The Madness of Crowds

The single factor which opinion polls showed to have changed public opinion on the matter was people knowing somebody – a family member, friend or work colleague – who is gay. This factor has significant implications for other rights movements. A second obvious factor in that change in attitude has been the increasing visibility of gays in public l

Few people think that a country cannot be improved on, but to present it as riddled with bigotry, hatred and oppression is at best a partial and at worst a nakedly hostile prism through which to view society. It is an analysis expressed not in the manner of a critic hoping to improve, but as an enemy eager to destroy.

If a growing awareness of people’s differences was meant to unlock some grand system of justice, or allow interlocking prejudices to free everyone up, then even at this fairly early stage the process has produced more problems than it has solutions, and more exacerbation than healing.

defining an entire group of people, their attitudes, pitfalls and moral associations, based solely on their racial characteristics is itself a fairly good demonstration of racism. For ‘whiteness’ to be ‘problematized’ white people must be shown to be a problem.

As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have shown in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, catastrophizing has become one of the distinctive attitudes of the era.

people only think that they would have acted better in history because they know how history ended up. People in history didn’t – and don’t – have that luxury. They made good or bad choices in the times and places they were in, given the situations and shibboleths that they found themselves with. To view the past with some degree of forgiveness is

people who are attractive manage to climb higher in their chosen professions than their less attractive peers. Is physical attractiveness plus youth and womanhood such a negligible set of cards?

just as racial differences were diminishing they suddenly became siloed in special-interest sections of their own: ‘black literature’, like ‘gay literature’ and ‘women’s literature’, now got a section of its own in bookshops and libraries.

rights battles are not all the same, and it should by now be clear that the T debate does not follow on seamlessly from the LGB ones.