On the Culture War Around Us
Douglas Murray's third book is about the ongoing culture war. It is a war against the roots of the Western tradition and all that is good in it.
Douglas Murray's The War on the West (2022)
Murray's resistance began with analysing the massive wave of migration in his first book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017). The open-door policy in Europe gradually led to the need to pull ourselves into a knot, and soon to demands that we hide our habits, traditions, and culture. All in order to pay off the 'historic debt' and redeem the 'guilt' which, as it turns out, we all share. The countries of Europe and the successors of European civilisation have to 'swiftly and fundamentally alter their demographic makeup' (Murray, p. 8) in order to have any legitimacy at all.
His second book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019), dealt with the madness of the masses, or the rage of the masses, the movements for racial, women's, gay and queer rights that began as a defence of minority rights. All of these movements have now become the opposite of themselves – they have come to hate, ban, and command. (Read a review of this book here.)
It is a good tone today to speak disparagingly of the West, giving the impression that Western culture is inherently and systemically racist as if years of struggle and countless remedies and laws against racism did not even exist. It is not customary to speak of racism and slavery rampant in Africa, the Middle East, or India, but to point out that 'the countries in the world that by any measure have the least racism, and where racism is most abhorred, are the homes of racism' (Murray, p. 11). One even hears claims that racism in the rest of the world is the fault of the West. A telling example of such thinking was the demand at a conference under the auspices of the United Nations that 'the slaughter of the Tutsi tribe by the Hutu tribe in Rwanda in 1994 should be paid out by the government of America' (Murray, p. 124).
Thirty years ago, a famous social activist and human rights campaigner Reverend Jesse Jackson (b. 1941) led a demonstration at Stanford University. With him, crowds chanted, "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!" They didn't like the popular "Western Culture" course in the Stanford University curriculum. According to Murray, it was the aftermath of this event that led to the capitulation of common sense. What is the point of universities if they let the screamers on the street decide upon their curriculum, the author asks rhetorically. In any case, the course that taught the gold standard of Western culture was replaced with the 'study of many cultures'. Indeed, it is from this event in 1987 that one might, with good will, predict all that follows, as Murray's book tells us. Today attempts to appreciate and study Western culture are rare, the subject is embarrassing, scholars engaged in the research are discouraged and ridiculed, the universities tend to avoid this. 'The culture that gave the world lifesaving advances in science, medicine, and a free market that has raised billions of people around the world out of poverty and offered the greatest flowering of thought anywhere in the world is interrogated through a lens of the deepest hostility and simplicity' (Murray, pp. 15). 'As a result, everything connected with the Western tradition is being jettisoned. At education colleges in America, aspiring teachers have been given training seminars where they are taught that even the term “diversity of opinion” is “white supremacist bullshit.”' (Murray, p. 15). This is what is taught to American students today.
The war on the West is being waged on at least four fronts: race, history, religion, and culture. Each of these is given a separate chapter in Murray's book. Between chapters, there are interludes on China, reparations, and gratitude.
Race
Until recently, it was considered impolite to lump people together and discard them simply because of the color of their skin. Now it is the other way round: race is the most important thing of all, and to overlook it is itself a manifestation of racism. The fight against racism began as a fight for human rights, for people of other races to have the same rights as whites. Now that struggle has become a hatred of whites. Whites are retreating and apologising, and there is also a debate about whether, how much, and to whom compensation should be paid to redress past wrongs.
In the past, racism was understood to be 'dismissing people, vilifying them, or generalizing about them simply because of the color of their skin' (Murray, p. 19). It was considered to be one of the most abominable human sins. In opposition to racism, the principle of 'color-blindness' was universally accepted, according to which race should not have influenced any important decision in a person's life, such as hiring or promotion. At the beginning of this century, things began to change, as 'critical race theory' moved out of the universities into schools, government departments, human resources departments, non-profit organisations, and finally onto the streets. Race, which used to be something to be trivialised, has now become the most important thing in the world. Failure to accept this is also seen as a manifestation of racism.
