Assault on our values

 

BRUTAL ASSAULT ON OUR

VALUES

A civilisational shift has rocked the

underpinnings of Western societies

DOUGLAS MURRAY

In recent years it has become clear that there is a war going

on: a war on the West. This is not like earlier wars, where

armies clash and victors are declared. It is a cultural war, and

it is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of the

Western tradition and against everything good that the

Western tradition has produced.

At first, this was hard to discern.

Many of us sensed that something was wrong. We wondered

why one-sided arguments kept being made and why unfair

claims kept being levelled. But we did not realise the full

scale of what was being attempted. Not least because even

the language of ideas was corrupted. Words no longer meant

what they had until recently meant. People began to talk of

“equality”, but they did not seem to care about equal rights.

They talked of “anti-racism”, but they sounded deeply

racist. They spoke of “justice”, but they seemed to mean

“revenge”.

It is only in recent years, when the fruits of this movement

have come into plain sight, that its scale has become clear.

There is an assault going on against everything to do with

the Western world – its past, present and future. Part of that

process is that we have become locked in a cycle of unending

punishment. With no serious effort at (or even consideration

for) its alleviation.

Of course, countries and states have the right to change.

Over time a certain amount of change is inevitable. But there

seemed something loaded in what was going on: something

unbalanced and off-kilter. The arguments were being made

not out of love for the countries in question but out of a

barely disguised loathing for them. In the eyes of many

people, not least within their own populations, these

countries appeared to have done something wrong.

Something for which they must atone. The West was the

problem. The dissolving of the West was a solution.

At the same time, it had become unacceptable to talk about

any other society in a remotely similar way. Despite the

unimaginable abuses perpetrated in our own time by the

Communist Party of China, almost nobody speaks of China

with an iota of the rage and disgust poured out daily against

the West from inside the West.

Western consumers still buy their clothes cheap from China.

There is no widespread attempt at a boycott.

“Made in China” is not a badge of shame. Terrible things go

on in that country right now, and still it is treated as normal.

Authors who refuse to allow their books to be translated into

Hebrew are thrilled to see them appear in China.

Because in the developed West some different standard

applies.

With regard to women’s rights and sexual-minority rights,

and in particular when it came to the issue of racism,

everything was presented as though it had never been worse

at the point at which it had never been better. Nobody could

deny the scourge of racism – a scourge that is to be found in

some form throughout recorded history.

Yet, in recent decades, the situation in Western countries in

regard to racial equality has been better than ever. Our

societies have made an effort to get “beyond race”, led by

the example of some remarkable men and women of every

racial background, but most notably by some extraordinary

black Americans.

A war on everything

It was not inevitable that Western societies would develop,

or even aspire to, the tradition of racial tolerance that we

have. It was not inevitable that we would end up living in

societies that justly regard racism as among the most

abhorrent sins. It happened because many brave men and

women made the case, fought for that situation and claimed

their rights. In recent years, it has come to sound as though

that fight never happened.

In recent years, I have come to think of racial issues in the

West as being like a pendulum that has swung past the point

of correction and into overcorrection. As though if the

pendulum stays in a slight overcorrection for long enough,

then equality can be more firmly established.

By now, it is clear that however well-intentioned such a

belief may have been, it was wildly misguided.

Race is now an issue in all Western countries in a way it has

not been for decades. In the place of colour blindness, we

have been pushed into racial ultra-awareness. A deeply

warped picture has now been painted. Like all societies in

history, all Western nations have racism in their histories.

But that is not the only history of our countries.

Racism is not the sole lens through which our societies can

be understood, and yet it is increasingly the only lens used.

Everything in the past is seen as racist, and so everything in

the past is tainted. Though, once again, only in the Western

past, thanks to the radical racial lenses that have been laid

over everything. Terrible racism exists at present across

Africa, expressed by black Africans against other black

Africans. The Middle East and the Indian subcontinent are

rife with racism.

Travel anywhere in the Middle East – even to the

“progressive” Gulf states – and you will see a modern caste

system at work.

There are the “higher class” racial groups who run these

societies and benefit from them. And then there are the

unprotected foreign workers flown in to work for them as an

imported labour class. These people are looked down upon,

mistreated and even disposed of as though their lives were

worthless.

