Being Essential, Essential Being
I write as a philosopher who went out on a limb in the 1990s by arguing forthrightly for an essentialist metaphysics, in the teeth of an anti-essentialist wave sweeping through the academy. That anti-essentialist torrent came in time to engulf culture. And it shows. Politics and culture have lost touch with reality, not only with the basic facts of life but with the idea of a shared humanity. Common human decency is becoming increasingly uncommon.
I did think to write at length on this issue, but decided, wisely I think, that I have much better things with which to occupy my time, including idling the hours away playing online checkers. T he world has gone to extremes and the most salient characteristic of extremists is that they don't listen to anything other than themselves. There are still plenty of people in the middle, of course. The problem is that those people seem inert, as if not quite believing the insanity that is sweeping the world, waiting for it to blow over. It won't. Anti-realism is in the modern DNA. This crisis has been a long time coming. The uncanny guest of nihilism came through the door more than a century ago, and people are still waiting for that unwanted visitation to go away. It won't. I cover the metaphysical malaise of the age in a number of other posts and works and refer those who want to understand the roots of the contemporary lunacies in their direction.
Above the depths are the shadows and the shallows, which is where you will find the attention of most people being drawn and absorbed. If I was a conspiracy theorist I would say the nonsense has been engineered to divert, distract, and absorb mass energies whilst the real business is being executed elsewhere.
Politics and culture have become spheres of endless and unwinnable wars, with the protagonists being drawn into taking sides to join in the daily hate. The world divides into friends and enemies. I saw the Green movement degenerate into technocratic elitism in one part and a religious cult on the other and took my leave. I am politically homeless and refuse to take sides on this barren terrain. Like Dante, I have become a party of one to affirm truths and standards that transcend the endless contention. In another time, and not too distant, I would have condemned such an approach as an evasion, a retreat to an impossibly ideal and unreal vantage point.
Unreality lies at the heart of the contemporary malaise. Long before it swept politics and culture, anti-realism became the dominant metaphysics of the age. It's proponents will deny that anti-realism is a metaphysics, of course, asserting it as an anti-metaphysics. They are deluded. It is a metaphysics, just a particular bad and noxious one. You can see its baneful effects in the self-righteous hatreds and lunacies of those determined to prosecute 'their truth' against those who think otherwise, not least those still on nodding terms with reality. It's a sign of how bad things have got that I find myself supporting neo-Darwinist biologist Richard Dawkins for stating clearly that there are only two sexes. As if this is some groundbreaking truth! You shouldn't need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows. Dawkins is saying nothing that we didn't learn in the second year of junior school aged 9 (which in turn merely confirmed what we already knew).
So where did the confusion come from? The linguistic turn and the inflation of discourse, the idea that reality is a social construction, that truth is no more than a projection of power, that truth claims reduce to power differentials, the assertion of the autonomy of culture over nature. It comes from an anti-realist metaphysics, which also entailed an anti-essentialism, the idea that 'there are no necessary relations' in the world, that reality, including human nature, is endlessly plastic, malleable, and manipulable. And now we get the manipulation, with identities fashioned in accordance with will and preference.
I predicted the worst in my work in the 1990s, and so it came to pass. I am not as despairing as other people, however. I saw this 'fashionable nonsense' sweet through university departments in the 1990s and 2000s and felt very much as though I was spitting in the wind. Academics desperately seeking relevance have a vested interest in rendering simple things complex, concealing paucity of thought in grandiloquent, meaningless gibberish and jargon. I called it out then, as did many others. But was powerless to resist as the academy was captured. In invading politics and culture, this dreck is now out in the open. If isolated academics couldn't resist the initial tides, then it is for the good senses of 'ordinary' people to see that the emperor really is wearing no clothes, and is repulsively ugly in his nakedness.
Not least the worst part of this controversy is the fact, as with so many issues encroaching on people from so many different directions, society and its institutions and authorities have allowed tiny organised majorities to engineer and manufacture crises and controversies in order to advance and serve their agenda. Social institutions have been taken over until now we are faced with an almost totally captured public sphere.
We are looking at the end of reason and reality and the issues that are occupying our time are merely the surface manifestation of a deeper problem. I have no intention of joining the cacophony of noise. I have, in the main, kept out of the daily outrage and hatred. Every day we are enjoined to take a stand on the issue and outrage of the day; every day people accept the invite; every day attention is diverted from deeper realities.
Suffice to say, as someone who has an interest and a little involvement in women's sport, I see the threat to women's sport very clearly, and bitterly resist the attempts of biological males to encroach in this arena. I see the threat to women's safe spaces, too, and see the rollback of women's rights. I see a culture in which people are frightened to speak out against an organised and systematic pressure and bullying, for fear of being labelled 'anti-' whatever and something 'phobic' and 'ist.' In an age of activism, 'tiny majorities' of organised people claim a power without responsibility, and use that power to dictate, direct, order, manipulate, and label others. These minorities capture social bodies and institutions and, from there, get the rest of society to jump to its tune. The modus operandi and mentality is clearly discernible – minorities detached from the great public target institutions and authorities, infiltrate and capture them, and then seek to organise the passive masses from the outside and from above. I see it as part of a general malaise afflicting politics and culture. The loss of faith in people, politics, and democracy is palpable – activists and ideologues want what they want, they want 'their' truth and 'their' idea of the good to prevail and predominate, and they will push and proselytize until they get it, inflaming situations and firing people up in causes and crusades. This mentality is fundamentally anti-democratic. Far from respecting the agency of the individual members of the demos, it holds 'ordinary' people in contempt as some uneducated, unthinking rabble. The mentality is also characterised by a secular religiosity, finding a meaning and purpose in what disenchanting science reveals to be an objectively meaningless and purposeless world in a political cause. It follows that political opponents are to be damned as enemies and heretics, unbelievers. That religiosity is the worst of all religions, a religion that is without mercy and forgiveness, yielding no redemptive possibilities for sinners. That mentality is crawling all over the contemporary environmental movement, with its members moving from one crisis and protest and demonstration to another, citing 'the science' as authority whilst blackmailing the public and its representatives with threats of the 'end of the world.' We live in hope. I have heard this dreary dreck so often now that I almost wish for the end of the world to put us all out of our misery. If things really are as bad as environmentalists say then it is already too late. The only thing to do is for modern 'men as gods,' all those progressives who thought that science and technology would deliver Heaven on Earth, to get on their knees, beg God for forgiveness, and make their peace with the world they have created as best they can. I'm finished with them. This is not the environmentalism I argue for. This is an anti-politics and religiosity born of scientism and nature fetishism. It is significant, too, that a Green movement that is so austerian and puritanical when it comes to the transgression of natural boundaries becomes so permissive frankly so feverish when it comes to supporting a reality-transgressing identity politics in which people can choose to be whatever they want to be. So what happened to nature doesn't care which ism you support? Whatever happened to 'physics doesn't care about your politics?'
