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Can a Sexual Revolutionary Save the West?
To what extent can a sexual revolutionary be counted upon to defend Western civilization, even a sexual revolutionary who believes he is quite conventional?
Douglas Murray is wicked smart. He can write and speak rings around the likes of me. He is witty, droll, dramatic, deadpan. Because of these theatrical attributes, and that he is good on a whole host of conservative issues, Murray is catnip to a plethora of important conservatives.
And now he is out with an excellent new book—The War on the West, a look at those who want to tear down our past, all that is European, straight, male, and white.
In this new book, he turns to the Culture War on the West by those who want to tear down statues, ruin reputations, paint over art, even dig up or otherwise denigrate plants, yes plants, that are deemed too white and too colonial. Just like math and being on time, plants are now racist. The War on the West is an immensely satisfying book, and he hits every one of the right notes. It is highly recommended.
But one thing is missing, and it is a massive thing, a foundational thing, in defending the West. And it is Mr. Murray’s blind spot.
The great writer/thinker/teacher Michael Uhlmann used to say that every country has a sexual constitution. These are largely unwritten but widely understood. The sexual constitution encompasses what is allowed and what is not allowed. Divorce was a scandal. Adultery was condemned. Unwed mothers got married lickety-split.
Janet Yellen, yes, that one, published a marvelous paper on how shotgun weddings largely disappeared with widespread availability of the contraceptive pill and how this has been a detriment to women. The great project of the Left is to destroy this sexual Constitution. Indeed, all of this has been upended.
Besides divorce, adultery, and much else, the sexual constitution did not allow sodomy. Oh sure, boys lurked around dark places, as they still do, but it was frowned upon. It was even illegal in some places. And though some folks may have smirked at such behavior and looked the other way, it still fell outside what the sexual constitution allowed.
Mr. Murray does not look kindly on those who hold these views that he calls “niche.”
He was not happy that some of us “niche” holders spoke at the National Conservative Conference in Orlando last year. In a subsequent column, he bemoaned that some “thoughtful ex-liberals” might shy away from joining conservative ranks because of the likes of you and me, those who oppose abortion, no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage, and understand the pill has been among the Devil’s most masterful works.
He objects especially that such views may spring from religious belief. He says other than religion, he knows of no principled reason to oppose same-sex marriage. Murray recalled a previous conference in Europe where one of those smelly religious conservatives referred to homosexual couples “as being in a sodomitical relationship.”
Mr. Murray does not like that word. Sodomy is an ugly word for an ugly thing that Mr. Murray writes about downright poetically. I do not know what Mr. Murray does, but I know what he professes, in that he is downright evangelical. In his otherwise clever book The Madness of Crowds, he talks about sodomy as the great mystery that gives straight men a glimpse into something they obsess about, and that is what women feel like when they are penetrated. No kidding.
So blinded is Mr. Murray by his own revolutionary predilections, he thinks the war on the West started roughly on the day Jesse Jackson led a crowd down Palm Drive at Stanford shouting, “hey, hey, oh, oh, western civ has got to go,” which was an effort to eliminate core curriculum of dead white males. This was in 1987.
Mr. Murray does not recognize that the Culture War on the West began a few decades prior. Consider that in 1962 prayer was kicked out of government schools. The Bible was kicked out the next year. Consider that as late as the 1950s, fornication was illegal in at least 38 states. Adultery was illegal in all but five states. Sodomy was illegal in all the states. Even seduction was considered both tort and a crime. Contraception was forbidden in most places.
Each of these laws reflected fundamental aspects of Christian teaching. Striking all this down and much else was a genuine revolution in civilization. And what followed? Contraception was made constitutional, followed by legal abortion, followed by constitutional sodomy, followed by a redefinition of marriage. These were revolutionary moments, whether Mr. Murray sees them that way or not. Indeed, Mr. Murray cheers them. But what followed has been destruction to the West.
French author Olivier Roy calls this the “new faith of the desiring subject”—whatever we desire to do, we have the right and even the obligation to do. And Roy wonders if this may be a current too strong for Christian civilization to resist. The West is Christian civilization.
Douglas Murray may be quite good—he is quite good—on defending Western art and music, Western horticulture, Western history, and all the rest. Murray is good on these tactics. On strategy, he is bad, very bad. On strategy, in fact, whether Murray knows it or not, he is with the enemy of the West.
