Douglas Murray's War on the West—A ReviewIf 'The Strange Death of Europe' was a requiem for a stricken continent, 'War on the West' is intended to be an act of defiance.
Gisa Tunbridge
23 Jun 2022
At a speaking event hosted by the Show-Me Institute last November, Douglas Murray opened his remarks with some reflections on the influence of T.S. Eliot. Eliot had done for Murray, he said, something similar to what he had done for the late English philosopher Roger Scruton, who wrote in his memoirs that the poet had “saved him from Oswald Spengler.” Intrigued, I decided to have a look at Spengler’s best-known work before reading Murray’s new book, hoping to gain some idea of what exactly he was so grateful for having escaped. This was not difficult to ascertain. Excavating a copy of The Decline of the West from the nearest library, my first impressions were forbidding. Dimensions—unwieldy; weight—alarming (this is not a book you want to drop on your toes); binding—thick leather, as though to prevent the escape of insalubrious thoughts; pages—unusually musty, as though still damp with the fetid anguish of previous readers.
Flicking through this monumental tome did little to raise my spirits. In the final chapter, Spengler pronounces on the tragic and inevitable decline of Western civilisation, its yearning to unlock the mysteries of the universe gradually subverted and made hollow by enslavement to “the machine.” Science and technology, invented as tools to serve a transcendent purpose, end up destroying the dream that gave them birth, and the “Faustian” civilisation that dreamed it. It took me half an hour to extract this doom-laden insight from the hard-boiled, labyrinthine prose of the conclusion. In search of further elucidation, I turned to the beginning of the book, only to shrink at the prospect of a near hundred-page introduction, crowded with bewildering phrases like “morphology of history,” “logic of time,” and “world-formation.” With rising panic, I hurried on, flipping page after page until finally, blinking cold sweat out of bulging eyes, I arrived at “Chapter 1: The Meaning of Numbers.” Whereupon I shut the book and fled in terror. Scruton, as it happens, writes somewhere that he was first introduced to Spengler while still at school. Which just goes to show how refined the practice of child abuse had become in the English schools of that benighted age.
Fortunately, Murray’s new book War on the West steers clear of the humourless gloom so typical of other “Spenglerian” works, which take as their theme the notion that Western culture is imperilled. The book departs, in fact, from the rather lugubrious tone of Murray’s own recent output. If The Strange Death of Europe reads like a requiem for a stricken continent, War on the West is intended to be an act of defiance. “The anti-Western revisionists have been out in force in recent years,” he writes in the prelude to a chapter on history. “It is high time that we revise them in turn.” It should be obvious that the “anti-Western revisionists” to whom Murray refers represent a loose coalition of left-wing ideologues convinced that Western culture is irreparably corrupt, its institutions polluted at a fundamental level by various forms of prejudice concerning race, gender, and sexual orientation. These ideas, in Murray’s view, are not only hysterically misguided, but harmful and even dangerous.
Among the strongest passages of the book are those concerning the artistic achievements of European civilisations. Murray writes very eloquently about some of the artists, musicians, and sculptors of the Western tradition, contrasting the depth, humanity, and universality of their works with the sheer crassness of recent attacks mounted upon them. Thus, Michael Tippett’s oratorio ‘A Child of Our Time’ can be denounced for “cultural appropriation” because it incorporates Negro Spirituals. This work, as Murray movingly relates, was conceived as a protest against Kristallnacht, by a Jewish-American composer so deeply affected by the plangent music of the African-American tradition that he once wept at a performance in 1960s Baltimore, at which the largely black audience recognised the spirituals and began, spontaneously, to sing them. This piece of music is now deemed to be somehow suspect, tainted by “white supremacy” despite its profoundly humane and sympathetic intentions.
There is something very disturbing about this reductive, inquisitorial reaction to even the least objectionable artefacts of Western history. Nothing speaks more strongly to the spiritual aridity of social justice extremists than their complete insensitivity to aesthetic nuance and artistic value. Yet Murray deserves credit for not retreating into the embittered fatalism of the prophet of despair. At least with regard to artistic achievements, his defence of the Western tradition is not merely optimistic, but also completely devoid of rancour or exclusionary sentiment. The cultural treasures of the West “deserve respect not because they are the product of white people but because they are the inheritance of all mankind.” One gets the sense, when he writes on these issues, that the crowning achievements of Western culture are not doomed, that they can be reclaimed by anyone who chooses, and that those who do might find rejuvenation in them. This is the hopeful message with which he concludes the book, in fact, insisting that “when people ask where meaning can be found, they should be encouraged to look at what is all around them and just beneath their feet … It is all that they will ever need.”
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/06/23/murrays-war-on-the-west-a-review/
