The Madness of Crowds Read online

  It is the central cause of the ugliness of both online and real-life discussion. For we are being asked to perform a set of leaps and jumps which we cannot, and are perhaps ill-advised to make. We are asked to believe things that are unbelievable and being told not to object to things (such as giving children drugs to stop them going through puberty) which most people feel a strong objection to. The pain that comes from being expected to remain silent on some important matters and perform impossible leaps on others is tremendous, not least because the problems (including the internal contradictions) are so evident. As anyone who has lived under totalitarianism can attest, there is something demeaning and eventually soul-destroying about being expected to go along with claims you do not believe to be true and cannot hold to be true. If the belief is that all people should be regarded as having equal value and be accorded equal dignity, then that may be all well and good. If you are asked to believe that there are no differences between homosexuality and heterosexuality, men and women, racism and anti-racism, then this will in time drive you to distraction. That distraction – or crowd madness – is something we are in the middle of and something we need to try to find our way out from.

  If we fail, then the direction of travel is already clear. We face not just a future of ever-greater atomization, rage and violence, but a future in which the possibility of a backlash against all rights advances – including the good ones – grows more likely. A future in which racism is responded to with racism, denigration based on gender is responded to with denigration based on gender. At some stage of humiliation there is simply no reason for majority groups not to play games back that have worked so well on themselves.

  This book suggests a number of ways out of this. But the best way to start is not just to understand the basis of what is going on at the moment but to be free to discuss it. While writing this book, I discovered that the British Army has a mine-clearing device now named ‘The Python’, but in an earlier design it was known as ‘The Giant Viper’. When this trailer-mounted system is fired at a minefield it unleashes a rocket, behind which unfurls a hose-like trail hundreds of metres long and all packed with explosives. Once the whole thing is lying across the minefield (and like everything else you can see videos of this online), it causes what is called ‘sympathetic detonation’. That is, the whole thing explodes, setting off the mines within a significant radius of the rocket and its tail. Although it cannot clear the entire minefield, it can clear a path across the minefield, allowing other people, trucks and even tanks to travel safely across what was previously impassable terrain.

  In my own modest way I think of this book as my Viper system. I do not aim to clear the whole minefield and could not, even if I wished to. But I hope that this book will help clear some terrain across which afterwards other people may more safely pass.

  1

  Gay

  It is a chill February day in London in 2018 and a small demonstration is taking place outside a cinema just off Piccadilly Circus. Wrapped-up warm, the quiet protestors are holding up posters that say ‘Silenced’ in capital letters. Most Londoners trying to get to their bus stops or across to the bars of Soho barely notice them. A passing couple clock that the group is mainly middle-aged and elderly. One says to the other, ‘Some kind of UKIP protest I guess.’ But it is not. The assembled dozens came here to watch a film called Voices of the Silenced. But as their placards point out, Voices of the Silenced has itself been silenced.

  The organizers booked the cinema three months earlier, and say they had complied with all the cinema’s rules for private screenings, including sending them the film in advance. But a day before the screening Pink News – an online remnant of Britain’s gay press – found out about the screening and called for its immediate cancellation. The call was successful. The Vue cinema swerved around any negative publicity by swiftly announcing that it had the right not to honour private hires if the film to be shown was ‘in direct contradiction’ of its ‘values’. The cinema also warned the group who had hired the venue that there might be a ‘public order’ and even ‘security’ threat if the screening was to go ahead.

  So on the big night, with exactly 126 people apparently travelling to attend the screening from as far away as the Netherlands, the organizers are scrambling to try to find another venue at which their assembled punters might view the film. Chief among the evening’s organizers is Dr Michael Davidson of the Core Issues Trust. Davidson is not a doctor of medicine. He has a doctorate in education, but like some other public figures who use the prefix you feel that Davidson would not be displeased if someone laboured under a misapprehension about the precise nature of his qualifications.

  Davidson had come to national attention in Britain six months earlier when he had been invited as a guest on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, co-hosted by Piers Morgan, to discuss homosexuality and so-called ‘conversion therapies’. Davidson has admitted that he used to be gay himself – or at least had ‘homosexual experiences’. But at some point he decided that it was not for him. He has been married to his wife for 35 years and has two children. He believes that where he has gone other people can follow, and so through his group he offers counselling on a voluntary basis to other people who would like to move from being gay to becoming a heterosexual like himself who admits that he still gets – though doesn’t act on – certain ‘urges’.

  When challenged about all this on national television, Davidson calmly and politely makes it clear that he thinks homosexuality is an ‘aberration’ and specifically that it is a learned behaviour. Asked whether it can be unlearned, he claims that it ‘in some cases is reversible for people who want to make that the trajectory of their lives’. Dr Davidson managed to get this out before his main interviewer denounced him to the others present in the studio. ‘Do you know what we call these people, Dr Michael?’ Piers Morgan asked. ‘We call them horrible little bigots, in the modern world. Just bigoted people who actually talk complete claptrap and are in my view a malevolent and dangerous part of our society. What’s the matter with you? How can you think that nobody’s born gay and they all get corrupted and they can all be cured? Who are you to say such garbage?’