And in the world’s second most populated country, as

anyone who has travelled through India will know, a caste

system remains in vivid and appalling operation.

Yet we hear very little about this. Instead, the world gets

only a daily report on how the countries in the world that by

any measure have the least racism, and where racism is most

abhorred, are the homes of racism.

This warped claim even has a final extension, which is that if

other countries do have any racism, it must be because the

West exported the vice to them. As though the non-Western

world is always made up of Edenic innocents.

Here again, it is clear that some unfair ledger has been

created.

A ledger in which the West is treated by one set of standards

and the rest of the world by another. A ledger in which it

seems that the West can do no right and the rest of the world

can do no wrong. Or do wrong only because we in the West

made them do it.

These are just some of the symptoms that can be discerned

in our time. The more I have considered them and the

farther across our world that I have travelled, the clearer it

has become that this era is defined by one thing above all – a

civilisational shift that has been under way throughout our

lifetimes.

A shift that has been rocking the deep underpinnings of our

societies because it is a war on everything in those societies.

A war on everything that has marked our societies out as

unusual – even remarkable.

A war on everything that the people who live in the West

had, until very recently, taken for granted.

Sign of things to come

If this war is to prove unsuccessful, then it will need to be

exposed and pushed back against. The War on the West is a

book about what happens when one side in a cold war – the

side of democracy, reason, rights and universal principles –

prematurely surrenders. Too often, we frame this fight all

wrong. We allow it to be called temporary or on the fringe or

merely dismiss it as a culture war.

We misinterpret the aims of the participants or downplay

the role it will have in the lives of future generations.

Yet the stakes here are as high as any fight in the 20th

century, with many of the same principles involved – even

with many of the same bad actors. We have gone from

appreciating and weighing up what is good about Western

culture to saying that every part of it must be dismantled.

It is now over 30 years since the Reverend Jesse Jackson led a

crowd of protesters at Stanford University with the chant

“Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go”. Back then,

Jackson and his followers were protesting against Stanford

University’s introductory program “Western Culture”.

They proposed that there was something wrong with

teaching the Western canon and the Western tradition. But it

was what happened next that was so striking.

The university swiftly gave in, replacing the study of

“Western culture” with the study of many cultures. What

happened at Stanford in 1987 was a sign of everything to

come.

In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the

Western world followed Stanford’s lead.

The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture

became an ever less communicable subject. Indeed, it

became something of an embarrassment: the product of a

bunch of “dead white males”, to use just one of the

charming monikers that entered the language. Since then,

every effort to keep alive, let alone revive, the teaching of

Western civilisation has met with sustained hostility,

ridicule and even violence.

Academics who have sought to study Western nations in a

neutral light have been prevented from doing their work and

subjected to intimidation and defamation, including from

colleagues. In Australia, the Ramsay Centre for Western

Civilisation, whose board is chaired by former prime

minister John Howard, has tried to find universities to

partner with so students can study Western civilisation.

They have had great trouble finding any universities willing

to work with them. And that tells us something about the

speed of this great shift. Just a couple of decades ago, a

course in the history of Western civilisation was

commonplace.

Today it is so disreputable that you can’t pay universities to

do it.

In 1969, the BBC ran Sir Kenneth Clark’s extraordinary

documentary series Civilisation. It aimed to give a unified

history of Western civilisation, and it did so, informing the

understanding of millions of viewers around the world. In

2018, the BBC tried to follow this up. Civilisations (with an

emphasis on the s) was a hodgepodge creation of three

historians, trying desperately to make sure that they didn’t

sound as if they were saying the West was better than

anywhere else and giving a sort of world history that made

nothing very clear. In a few short decades, the Western

tradition has moved from being celebrated to being

embarrassing and anachronistic and, finally, to being

something shameful. It turned from a story meant to inspire

people and nurture them in their lives into a story meant to

shame people.

Of course, some swing of the pendulum is inevitable and may

even be desirable. There certainly have been times in the

past when the history of the West has been taught as though

it is a story of unabashed good. Historical criticism and

rethinking are never a bad idea. However, the hunt for

visible, tangible problems shouldn’t become a hunt for

invisible, intangible problems. Especially not if they are

carried out by dishonest people with the most extreme

answers.