[Image Credit: Douglas Murray’s Twitter account]
Published in General
I find Murray tiresome. But that’s me. I couldn’t believe how Tucker Carlson was fawning over him.
I find Murray to be interesting. He has insights on a number of issues, but also has a huge blind spot. I’ve watched quite a few of his podcast interviews, read his prior books, and am in the middle of The War on the West.
This is one of the areas in which I find Murray to be obtuse to an astonishing degree. I’ve even heard Murray discuss the problem of declining birth rates, and advance the idea that it is reasonable for a society to have a special consideration for relationships that lead to perpetuation of the species. So he does know one principled reason, but he rejects it. I do suspect that this is due to his own sexual perversion, in his particular case, but I do see other prominent people making the same point.
Another strange thing about Murray is his admission that what he calls “the West” is founded on Christianity. He even seems to have some respect for the Christian faith. Yet when he defends “the West,” it is the so-called Enlightenment that he defends. I think that the Enlightenment, in its various forms, is the ideology of the movement that is destroying “the West.”
It may be that part of the original so-called Enlightenment wasn’t too bad. There is the line of thought leading from figures like Rousseau and Voltaire to the French Revolution to the early Communists to Hegel and Marx and, I think, to both Hitlerism and Stalinism. There is another line of thought leading from philosophers like Locke and Smith, which seems to lead to a doctrine of “tolerance” that, in practice, amounts to an unwillingness to enforce any norms of behavior or declare any ideas to be anathema.
Thus, we have an aggressive Left undermining tradition at every turn, and a passive Right that refuses to fight effectively.
@arizonapatriot
I don’t agree with you on a lot of things. Should I delete your posts? Rail against your positions? Perhaps I could get a mob to storm your house?
You see, “tolerance” is not “acceptance” or “celebration”. It’s control over a negative reaction. Drought-tolerant plants still grow better when watered, while aerotolerant bacteria grow as well if not better without air. When you can’t tolerate something, it becomes intolerable.
The root of modern tolerance goes back to the 30 Years War and the Peace of Westphalia, as people realized just what was involved in achieving religious conformity. Tolerance means that we can agree to disagree rather than kill each other. Do you really want to replicate the Woke purity spiral with constant infighting?
If it was not for tolerance, there is no way the USA would have formed. The Founding Fathers disagreed greatly. Hell, this has been part of our country for a long time – we used to be able to put aside differences in politics, religion, and private behavior aside to get along and enjoy life.
Historically, at the time of the Founding, we did not have significant differences in religion or private behavior.
I want enforcement of traditional standards of morality. I think that we did this for about 180 years in this country, through the 1960s. I wasn’t alive at that time. It seems to have been much better than the world of today.
You can rail against my positions if you wish. You cannot delete my posts, though the powers-that-be at Ricochet could, if they wished. The idea that I would approve of a mob storming someone’s house is absurd.
What is not absurd is to ostracize people who have despicable views. Even through the early 1960s, illegitimacy was a source of shame and social stigma. That was a good thing, in my view. Sodomite perversion was a source of shame through the 1980s. That was a good thing too, in my view.
Many of these standards of behavior used to be enforced by the law, too. It seems to me that our country was a much better place when we did so. Marriage rates were high, and we were having enough kids to keep the population growing modestly.
This is of course not your main point, but I have always wondered why on earth anyone would be in favor of government schools requiring and enforcing a version of religion. It gives me the willies, and I’m not even religious.
[Bold added]
How are the traditional standards to be enforced, if not by someone (the police? Concerned neighbors? The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice?) storming the presumed offender’s house (or dinner out, or gay dance club, or whatever)?
First, I don’t think it was forced. Second, this was before the DOE, federalized education, and when local school boards had far more control over education.
In other words, religious education existed in schools at the pleasure of their local communities. The laws that banned them abrogated the parents’ and communities’ rights to teach their local children how they saw fit.
Fair point. I have always envisioned the classroom prayers being led by 21st-century public school teachers, which is horrifying to contemplate.
They could be enforced by the police, as they used to be in the case of laws prohibiting sodomy. That is not a mob storming someone’s house. It is the duly constituted authorities enforcing the law.
As to informal enforcement mechanisms, I specifically mentioned these in a portion of my comment that you did not cite:
That’s a method of enforcement.
Ostracism includes declining to hire people. I would favor a law or rule prohibiting sodomites from being employed as school teachers, for example. We used to have such laws, including for the military. Not very long ago, in fact.
