The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

This process carries forward one of the central claims of those who attacked Western Civ courses in America in the 1980s. Which is that the best and easiest form of revenge is to trash the entire Western canon and tradition.

From this wholesale attack on Western history, it can be seen that every discovery made by the West, whether it is the discovery of new lands or the discovery of the atom bomb, can be used against it. As though it were obvious that had any other group of people got there first, the results would have been more peaceful, equal, and socially just. There is no evidence whatsoever for this. Indeed, there is a great amount of evidence that things would have gone far worse and more bloodily had the West not been first in a whole range of discoveries. Still, it seems that it is not enough to attack the West merely by attacking every aspect of its history. It is also necessary to attack every other aspect of its inheritance.

Into that gap many religions and pseudoreligions have flooded. As Christianity has withdrawn, so one new religion in particular has found its way into the cultural mainstream, starting off in America and flooding out from there across the Western world. It is what the linguistics teacher from Columbia University John McWhorter has called the new religion of antiracism. This new belief system has much in common with that of other religions in history and is, as McWhorter has written, “a profoundly religious movement in everything but terminology.” It has an original sin (“white privilege”), it has a judgment day (“coming to terms with race”), and it has “the excommunication of the heretic” (social-media shamings and more).

With any and all other grand narratives collapsed, the religion of antiracism fills people with purpose and a sense of meaning. It

gives them drive and allows them to see where they are going. It allows them to imagine a perfectible upland toward which they and everyone else on earth might strive. It imbues them with confidence, and consolation, dividing the society they are in between saints and sinners in a way that gives them the illusion of great perception. Perhaps most crucially, it also allows them to war on what were their own origins. The appeal of this conflict should not be underestimated. It is a very deep-seated instinct, the instinct to destroy, to burn, and to spit on everything that has produced you. And, of course, there is one final appeal. The opportunity to treat other people badly beneath the guise of doing good.

Most often, it exerts itself by using other peoples and cultures as a way to show how lacking in admirable traits we are in the West.

All this played into what is clearly a deep-seated need in human beings: to think of a place that is unspoiled. To believe that a place exists where all is peace and where the woes and struggles of civilization can be escaped.

Other societies provided a blank slate onto which could be written all the habits, manners, and virtues that were seen as lacking in the West.

Yet the tendency to extol all non-Westerners survived Rousseau and Marion du Fresne. In the twentieth century, the vogue for using non-Western natives as a means to criticize the West has continued. If anything, it has sped up, with the added oddity that by now so much of what had been asserted in centuries past not merely was provably wrong but also could be seen to be insultingly naive.

Furthermore, as the scholar Jane O’Grady has persuasively argued, thinkers such as Hume and Kant set the foundations in their work for the arguments that would make racism untenable. They helped to expose its fundamental flaws.

But one of the oddities of the attack on many of the preeminent figures in Western thought is that the same accusations are leveled at them whatever their views.

Mill was “not blind to the possibility that it may require a long war to lower the arrogance and tame the aggressive ambition of the slave-owners.” But, he said: “War, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.”

The first is the possibility that there is genuinely a reckoning against the thinkers of the Enlightenment that has never before been carried out.

One possibility is that all these thinkers were living and writing at a time when what have become the two great sins of the West—slavery and empire—were going on and that a reckoning on this is overdue. But being alive at the same time as other events does not make someone central to the darkest aspects of those occurrences.

It would have been an unusual figure who lived through past centuries and saw every part of them with all the varieties of insight that the rearview mirror provides. It would have been an uncommon figure in the 1770s who without making it their special area of study—or even if they had—could have come to the

conclusion that peoples they had rarely if ever met, or even read about, were without doubt from the same genetic stock as themselves. It also assumes that the issues that exercise us today must de facto have been the same issues that should have preoccupied not just some people, but all people, in the times before our own.

The European Enlightenments were the greatest leap forward for the concept of objective truth. The project that Hume and others worked away on was to ground an understanding of the world in verifiable fact. Miracles and other phenomena that had been a normal part of the world of ideas before their era suddenly lost all their footholds. The age of reason did not produce the age of Aquarius, but it put claims that were ungrounded in fact on the back foot for the best part of two centuries. By contrast, what has been worked away at in recent years has been a project in which verifiable truth is cast out. In its place comes that great Oprah-ism: “my truth.” The idea that I have “my truth” and you have yours makes the very idea of objective truth redundant. It says that a thing becomes so because I feel it to be so or say that it is so. At its most extreme, it is a reversion to a form of magical thinking. Precisely the thinking that the Enlightenment thinkers chased out. And perhaps that is why the Enlightenment thinkers have become such a focus for assault. Because the system they set up is antithetical to the system that

is being constructed today: a system entirely opposed to the idea of rationalism and objective truth; a system dedicated to sweeping away everyone from the past as well as the present who does not bow down to the great god of the present: “me.”

