The War on the West. Douglas Murray. Harper Collins.
Your correspondent once suggested to The New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma (ha ha through about three intermediaries) that he should run a review of books entitled ‘”Suicide/Death of the West”, of which I had found at least five, beginning with James Burnham’s 1964 volume, and added to most recently by right-wing trekkie Jonah Goldberg (2018).
Buruma’s career suffered its own petit mort a while later, and the review never got done. Today one could add a further half-dozen such titles, and British right-wing ideas warrior Douglas Murray must be frustrated that it is now simply impossible to reuse it. So The War on the West must substitute for what is another example of this genre: a catalogue of the challenges, assaults, and underminings of something that these writers call “the West”.
The failure to define that term, or to sort out the several things it could mean, always leads these books into contradiction, and usually exposes their claims to having identified an epochal shift as a nostalgia for a very limited span of recent history. The War on the West is no exception, and for the most part it canters along as a collection of loosely related chapters on race, statues, the memory of Churchill, imperialism, etc.
For much of this it offers no argument or substantial analysis as to why millions of people and thousands of institutions in the West should suddenly have taken up passionate denunciations of the history of colonialism and racism that is undeniably part of the West’s heritage, and that persists to whatever degree in the present.
Eventually he gives us a chapter on ressentiment, the idea that collective lack of achievement, exclusion etc by the unsuccessful or the oppressed, and which is as much of a theory of the present as he is willing to give — before, in the conclusion, the book takes an extraordinary turn that casts all that has gone before in a new light.
Murray certainly has much to work with. Over the past eight years or so, the US has been subject to a huge insurgent wave of challenge to the notion that the public space of its society is neutral and colour blind. Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, statue-toppling, challenging imperialism and colonialism, children’s education and much more have risen and broken across the country, bringing righteous anger with utter absurdity, resistant courage twinned with political cowardice.
The refusal to accept the everyday racism of many police departments in an age of omnipresent phone cameras became also a complete misperception of the number of black deaths at the hands of police; a fresh encounter with the legacy of slavery became The New York Times’ unhistorical “1619” project, putting slavery’s beginnings as the starting point of the US; awareness of the structural and ideological layers of racism in everyday life became a process of endless mutual denunciation fuelled by social media — and on it went.
From schools instructing white children to denounce their own racism to artists being named as beneficiaries of slavery because a great-great grandparent was associated with the trade, examples abound of the way in which a passionate and just political movement became an autonomous machine in which denunciation and inquisition work hand in hand.
That is worth serious inquiry, as to just how far and wide this movement has spread, and how much of its expression has become absurd and self-defeating. That would require statistical inquiry. Instead Murray cherry-picks from clippings files, fielding six or eight examples of anti-racist zealotry in US schools, reported widely because they were so strikingly extreme, and telling us nothing of the general mood.
There is nothing of course on the wave of right-wing hysteria that has seen the incredible overreach of state repression to control what teachers say to their students or the books in their libraries.
Were it a merely a catalogue of woke, it would be of modest use. But Murray takes on the whole task of defending the virtue of European empires and their legacy in the modern world, largely on the basis of “reversing out” accusations of colonialism — how much the British empire did to stamp out slavery etc — and the result is a dilettantism which collapses into compulsive defensiveness.
Once again he’s right to raise some of these issues; imperialism had a dual character, drawing pre-modern parts of the world into a world system. But a neurotic need to perceive the West as having only minor blemishes means that he can acknowledge the singular brutality of lurid events like the Amritsar massacre, without mentioning the quiet way in which an imposed “free”-market liberalism submitted tens of millions of Indians to famine and death over decades. Sometimes this is as absurd, and funny, as some of the absurdities he draws out of wokeness, such as an attempt to claim that Winston Churchill wasn’t racist.
The importance of that, and why this book stands as a useful measure of a whole genre of the right is that its purpose appears to be not merely defensive, but desperately so.
Murray’s background is such that if he did not exist, Anthony Powell would have had to squeeze him into The Music of Time somewhere; he is a middle-class Eton music scholarship boy, out of Magdalen college Oxford, author, age 19, of a biography of Lord Alfred Douglas.
Yeah, I know. The lack of interest in any sort of social analysis as to why such a wave of resistance and challenge would arise — hint: 30% college-educated population, three generations of multicultural immigration and integration, a mediatised culture breaking up old forms of cultural authority — is the mark of the true political aesthete, vastly exaggerating the challenge and uninterested in anything but the beautiful things, denouncing “the horror, the horror”.
The fact is that once something like critical thinking develops in a society, it starts to cease to be merely of that society and becomes global — at which point it can be turned back on to the place from whence it originated and investigate that, and its “other”, of domination and destruction. In a multicultural society that has to happen, and there will be many silly examples mixed up in the more general rational process.
In retreating into self-assuring nostrums about the glory of the West, Murray misses what’s really going on, and encourages his readers to do the same. With such blinkered, narcissistic self-assurance, endlessly maintained by a torrent of books, they missed the social transformation under way in Australia, and lost the political field. With a bit of luck, Murray and co will help them to a similar not so petit mort in the UK.