Similar stigma and ostracism applied to the mothers of bastards, too. It seemed to work pretty well.
Good point, Charlotte. It is hard to see how we can get back to where we used to be.
I’m not a Catholic, but I did go to Catholic high school. We used to start the day with the Pledge and the Prayer. Meaning the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Lord’s Prayer. This is the sort of thing that I’d like to see.
Politically, it might be feasible in many areas, perhaps even entire states. Not nationwide, at present, but that might change.
Basically that means that you cancel them?
But it is no longer the case. Who’s cancelling whom today?
From a freedom of expression point of view, normalising cancel culture is a bad thing. There’s a straight line between Helen Thomas ‘resigning’ being seen as acceptable and people being cancelled for conservative views today.
So obviously I vote for The Commission, but what exactly are traditional standards?
Do women get the vote? That’s not traditional. Wear trousers? Also not traditional.
Is miscegenation going to be legal? Again, not traditional.
How about traditional ages for marriage? (14?)
How about traditional careers for women? (Are there any?)
At any point in time ‘traditional standards’ are invented by the people – not in the sense that we make them up out of nothing, but that we curate them from a set of options. We invent tradition as we go along by picking what makes sense to us based on the mores of today.
In this case, since there will likely be some ‘discussion’ because there are widely varying mores, I think the basis of curation might well need to be articulated.
For the record, I have no desire whatsoever to “get back” to any of this in public schools (although I’d be 100% in favor of abolishing the Department of Education). Private schools can and should make whatever rules they want.
Pretty sure Jerry would be on board with quite a bit of this. :-)
Drop kick the Department of Education for certain. Education has declined across its entire existence.
Alexander Hamilton unavailable to comment.
Aaron Burr put a bullet in his political career there along with Hamilton.
@arizonapatriot
I am a moderator. That includes the ability to edit and delete posts. I don’t use it for political vendettas or to be religious police.
I honestly don’t know if most people would be on board for locking up Davin Rubin or Richard Grinnell for sexual immorality. I also worry the Left might use similar laws against us.
There is a cultural power base. There is an economic power base, and there is a social power base. If you talk about “traditional”, there have been many traditions throughout history. It seems to me that being tolerant of others is not at all traditional, not only culturally, socially and economically, or even psychologically — it is not fundamentally part of being human. The question is which power base would you approve of? Which do you want to live within?
In small social or business groups these are called cliques. In larger social or political groups they’re called organizations or factions or associations. In the larger sense they are called political parties, professional organizations, or NGOs, or national associations. In the large scale, there’s a group for every legal view, for every medical condition, political view, hobby, profession or interest there is. On the small scale there are cliques in pretty much every personal view, corporate department, language and neighborhood. I’ve seen people denied promotion because they did not belong to the right group. There are jobs the entry of which requires you to be an adherent of a particular group.
The essential drive for “cancel culture” has always been with us, and culturally, there have always been groups. Try being a Christian in some areas of Africa or the Middle East today.
Everywhere the majority groups have effective control over minority groups. The US was founded in part on trying to minimize the divisive and destructive aspects of religious factionalism, class and heritage, and political view. But it is necessary that there be one language, one morality, and one concept of humanity, the acceptance of one civic good, and especially the adoption of one concept of truth. This is necessary for a unified and functional culture.
We are now seeing the effects in all these areas of a major effort to change the nature of the United States from one culture to another. I won’t recite all the bizarre changes here again, so many have already cataloged them, but the choice today is between a culture of woke, socialist, pagan, “personal truth”, anything goes, and pervasive repression, and a culture of Judeo-Christian morality, individual autonomy, right to ownership, religious freedom, and tempered liberty (or “controlled freedom”).
These two cultures cannot coexist, especially when one of them refuses to let the other exist. Only one group will become dominant and prevail. If it has not become too late to choose, this is our choice.
The prayer was rather anodyne. Written by a Catholic priest, a Jewish Rabbi, and a Protestant Minister. It was not controversial at all.
“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.”
11 out of 13 lower court judges determined it did not violate the Constitution. The Supremes disagreed. When it was struck down, there were protests coast to coast, all major newspaper condemned the decision. Every governor except one condemned the decision.
I think that most people would not be on board with anti-sodomy laws at this time. I’m undecided myself. I was using this as an example of an enforcement mechanism that was not a mob storming someone’s house.
I will try to answer these in turn.