The only defense that might be made of him by his defenders and disciples is that he was a man of his time. That Marx lived in the nineteenth century and therefore held on to a number of the era’s more unpleasant attributes. And yet this defense is packed with explosives waiting to go off in the face of anyone hoping to use them. First, because who is not a man of their own time? Every person whose reputation has been brought down in the cultural revolution of recent years was also a man or woman of his or her own time. So why should this excuse be successful when used in defense of Marx, yet dismissed when used in defense of Voltaire or Locke? With Marx, there is another problem

in his defense, which is that for his defenders, he is not simply another thinker. He is not even to be compared with Hume or the sage of Königsberg. For his followers, Marx is the last or (depending on how you count it) the originating prophet. He was not just a thinker or a sage—he was the formulator of a world-revolutionary movement. A movement that claimed to know how to reorder absolutely everything in human affairs in order to arrive at a utopian society. A utopian society that has never been achieved and has cost many millions of lives in not being achieved but that activists across the West still dream of instituting next time: always next time.

To lambaste them for holding

on to one or more of the attitudes of their time that our own age holds to be abhorrent. And at the same time to ensure that figures whose work is helpful in pulling apart the Western tradition, even to the point of demanding revolution to overturn it, are never treated to this same ahistorical and retributive game. Marx is protected because his writings and reputation are useful for anyone wishing to pull down the West. Everybody else is subjected to the process of destruction because their reputations are useful for holding up the West.

It is in such omissions and double standards that something crucial can be discerned. Which is that what is happening in the current cultural moment is not simply an assertion of a new moral vision but the attempted imposition of a political vision on the West. One in which only specific figures—whom the West had felt proud of—are brought down. Meanwhile, 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 still remain on their pedestals (both real and metaphorical) are those figures who were most critical of the West. Meaning that the only people left to guide us would be the people who will guide us in the worst possible directions.

Over 77 percent of the leadership defined racism as “a combination of racial prejudice or discrimination, a system that grants power to one social group.” They did not define it as an intention to harm one group or an outcome that harms one group. They defined it as a system of power, which is much harder to see or fix without tearing that whole system down.

If the

problem in everything is racism and the answer to everything is to disrupt the racist system, it appears to produce only two verifiable outcomes: a lowering of standards in the name of antiracism and a rise in the need for racist policies in order to deal with a problem that is always said to be racism. The war against standardized testing, like the war against religion, philosophy, and everything else in the West, does not erase racial differences. It foghorns them.

It is one of the saddest realizations we have as a species: not just that everything is transitory but that everything—particularly everything we love and into which love has been poured—is fragile. And that just as the line between civilization and barbarism is paper-thin, so it is a miracle that anything at all survives, given the fragility of all things plus the evil and carelessness of which men are capable. What is it that drives that evil? Many things, without doubt. But one of them identified by several of the great philosophers is resentment (or “ressentiment”). That sentiment is one of the greatest drivers for people who want to destroy: blaming someone else for having something you believe you deserved more. Among those who have been interested in the question of ressentiment was Friedrich Nietzsche. It is alarming how specifically he diagnoses the type. At one point, he writes that any psychologist who wishes to study the subject must recognize that “this plant thrives best amongst anarchists and anti-Semites today, so it flowers like it always has done, in secret, like a violet but with a different scent. And just as like always gives rise to like, it will come as no surprise to find attempts coming once more from these circles, as so often before to sanctify revenge with the term justice—as though justice were fundamentally simply a further development of the feeling of having been wronged—and belatedly to legitimize with revenge emotional reactions in general...