The aim of critical race theory was to create 'a movement of activists within academia who would interpret almost everything in the world through the lens of race' (Murray, p. 20), so that it, in the words of its proponents, 'questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law' (Delgado, Stefancic 2001; cited in Murray, p. 22). Paraphrasing the classics of Marxism-Leninism, critical race theory declares: "It not only tries to understand our social situation, but to change it; it sets out not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies, but to transform it for the better" (ibid.). This is, of course, an unusual use of language and an unusual aim for scientists, but it is also unusual and unprecedented for scientists to publish articles that consist only of assertions without any evidence. But this is the kind of science that 'critical race theory' is, now part of the mainstay of contemporary Western social thought. 'Asking for proof was proof of racism' (Murray, p. 23).
According to polls, when President Barack Obama was inaugurated into his office in 2009, a majority of Americans thought that all was well with race relations in America. At the beginning of Obama's second term in 2014, this satisfaction began to recede. Murray does not have a good explanation for this, and in general, the book is more of a colorful description than an analysis. But what is obvious, of course, is that most people are influenced by what and how much of the media reaches them, and the triumph of 'critical race theory' has planted racist pills in many people's heads, sometimes through fear. The clash with common sense is also common and to be expected. When it comes to race, sometimes it is even dangerous to ask questions.
Looking through this lens, a Dominican monk walking on a university campus has been seen wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood, a claim has been made that babies can be racist, and of course, all the crimes against black people have been made to look the same. Take the famous George Floyd case, for example. Who would doubt that it was a racially motivated crime? But who can cite any evidence to support that claim? Murray claims that there is none, and in any case, it is true that the accusers did not present it in court (sic!). This crime was not racially motivated, as was the situation with a very similar case four years ago when a white man was killed using the same (legal, sic!) police methods. Strangely enough, nobody seems to have heard anything about that other case. Leaving aside the fact that at least one of the policemen who killed the white man was black, Murray draws attention to the selective reactions to these two otherwise very similar cases. The policemen who killed George Floyd were convicted in less than a year and are serving prison sentences, while the policemen who killed a white man four years before were not prosecuted despite exactly the same circumstances and are still on the beat. We are hearing a lot more about black victim crimes and hence, of course, people have an exaggerated idea of how many black people in America are killed by the police every year. Many respondents to a poll estimated the figure to be as high as ten thousand, with the correct figure being in the region of ten. The strength of this attitude correlates with the respondents’ self-definition as 'liberals'. In other words, the more "liberal" the respondent, the worse the situation of black Americans is perceived by them. Perception, of course, bears no relation to knowledge of the facts.
Under the influence of critical race theory, books are appearing that claim that racism can be present in babies as young as a few months old and that racism is most pronounced in white children between the ages of four and five. Racism is an innate white disability, which is why people must be educated about anti-racism. There are training programmes and courses in many schools and public institutions which are compulsory for all whites. Participants are required to find the racist within themselves, apologise for this attitude, write letters of apology to imaginary victims, etc. This is a very important part of the programme. Those unwilling to go along with such brainwashing put their jobs at risk. The same is happening in private companies, where mandatory training programmes teach employees to analyse their own guilt and shame and seek redemption in opposition to the 'color-blind principle'. Yes, indeed, strange as it may seem, the 'color-blind principle' advocated by Martin Luther King Jr. has now been declared racist.
Tragically, race relations have also found their way into health policies. At the beginning of the Covid, activists who claimed that Western racism was trying to kill black people with this virus were being quoted in The Guardian. Before anyone had a chance to discuss the reasons why blacks were more likely to suffer severe forms of the illness, frightened health officials decided to avoid prioritising the at-risk group (over 65s) for vaccination because there were more whites in this age group. One medical ethics expert explained: "Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit." In other words, as a matter of fairness, it was considered right to let whites die more (Murray, p. 57). That is not all. Cheryl Harris, a professor at the University of California and an advocate of 'critical race theory', has suggested that 'whites' right to private property should be suspended, with land and money seized and then redistributed along racial lines' (Harris 1993, cited in Murray, p. 59-60).
What is the reason for all this? Unfortunately, Murray does not say. This is the major drawback of his book – he quotes extensively, sometimes to the point of annoyance, worthless arguments by mediocre authors whose extreme, erroneous, and illogical views are easy targets for ridicule. It would be more difficult to seek explanations for the underlying causes of the phenomena, which is what Murray avoids. Who is behind this war? Are the BLM riots or the '1619 riots' really all spontaneous demonstrations? We do not even find this question in the book, let alone the answers.
