The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

By and large, any and all additions to the canons of Western art are welcomed, and if there are gaps that exist, then these are gaps that practitioners are actively seeking to fill.

there is no reason why culture should be regarded as having borders that cannot be traversed. On the contrary, the whole history of culture is one of sharing, borrowing, imitating, and admiring. Who would have it any other way? Only, it seems, a movement almost entirely centered in the West itself that believes—or claims to believe—that the West alone should not be admired and must not be allowed to admire in turn. This belief is not just factually wrong. It is morally wrong: an error that not only would rob the West of its own culture but would rob the rest of the world of sharing in it.

And so at this stage, the proponents of the theory fell back onto a number of deflecting moves. The first was to claim that what was going on was an entirely invented hysteria and that the people who were now talking about CRT had simply created a new enemy to rail at that was in fact no more than a figment of their imagination—predominantly the imagination of the American right.

This overlapped with a second move that was also deployed. Which was the pretense—practiced by Joy Reid of MSNBC, among others, on her evening show—not only that CRT was not

being taught in American schools but that, in any case, CRT was not what critics said it was. At one and the same time, people such as Reid argued, CRT was both too complex for ordinary people to understand and an exceptionally obvious demand for social justice.

So at one and the same time, CRT did not exist, was not being taught, was being taught (and that was a good thing), and was also too complex for most mortals to understand (although we should praise those who invented such a clear and necessary theory).

The first way to answer it is to try to take the path that Rufo tried to take. That is to say—basically, I do not want to see color. I do not want to see people primarily through the prism of their skin pigmentation. I think that skin color is essentially uninteresting and unimportant, and we should leave it at that. This is a perfectly respectable answer to give, and it is about the only answer that is survivable if asked such a question in any public forum today. The second way to answer it would be to step a little further along the same road as that: which is to say that effectively what is described as “white culture” is in fact no more than a part of a universal culture. And that whereas some black people and people of other races might decide to cut themselves off from allowing other people to join their party, white people should take a different route. That what is called “whiteness” is something that can be open to all people. And that whereas the traditions and cultural norms of black Americans may try to be kept back solely for the enjoyment of other black people, white culture should not be identified in such a way and should almost be a synonym for something that is open to all. So in an era that

wishes to identify people along tribal lines, “whiteness” becomes a convening body for people of any background or skin color who wish to engage themselves in an ongoing tradition known in shorthand as the Western tradition.

Outside China, Chinese culture is a matter for scholars and aficionados of Chinese culture. Whereas the culture created by white people in the West belongs to the world, and a disproportionate swath of the world wants to be a part of it.

For there is, even today, no serious movement of peoples in the world struggling to get into modern China. For all its financial prowess, the world does not wish to move to that country. It does want to move to America and will go to extraordinary lengths—even the risk of life—to reach that goal. Similarly, there is no serious global effort to break into any of the countries of Africa. Indeed, a third of sub-Saharan Africans polled in the last decade said that they wanted to move. Where they want to move is clear.

Despite everything that is said against it, America is still the world’s number one destination for migrants worldwide. And the next most desirable countries for people wanting to move are Canada, Germany, France, Australia, and the United Kingdom.8 The West must have done something right for this to be the case.

And while we are at it, one final thing. This culture that it is now so fashionable to deprecate, and which people across the West have been encouraged and incentivized to deprecate, remains the only culture in the world that not only tolerates but encourages such a dialogue against itself. It is the only culture that actually rewards its critics. And there is one final oddity here worth noting. For the countries and cultures about which the worst things are now said are also the only countries demonstrably capable of producing the governing class unlike all of the others.

It is America that has twice elected a black president—the son of a father from Kenya. It is America whose current vice president is the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica. It is the cabinet of the United Kingdom that includes the children of immigrants from Kenya, Tanzania, Pakistan, Uganda, and Ghana and an immigrant who was born in India. The cabinets of countries across Africa and Asia do not reciprocate this diversity, but it is no matter. The West is happy to accept the benefits this brings, even if others are not.”

In the absence of anything else, the only public ethic in the West that people are encouraged to unite around is opposition toward itself.

Anyone else might conclude from this that the game that DiAngelo, Kendi, and others are inviting people to participate in is unwinnable. It is never possible to be antiracist enough for these people, and it seems fair to conclude that they are unfair actors.