  A relatively unflustered Davidson asked Morgan for evidence that people are born gay, pointing out that neither the American Psychological Association nor the Royal College of Psychiatrists believe that homosexuality is innate and unchangeable. At which point his interviewer ordered him to ‘stop talking for a moment’ and ‘stop banging on about whacky-backy scientists in America’. Morgan then continued to shout at his guest, ‘Shut up you old bigot’, before he brought the whole interview to a close with the words ‘I’ve had enough of him. Dr Michael, shut up.’1 And so it finished. ITV had sent a car to a guest’s home in the early morning to bring him to a national television studio only for him to be told during his interview to shut up.

  Six months after that event and Davidson remains clearly unmoved by that high-profile brouhaha. Talking on his mobile phone outside the cancelled venue in Piccadilly, he is relieved to be able to tell his audience that he has finally found a venue which would allow him to screen his film. So the assembled men and women head to Westminster’s Emmanuel Centre, just around the corner from the Houses of Parliament.

  The doors to that venue are tightly shut, but at one side door, if you mention your name and your name is checked off the list, then the entire evening opens up. Indeed, once inside it becomes a rather jolly affair. We are all given a glass of prosecco and a bag of popcorn to take into the screening. One elderly woman comes over and thanks me for coming. ‘Obviously I know your own background,’ she adds, and I realize she is not talking about where I was brought up, ‘as you talk about it often,’ she adds gnomically. But she explains that this only means she is even more pleased to see me here. It is true that I may be the only out person at this gay-cure film-screening. But I suspect that I am not the only gay in the room.

  The film Voices of the Silenced itself is less coherent
than might have been hoped. The main point (as explained by Davidson himself in the film’s opening) is that ‘Ancient ideologies and modern ideologies are coming together.’ It is never quite clear how, and the whole thing feels like two different films awkwardly melded together at a late stage in the editing process. The first film is about the ancient world, with very scary apocalyptic images. The second film consists of some very specific testimony from doctors and patients talking about being gay and then not being gay any more. As well as Dr Davidson there is a Dr Stephen Baskerville and an expert from Texas named (I cannot stifle an audible laugh) David Pickup.

  So each time there is something in the film on the loss of the Temple in AD 70 and the Arch of Titus, then it cuts to the gays again. Or the ex-gays. We are told that ‘the new state orthodoxy celebrates homosexuality’. Then, along with a range of ‘experts’ – mainly from the United States – we get the testimonies. What any of these have to do with the Arch of Titus is never fully made clear. Perhaps homosexuality is causing the collapse of this civilization? If so the accusation is never quite made. There is an ‘ex-lesbian’ now married with five children who says that her ‘vulnerability’ resurfaced ten years ago but that she got help from a ministry. Several witnesses talk of suicidal thoughts, alcohol abuse and ‘self-centredness’. One (called John) mentions that his mother was ‘a Jewess’, which is a word you don’t often hear these days. There is a lot of testimony from a handsome 29-year-old German called Marcel. He describes his own tribulations. He says that as a child his mother beat him, naked, in front of his sister and this – it is suggested – may be one of the reasons why he has in the past found himself attracted to men. Some of the interviewees were from families where their parents divorced. Others were not. Several of the interviewees seem to have been very close to their mothers. Others not.

  Dr Joseph Nicolosi – one of the stars of the film – offers up the idea that many of his ‘patients’ actually hate their mothers, don’t know how to deal with men and thus develop certain fantasies as a result. He suggests that one cure for anyone troubled by homoerotic temptations is that they might consider taking up a healthy pursuit such as ‘going to a gym’. Suggesting, perhaps, that Dr Nicolosi has never been to a gym.

  Of course it is easy to snigger at all this, and for some people it would be easy to be outraged too. Yet the human stories are there. John and Lindsay say that they have both suffered from SSA (Same-Sex Attraction) but have been able to tackle it together and are now working together as a very successful heterosexual couple with five children. ‘It’s not just us,’ Lindsay reassures the viewer. ‘We know several people [who have also had SSA] who are happily married. It is hard work,’ she continues, with John sitting slightly awkwardly beside her. ‘It’s not for the faint-hearted. And I think you have to just push through. Particularly in the present era: all the media and all the cultural pressures to do something else.’

  Sadder than this couple are the several interviewees who were gay once but now appear here with their faces blacked out. Perhaps it is too charitable to reflect that it wasn’t so long ago that this need for blackened-out faces and back-of-head shots would have applied the other way around.

  Towards the film’s end an Irish pastor sums up a part of the film’s point. He explains that he doesn’t mind people holding out the view that homosexuality is inherent and unchangeable. He just wants to be allowed to be able to hold his view. As Dr Baskerville reiterates, only one position on this matter appears to be able to be held in academia and the media, and that is ‘promotion’ of homosexuality. ‘Sexuality is being politicized,’ we are told in the final moments. And then, after another inexplicable reference to the Ancient Jews, the film ends with the dramatic yet careful line: ‘It is time to accept difference.’