History
"Who controls the past controls the future." These words are spoken by a character in George Orwell's famous novel 1984, who is an influential member of the Inner Party. Today's activists are his diligent students.
In an adaptation of the Orwell novel, a character asks: "How do we know the Party fell? Wouldn’t it be in their interest to just structure the world in such a way that we believed that they were no longer…” The allusion in this play, written in 2013 by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan and staged in many theatres around the world, is eerily modern a decade later. Militant activists, more influential than ever, are after all doing what Orwell's Ministry of Truth was all about: rewriting history, undoing people, rewriting language so that no one can perform 'crimethink' and thereby 'thoughtcrime'. The rewriting of modern history is aimed at diminishing the achievements of the Western culture, and the way chosen for it is to emphasise the injustices of the past. For the sake of a better today and tomorrow.
One of the outstanding landmarks on this front was The New York Times’ “Project 1619”, for which its initiator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In Hannah-Jones's words, it “is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the four hundredth anniversary of the beginning of American slavery”. The aim of the project was, in her own words, to "reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very centre of our national narrative". The first slave ship allegedly landed on the American Continent in 1619, and this was the real starting point of the history of the United States. Of course, the actual date of the country's birth is well known to all: July 4, 1776. We also know about the founding principles and the quest for freedom that led to the birth of that country. The New York Times has now chosen to replace this story with a tale of oppression and shame. However, even the most important newspaper cannot change the time and circumstances of the founding of the most powerful country in the world. The American story has always been, in Murray's words, 'one of a great leap into glorious liberty, led by some of the most remarkable men of their, or any, age' (Murray, p. 81). The New York Times, on the other hand, sought to anchor the founding of America in crime. To do so, they had no new knowledge or research to present as an argument; they hoped to simply just do it with a special edition of the newspaper. There were unsubstantiated and historically inaccurate claims by Hannah-Jones, the journalist who ran the project (the main reason for secession from England was, in her words, “the colonists' desire to protect the institution of slavery'), as well as ignorant arguments of anti-capitalist authors that many modern tools (such as Excel spreadsheets!) were originally invented on slave plantations. Serious historians commenting on this enterprise have said from the outset that it is 'a displacement of historical understanding by ideology' (Murray, p. 83). But the same can be said of much of the so-called social sciences.
All it got even more interesting when the story made its way from the newspaper to the street. The demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd, which soon escalated into an uncontrolled violent nationwide riot, were dubbed the '1619 riots' by another leading newspaper, The New York Post. Hannah-Jones took the title as a compliment to herself, saying that calling the unrest '1619 riots' "would be an honour". She said this at a time when the whole country was in flames and rioters were terrorising peaceful citizens. Soon they were tearing down memorials to the Founding Fathers of America. Christopher Columbus was the first victim, who was soon followed by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and later, many others, for example, Francis Scott Key, the author of the words of the American anthem. It seemed as if the aim was to erase all American history and that it would have been better if America had been discovered and settled by another civilisation instead of Columbus. "For if the land you are on is simply stolen, the Founding Fathers were simply “slave owners,” the Constitution needs to be rewritten, and no figure in your history deserves any respect, then what exactly holds this grand quarter-millennial-long project like America together?" Murray asks (p. 88).
Anti-Westernism did not come into being yesterday; its path was paved by a long tradition of anti-colonial writers (Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and others). It is easy to turn the legacy of colonialism into anti-Westernism and seek the solution not in a return to traditional social order, but quite often in Marxism and the corresponding social order. In the academic world, Said's hugely popular book Orientalism (1978) is, according to Murray, an important vehicle for the anti-Western rhetoric prevalent among (leftist) intellectuals, according to whom 'the non-Western nations were people to whom things were done, while the Western nations were people who did things. And terrible things at that.' (p. 93). Of course, this is accompanied by the notion that 'the West itself was overdue for some justice or, rather, revenge' (ibid.). Against this background, it is not surprising that historians of the postcolonial period find it impossible to find anything positive in the colonial period. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the colonial empire was perceived to serve goodness, the only possible view in the twenty-first century seems to be that this was the empire of evil.