Even if the ambition is to have an absolute equality of outcomes in our societies, there doesn’t appear to be any serious

reflection on how these theories are practically going to help us reach that state.

Still, it is the question that waits after this conclusion that is more pertinent. When you are invited to play an unwinnable game, a thought will inevitably pop into your head: even if this game could be won, would it be a game worth winning? In recent years, Americans and other people in the West have fallen over themselves to prove that they are not what their critics say that they are. They try to prove that they are not racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and more, and hope that it is understood that while their history may have included racism, racism was not by any means the sole point of their history. Governments, individuals, sports teams, awards ceremonies, and all

cultural institutions have bent over themselves to demonstrate their diversity. They have gone out of their way to increase their enrollment and recruitment of people who are not white. They have tried to make sure not just that minority groups are represented in every walk of life but that they are overrepresented. So that there is actually more visibility in the public eye than there is in the public as a whole. The aim has behind it a presumption that if exact representation or overrepresentation is achieved, then something great will happen. And while it is true that a society that allows its most talented people to rise as seamlessly as possible can be advantaged, there is no evidence that a society thrives by developing the racial and cultural obsessions that the West has now developed.

At the end of all of this, while the West mires itself in this ever-greater self-inflicted sclerosis, does the West beat China? Does it even stand a chance? Is the game that our entire culture has dedicated itself to even a game worth playing?

But no greater threat exists than that which comes from people inside the West intent on pulling apart the fabric of our societies, piece by piece. By assaulting the majority populations in these countries. By saying that our histories are entirely reprehensible and have nothing good to be said about them. By claiming that everything in our past that has led up to our present is irredeemably riddled with sin and that while these same sins have beset every society in history, the debtor should knock at only one door. And most importantly by those who pretend that a civilization that has given more to the world in knowledge, understanding, and culture than any other in history somehow has nothing whatsoever to be said for it. What is anyone to say or do in the face of such myopic, omnipresent hatred? We have, it seems to me, only a couple of options. They are options that remain the same today as they have always been. One is to fight and defend our own history along clear but exclusionary lines. The steam building for this backlash is already starting to become visible. It would consist of a brutal but logical calibration. If people decide that they have contempt for our ancestors, then we will have contempt for theirs. There is, after all, no reason why everybody in the West should agree to remain stuck forever in the position of a masochist with no safe word. More likely is that a growing number of people will come to reject the whole game. They might reply with the follo...

Fortunately, there are also wiser voices around. One of them is the American writer Thomas Chatterton Williams. In his recent memoir, Self-Portrait in Black and White, Williams writes: “One way or another, we are going to have to figure out how to make our multi-ethnic realities work, and one of the great intellectual projects facing us—in America and abroad—will be to develop a vision of ourselves strong and supple enough both to acknowledge the lingering importance of inherited group identities while also attenuating, rather than reinforcing, the extent to which such identities are able to define us.”

the most shocking aspect of today’s mainstream antiracist discourse is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race—specifically the specialness of whiteness—that white supremacist thinkers cherish. “Woke” antiracism proceeds from the premise that race is real—if not biological, then socially constructed and therefore equally if not more significant still—putting it in sync with toxic presumptions of white supremacism that would also like to insist on the fundamentality of racial difference. Working toward opposing conclusions, racists and many antiracists alike eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while any of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice.18 It may seem today that there are more people on the side of Kendi and DiAngelo than there are on the side of Williams. But history is on Williams’s side. And not just in the presumptuous, too often heard claim that the future will bear him out. But in the sense that the recent and distant past already does so. Glenn Loury, Adrian Piper, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and many others have made a similar point, and like a growing number of others, Williams marshals them to his side. For all have understood that the best of human knowledge and culture must be transferable

and understandable across racial and social lines. Otherwise, we decide that some things must be cordoned off, offered to, and appreciated by only certain racial or ethnic groups. That way lies a replay of all the worst things of the past. Replayed in the guise of opposition to just such a replay.

We in the West are lucky because men and women before us worked hard to make it so and performed feats extraordinary and mundane to see that luck was what we got.

And to recognize that “any human being sufficiently curious and motivated can fully possess another culture, no matter how ‘alien’ it may appear to be.”