  Unsurprisingly this audience gives the film a very warm reception. And then something mortifying happens. Several of the film’s interviewees are in the audience and are invited up onstage to receive more applause. Among them is a young British man from the film called Michael. He seems slightly twitchy and nervous and filled with suffering. His forehead is more than usually wrinkled for someone of his age. For various reasons he has already expounded on in the film he doesn’t want to live as a gay man and so has put himself on an obviously internally wracking path to try to live as a heterosexual and to become (as Dr Davidson himself has) an ex-gay – perhaps also, in time, with the same pleasures of having a wife and children of his own. The evening finishes with a prayer.

  On the way home and in the days that followed I wondered about my evening with the voluntary conversion therapists. And I wondered in particular why I was not more bothered by it.

  First, it must be said that I do not fear these people – and certainly could not kick up that level of outrage which the gay press has decided to trade in as it loses its purpose. If there is a reason it is because I cannot see that events are going in the direction of the people in the Emmanuel Centre that night. Today, and for the foreseeable future, they are on the losing side.

  When they appear on television they are treated with scorn – perhaps too much scorn. They find it hard to make watchable documentaries, and find it even harder to screen them. They are forced to hide away in secret venues, and seem unlikely to be taking anywhere by storm any time soon.

  Of course if I was a young gay man growing up in parts of rural America or Britain – even today – I might think differently. Certainly if I had grown up in parts of the American Bible Belt, or had ever lived through (or been threatened with) the forced conversion therapies that went on there – and still go on in parts of the world today – I might look at Michael (Dr) Davidson and his friends in a very different light.

  But here, this evening, they are the losers. And aware of the thrill that can occur when the boot is on the other foot, I feel a reluctance to treat them in victory as some of their ideological confrères might have treated me if we had met before, in different circumstances. The manner in which people and movements behave at the point of victory can be the most revealing thing about them. Do you allow arguments that worked for you to work for others? Are reciprocity and tolerance principles or fig-leaves? Do those who have been censored go on to censor others when the ability is in their own hands? Today the Vue cinema is on one side. A few decades ago they might have been on the other. And Pink News and others who celebrate their victory in chasing Voices of the Silenced a mile down the road one February night seem very ready to wield such power over a private event. In doing so they contradict the claims made by gay rights activists from the start of the battle for gay equality, which is that it should be no business of anyone else what consenting adults get up to in private. If that goes for the rights of gay groups then surely it ought to apply to the rights of Christian fundamentalists and other groups too.

  There are two other things. The first is that in order to fear what was happening that evening you would have to extrapolate from it. You would have to suspect that, when Davidson says he only wants to deal with people who come to him seeking help, this is a mere cover-story. You would have to believe that this is in fact just a front – the first part of a wider plan to turn something voluntary into something compulsory and from something compulsory for some people into something compulsory for all. And that would be to trample all over one of the bases of political tolerance. It would be to award yourself the right not just to come to your own conclusions about people, but to attribute motives to others that you cannot see but which you suspect. Which leads to a question that everybody in genuinely diverse and pluralistic societies must at some point ask: ‘Do we take other people at face value, or do we try to read behind their words and actions, claim to see into their hearts and there divine the true motives which their speech and actions have not yet revealed?’

  If we were to do this in cases like these, then how would we do it? Do we insist that the other party has the darkest possible motives unless they fully satisfy us that their motivations are otherw
ise? Or do we have to learn some degree of forbearance and taking on trust? Even the responses to that question aren’t fixed. They fluctuate depending on date, location, circumstance and luck. Someone now in their seventies who was put through forced conversion therapy (especially if put through ‘aversion’ therapy) will have more cause to be suspicious than anyone from each of the successively luckier generations that have followed. Warning sirens go off earlier if they were set earlier, or in harsher times.

  Perhaps these generational and geographical differences will diminish over time and the flattening effects of social media will make everyone equally sanguine. Or perhaps these tools have the opposite effect, persuading a gay in 2019 Amsterdam that they are permanently at risk of living in 1950s Alabama. Nobody knows. We live in a world in which every fear, threat and hope imaginable is always available to us.

  Yet one prerequisite for avoiding perpetual confrontation is an ability to listen to people’s words and hold some trust in them. True, in borderline cases, when alerted that something strange may be going on, it may be necessary to dig behind the words to ensure that nothing else is happening. But if that has been done and nothing found then the words must be trusted. None of the press which had sought to silence Voices of the Silenced had shown that Davidson or his colleagues were forcing unwilling participants to submit to a regime of heterosexual conversion. None had even enquired into what details the film included or how his ‘counselling’ was being done. And so a set of assumptions had been made about his group and words assigned different interpretations because of their speaker. In this calibration ‘voluntary’ meant ‘forced’, ‘counselling’ meant ‘persecution’ and everybody who went to him was irrevocably and unalterably gay.