One of the central phenomena for which the West has to worry, apologise and feel ashamed is, of course, slavery. It gave rise to colonial empires, but even countries that had no colonial possessions are not free of charge here. Nor can the efforts to end the slave trade, which Britain began as early as 1807 when it decided to send the Royal Navy to all the world's seas to combat the slave trade, be taken into account as an extenuating circumstance. Soon as many as one-sixth of the navy's ships and sailors were engaged in this task. One thousand six hundred slave ships and more than one hundred and fifty thousand African slaves were freed by the British Navy. British naval casualties exceeded one thousand five hundred marines. All this counts for nothing to those who wish to see and show Britain as a mere slave trader and conceal what it did to free the world from slavery.
The slave trade is not an invention of white people. 'Slavery has been a constant in almost every society since the dawn of recorded history' (Murray, p. 102). In antiquity, slaves were brought from Ethiopia and further afield, and between the 15th and 19th centuries up to twelve million Africans are thought to have been transported across the Atlantic. The slave buyers were Europeans, but the sellers were mainly Africans themselves, usually neighbours or relatives of those sold as slaves. This does not diminish the guilt of the buyers, but it is nevertheless an important aspect to understand the whole phenomenon.
At present, it is customary to speak only of slaves transported to the West, completely ignoring the slaves transported to the East by the Arabs. It is claimed that the Arabs transported up to seventeen million people out of Africa. The Arab practice of systematically castrating slaves ensured that slaves transported eastwards had no descendants, which also makes estimates of the volume of this trade more difficult. The Barbary pirates, mainly Mohammedan pirates from North Africa, who raided European coastal villages and towns between the 16th and 19th centuries, kidnapping and imprisoning people whom they freed for ransom or sold into slavery, were also active. The number of Europeans deported by them may have been about 1.25 million.
A specifically anti-Western view of slavery either refuses to notice all this or thinks that the indiscriminate slave trade of the early modern world, 'with diversity at its heart', is somehow better than the later black-centred trade. That 'enslaving Africans, Arabs and Europeans alike' is better than the practice of exclusively trading only 'African bodies' (Murray, p. 103).
Even today, slavery has not disappeared from the world. Anti-slavery spokespeople prefer to address the guilt of the past rather than worry about the slaves of today. Slavery is a daily occurrence in Mauritania, Ghana, and South Sudan and is reaching the West from there. A Samoan tribal chief was recently imprisoned in New Zealand for luring people from Samoa to New Zealand, where he imprisoned and enslaved them. It is estimated that over forty million people live in slavery today, many more than in the 19th century.
Religion
When rumours spread that someone has burnt the Quran, it often breaks nationwide news or even an international scandal. If, on the other hand, a Bible is burnt, it can be clad in virtual silence and declared null and void. Well, what the hell, a couple of Bibles were simply used to kindle a fire, which was indeed what was said about what happened at one demonstration. Well, the West tends to honour all the holy things except its own. The popularity of the Church and identification as a Christian is in decline throughout the West, unless the masses of immigrants here and there change the big picture. The vacant space is taken by fake religions. One of these is 'anti-racism'. It is a religious system that is perfect in several respects: it has its own original sin ('white privilege'), its own last judgement ('coming to terms with race') and the ex-communication of heretics (social-media shaming and more). This new religion looks down on the old religions and gives its adherents the perfect opportunity to mistreat other people while posing as benefactors. This new religion is not interested in the sources of Western culture but tends to respect and praise anything outside the Western tradition. This attitude of denigration goes back to Voltaire and Rousseau, with later contributions made by Claude Levi-Strauss, Edward Said, and many others. The pure and unspoiled savage, living peacefully and lovingly in the Garden of Eden or on some sunny island – this is the recurring motif in the works of many idealists – explorers and missionaries – who were often shot down and eaten when they travelled out in pursuit of their presumed ideals.
