The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason

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When people claim that populations are ignorant of the history of the West, they forget that most people are ignorant about almost everything. There are prestigious universities considering eliminating the end of required notation reading, conducting, studying classical composers, (they’re all white) and of course, their music, due to this stress. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning; however, some is part of a larger international attack on reason, democracy, science, progress and the citizens of the West by dishonest scholars, hatemongers, hostile nations and human-rights abusers hoping to distract from their ongoing villainy.

On cultural appropriation vs cultural admiration I’m broadly in agreement too; while some moves in artistic history may look dubious now, for the most part the intention seems to have been well meant (Murray gives the example of Michael Tippet’s oratorios inspired by traditional black gospel spirituals which he wrote as a response to the horrors of Kristallnacht) and it seems another case where context is key. For the most part, people aren’t suggesting we stop studying Shakespeare, and anyone who does should be ignored. Murray’s answer is heavily slanted towards the US—and when you notice spellings in the book such as “color” and “labor” alongside dismissive references to someone as a “whack-job,” you begin to sense the target readership. It does seem a peculiar trait of patriotic conservatives to be indignant in the face of resentful former colonial subjects. But Wiesenthal, though a member of the same ethnos, was too far removed from the situation to pass comment in such a way.Murray’s focus is narrowly centred on a movement within universities that he doesn’t approve of, which has subsequently bubbled over into the mainstream. Edward Colston, a 17 th-century trader, had been involved in the enslavement of 80,000 African people. They seem to have had no effect whatsoever in even promoting their arguments, let alone winning them.

These arguments have bounced off British society leaving almost no trace, so that the fundamental character of Britain has hardly changed in a generation. Murray appears regularly in the British broadcast media, commentating on issues from a conservative standpoint, and he is often critical of Islamic fundamentalism. Bell’s central idea was that the law was incapable of delivering justice due to its structural racial unfairness.For a start, bringing Nietzsche into a debate about politics is something of a double-edged sword, because the arguments here deployed against the social justice warriors Murray disdains can just as easily be applied to things he values and respects, notably Christianity (a religion based, in Nietzsche’s view, on slave resentment). The actual arguments made in the 1619 project turn out to be faulty and ideology-led and that simply isn’t acceptable, here I agree with Murray, but he does a bit of moaning about the validity of reframing history before he gets to the factual objections, even when he quotes historians as saying that reframing is acceptable but the 1619 Project’s inaccuracy isn’t. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn't we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Yes, to act as though these institutions are irredeemable is ridiculous, but only fringe lunatics want to dismantle science as a whole, and Murray’s silly act of pretending the views of these people are significant is tiresome.