I am ambivalent about women having the vote. Women are plainly intelligent enough to have the vote. There is a significant difference in the male-female distribution of certain Big Five personality traits, particularly trait neuroticism and agreeableness. This may be the source of much of the Left-leaning nature of our current politics, which often looks like the feminization of society, an overprotectiveness reminiscent of the Oedipal mother model, and a refusal to face difficult facts. It’s hard to be empirical about this, because we have a limited number of societal examples, and there have been many other things going on. Across the developed world, the near-universal result of recent changes has been a precipitous drop in the birth rate, which does seem likely to lead to demographic suicide, if not reversed.
I have no objection to women wearing trousers. I liked Pastor John MacArthur’s response on this issue, which was to point out that in Biblical times, the men weren’t wearing trousers either. They were wearing robes, generally. The important thing, I think, is to adopt customs of dress and grooming that allow us to easily distinguish men from women.
Anti-miscegenation laws were not traditional. Lincoln opposed them, for example. Such laws were one consequence of the slavery system in the US, which was a departure from traditional British law.
I don’t know where you get the idea that the traditional age of marriage was 14. That may have been true in some times and places, but I’m not looking to the traditions of the Jews, or the Greeks or Romans, or even the Indians. I generally look to 17-19th Century British and American traditions. Some quick internet research (here is a summary) suggests that the average age of marriage, for a woman, was around 20-22 in the Colonial period, rising to around 22-24 in the late 19th and early 20th Century.
I strongly support the traditional career for women, which was to be a wife and mother. I think that this should be their top priority. This does not necessarily exclude other work. The economy has changed greatly, so I do think that we need to adapt to this, while not losing the focus on the family. Since feminism, as noted earlier, we seem to be committing slow demographic suicide. It is a problem. Jordan Peterson discusses his own observation, from working with very high-achieving women in law firms, that they almost universally decide, by their early-to-mid 30s, to get out of the rat race and try to have a family. This is much more difficult to do in one’s 30s.
Your statement that we “invent tradition as we go along” is incorrect, I think. Tradition is precisely the thing that we do not invent. It is the thing that we inherit from our forefathers. Tradition certainly developed in the past, for a variety of reasons, including religious revelation and cultural adaptation.
Christian morality. Not Judeo-Christian. They are not the same thing.
As an example, polling indicates that Jews are the most pro-abortion group in the United States. Here is a Jerusalem Post article summarizing the polling (from Pew), and reporting the widespread Jewish response to the leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs, which was to support Roe.
Edited to add: This holds for homosexuality too. This Pew poll shows that Jews are third in their acceptance of homosexuality, behind Buddhists and the religious “nones.” According to this poll, American Jews think that homosexuality should be accepted, 81%-16%. If you’re a Christian conservative, the Jews are not your allies. They are among your worst . . . let’s say adversaries.
Obviously, this does not apply to each and every individual Jew. There are some rare exceptions. I say “rare” because Jewish support for abortion, 83%-15% per Pew, is even more lopsided than for homosexuality.
It’s an oldened and wizened generation that passes on what worked and didn’t work to the new and untried generation. There is some take and leave, but in the vast majority, it’s the stuff that was passed to them that worked and goes to the next generation. Some of it does fall by the wayside – like goin courtin’ is not going to be the method of dating passed on. However, don’t be surprised if arranged marriage makes a comeback under the new cultural zeitgeist of “male and female he did not create them so go forth and be barren.”
What does this mean?
What a shame! I always thought it would be neat to be courted. Or wooed, maybe.
:-)
The rejection of male and female that is happening among 30-40% of my kids’ generation with government backed medical sterilization to go with it means that selecting a mate to build a family with is going to be nigh impossible without guidance.
It may be the best guidance will be parents arranging marriages between like minded families who reject mutilation of children and that God created them male and female.
I’m already seeing some of this in families with kids approaching 17-18. They have isolated themselves to very limited subsets of families for which their kids socialize with in the hopes a future spouse is found in those groups.
This seems like a wonderful modern-day equivalent of/replacement for arranged marriage. I would hope that the isolation you mention isn’t too extreme as people still need to navigate the broader world, but making the effort to mix with like-minded (marriage-minded!) families and peers is a great idea.
It’s pretty strict, but it encompasses a huge amount of families. Unfortunately, I’m not acceptable because my kids are in public schools.
Thank you.
When you get over a certain age, it is a massively stupid idea to date somebody that doesn’t have matching political views.