A major frontline of anti-Westernism is the negation of Western thinkers. Immanuel Kant for example. "Did you know that Kant used the n-word," Murray heard from a student after a lecture in which he had mentioned him. Of course, the modern n-word was not known in Kant's time, but there are a few phrases in his prolific works that do not fit well into modern academic parlance. These can be found in the writings of many of the great men of the time when much of what we know was not yet known and the common understanding of many things was different from ours’. For example, it was quite common to compare the level of development of different cultures and races. Nowadays, almost all thinkers of the past can easily be annulled, their statues removed from the public sphere, their work declared unworthy or undesirable for study, etc. Doesn't that make life easier? To argue with Kant you have to read him, but the accusation of using the n-word relieves one of this tedious duty. Since no one reads much of anything any more, distorted or outright falsehoods will do to cancel someone. For example, when a statue of Voltaire in front of the French Academy was taken down in 2020 because he had invested in the French East India Company, which was linked to the slave trade, or made a racist remark somewhere, no one bothered to notice his furious attacks on the amorality of slavery. In Britain, several Enlightenment figures such as John Locke, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill are attacked. You will always find a footnote or a point of view expressed in a private letter that, taken out of context, comes across as racist. The author thinks that the background for attacking the Enlightenment figures is that they do not fit into today's world where everyone has their own truth. 'The European Enlightenments were the greatest leap forward for the concept of objective truth', but it 'put claims that were ungrounded in fact on the back foot for the best part of two centuries' (Murray, p. 153-154). More recently, however, the reverse has occurred: a move has been made to ostracise verifiable truth so that it 'is cast out' (Murray p. 154). Everyone can have their own truth, and it is for this reason that the Enlightenment rationalists must be consigned to the dustbin of history. This is one of the beginnings of analysis, or rather of the allusions Murray sometimes makes. It is a pity, though, that he does not develop them further.
Yet, there is a group of people who are immune to accusations of racism. At the forefront of these are Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose correspondence is replete with racist and anti-Semitic statements, as well as outright justification of slavery: 'Slavery is an economic category like any other,' wrote Marx (Murray, p. 158). And yet Marx is protected because his views suit well with any attempts to destroy the West. "Everybody else is subjected to the process of destruction because their reputations are useful for holding up the West. After all, remove every other philosopher from the field, take down all their monuments and the tributes to them, and ensure that their thought is taught primarily (and ahistorically) as a story of racism and slavery and what is left standing in the Western tradition?" (Murray, p. 159).
A good illustration of this line of thought is the case of Michel Foucault (1926-1984). As the most-quoted author in countless disciplines, no one has done more to 'undermine the system of institutions that had made up part of the Western system of order'. 'Foucault’s obsessive analysis of everything through a quasi-Marxist lens of power relations diminished almost everything in society into a transactional, punitive, and meaningless dystopia' (Murray, p. 160). Along with his great populariser Edward Said, his desire is 'to destabilize if not deconstruct the idea of the Western nations as having almost anything good to be said for them' (ibid.).
In 2021, Foucault's cases of buying sex from underage boys in Tunisia, whom he systematically and en masse sexually abused for money in a graveyard, became public knowledge. This case has had no impact on Foucault's reputation, the sales of his works, or the number of his citations. Foucault remains on his throne and no one 'seems to think there is anything especially telling about one of the founding icons of the anti-Westernism of our time having found personal pleasure in purchasing native children of foreign countries to satisfy his sexual desires' (Murray, p. 161). When all the other great figures are pulled down, those figures who have been most critical of the Western traditions of culture and the free market are spared the same treatment. “As though in the hope that when everyone else is brought low, the only figures who will remain on their pedestals (both real and metaphorical) are those figures who were most critical of the West.” (ibid.).
In the era of cultural turbulence, people seek refuge in institutions that have weathered such storms before. Christian churches are certainly one of such institutions. But now they too have decided to move along with the times and have begun to contribute to anti-Western sentiment with apologies for their unique cultural heritage. The Anglican Church is at the forefront of this, making the harshest criticisms of itself and taking decisions to ‘improve’ itself. These 'projects' range from the inclusion of 'an introductory Black Theology module' in its curricula, to the organising of 'Racial Justice Sundays' and positive discrimination in recruitment. According to Murray, 'critical race theory' is even more important than the teaching of Christ in the contemporary Anglican Church. Worse still, if the church itself proclaims itself to be thoroughly racist and old-fashioned, people will continue to believe it and stay away from this evil place. The story of Canada's 'mass graves scandal' is perhaps the most startling example to illustrate this phenomenon. In July 2021, as 'another orgy of statue toppling' was being held in Canada (Murray, p. 169), stories began to appear in the press about ‘unmarked graves around Canadian churches’. Unsubstantiated allegations claimed that there were hundreds of graves of children, and soon it was clear that they were probably Indian children, and then that they had been murdered by the Catholic Church. Well, that's what these churches do, don’t they!? Not a single grave was opened, and there were no actual records. But people started burning churches, and within a week at least thirty were damaged. Several organisations approved of what was being done, and professors and presenters approved. Even an adviser and personal friend to the Canadian Prime Minister said publicly that ‘he understood people who behaved in this way’. Pope Francis, who was visiting Canada, felt it necessary to make his own apology.