that have closed and open scars “and make themselves bleed to death from scars long-since healed.” Such people may drag down their friends, family, children, and everyone else around them, says Nietzsche. And the only answer is that someone must stand over the person (an “ascetic priest” in Nietzsche’s telling) and say the most difficult thing. Which is that they are quite right. It is true. “Somebody must be to blame: but you yourself are this somebody, you yourself alone are to blame for it, you yourself alone are to blame for yourself.” Nietzsche recognizes that this is difficult, but if this was to be said, then if nothing else, one thing at least might be accomplished, which is that “the direction of ressentiment” could be “changed.”7 Others responded to Nietzsche’s insights—notably Max Scheler and Helmut Schoeck. They added to it by noting that resentment relies always on playing A off against B. In particular, where A is praised solely and wholly in order to denigrate and devalue B.8 In all matters, whether to do with money, sex, or anything else, no man feels that the scales are weighted in his favor. And so just as the men of resentment talk about “justice” while meaning “revenge,” so it is that something is disguised within their talk of “equality.” For anyone who talks of “equality” will find an inbuilt problem. Only a person who “fears he will lose” will demand equality as a “universal principle.” It is a speculation, says Schoeck, “on a falling market. “For it...

In other words, it may be worth recognizing what we are up against when we hear the critics of the West today. For just as we are not up against justice but rather up against vengeance, so we are not truly up only against proponents of equality but also against those who hold a pathological desire for destruction. An only vaguely milder version of this has existed in plain sight for decades. That is the obsession that started in the academy and then spread elsewhere that is given over to the veneration of “deconstruction.” This is the process by which everything from the past can be picked over, picked apart, and eventually destroyed. It can find no way of building. It can only find a way of endlessly pulling apart. So a novel by Jane Austen is taken apart until a delicate work of fiction is turned instead into nothing more than another piece of guilty residue from a discredited civilization. What has been achieved in this? Nothing but a process of destruction.

Why should we not simply stand back and credit our good fortune to have inherited these things and enjoy the great good fortune of being able to live among them? These are a gift from humans to all humankind. The reason is that what we have seen in recent decades in the West has been a grand project of deconstruction and destruction fueled by resentment and revenge. In this process, the West has been settled on as “the evil one” in the global search for blame.

Obviously, many people inside the West have found it comforting to settle into this mindset as well. The men of resentment have had an easy time pointing to things that the West has done, pointing to bills unpaid and outrages forgotten or insufficiently atoned for. Such people have enjoyed reopening ancient sores and claiming to feel hurt for wounds and wrongs done long before they themselves were ever alive. They have felt contentment through opening up these old wounds and demanding that people pity them afresh as though they themselves were the victims. Because to do so is to place themselves at the center of all things, to expect recompense forever, and never to have to look to themselves to address anything—even if it is something they could only address themselves. Such people have nothing to say about themselves, or about anyone outside of the West, because to do so might lead them to change the direction in which their resentment is funneled. It might in fact cause them to finally turn their gaze on themselves. If the West is not responsible for all ills in the world, in its past and in the past and present of others, then other actors must be held responsible. And some people would have to look to themselves to explain their lack of outcomes, achievements, and more. They would have to look into the causes of their discontents and see that at least one of them is themselves. How much easier it is to keep claiming that another party—and a vast, historic party at tha...

They are interested in native tribes solely in order to try to demonstrate how bankrupt the West is. And they are interested in every other civilization in no serious sense. They do not learn the languages of other civilizations or study their cultures in any depth—certainly to nothing like the extent that the much-derided “Orientalists” and others from the Western past did. But they praise any culture so long as it is not Western solely and simply in order to denigrate and devalue the West. As a result, they reach their final end argument, which is to demand why anyone should admire or wish to continue a civilization that has done so much wrong and had such bigotry and hatred built in throughout its history.

Without an ability to feel gratitude, all of human life and human experience is a marketplace of blame, where people tear up the landscape of the past and present hoping to find other people to blame and upon whom they can transfer their frustrations. Without gratitude, the prevailing attitudes of life are blame and resentment. Because if you do not feel any gratitude for anything that has been passed on to you, then all you can feel is bitterness over what you have not got.

You might regard it as a terrible thing that not everybody in the Western past always held views wholly in accordance with the social and moral values that we happen to adhere to in the 2020s. You might deride that fact or otherwise pick over it. But it makes no sense to do so unless you also recognize, for instance, that to live in the West in this time is to enjoy a piece of historical good fortune unlike almost any good fortune in history. You might feel some regret that things happened in the eighteenth century that people are not proud of today. But you might balance that out by feeling some gratitude to be part of a civilization in which all human life came to be regarded as sacred, in which people are regarded as being endowed with innate dignity, in which peace is the normal state of affairs and where wrongs done in the current day can be remedied through the application of the law.

