The Intersectionality Loophole
I’ve been trying to understand how John Maynard Keynes got away with being openly homosexual in the early 20th century. Oscar Wilde didn’t get away with. Alan Turing didn’t. Why Keynes?
I think of this as the intersectionality loophole. A conservative society is one that seeks to conserve itself. Natural selection is a conservative process, so if we’re living in a society that has survived the centuries, it is by definition that society which has succeeding in leaving faithful copies of itself, changing just enough to be well-adapted to the inevitable change in the external environment but conserving the majority and reproducing itself. It’s a miraculous decentralized coherent process of high fidelity.
We do this by treating society like a listed company on the stock exchange. Every share you hold in society is a symbol of your investment in its fate. Hold no shares and we know you couldn’t care less what happens to it. Hold a couple of shares and you’re incentivized to root for its success, but only as far as you don’t find better opportunities elsewhere. We will look at what other shares you hold and constantly suspect you of conflicts of interest. Hold a huge number of shares and you’re above suspicion. Anything you do that reduces the success of the company comes at a degree of personal loss that crosses the threshold we need to be satisfied you’ll self-regulate. Hold a majority of shares and your fate is intrinsically tied to the company, we make you a board member and you get to make decisions because we know our incentives are aligned and you are disproportionately invested in the success of the company. Noone will work harder than you to make sure we win.
This is like the negative-roll of the intersectionality worldview. Instead of counting all the ways you are a minority, we count all the ways you are invested in the status quo of society and therefore incentivized to propagate it. J.M Keynes was born upper middle class, that’s already a few shares he owns. He went to Eton. More shares. Cambridge. More shares. Civil service. Government. Invaluable contribution to the war effort in WW1. He even applied to be a conscientious objector, losing a few shares, granted on the condition he buy more shares by working for the treasury during the war. For the contribution, he is inducted into the British chivalry with the ‘Companion of the Order of Bath’, inextricably tying his incentives with the company. He is now fabulously rich through savvy investing. That private wealth is protected by society. Would be a shame if something were to happen to it. He is part of the upper class and intellectual circles of Britain. Even his economic policies are centered around the benefits of controlling the free market with macroeconomic principles devised by a benevolent intelligent member of the ruling class. His investment in the fate of the company is above question. When he is openly homosexual, it does nothing to threaten the image of his commitment to the fabric of society. It ironically adds to it. He is the symbol of an enlightened society’s willingness to encourage self-expression and exploration of the human experience.
Oscar Wilde, on the other hand, is Irish. That’s already no shares to start with. He goes to university in Dublin and becomes a classicist, getting a few shares in that great social pillar of Western civilization. Then Oxford. He’s a popular artist and intellectual now in the posh circles of London. He’s got enough shares that his homosexuality is well known but not condemned, even being appreciated as a sort of an enlightened Uranian love that is even greater than heterosexual love. His lover is majority stock holder Lord Alfred Douglas. He prosecutes his lover’s father, majority-er stock holder, the Marquess of Queensberry, for libel (calling him a sodomite). Surely this is not the forgivable action of a man whose interests align with the company. In court, things seem to be going his way, he is sticking to his guns of being an artist whose works are above the claims of morality or decency. He would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for you pesky kids. He’s made some fatal errors. He’s invested in competitor company shares. All his affairs with labor-class men are brought up in court. His affair with Lord Alfred Douglas bothers nobody. But affairs with the lower classes, that’s treason. He is sent to jail for gross indecency. Nothing happens to Lord Alfred Douglas, enlightened seeker of Uranian love.
Alan Turing was born with some modest shares. Family of civil servants and clergymen. Cambridge. A series of seminal papers. Turing Machines. Princeton university. Large bumper crop of shares in Bletchley Park during WW2. Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Things are going great. He calls off his marriage in 1941, admitting his homosexuality. But it’s fine. He has the shares. But it isn’t too many shares. He’s quiet and reserved. He isn’t creating the impression of someone undeniably invested in the company’s success. In 1952, he invests in a competitor, starting an affair with an unemployed man from the lower classes. His house is robbed. By a friend of his lover. Turing reports the crime. He’s instead charged with gross indecency and chemically castrated.
The intersectionality loophole is theoretically simple in its devious manipulations. Convince the company your fate is tied to its success. Invest enough shares in it that your alignment of incentives is guaranteed. Then do whatever you want. Your transgressions will result in the subtraction of some shares, but as long as your share-balance is above the threshold, you’re fine. Be an Indian atheist in the US, but be well-educated, qualified, and rich. Be poor, but be of the majority religion, majority race, and right-wing. Intersectionality is a brutal trap with steep walls that you likely can’t climb out of. But there’s a loophole at the bottom, and maybe you might just leak through it. All you need to do is say society is awesome just the way it is.
Addendum:
The law that criminalized ‘gross indecency’ ie even just a suspicion of homosexuality where nothing can be proven, was pushed by Henry Labouchere, a man born into a family of the board of directors of the company, wealthy businessmen, Whig politicians. Eton, Cambridge, diplomatic services, politics. Fervently anti-feminist and anti-semitic. He added the Labouchere-Amendment to a law that had nothing to do with homosexuality, instead dealing with the protection of prostitutes. As a majority shareholder in the company, it’s difficult to have liberal values in any sphere. The 2015 law that repealed this stupid law is aptly called the Alan Turing Law.
