s masterfully argued and fiercely provocative book, in which he seeks to inject some sense into the discussion around this generation’s most complicated issues. He ends with an impassioned call for free speech, shared common values and sanity in an age of mass hysteria. Shermer and Murray discuss:

• gay: born this way?

• race: why current attitudes are an inversion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream

• gender: is it really all about power? Men and women in the workplace

• trans: how big an issue is this and how many trans people are there? Reversing trans surgeries

• the problem of intersectionality, or the oppression olympics

• campus craziness: how big a problem is it really?

• political correctness and free speech

• the problem of “overcorrection” in moral progress, and

• the way forward.

Douglas Murray is an author and journalist based in Britain. His previous book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, was a No. 1 bestseller in non-fiction. Murray has been a contributor to the Spectator since 2000 and has been Associate Editor at the magazine since 2012. He has also written regularly for numerous other outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun, Evening Standard and the New Criterion. He is a regular contributor to National Review and has been a columnist for Standpoint magazine since its founding.

This dialogue was recorded on October 8, 2019 as part of the Science Salon Podcast series hosted by Michael Shermer and presented by The Skeptics Society, in California.

Listen to Science Salon via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and Soundcloud.