The movement is hypocritical and hollow, a very dangerous combination in politics.
I have had several exchanges with environmentalists on this issue. I consistently make the point that environmentalists are not taking people with them but are actually alienating people. I am concerned with the democratic deficit that has opened up in green politics, arguing that a movement for widespread societal transformation – which I support – requires substantive social democratic content. This concern is consistently dismissed. The anthropological and democratic pessimism at the heart of contemporary environmental politics is palpable. That will leave environmentalism as a head without a body, meaning that it will take the form of a top-down technocratic elitism, if it takes any form at all. My criticisms are met with the now stock response – 'movements push, people follow.' It wouldn't be difficult at all to find Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, or any would-be or actual tyrant arguing the very same thing. This is not about democracy but active minorities who, in already possessing 'the truth' – or 'the science' - see no need to consult the people. You may look up here a woman called Fleming at the UN who made a boast of how 'we own the science and we think the world should know it.'
The failures and dangers of environmentalism as an inherently anti-democratic anti-politics is not my concern here. I have written extensively on this and have no intention of repeating myself. But I am concerned to call out activism as a vanguardism which is a systematic repudiation of democracy, democratic institutions, and the democratic spirit. The activists have 'the truth' and the members of the demos have no independent agency and creative input.
I have no intention of wasting time, energy, and intelligence fighting guerilla wars from issue to issue. It's a full-time job fighting unwinnable wars that lead nowhere. People go where the hot air and action is. They are meant to.
The specific concern motivating this piece is the threat posed to women's sport – and women's health and safety – through the encroachment of biological males in women-only events and spaces. This is a 'women's issue.' But it is more, and has much deeper cultural and intellectual roots than those seeking to fight back may realise. I would encourage people to fight back and speak out, all the same. This issue affects all of us, so I would encourage people to hold the line when it comes to affirming reason and cleaving to material reality. Lose these things and society is truly lost. The world will be plunged into a nightmare of endless contestation with power and force the only arbiters of outcomes.
But it's an issue for everyone, everyone who has mothers, aunts, sisters, daughters, nieces, anyone female. People are afraid to speak up and risk becoming the target of abuse and pressure – read the death threats and rape threats that have been directed towards those who have had the courage to speak up, and identify these threats for what they are: the plainest, vilest misogyny. And ask yourself why those supposed feminists who have been most vocal and most militant in talking about 'toxic masculinity' have been so silent in this instance. That reference to 'toxic masculinity' indicates why I am leery of taking sides. I started with my case for essentialism for a reason. Militant feminists have been the most vehement anti-essentialists of the modern age, succeeding in rooting out essences to such an extent that culture has almost entirely supplanted nature. In defending women's sports, spaces, and rights, I am maintaining my criticism of the anti-essentialist feminism that opened the doors to a reality-denying identitarianism. If we are going to talk about 'toxic masculinity,' then we need also to talk about a 'toxic feminity' - we are all sinners, all of us have original sin.
The threats and the abuse are plain and public, and the women on the receiving end, such as J.K. Rowling, Sharon Davies, and too many more have made them public. Yet there is no outrage from those whose default position with respect to male violence has been one of outrage. The abuse of Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel, Suzanne Moore, Julie Birchall .. (the list is endless) has been vicious and appalling. Had biological males not linked to a cause and an identity issued this abuse and made these threats there would have been outrage. There has been no outrage. Instead, there has been mealy-mouthed rationalisation designed to show how wrong and oppressive all these women are, and how progressive and kind the abusers are.
The hatred and division all come entirely from the activists, and not the people on whose behalf these activists claim to speak. What trans activists demand and what actual trans people want are not necessarily the same thing. I have no problem with the latter. I have a very big problem with the former. It's nothing personal. I have a big problem with activists in pretty much every field, given the extent to which they pitch issues at extremes in order to engineer controversy and conflict, pulling us away from reason and reality with their every outrage. That is what is so obscene about it all. It is always that active minority of trouble-makers who engineer the controversies and conflicts and then proceed to feed off the division. And it is always the people whose identities and politics are drawn into controversy who suffer pain and anguish in the aftermath.
It's a reason why I am critical of the way that autism is being dragged into environmental and identitarian politics – your case should stand and fall on its own merits, not whether or not it is tailored to favoured identities. I'm autistic, I am nobody's political pet. I bite.
The rot always starts with cowardice. If you keep quiet and keep your head down in the belief that things will blow over you will find that the people who push will keep on pushing until they have possession of the public realm, to do with as they wish. And the push never ends. There will always been a new crisis and a new conflict. Power proceeds according to its own endless dynamic and can never be satisfied.
With respect to this issue, it is clear that if we do not use biological sex as our ground and identifier then we are going to render women and girls obsolete in general and not just in sport. With respect to sport, there is no like for like comparison – male and female bodies are different and need to be tested differently, and equally, on a level playing field.
But rather than continue to state what should be obvious, I'll simply encourage people to listen to the likes of ex-Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies. She writes: “I've received several threats to myself and my work because I present evidence based facts on the unfairness of male inclusion in women's sport. Which is biological sex discrimination. I will not stop bringing these actual facts into the light or be bullied into silence.”
Cut past the abuse, the hot-air, and the distortion of language and instead listen to the reasoned words of Sharron Davies
Sharron Davies: I find it so sad we throw women under the bus over the toxic trans athlete debate
Sharron Davies threatened for views
I agree 100% with Sharron Davies and have supported her consistently in her fight.
I backed her when she openly stated “This is cheating.” I added that, in truth, it is cheating so bare-faced as to be worse than performance-enhancing drugs. At least the drugs cheats of the past knew their cheating to be wrong and kept it secret. I rage and despair for the girls and women who not only lose the opportunity to compete fairly and win awards they deserve for their hard work, talent, and training, but lose hope and simply go and do something else. This is a serious threat to women's sport. The true headline is this: "Enormous cheat uses male advantage and smaller hurdles to put girls in their place.”
Putting girls and women in their place does seem to be a motivating factor in this controversy. The excitement of some is unmistakeable.
