Douglas Murray's latest book The Madness Of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity is a wonderful dissection of the current times we live in. A time in which identity politics pervades every aspect of our lives. It is madness and the book does a great job of showing just how mad things are right now.
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At the end of his book Douglas Murray laments on why politics is one of the unhappiest pursuits of personal meaning. This is because politics is laced with a passion and a rage that "perverts the whole enterprise." The end game of politics is not to discover what is true. However, Murray does believe in retaining an interest in politics, but not to rely on it as a source of meaning.
In the last two paragraphs of his book, Murray talks about why concentrating our energy on identity politics is a waste of time, energy, and life. Here is the direct quote below.
Using ourselves up on identity politics, social justice (in this manifestation) and intersectionality is a waste of a life.
We may certainly aim to live in a society in which nobody should be held back from what they can do because of some personal characteristic allotted to them by chance. If somebody has the competency to do something, and the desire to do something, then nothing about their race, sex or sexual orientation should hold them back. But minimizing difference is not the same as pretending difference does not exist. To assume that sex, sexuality and skin colour mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything will be fatal.
