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.
I’ve had a very tame comment, in agreement with the article’s author, ‘awaiting approval’ for days now.
Given the unusually low number of comments here, I wonder how many others are stuck in the machine.
Crikey management – your readers are what makes you! Some of us have been around a few decades. You could at least explain your decisions to us.
You’d be lucky!
Never explain, never apologise and NEVER return subscriptions taken under false pretenses of being a serious, intelligent, tolerant forum – it is only Creeky after all, last redoubt of the bien pissants and the even less able spawn of a collapsed kultur.
The mission of the modern Right perplexes me as to how it relates in any way to a better society or at least better humanity. Conservatism I get, albeit contest; Conservatism seeks to preserve what has been proven good and be sceptical, but not necessarily dismissive, of change.
The modern Right is obsessed with mandating a myth, that the ‘West’ has been an overwhelmingly positive force for good in the world. That colonial oppression, racism, slavery, the negative legacy of colonialism (Africa, South America and parts of Asia) should be ignored in adoring the propagation of a global ‘free’ market. It is about constructing a belief in reality that is complete bullsh*t. It requires that a whole lot of real people be marginalised, despised or made criminals in the pursuit of social cohesion and development.
It is insane illogicality.
The left leaning Counter Punch has an article titled ‘Dear Mainstream Media: Please Retire the Word “Conservative”‘ in the US context, which posits that the GOP, Fox News, legacy media, alt right influence etc. is not ‘conservative’. New Yorker’s Jane Mayer who researched the Kochs, describes how ‘radical right libertarians’ claim to be ‘conservative’ but not by any standard definition.
I agree the traditional conservative (Menzies, Fraser) is a different animal from the ideological craziness and belligerence of the radical right libertarians (thankyou Drew) like Abbott, Bolt, Koch, Bannon.
But there is a sinister side even to conservatism (which is different from holding conservative views on some issues after careful reflection). A ‘conservative’ is someone who, as a matter of principle, believes today what he believed yesterday. And in fact, he’ll believe tomorrow what he believed yesterday. So he is impervious to new information or evidence or critical thinking. One wonders at what age such conservatives know everything – 25, 15, 5, or were they born knowing everything?
Even funnier is hearing Murray interviewed. Periodically, his voice drops an octave, slows, and in contrived, gravely tones he announces some banal point as if reading from the Old Testament. There is invariably a pause from his host as they wait for more meat … but it never comes. That said, even if he misses the mark more often than not, he does land some punches. And there are plenty of voices there on the sane left who could speak out but aren’t brave enough to take on the excesses of woke academia because they don’t want to risk their reputations, so sadly we are left with numbskulls who long for a time the sun never set on the British empire.
I struggle to understand what ‘woke’ means. No criticism of your comment. I just do not understand what it means or, to the extent I have a sense of it, why it is thought so virulently socially negative.
Used to be PC or ‘political correctness’, but now a catch all to denigrate enlightenment, science, education and empowered citizens; along with LGBT, immigration and other wedge issues.
Right, but what is it’s opposite – asleep, vegetative, dreamland? Are the woke-critics implying they are in one of these contra states? We know they are, but are they so stupid they don’t realise that’s what they’re describing themselves as?
A bit like the ‘do-gooder’ label. So the opponents are proud of their ‘evil-doer’ status?
Bizarre.
This is how I see it: from the right “woke” means sanctimonious humbug about issues such as race and ethnicity, gender and sexual identity, the environment and climate change. From the materialist left it can mean the same – no-one likes humbug – but more substantively can denote over-emphasis on such issues and their interconnections at the expense of class analysis, which is seen as fundamental. As such, it derails not only working class support for social progress, but also the underlying task of intellectual analysis.
So yeah, it’s pretty much a no no. But is “humbug” fair?
Like “political correctness”, “woke” has to be understood dialectically. The key to both terms is that they originated on the left.
“Politically correct” migrated from the communist left as a term for adherence to the party line, whether Moscow, Mao, or whatever. In the 70s it was often used by the new left and progressives themselves to mock any incipient authoritarianism they detected in each other. But by the 80s, the right had fully appropriated it as a handy trope with which to mimic and mock the self-righteous left.
In the case of “woke”, a black urban term for political “awakeness” to structural racism gets adopted by progressives generally. The right are quick to hear how phoney it can sound in the mouths of the white educated middle-class. So they use it to “own” the left, their chief pleasure in life, and their most effective rhetorical tactic.
It is effective because they have a point. It is difficult to stay principled and authentic while avoiding sanctimony and humbug. Just ask the christians.
As for the argument on the left about whether class should have primacy as a category for analysis, it’s been going on in left circles in my hearing since the 60s and no doubt began long before that.
In its current iterations, Guy Rundle is a top and very instructive participant, and has been since the 80s. He currently argues that there is a new dominant class, the knowledge class, whose work produces progressive values but also industrial quantities of condescension. An unreconstructed Marxian (like me, I think) might see these values (and even the condescension) as a new form of ideological “super-structure”, but I think Rundle rejected the base/superstructure model as an undergraduate.
Rundle asserts that knowledge is the new capital. I think that allows him to escape the narrow confines of materialism. However, his work also makes him a member of the new class, albeit one offended by its sanctimony. As he sighed recently, we can only be who we are (or words to that effect). Indeed. Just ask the christians.
So, it’s important to keep the R in working class. Just ask Metal Guru.
Anyway, that’s my take on “woke” and why it is important to have some sort of working definition of it. As always, I am very happy to be corrected.
Part of “woke” culture is a single-minded adherence to the concept that politics involves saying the right words about issues, and that if we only get our words exactly correct, then all the other stuff will follow naturally.
So …
Making sure everyone does Welcome to Country at the start of large gatherings – Woke.
Negotiating an actual Treaty, with clear provisions for what rights Indigenous people can expect as a result of their original ownership of Australia – Not Woke.
Woke Politics consists of constantly policing words, and never getting around to the second bit where you actually make a practical difference to people’s lives.
Well said, Rundle. Almost as tiresome as the numerically tiny examples of so-called “woke” gone too far are the endless denunciations of wokeness, a term as useful as latte-sipper or chardonnay socialist, that emanate not only from the loony right, but from sections (usually old, usually white, usually male) of the stiff-backed and righteous left.
People apparently feel silenced and afraid of their reputations – generally the same people who tell others to stop being snowflakes and take a joke!
While countless examples abound of people losing their funding, their jobs, even attacked, sometimes killed, for opposing right-wing views, those who counter wokeness are afraid of losing their “reputation”. Reminds of a similar formulation about relative power – men are afraid that women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them.
Didn’t Guy Crouchback do officer training with a Murray character?