A common argument of women outraged by the turn of events is that girls and women should simply refuse to participate in events in which a biological male enters. I'm less than sure that this is a real possibility. When the burden of protest and resistance falls on the girls and women in competitive sport alone, you will simply fail to get the 100% solidarity that is required to succeed here. The strategy only works when everyone supports you. What we have seen, instead, is women's sport being picked off and gradually eroded within, with voices of protest being few and far between, most not knowing how to resist, many simply walking away at the hopelessness of it all.
The evidence – so far at least – is that those who take a stand face ostracization, losing any number of opportunities in the process. So what. we may ask, when the end result is participation in a rigged game? Most are trying to get into teams and clubs, obtain scholarships and sponsorship, get into college and stay there with a sport scholarship. Schools and colleges are perpetrating this, as are clubs and teams. There is an institutional and organisational force here, as well as social and cultural, that individual girls and women simply cannot resist and fight on their own. What will happen is that individual girls and women will simply stop taking part, with 'inclusion' advancing by way of 'self-exclusion.'
I would support girls and women should they refuse to compete, but I think the mass non-compliance required unlikely. I think it places far too much of a burden on the girls and women themselves. My view is that this will take protest and resistance on a large scale, involving family members, friends, communities, along with legislation enforcing proper standards. We can't put this on the girls and women competitors alone.
It's the brainwashed adults and activists who are well-organised and insistent and who know how to get inside institutions that are the problem and who need to be rooted out. In my understanding, the girls who protest can be ostracized by their peers too. It takes extraordinary courage to resist such isolation. This generation has been raised on a pernicious ideology, one that will take some defeating. At this rate, without a concerted, targetted fightback, women's sport will have to be destroyed before 'society' sees the danger. Having made so much good progress in recent decades, women's sport will be back to year zero unless effective action is taken.
We also need to bear in mind the extent to which young people have been indoctrinated. The most common place for girls and women to stand has always been where approval of the dominant males is to be found. A truth that feminists don't like to hear is that no-one brings women down more than other women. I have a feeling that I'll get into less trouble now for saying that than I would have done a couple of decades ago. Some women are indeed in on the abasement of women's rights. How has this happened? Easy. It's bound to happen once you supplant justice with grievance hierarchies in which the identity of the most favoured/most oppressed changes according to arbitrary fashion. In large part, the feminism of the 20th and 21st century has been premised on victimhood. The strength of that approach is that it triggers a demand for restitution. The weakness is that it can be easily usurped when fashions change and a "greater victim" emerges.
It's a question of 'different,' not 'better' (how telling that the haters and baiters are so keen to incite a war of words by accusing females of being losers and poor competitors who are simply not good enough). Females are as talented as males and train as hard, but cannot compete against the advantages that male hormones, body architecture, and muscle bring. Allowing average to mediocre males to steal the hopes, dreams, ambitions, and opportunities of girls and women is sickening. But the girls and women in sport cannot fight this alone: we ALL need to take a stand against this scandal. And that requires concerted comprehensive action that is become political, institutional, and legal. Otherwise, I fear girls and women will continue to be picked off, to the ruination of women's sport.
The beauty of sport lies in equal and fair competition - equality and fairness is not too much to ask for at all, they are the essential conditions of a flourishing life for all.
But the issue is so much greater than sport, with long and tangled roots. The setting of identity against identity, an endless circulation of self-definitions on the part of tiny numbers of very vocal people, will eat itself and society at large alive. It was always going to end this way. And sport is merely one of the most visible areas where the collision can be seen in all its inanity and insanity. Sport is where 'the masses' are looking, where 'ordinary' people attracted by a fair contest can see the manifest unfairness in all its ugliness. But the problem is pervasive and spreading in much less visible ways. The war cannot be won by arguing for one identity against another.
Kathleen Stock gives us the clue. Kathleen Stock is the biology and philosophy professor who lost her job as a result of students objecting to her affirmation of the reality of biological sex. She is now doubling down on the assertion of material reality against those who think reality a mere social construct and cultural self-creation. Not before time. I've been doing this since the start of my own academic research in the 1990s. I saw clearly the dangers inherent in the constructivism and relativism – and power-obsession – in the fashionable thought of the time. And I saw the dangers that this kind of thinking posted to the left in politics most of all. Once you lose connection with people, with reason, and with reality, once you supplant universal standards with differential pragmatics and identities, there isn't much point to leftist politics any more – or to any politics for that matter.
Kathleen Stock is a biologist and philosopher. I am an essentialist in philosophy, holding that a thing is essentially something and something essentially. I had to defend my work against criticisms that essentialism involves a biological determinism. It most certainly does not. The fashionable intellectuals of the age routinely conflated essences and biology out of their own philosophical amateurism and ignorance. Their political commitments far outweighed any philosophical concerns on their part. Unfortunately, they captured entire university departments and proceeded to pulp their errant nonsense out into society and culture via generations of over-charged and short-changed students. I called it dreck at the time and everything that has happened since has confirmed that view. It's intellectual rubbish, it really is. It's superficially clever but is entirely lacking in intellectual substance. Back in 2000 my Director of Studies told me that I was 'swimming against the intellectual tide,' but reassured me that these various 'post' thinkers are 'heading up the creek without a paddle.' They are still heading in that direction, only now they are taking culture and society with them. Now that their ideas have come out of the university and into society we see their delusional and destructive quality. Forget academics, they were not only incapable of resisting this dreck when it struck, all too many of them joined in the tidal wave. It's going to take 'ordinary' folk, or all folk concerned with keeping society afloat, to tell this crowd to take a hike. If I didn't know any better I would say that the people spewing out this nonsense do actually know it to be nonsense and, having failed to win on the political and socio-economic front, have simply sought to dissolve and destroy culture and society from within, destroying stable grounds and meanings in the hope of prospering in the confusion. Then there are the people who lap it up as necessary truth. Political movements have never been short of true believers. The approach has bad faith and contempt for people written all over it.
Gender identity has primacy over biological sex and over the materiality of sexual reality. This is clear in the concerted efforts that are being made to shift the language of sex towards gender, the way in which we are told that it is not appropriate to have protections for sex in the equality act but is appropriate to have protections for gender identity. In the language that is used by politicians, health services, police, other social institutions, there is a clear sacralizing of gender identity and a downplaying of biological sex and the material reality of sex.