Is there still a place of refuge left for Western thought? How about simple logic and facts? However, probably not any more. When a leading medical journal, The Lancet, has published an 'antiracism pledge' stating that 'racism is a public health emergency of global concern' (Murray, p. 171), things are bad. The journal Nature also felt it necessary to reaffirm its stand against racism in the light of the BLM movement. They found, among other things, that 'conventional metrics—citations, publications, profits—reward those in positions of power, rather than helping to shift the balance of power' (Murray, p. 171). Why should a scientific journal think about 'shifting the balance of power' is perhaps an inappropriate question nowadays, when for many scientists it is a matter of daily routine to write such things into various proposals and reports. Murray represents the old-fashioned notion that the job of the scientist is simply to 'publish the best and most important research'. He has apparently hoped, along with some conservative commentators, that 'the wildest fringes of academic thought had boundaries that would be asserted naturally'. According to him, there is no harm in the fact that 'ideas such as CRT may well run like wildfire through the humanities but that even if this did happen, it did not matter overmuch'. 'People were welcome to get themselves into debt studying for useless humanities degrees that educated them in nondisciplines. Because all the time, reality and the facts would continue to assert themselves in STEM subjects. These people asserted that while Theory, with a capital T, might work in lesbian dance theory classes, it would halt at the borders of the hard sciences and mathematics. It would stop at the doors of engineering because at some point the bridges had to stay up.' (ibid.)
But even this hope turns out to be unduly optimistic. In order to break the foundations on which everything else is built, the foundations of mathematical indisputability must also be broken. Having gotten rid of distinguishable men and women, let us now take down mathematics as 'elitist, privileged, and of course inherently racist' (Murray, p. 172). The remedy is already there in the form of a different approach. Murray's book goes to great lengths to describe textbooks in which the material for primary school maths lessons includes supporting pupils in reclaiming their 'mathematical ancestry', honouring and acknowledging 'the mathematical knowledge of students of color, even if it shows up unconventionally' and dismantling 'the culture of white supremacy that exists within the math classroom', replacing 'Eurocentric mathematical pieces of knowledge' with the 'a decolonial, antiracist approach to mathematics education (p. 173). So what does this really mean? Incredibly, in the summer of 2020, many maths teachers and lecturers were engaged in 'deconstructing' the 'hegemonic narrative' that 2 + 2 = 4. A bioethics researcher from Harvard lent a helping hand and made things clear. Namely, he stated simply and clearly, that numbers are 'quantitative measures' and 'abstractions of real underlying things in the universe and it’s important to keep track of this when we use numbers to model the real world'. So everyone could call the statement 2 + 2 = 4 a simplification of reality, and prepare to give the white man a livery by proving that 2 + 2 does not always equal 4. Had none of these activists really read George Orwell's famous book 1984? I am afraid that was the case. I recall: A character in the Inner Party says "In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it”. The Harvard bioethics doctor, who took the side of 2 + 2 = 5, found out about this Orwellian episode too late. He had nothing wiser to say than that it was an 'unfortunate' case. This is, of course, spot on, whatever he himself meant by saying it.
Culture
In 1927, a restaurant opened in London's Tate Gallery with a mural of Rex Whistler called In Pursuit of Rare Meats. It was a fantasy painting of the 'Duke of Epicurania' and his court's foray into a fictional land in search of tasty morsels. George Bernard Shaw gave a speech at the opening event, and the press described the newly opened restaurant as "the most amusing room in Europe". Almost a hundred years later, in 2020, the Tate Gallery announced the closure of the Whistler restaurant. The reason for the closure was the accusation by unidentified activists that the painting included two tiny black figures who were apparently slaves. The complaint was lodged by "the self-styled cowboy critics" linked to an Instagram account, whose chants of "Fuck the Police, Fuck the State, Fuck the Tate: Riots and Reform" terrified the Tate's ethics committee. Tate initially tried to get out of it by declaring the work racist and imperialist and adding explanatory texts to the exhibit, but later gave in to mounting pressure and decided to close the restaurant. The Tate's curators did not even try to resist the terror of the activist outsiders, and so conceded that the modern political pothole had every right to run over the work entrusted to their care and stick an unwarranted racist label on a great artist.