If we allow malicious critics to misrepresent and hijack our

past, then the future they plan off the back of this will not be

harmonious.

It will be hell.

Through the spin cycle

Critics of Western civilisation do provide alternatives. They

venerate every culture so long as it is not Western. For

instance, all native thought and cultural expression are to be

celebrated, just so long as that native culture is not Western.

Two major problems come from celebrating all non-Western

cultures.

The first is that non-Western countries are able to get away

with contemporary crimes as monstrous as anything that

has happened in the Western past. A habit that some foreign

powers encourage.

After all, if the West is so preoccupied with denigrating

itself, what time could it find to look at the rest of the world?

But the other major problem is that it leads to a form of

parochial internationalism, where Westerners mistakenly

presume that aspects of the Western inheritance are

common aspirations across the rest of the globe. From

Australia to Canada and America and throughout Europe, a

new generation has imbibed the idea that aspects of the

Western tradition (such as “human rights”) are a historical

and global norm that have been rolled out everywhere. In

time, it has come to seem that the Western tradition that

evolved these norms has uniquely failed to live up to them

and that non- Western “Indigenous” cultures are (among

much else) purer and more enlightened than Western

culture can ever be.

These views are taught in universities and schools across the

Western world. And their results can be seen in almost every

major cultural and political institution Everything from art,

mathematics, and music to gardening, sport, and food has

been put through the same spin cycle. There are many

curiosities in all this. Not the least of them is that while the

West is assaulted for everything it has done wrong, it now

gets no credit for having got anything right. In fact, these

things – including the development of individual rights,

religious liberty, and pluralism – are held against it.

This leads us to a second, deeper puzzle. Why open

everything in the West to assault? The culture that gave the

world lifesaving advances in science, medicine and a free

market that has raised billions of people around the world

out of poverty and offered the greatest flowering of thought

anywhere in the world is interrogated through a lens of the

deepest hostility and simplicity.

The culture that produced Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bernini,

and Bach is portrayed as if it has nothing relevant to say.

New generations are taught this ignorant view of history.

They are offered a story of the West’s failings without

spending anything like a corresponding time on its glories.

Every schoolchild now knows about slavery. How many can

describe without irony, cringing or caveat the great gifts that

the Western tradition has given to the world? All aspects of

the Western tradition now suffer the same attack.

The Judeo-Christian tradition that formed a cornerstone of

the Western tradition finds itself under particular assault

and denigration.

But so does the tradition of secularism and the

Enlightenment, which produced a flourishing in politics,

sciences and the arts. And this has consequences. A new

generation does not appear to understand even the most

basic principles of free thought and free expression. Indeed,

these are themselves portrayed as products of European

Enlightenment and attacked by people who don’t

understand how or why the West came to the settlements

that it did over religion. Nor how the prioritising of the

scientific method allowed people around the world untold

improvements in their lives. Instead, these inheritances are

criticised as examples of Western arrogance, elitism, and

undeserved superiority. As a result, everything connected

with the Western tradition is being jettisoned.

At education colleges in America, aspiring teachers have

been given training seminars where they are taught that

even the term “diversity of opinion” is “white supremacist

bullshit”.

One-sided debate

I do not wish to shut down the considerable debate that is

going on at the moment. I enjoy that debate and think it

helpful. But to date it has been riotously one-sided.

Politicians, academics, historians and activists getting away

with saying things that are not simply incorrect or

injudicious but flat-out false. They have got away with it for

far too long.

There are many facets to this war on the West. It is carried

out across the media and airwaves, throughout the education

system, from as early as preschool. It is rife within the wider

culture, where all major cultural institutions are coming

under pressure or actually volunteering to distance

themselves from their own past. And it now exists at the

very top of the American government, where one of the first

acts of the new administration was to issue an executive

order calling for “equity” and the dismantling of what it

called “systemic racism”.

We appear to be in the process of killing the goose that has

laid some very golden eggs.

This is an edited extract from The War on the West: How to

Prevail in the Age of Unreason by Douglas Murray, published

by HarperCollins on May 18.