Kathleen Stock's new book contains a chapter titled 'What is Sex?' I went to Catholic schools. We had this one all wrapped up by the second year of the junior school, aged 8. In fact, as I remember Janice H. seemed to know a whole lot more than poor Miss Forkin who was trying to give the lesson. She just gave us pictures in a book and left us to chat among ourselves. Are people really such infants that they need an academic to explain what sex is. Of all the things we could be talking to biologist Richard Dawkins about, the binary nature of sex has to be the least important. The fact that it has come to this suggests that a mere restatement of scientific fact is not going to suffice. This results from the loss of reason and reality, the loss of confidence, the inflation of discourse without referents. Male and female, a material state that is real rather than psychological. It is not in your head and something that you identify into and out of. But the problem is not a scientific one, to be resolved by a statement of scientific fact. Science needs metaphysics for its very possibility. We have lost reality as a result of metaphysical confusion.
But back to the clue which Kathleen Stock gives us. She believes that feminism may have accidentally created the gender confusions the western world is currently mired in.
I would accept the word 'accidental' here in the sense of unintended consequences, but not in other respects. Feminism hunted down and uprooted essentialism actively and deliberately. The loss of essential reality was no accident. I frequently quote Terry Eagleton's description of anti-essentialism in the contemporary school of 'post' thought as evidence of 'philosophical amateurism and ignorance' (Eagleton After Theory 2004). Eagleton sought to present a non-obscurantist definition of essentialism. I attempted precisely this in my own work in the previous decade. Scott Meikle and Lawrence Wilde, the man who chaired my viva voce, did likewise. This work was all ignored. The result has been an explosion of all-too predictable consequences. I, for one, predicted the all-but inevitable outcome of uprooting essences in favour of a vision of the world as endlessly malleable, plastic, and manipulable. Well here we are.
Stock argues:
'gender is a word that gets used in different senses, including within feminism, so there is a use of gender which I am perfectly happy with, which is the social meanings around being male or female, like masculinity or femininity, without pronouncing at all on whether that's inbuilt or not, whether it is nature or nurture … But what some radical feminists did in the 70s and 80s was use gender in a different sense to mean something like the claim that womanhood and manhood, that being a woman, being a man is purely social, it is not a biological state, it doesn't actually track being a woman and being female and not co-extensive. And they did that not because they were trying to be trans-inclusive … it was this futile attempt to avoid this charge that women are born with certain psychological traits that makes them suited to domesticity and ill-suited to education etc which people do make, women are thicker than men, can't drive or whatever the sexist claim is. Instead of just saying 'no,' that's not true, let's find some empirical science that shows that that's not true, these feminists made the genius move of saying 'right, we'll just redefine “woman” so that it's not something biological, then they can't get us.' And as I say in the book, this is a bit like … trying to escape the fact that an asteroid is about to hit the Earth by redefining the Earth as something that cannot be hit by an asteroid. It's not going to work and it's not going to stop the sexists telling women that they can't drive and should stay in the kitchen anyway, as if they were going to be fooled by a ridiculous move like that. So it's not the point, really. We need a concept to refer to half of the human race that produces large gametes .. and that concept is woman and it works alright and we're not going to change something social is just barking mad, you've just changed the subject really.'
Why biological sex matters, with Kathleen Stock | The Brendan O'Neill Show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhknuthdGVU&list=LLMFi9sDNMPGqfEj-qTBHWoQ&index=4
The word 'woman' is in doubt.
A few years ago I made the prediction that the Left will make women reap what generations of anti-essentialist feminists have sown. The result of decades of man-hating feminism has brought a situation in which the only people who can call themselves women are men. What complete bonkers mad nonsense. 'Have you any women friends left,' a dear friend (and woman) once asked me after I had sent another anti-essentialist feminist ignoramus packing. If there is any intelligence and justice left in the world, I would expect to gain a few more women friends as a result of this. For all my criticisms of feminism, the ladies will find me their true, if somewhat abrasive, friend.
'One is not born but rather becomes a woman.' Entire careers have been built on a misinterpretation of this line from Simone de Beauvoir.
The contemporary world has been constructed on the basis of philosophical amateurism and ignorance. What interests me is the way that my attempts – my gentle criticisms of friends who have joined in the anti-essentialist animus by repeating criticism of the caricatures – have been met by incomprehension and indifference. I tried to get through to people I knew to be on the left by citing the essentialist categories that run through Marx, with quotes from Marx which identify him as an essentialist thinker for whom essences unfold in history through social practice. A few seemed to take the point I was making, only to return quickly to the anti-essentialist fold. People, sadly, get into the fashionable modes of thought and action and stay within them.
And now we are in a situation in which we are having to defend the reality of biological sex. At a time when we are trying to create a culture, a polity, and a political economy that recognizes and proceeds within natural boundaries, we are mired in controversies concerning the most basic and most obvious boundaries of human nature. Sorry folks, we had the differences between boys and girls worked out first year infants, indeed pre-school. Girls and boys were quite clearly separated when it came to visits to the toilets in the infants school. We knew the differences. You need to take a serious look at the intellectual and political developments that have infantilized society in this way. The infantilized are in for some harsh lessons with the reality checks to come in the near future and they don't seem remotely resilient enough to withstand the shock. The age is obsessed with the inane and the vacuous, with the fantasy of unreality being indicative also of unambition. I don't remotely blame the younger generation; they have been badly failed and misled by the adults. It is no wonder that so many have only the flimsiest and most fleeting grasp of reality, living in a world of make-believe and self-definition in which the hard but essential is shunned in favour of short, sharp hits that bring immediate pleasure.
I cannot resist halting here to speculate that we are being had. That 'society' is being deliberately divided and broken up, that people are being set against one another over trifles and inanities, that the social order is being deliberately deconstructed so as to be reconstructed in future by those with an agenda and a capacity to push it through. I would cautious of such thinking, not because it veers in the direction of conspiracy theory but because it optimistically finds reason to be at work in what seems to be an utterly irrational world. But I'll repeat what I have said before – this constant state of fear and anxiety doesn't appear to be accidental. Switch and bait; first 'this,' and then 'that,' and then back again. Always the crisis, always the 'end of the world.' We are being gamed and groomed, triggered and trolled, divided and diverted, by masters of the dark arts. Our energies and attentions are being directed towards the shadows and the shallows. Why? Because if we focused on realities, we might really wake up, see a social order and ruling class running on empty, and sweep the whole rancid lot into history. We have just lived through financial scandals and crashes, privatisation and corporatisation, illegal wars, and the biggest transfer of wealth from labour to the rich (now superrich) in history. And where are political energies concentrated? Where are the Left?
