If anything good comes out of Niall Fergusons’ comment that Keynes was uninterested in the long run of human society because he was a childless homosexual, it will be to discard the current trend of making judgements based not on a person’s work, but on the ‘identity group’ to which they belong. A basic rule of rational discussion is that the motive driving someone to argue a point does not affect its truth.

In this case, the idea that the homosexual is naturally disinclined to think in terms of la longue durée and makes little thought for posterity would come as a surprise to Victor Hugo or Old Fritz (Frederick the Great).  That’s all that really needs to be said to dismiss the crass and boring comment of Niall Ferguson that Keynsian economics can be explained by Keyne’s homosexuality.  But it is by no means all that has been said.  

Norman Mailer once complained that his work received bad reviews because of a homosexual clique lead by Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and Ian Hamilton; Hitchens and Amis sweetly replied that this was very unfair to Ian Hamilton.  The kerfuffle over Ferguson’s folly hasn’t quite reached that level.  Step lightly over the cries of ‘offensive’  - be charitable and assume that those claiming Ferguson “takes gay bashing to new heights” are ignorant of, say, the past rants of our own Wolfson College lecturer Abdal Hakim Murad.  Aside from the bores, there have been two very healthy signs of change in our discourse.  First there has been criticism from the right whereas once there would have been indifference at best.  Second, there have been openly gay figures like Douglas Murray who apparently feel secure enough to defend Ferguson.  Good.  Maybe then we are at a point where we can move beyond the ludicrous business of identity politics. 

For Ferguson’s words didn’t come in a vacuum.  There is a persistent tendency for people to use the phrase ‘speaking as a...’ added to some non-intellectual classification, rather than develop their own arguments, or conversely to stress the non-intellectual attributes of their opponents.  That is particularly true in the United States, where Ferguson makes his home, and where obsession with identity politics is beyond parody.  During the arguments of President Obama’s healthcare proposals, Frank Rich wrote in the US journal of record that opponents of the plan were motivated by insecurity over the, ‘conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the house – topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman’. 

I had my own encounter with this mentality some time ago when in these pages I forcibly expressed my views about some student protestors, and was promptly buried under responses weirdly obsessed with my Christian name (Only much later did I learn that a common name for sturdy and plebeian sons of the Fatherland is reserved for the champagne-and-truffle-crust of this rain-soaked island).  The best response slammed your humble-servant as ‘a parody of reactionary upper class bigotry’, an endorsement carefully copied out for later business-cards, and signed with the unimprovable moniker of ‘Rees Nicolas Arnott-Davies’.

I hope the point is made.  If the ‘identity’ card can be played one way, it can absolutely be played in reverse.  Those who think that they can defend their prejudicial views need to learn that their views can then be dismissed by an attack on the same.  These same figures that attack Keynes’ economics cannot do so by appealing to homophobia and those that defend them cannot do so by crying it.  Maybe we can try something completely new and discuss ideas as ideas.