The kind of vicious circle that Whistler was driven through threatens all cultural fields today. Harsh critics are often completely ignorant. By attempting to listen to such voice of the people, as Tate did, in the spirit of the times, respected cultural institutions fall into a trap from which there is no escape. Universities are slashing curricula, leaving out the Middle Ages altogether and drastically reducing the coverage of early modern literature in the syllabus in order to be 'sustainable' and 'compete on a global level', the Globe theatre has decided to 'decolonise' Shakespeare by hiring a group of scholars who have expressed the view that the language of an author admired for centuries is 'problematic' because it contains expressions such as 'dark' and 'light'. In 2020, the peak year of the anti-racist craze, the British Library decided to 'become an actively anti-racist organization, and will take all the necessary steps required to make this promise a reality'. They started compiling a list of writers with any connection to the slave trade or colonialism. The original list of three hundred authors included Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron, and George Orwell. London's botanical gardens, Kew Gardens, also declared in 2021 that they were planning to 'decolonise' themselves and acknowledge their 'exploitative and racist legacies'. This meant replacing all the statues and signs with new ones highlighting the guilt of colonialism and the link between plants and slavery and colonialism. 'Plants were central to the running of the British empire,' explained the Kew director (Murray, p. 198). The BBC broadcaster James Wong, on the other hand, wrote an article in support of the politicisation of gardening: "Other Arts Are Political, Why Not Gardening?" (Murray, p. 199).
In Canada, lawns were attacked because lawns are "a statement of control over nature". "A backyard with a big lawn is like a classroom for colonialism," explained John Douglas, a professor of history. (Murray, p. 200).
There is no escape for the music world either. The New York Times, for example, is calling for an end to 'blind auditions' to ensure greater racial diversity in orchestras. In fact, the current practice of blind auditions has been set up precisely to ensure that hiring decisions are not influenced by anything other than a player's mastery. They even attack the music notation for being elitist, white, and Western, to the point of calling it a "colonialist representational system". This list of madnesses could go on, but the basic point is already obvious in these examples. It is 'that the same rebarbative, retributive worldview is run with everywhere', Murray sums up his depressing overview (Murray p. 208).
In conclusion,
Douglas Murray's third book is unfortunately not as good as the previous two. This is often the case with authors at the beginning of their stellar careers – when the first two books have made the author rich and popular, the publisher wants a third and the author gives in instead of taking time to delve deeper and write something more substantial.
Much of the book is simply descriptive, with many interesting stories told, each one compelling and gripping, but for a reader hungry for generalisation and the big picture, it remains a fragmented and loosely connected series of details. Like a thesis or dissertation that the author did not really have time to digest, and a corrected version of the concept went to press.
Several questions remain: Why is all this nonsense happening? Is there an organising hand and/or funding behind all this? Of course, one would also like to know what lies ahead – is the pendulum still swinging up, or moving back, how steadily and how fast is it moving? These answers must be sought elsewhere, since this one only documents the culture wars like a front-line blogger chronicling the current events, without making predictions about what will happen in the coming years or drawing conclusions about the causes of what has happened.
Douglas Murray is a prolific publicist who often makes good, witty, and pithy generalisations in his articles and speeches. Let us hope that these will become the material for his next and better book. For the moment, however, we can gratefully appreciate what we have: a thoughtful and readable collection of examples of the war against our civilisation, the scale and systematic nature of which we might not have noticed previously.
There is a suggestive pattern of behaviour exposed in the final section of the book, which I would like to mention in conclusion. We must not give in to the absurd demands of an impatient minority, it will only make matters worse. The stories told in the book show convincingly that giving in leads to new, increasingly absurd demands, but firm resistance can produce effective results. The custom of denigrating Western culture cannot become universal unless we go along with it, but once you are in a position where white people can be vilified for the culture they have created, it is very difficult to stand firm for your values. However, we have no choice but to acknowledge the achievements of Western scientists, statesmen, architects, composers, and writers with dignity, without disparaging anyone, and to resist any attempt to undo them in any form.
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