Current University education has a lot to answer for. Critical and analytical skills are downplayed in favour of ideology and activism. Universities have had 20 years or more churning out people detached from realities. We are suffering the lunacies of a gender and social justice educated generation. The problem is that this graduate class dominate our institutions and are employed in government and in NGO jobs. 'Progressivism' is not merely a new belief system, it is a managerial ideology in which a knowledge elite arrogates to itself the right to order, organize, and control society from the outside. It should be no surprise that when 'ordinary' people protest and try to resist they will be denounced as 'fascist' and 'far right.' Asymmetrical relations of power and distribution of resources will be extended and entrenched in a new class system. And what's left of the Left is cheering it on. Tools and fools? There'll be jobs, places, and rewards for many of them. Vanguardism is an elitism, with the minorities involved always finding a role for themselves in the new order. We are talking significant and influential minorities, with enough numbers to bully the agendas through in the teeth of mass resistance and opposition.
We live in a world in which word and deed have parted company, and where the relationship between cause and effect, action and consequence, is being postponed, exported, or outsourced. That world has become disconnected from reality. That this has happened can hardly be a cause for surprise given the systematic intellectual assault on reality that has been launched from within the realms of academia, with generations of students being 'educated' into this unreality. Foundations, grounds, substances, and necessary relations are 'out' in a world of free-floating – and empty – signifiers. Of course reason and reality have come to be lost as a result. The outrages perpetrated against women and women's sport are merely the most visible manifestations of a pervasive unreason and unreality. If we need eminent biologists like Richard Dawkins and Robert Winston to tell us what biological sex is, then we have seriously lost our grip on reason and reality. Sex is the simplest of the simple stuff. It's the first thing human beings go for. Human beings instinctively and unthinkingly assess each person they meet as a potential mate in a split second. If the reality of biological sex has been rendered 'problematic' and controversial, imagine the extent to which much more complicated matters have been rendered opaque. To those who have done this and who claim to be on the Left in politics, I have consistently repeated that where there is nothing, then there is no left or right any more, such terms have no meaning; the is simply no point in Leftist politics any more, or any kind of politics.
I have had to severely restrict the time I spend on news and social media. The world is full of people making big stands on little or no ground. Daily. The daily doom, the daily demonstration, the daily disaster. People are hooked on it. It absorbs so much of people's time and energy that I cannot but think of what would happen should they abandon the shadows and shallows for a while and invest just half of their activism and attention in other, deeper, areas. The world at large has the character of a virtual-reality world, one big social media platform in which people loudly and visibly chant ‘I Support The Latest Cause.’ Or 'the end of the world is nigh' and 'it's so much worse than that.' And that's just the 'progressive' wing of politics. I see it as predictable, safe, and conformist to the core. The world is engulfed in the civilisation-ending lunacies and idiocies of people with causes and crusades, all of which seem to fire the lacklustre mind of the body politic. For all the excitement, it is dull and dreary. I can remember the day I stopped watching soap operas. I used to watch all of them, getting interested in the characters and who said what to whom and did what with whom. As these episodes were increasingly expanded into three a week for each show, with hour long specials, I decided that this was a complete waste of time. I wondered which ones to drop, decided they were all much of a muchness and dropped them all at once. I never missed them. You get hooked on the succession of crises and controversies. But it's a diversion and a waste of time and energy. Politics has been overtaken by this endless crisis and controversy.
Why the surprise? We are being squeezed in a pincer movement, with the idiocy of the 'there is no such thing as society' school of economic libertarianism/neoliberalism merging with the 'there are no necessary relations' anti-realism and anti-foundationalism of cultural libertarianism/neoliberalism. Stock's words above are revealing in the extent that they do indeed make plain the flat plain mediocrity of this thinking and the way it jettisoned an entire philosophical basis in order to challenge the most basic sexism. It's all so very simple. There are certain standards on the one hand, call them objective or transcendent if you like; and there is their social and historical incarnation in time and place on the other. In rightly rejecting any false fixities within social and historical relations, the radicals abandoned standards of evaluation and truth, with the result that radicalism itself no longer became possible. To be radical is to go to the roots. You cannot be radical if there are no roots to go to. The whole process has been one of self-immolation and self-destruction and I warned and warned again against the left going down this route.
And now I see conservatives in the US and UK being praised for holding the line on material reality, with former Leftists and feminists finding a platform only on conservative media, even arguing that if you care about women you have to vote for conservative candidates. It's hard to disagree when, in the UK, you see the craven cowardice of Labour, Liberal, and Green politicians when faced with the question 'what is a woman?' It is even worse in the US. I would never vote for the confused, still less for the cowardly.
It is just despairing for me to have to address these issues. That the issue has been reduced to one of basic biology is tragic. My essentialist conception of reason and reality is so much more than biology, involving a normative dimension that takes us well beyond issues of determinism and natural imperatives. That the line is having to be drawn on biology shows how far the world is from grasping the issues I have set out in my own work. Essentialism is not biology, still less is it a biological determinism. But if the fight to reclaim reality has to start with biology, then so be it. It's going to be a long, hard road, though. It is incredibly disheartening to see how many on the Left are cosigning this foolishness, in the deluded belief that they are being progressive and emancipatory. Again, it is so hard to credit that my mind cannot help but wonder in the direction of dark forces engineering distraction and division from above. Surely, there has to be some overarching reason at work? People really can't be this stupid, can they?
Some of the scenes in recent days beggar belief. Ministers and shadow ministers who purport to speak for women being unable/refusing to define what a woman is. If the word 'woman' can't be defined, then it makes no sense to use it, begging the question as to why people be so desperate to transition into becoming something so undefinable. It seems that the only people able to say what a woman is now are men. There is no such thing as a woman and yet people demand that they become one and we all recognize them as one.
In ambiguity lies confusion, and in confusion lies opportunity, and in opportunity lies power.
The next time you see a female politicians refuse to define what a woman is or claim not to know what a woman is, ask her if she is a woman. If she replies in the affirmative, then ask her how she knows.
And what on Earth happens to women's rights and equality when politicians can't define what a woman is?
The controversy is nothing to do with biology at all. Biologists making statements on biological sex are not going to resolve issues; restating material reality is not going to cut it. The people who refuse to answer or claim not to know enough to answer know very well what a woman is – they are running scared of definitions and labels and of those who define and label. This is all a non-riddle to test and judge loyalty to an imposed 'truth.' The test is whether people are prepared to speak plainly and honestly, and risk opprobrium, or whether they be cooperative, compliant, and defer to the orthodoxy.
I've nothing to lose and have no reason to keep quiet. I'm out of it all and am beyond cancellation. And I can tell you that, from my position on the outside of this mad society, I saw it all coming. I'll be a voice in the wilderness, then.