People who have the good fortune to live in the West are not just the inheritors of comparatively good economic fortune. They have inherited a form of government, justice, and law for which they ought to feel profound gratitude. It may not always be perfect, but it is better by far than any of the alternatives on offer. And when it comes to what we in the West have inherited all around us, this must count as one of the greatest gifts, if not the greatest gift, that any civilization has left for those who came after. A gift not just in liberal order and beautiful cities and landscapes but in artistic achievement, cultural inheritance, and a wealth of examples of how to live. Examples never exceeded anywhere on earth.

But a life lived without gratitude is not a life properly lived. It is a life that is lived off-kilter: one in which, incapable of realizing what you have to be thankful for, you are left with nothing but your resentments and can be contented by nothing but revenge.

There are several reminders in this affair. One is that the people who claim to know what they are talking about do not. They are mostly ignorant, sloppy, and less than half-informed. The other is that the slightest firm pushback can bring about a reversal. So why does this not happen more often? Why is it that the same language, ideas, assertions, and dogmatisms are able to run through everything? For that is what they have done. It doesn’t matter how delicate or profound the subject, how frivolous or deep it might be. Everything is inspected under the same remorseless light. And everything comes out looking equally and eternally guilty.

Because one of the things that has made the West is its openness to ideas and influences. The history of the West is a history of gathering knowledge wherever it could be found. A history of collecting plants, ideas, languages, and styles. Not in order to subjugate or steal them but to learn from them.

After all, there is nothing wrong with white people being in an audience, any more than there is anything wrong with white people being in a congregation. If there are not enough black people in a particular gathering, it doesn’t make the gathering wrong. It may just not appeal to everyone, and it should be possible to make some peace with that, or affect it, without insisting that the cause must be “racism.”

According to critics such as Oluo, white people’s “taking” culture that is not theirs is wrong for two main reasons. The first is that they cannot know or share the roots of the culture that they are appropriating and that it hurts people who have been born into that culture to see others attempt to absorb it without feeling their pain. The second is that white people who appropriate other cultures apparently go on to make money from their appropriations, often unfairly. So when a white rapper makes money from a record deal, for instance, they are earning money that has effectively been stolen from a nonwhite person who could have done the same task at least as well, if not better.

For the history of Western culture is not a story of cultural appropriation. It is far more accurate to describe it as a story of cultural admiration. For centuries, European artists and composers looked around the world not with detestation but with admiration, even veneration.

There is something not just sad but shameful about an era trying so hard not to admire, appreciate, or even just understand the hopes and dreams of earlier days. As though everybody who dreamed or created before the present must be found to have slipped up somewhere and then be cast aside for good.

But that is just one of the problems of the ravenous expression of opprobrium now known as “cultural appropriation.” For the idea, spun off so mean-spiritedly from the American academy, does not simply claim that artists and others must “stay in their

lane,” it surveys the vast savannah of past creativity and sees it in a light that is solely negative. It looks to Western art and attempts to see it as a history of illegitimate acquisition and theft. What it resolutely fails to do is to recognize the spirit not just of generosity but of deep tribute that the history of Western art has always expressed when it met non-Western traditions.

But when painters, composers, and other artists did find their way outward from Europe, it was with a wonder and a respect that bears no resemblance to the spirit in which their actions are now commonly interpreted.

Yet Western art has constantly sought to go in another direction, opening itself up to the world and seeking to learn from it.

As the twentieth century developed, this fascination with the world beyond Europe grew. And though today, thanks to the influence of Edward Said over almost every discipline, this is seen as somehow sinister, there was nothing sinister about it. It was as a demonstration of European cosmopolitanism that great composers kept wanting to look beyond their own traditions and expand them.

For if a culture is to be condemned as insular, parochial, and limited if it is inward-looking, yet lambasted for cultural appropriation if it is outward-looking, then what exactly is a culture to do? In such a situation, it would appear that an unfair, indeed hostile, trap has been set up. One in which Western culture can be simultaneously attacked for its insularity and lambasted for not being insular enough.

Much more accurate is to understand the history of Western culture—especially as the centuries have progressed—as being a history of admiration, interest in, and praise for other cultures. And that gets to something absolutely central to the misunderstanding in the guiding anti-Western ethos of our time. Either you can see your cultural inheritance as only for yourself and

and others who happen to be born inside the same borders or culture. Or you can see it as something that you would want to share.