The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason

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The term was used by the author in a different context and was being used to mean opposition to genocide. To pretend that the USA hasn’t meddled on the world stage in a truly spectacular way is a staggering omission, and Murray knows it. We’re not able to effect another nation’s culture (well, we are, but let’s not go there) so the focus of political activists will always predominantly be upon internal issues.

Young people are trying to find a new narrative to hold the world together through the moment, and it might not be the right one—it almost certainly isn’t—but neither is the old narrative. Yet he runs with the incendiary accusations levelled against Foucault being a sexual predator who paid children to meet him in the dead of the night in Tunisia. It is worth noting that the west has created a culture so vibrant and fruitful that millions of migrants are willing to risk their lives to get a piece of it.

One can only hope, as Murray probably does himself, that the Left will prove him wrong by showing that there really is another way, that you can be critical without expressing undiluted contempt, and that you can struggle and hope for change without burning everything to the ground. Not all of the world’s ills can be blamed on the west, that would be simplistic, but it’s still a rather transparent bit of sophistry on Murray’s part. Murray says that the attitude of the modern anti-western lobby is one of resentment, a desire to tear down the achievements of others because you can achieve no such greatness yourself, hence the philosophy of deconstructionism. If enough are convinced that Western history is nothing more than a catalogue of moral outrages and that Western societies remain irredeemably oppressive, tyrannical, bigoted, and all the rest of it, then what sense is there in preserving such a system?

But there isn’t one: one is a man saying standardised testing is racist, and the other is a man saying standardised testing is inadequate. This is a sleight of hand because in juxtaposing the two quotes, Murray is trying to suggest a connection. The mantle of shame and self loathing I have worn purely on the basis of having white skin has become heavy. I will continue to support diversity, I will continue to condemn racism in all its forms and I will continue to appreciate the contributions of and uplift people from all backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities. That racism is interwoven so deeply into white-majority societies that the white people in those societies do not even realize that they live in racist societies.

He can’t really effectively combat any of the critiques, apart from talking a bit about enlightenment values, and when he gets to Klein he just quotes her a lot with a sardonic tone without ever saying what’s wrong with what she’s saying.

Bound up in all of this is the same idea that, by reanimating the past, the present can be ennobled—Spengler confounded by Eliot. That there is something lacking in modern life is one of the few things about which, in their way, the Left and the Right can agree.He levels a very weird and inconclusive critique at the long history of criticising the west, from Rousseau to Naomi Klein. Not only are these subjects spoken about but Murray gives specific examples that demonstrate his claims. There are prestigious universities considering eliminating the end of required notation reading, conducting, studying classical composers, (they’re all white) and of course, their music, due to this stress. There is something very disturbing about this reductive, inquisitorial reaction to even the least objectionable artefacts of Western history.

Murray succeeds in combining this somewhat high-temperature argument with a looming sense of racial threat. Bell’s central idea was that the law was incapable of delivering justice due to its structural racial unfairness. Murray claims this isn’t true and that colonialism, Indian independence and the slave trade are all big parts of history syllabi in the UK.

In that moment, and for the only time in this book, Murray accurately describes his war on the west. And history is the subject of Murray’s next chapter (oh fucking hell, he’s going to talk about statues). Now, the statue argument is a complicated one, but my take is, essentially, that many of these statues were raised in a different era, and the people we want to venerate will change over time.