In my philosophical work I have defended an essentialist position. My metaphysics is based on a whole range of essentialist categories such as form, substance, necessity, potentiality in the process of becoming actuality, immanent lines of development and such like. In defending and developing this essentialist metaphysics I have been aware from the first that I have been swimming against the intellectual and cultural tide. We live in an age in which social construction and cultural self-creation and self-determination predominate, with individuals claiming the right to be whatever they want to be and do whatever they want to do. I have from the first noted the extent to which this right to self-identity claimed by people on the progressive and leftist side of the political divide is not remotely leftist at all, certainly not in a socialist sense, but the cultural counterpart of political and economic libertarianism. In attempting to delineate this phenomena I have argued that it is a degenerate form of liberalism, blending individualism with a specific form of collectivism. Specifically, this phenomenon is a development of the Lockean tabula rasa or blank sheet with identity levelled on a specific – favoured and privileged – group. I have noted the extent to which the age routinely criticizes and rejects essentialism, and does so in the most unthinking terms, with many merely repeating the stock criticisms of timeless, fixed essences held by now essentialist ever anywhere, certainly not in the present age. Such criticisms are the stock in trade of postmodernist and poststructuralist thinkers and is evidence of philosophical amateurism and ignorance.
My concern in this piece is not, however, with presenting the normative essentialism that is central to my philosophical anthropology but with a contemporary issue that indicates why an essentialist foundation is our best guard against tyranny. I wish to focus specifically on the controversy incited by the recent victory of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas at the NCAA swimming championships in Georgia. Thomas is a biological male allowed by the rules to “compete” against biological females. This is patent nonsense involving an unfairness that pretty much everyone can see, but far too few are prepared to speak against for fear of upsetting the prevailing ideology. All I can say here is that this nonsense has been coming: such collisions between competing rights are built into the DNA of a world which sees everything as political and reducible to power and power relations. The issue offers an example of the self-cancellation that results from rights not being properly grounded in natural rights and natural law. It is a product of the degeneration of liberalism as a consequence of its shedding its metaphysical framework and supports. Liberalism ceased to be a comprehensive doctrine, with rights grounded in an overarching and authoritative moral framework, and instead became an overtly political doctrine. In this switch, rights ceased to be natural rights grounded in natural law, something transcending power relations in time and place and granted by our shared humanity, and instead became a political creation and recreation conferred by the state and law, and just as easily and as quickly withdrawn and withheld by those political institutions. In such a context it is power that prevails, not morality, not justice, not fairness, not equality. Many people express consternation at the extent to which people, designated 'progressive,' have been so willing to discard women's rights in favour of transgender rights. Many people are simply dumbfounded at the extent to which so many 'progressives' are able to hold two completely contradictory positions at the same time and yet be completely unaware of the contradiction. To call it hypocrisy is too simple. It looks more like cognitive dissonance. But this may be to dignify simple intellectual incoherence with a psychological condition. The good thing about the Lia Thomas affair is that it allows us to pin all-too elusive, free-floating, abstract and malleable terms, definitions, and signifiers down in a most practical, tangible, visible, identifiable way. I noted a meme circulating on social media in which women/feminists claimed that all the worlds problems would be solved if women were in charge and not men. It is a meme with a message that comes in a million variants. I picked up Greenpeace for contrasting men in suits with girls of various colours with the legend 'this is what real leadership looks like.' In those instances I have been concerned to challenge and check 'girlwash' as thoroughly reactionary. The problems facing the world, and hence the solutions, lie in specific social and political relations and in their transformation, not in genitalia. A focus on sex here is reactionary because it a) involves sexual stereotyping and b) diverts attention from institutional, structural, and systemic analysis in historically determinate conditions. The attitude comes with dangers of idealising females and demonizing males, which does neither side any good. We can put women on pedestals if we like, but the idealised women will find that men will rarely take them down and put them to use in the real world, except as servants of the demonic reverting to type.
Such 'girlwash' is bad enough. But the hypocrisy is staggering. Many of the same 'progressive' women sharing such memes can also be found expressing support for transgender rights. Why wouldn't they? Rights are a good thing, after all. Everyone should have rights. Every right thinking person motivated by good will is in favour of all good things for all people. The problem, however, is the nature of the rights being asserted. More specifically, without proper grounding in natural law and the authoritative overarching framework that comes with it, rights are mere constructions that are conditional upon no more than power and assertion. Such rights cannot but come into collision. The problem with a “morality” of ticking boxes is that if you tick one box you can find that you have to untick other boxes. In this instance, the rights of women and girls are colliding with transgender rights, with females, once the flavour of the month, now being thrown under the bus. That's how critics of feminism like me can now be found supporting the likes of Sharron Davies, Germaine Greer, Stock, Rowling, Moore, Bindell etc. I support them as women defending women's spaces and sports. I still don't much care for their thought and politics. Victory here will not be claimed by supporting feminism against the anti-women animus – I see a continuum here, a case of the biter being bit.
So to the people who have been sharing the memes on how good women are and how the world would be so much better if women were in charge. I couldn't help but comment sardonically that it is encouraging that they can at least identify what a woman is. In the UK we have witnessed the spectacle of senior politicians from every political party, left, right, and centre, stammering and stuttering in face of the question 'what is a woman?' One politician was observed to say 'I don't know enough to tell.' I was a slow learner at school, always somewhat behind, the youngest in the year. But on the very first hour of the first day of the very first year at infants school I knew the difference between girls and boys. Human beings can sex the people they meet in everyday encounters pretty much immediately. You can do your own research here, I've wasted enough of my time on this non-issue. That the time and intelligence of so many is being wasted on an issue as inane as this is not the least scandal of the entire controversy. But it seems that we live in a time and place where the obvious has become unsayable. Human beings not only sex the persons they encounter in everyday life immediately and unconsciously, they determine a potential mate in a split second. And now there are people who are attempting to confuse issues and have everyone as intellectually and morally constipated as they are.
The response of Kellie-Jay Keen to one of those who seek to obfuscate the perfectly clear is priceless. She was poolside to protest the presence of biological male Lia Thomas in the swimming final against women. She got into an argument with someone defending Thomas' presence. 'Can I ask you a question?' this character asked: 'are you a biologist?' 'I'm not a vet but I know what a dog is' she responded.
The question was revealing on any number of levels. The first concerns the presumption that only experts certified and qualified are entitled to speak, with authoritative voice, on issues that have been within reach of everyone since ever. Reduced to the most obvious level, sexual identification and selection is a knowledge and a skill that all are capable of managing unaided by 'experts.' How revealing that so much that is the biological – and social – inheritance of human beings is being abstracted away and placed in the hands of 'experts.' For our own good? Crime rates have gone through the roof as responsibility has been removed from communal relations to criminologists shaping policy (I could multiply examples with reference to psychologists, economists, sociologists etc).
The reference to biologists was a clear attempt to silence critical views, silence popular views. The presumption is that only qualified experts are allowed to speak. On sex andgriev biology!! After generations fighting for bodily autonomy, 'progressives' render each and all dependent on the say-so of biologists. I for one am not prepared to let 'experts' decide what a woman is for me.
This is a clear example of the extent to which an ungrounded assertion of rights eats itself in short time. Because the people now seeking to silence criticisms stemming from immediate instinct, innate knowledge, and observation of the obvious are precisely the ones who have been most concerned to supplant biology by social construction and cultural self-creation – these are the people who have explicitly rejected biology and 'biological determinism.' These are the people responsible for the likes of Kathleen Stock, professor of biology, losing her job.
I'll put that incident down to being a one-off, an instance of a particularly dumb activist who have been potty-trained to deal with criticisms not by answering them but silencing people who make them by reference to expertise (expertise that those attempting to silence rarely have). But if it's biologists you want to hear from, then there are plenty out there who stated very clearly that sex is binary, that there are only the two sexes, male and female, and that sexual identity is embedded in cells and bones. If Lia Thomas wins every medal in the women's races and breaks every record for swimming in the women's events and receives a statue in honour of being the greatest ever female swimmer in history, there will be cause for great confusion hundreds of years from now – the remains buried underneath the honour will reveal a male.
This is idiotic.
This is not ignorance, but something much worse: it is cowardice. People are afraid to speak up and speak out for fear of being labelled phobic in some way. That is complicity through silence, caving in to the power of the loudest voice. And in this instance it is women and girls who are being thrown under the bus, their efforts, their interests, their dreams being rendered null and void.
Sadly, in politely raising the issue with those social media 'friends' who would appear amenable to sound good sense, I have been met with either indifference, contempt, or hostility. There have been a few exceptions. I have noted, however, that people with critical views quickly fell into silence. Many activists and Leftists don't give a damn for sport in any case, and consider it to be an organised diversion from politics. They would be happy to see sport sabotaged, on the rather incredulous assumption that the dumb, diverted masses would suddenly wake up and come flocking to Leftist causes. The assumption that there is a built-in majority for Leftism in the mass population is lazy, to say the least, and indicates how little political activists and ideologues know 'the people.' It is revealing how little people are respected as agents in their own right. That's the psychological and intellectual basis for an authoritarian politics based on leaders and led, educators and educated, the manipulators and the permanently manipulated.
I could only shrug my shoulders at the condescension and let the issue drop. That it is obvious to me but a completely mystery to certain Leftists that sport matters as something of value in itself, that the things people take an interest in and enjoy are much more than diversions, presents one good reason why Leftist politics continually finds itself electorally challenged and having to take authoritarian routes to implementing its policies and principles. It was obvious to me that this issue would go public and become the source of mass controversy in the sporting arena. Sport is public, visible, and is something that people are passionately interested in and care about. What makes sport so exciting is the competitive aspect, to see who is quicker, faster, better. The appeal of that competition, however, lies in an even standard of comparison pitting like against like on a level playing field. It was always going to be sport that would take this issue out of the hands of the active, organized minorities working in and through social organisations and into the public sphere. Lia Thomas is a biological male “competing” against women and girls. Pretty much everyone who can see with their senses, without ideological filters, can see the disparity and unfairness, and too few are willing to speak out. Worse, too many are prepared to impose that unfairness at the expense of women and girls. That's what happens when rights become political creations and recreations – they become a function of power, with the favoured grievance of the day taking the place of past grievances.
My concern in this piece is less with essentialism and essentialist metaphysics, the philosophical foundation of my own work, than with basic material reality and its denial. In my work I have been at pains to argue that essentialism is not a biologism, still less a biological determinism. That is how critics have tended to view essentialism, claiming that it determines, fixes, and imposes sexual identities in falsely naturalised ways. Cue the familiar criticisms of women and women's roles as being 'naturally' this, that, or the other. If that's what essentialism necessarily means, then I would be the first to criticise it (although there would be quite a stampeding crowd heading in the direction of such an easy target). That's the easy stuff, which is why many prefer to start there and end there. We should always be alert to those who attempt to naturalize that which ought to be historicised. At the same time, we ought to be alert to those who go to the other extreme and denaturalize everything to such an extent that nature – not least human nature - no longer exists. Again, I note the internal incoherence of a Leftism (particularly an environmental Leftism) that is big on asserting 'Nature' as the only reality we have, insisting that we respect natural boundaries, whilst at the same time insisting on rights and identifies that are cultural self-creations rather than natural givens and essences. That is one for Greens to resolve. I used to be a Green. I am a Green no longer. It's not my job to iron out the inconsistencies and incoherences in the Green position.
Having been careful to distinguish essentialism from biologism and biological imperatives, particularly in the sense of possessing a normative dimension with respect to healthy potentials and their realisation, I find that I now have to join with biologists in defence of the most basic material realities. It is an indication of how parlous a situation the western world is now in as a result of social constructivism that holding the line on biology is now considered a radical act. Frankly, it is a bare minimum and indicates how low the bar in radical politics has been lowered. We really could be doing so much better than this in politics. But the extent to which basic biological reality is now being challenged and threatened indicates precisely why an essentialist metaphysics and rights grounded in natural law is required. As I have put the point generally over the years – science needs metaphysics. Without an essentialist metaphysics we lose reason and reality. The people now taking a stand on biological reality are right to do so – and I stand with them – but the issue is deeper. As the years have passed, I have cast a critical eye over the work I have done since the 1990s. I knew at the time that I was going out on a philosophical limb in embracing an essentialist metaphysics. By the mid-2010s I started to wonder whether I had erred here and needed to correct my errors. With the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx's birth in 2018, I restated the essentialist position with a vengeance. Essentialism was and remains so out-of-kilter with Leftist and liberal thought that it left me somewhat semi-detached politically and philosophically. But now that I see so much of the Left, liberal, and 'progressive' side in politics is inane, insane, hate-filled, and divisive, I'm inclined to become fully detached. And state openly that I am glad to be an essentialist. And an existentialist. The essential and the existential. I think I'll have that as the title of my autobiography. As for the current madness, it will get worse before it gets better, much worse. There is real hatred in the air. People are really beginning to hate others. When they start to hate one another, there will be violence and murder. The loss of reality is, at base, a loss of humanity. And with that loss, anything becomes possible.
Too many extremists and fantasists (I won't prejudice matters by calling them weirdos and perverts) have been encouraged, emboldened, mollycoddled and even ennobled by progressives, politicians, academics, and media for far too long. Looking at the complicity of the police and the timid response of the establishment, it's hard to avoid the feeling that the authorities are in on this. There would appear to be a purpose and an agenda. Let's just say I don't remember organised labour getting such a free hand in the industrial struggles of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the very opposite, in fact. I don't know and would prefer not to speculate. But whilst the Left seems to be making huge cultural inroads, the extent to which the corporations, the banks, the police, the establishment, big tech and finance are on board, cheering events on, is enough to have one's political nostrils twitching. Something doesn't smell right at all. In fact, something smells very rotten indeed. By some strange political alchemy, the working class have become fascists and far right.
Progressives, liberals, and leftists claim to be advancing the claims of vulnerable and fragile groups, but it is hard to agree when we see that these groups are so oppressed and marginalised as to have the support of all mainstream media and the large corporations, have their views entrenched in every major social institution, and are able to call on the police to arrest all those who refuse to use the language they demand everyone use.
This is a serious threat to freedom and democracy. In fact, it is a serious threat to the civic peace. If things carry on down this route, somebody is going to get hurt. And maybe many people. Not only is the hatred that some have for others palpable, the most dangerous thing about it is that it is a righteous hatred. The haters see themselves as wholly justified in their hatred, with the hated so demonised as to merit being hated. Such people move quickly from hatred to persecution and assault and murder. How this progresses rapidly is easy to see. It begins by branding people who refuse to accept your ideological belief as in some way 'phobic,' moves to demands that the 'phobic' be silenced, cancelled, lose their job, be arrested for hate speech, and beyond that to violence, assault, and murder. And it is all done with a self-righteousness that is invulnerable to reason. People are being branded 'racist,' 'fascist' and 'phobic' who are nothing of the kind. Who are these devils and demons? People who believe it is unfair for men to compete in women's sport, people who believe that men should not have access to women's spaces, people who believe that violent male rapists should not be confined in women's prisons, people who believe that sex is binary, people who are on nodding terms with truth and who have the courage to tell the truth in public.
In other words, the people these activists and ideologues consider to be dreaded enemies to be fought to the death comprise the majority of 'ordinary' people. That's an awful lot of fascists. In fact, that's a lot more fascists than were around in the 1920s and 1930s. Which makes the point that these activists and ideologues are extremists and fantasists, and dangerous ones, people who see demons of the mind everywhere they look. They are neurotics who have destroyed Leftist politics far more effectively than conservatives could ever have done. So effective has the job of self-destruction been I'm still inclined to think the political Left has been targetted in a psyops operation. It's been perfect, effectively diverting the Left from centres of capitalist power at bay. But if it is an operation, it is one which will eat its engineers. These cranks are possessed with a religious ferver and fanaticism that won't be easily reined in. And, rejecting the conspiratorial speculations above, it is perfectly possible to explain the insanity engulfing contemporary culture and politics by reference to the anti-realist and linguistic turn in the universities from the 1980s onwards, the expansion of academia, the supplanting of a politics rooted in class and socio-economic issues by media and culture – in fine, privatisation, liberalisation, corporatisation, and the globalisation of communications and social relations. The world has drifted off into a hyper-reality, and so have people's minds. The processes generating unreality and fantasy and extremism can be identified and analysed.
It's not difficult to see how this division and fanaticism develops. First, the activists and ideologues call everyone who disagrees with them Fascist, racist, and Far Right; then they start to chant ‘the only good Nazi is a dead one,' then they set about the murder and violence. Politics is dissensus and disagreement involving dialogue between people with different views. This is not politics: this is a religiosity which separates people between the unimpeachably right and the irredeemably wrong, between saints and sinners, the saved and the damned. Dehumanising others legitimises not cancellation and censorship but violence and worse. I fear things will get worse before they will get better. When labels are applied so widely, with scant regard to accuracy, it is profoundly ill-judged to claim that it is right to kill a 'phobe' of some description or other. But this anti-politics proceeds precisely by dehumanising, demonisation, and damning political rivals and opponents now considered mortal enemies. We are dealing with a bad and bogus religiosity comprised of ideological fantasists who see fascists, devils, and demons in their world of shadows. In more peaceful times, we could pity neurotics; in times in which they have been encouraged, enabled, emboldened and ennobled, we should fear them and, most of all, resist them. Because if they go unchecked, they will sweep through the body politic, taking the civic peace with them.
I anticipate a time, in the not too distant future, when women seeking to defend their spaces, sports, and rights, will be assaulted in public by men, cheered on by women who are on board with all the fashionable causes and crusades, enabled before the fact and justified after the fact by a complicit media and politics, with the forces of law and order offering maximum opportunity for the perpetrators of violence and minimal protection for the violated. There is a popular meme that is frequently circulated on social media by those who get their thrills from a cheap radicalism. It runs something like this: 'we were taught to be more afraid of witches than the people who burned them.' It's worth pondering who the witches are in the contemporary word and, more pertinently, who the witch-burners are. I have on occasion tweeted my support of Sharron Davies and her defence of women's sport. I've received some abuse as a result, but not much. I've been on the receiving end of snide remarks and sarcastic comments. I have received nothing like the abuse that Sharron Davies and women like J.K. Rowling have received, not even close. It's the women who get the volume and the vileness when it comes to abuse. There are your modern day witches. As to who the modern-day witch-burners may be, we shouldn't be too surprised to find them where we could always find them – among the self-righteous: the supposed 'progressives,' the all-inclusive 'be kind' people. 'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious convictions.' (Blaise Pascal). This animus is characterised by a rather malicious religiosity. That rather neatly explains where the 'progressives' go when women's spaces, rights, and sports are being transgressed by an identity deemed to rank higher than women in the grievance and grudge hierarchy. The next time you’re reading a history book and find yourself wondering how people can come to be so consumed by hysteria and hatred as to turn on others in their midst, watch clips of protestors and demonstrators venting their spleen on their enemies. And see how the self-righteous tend always to feel themselves to be surrounded by malevolent forces. This is how easily witch-crazes happen. This is how the fear and hatred of those who dare to think differently can come to override the reason of the righteous and unleash the most punitive and murderous passions of the mob on the world. When society divides into the unimpeachably right and good on the one hand and the irredeemably evil on the other, we can be sure that burning is never far away." Unfortunately, that prediction is coming true.