Tag: Douglas Murray

[Member Post]

 

Douglas Murray is smart. I like him as a pundit, and I like most of what I’ve heard of his guiding principles. His latest piece in the NY Post, though, while fairly considering counter points, ends with incorrect conclusions based on differences in basic assumptions. Here’s the link, and it’s worth a read, as he […]

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Quote of the Day: Sowing Doubt and Division

 

“With each of the issues highlighted in this book the aim of the social justice campaigners has consistently been to take each one – gay, women, race, trans – that they can present as a rights grievance and make their case at its most inflammatory. Their desire is not to heal but to divide, not to placate but to inflame, not to dampen but to burn. In this again the last part of a Marxist substructure can be glimpsed. If you cannot rule a society – or pretend to rule it, or try to rule it and collapse everything – then you can do something else. In a society that is alive to its faults, and though imperfect remains a better option than anything else on offer, you sow doubt, division, animosity and fear. Most effectively you can try to make people doubt absolutely everything. Make them doubt whether the society they live in is good at all. Make them doubt that people really are treated fairly. Make them doubt whether there are any such groupings as men or women. Make them doubt almost everything. And then present yourself as having the answers: the grand, overarching, interlocking set of answers that will bring everyone to some perfect place, the details of which will follow in the post.”

– Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds (pp. 281-282). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

ACF PoMoCon #11: The Three Waves of Liberalism

 

This weekend, the podcast’s back to cultural criticism–Oliver Traldi and I continue our series of conversations about the world the internet is making. We about the quarrel between Progressives and liberalism, about the noble free speech stand of the Intellectual Dark Web and their difficulties with accounting for that nobility, about generational politics–Boomers, X-ers, Zoomers, and Millennials fighting it out to define American culture anew, the transformation of the internet from a place of anonymity to competitive exhibitionism, and also Aristotle’s treatise on the soul!

Lonesome Purple Hearts and Angry Red Ones: Love and Contempt in a Divided Red Tribe

 

Red America, blue America. It’s a crude categorization, but useful. According to Rachel Lu, the red tribe is the tribe of traditional, transcendent bourgeois values, while the blue tribe is the tribe of neo-Epicureanism, which by its nature is shallow and tepid. According to Charles Murray, the red tribe professes traditional values while struggling to practice them, while the blue tribe, for the most part, lives out these values while failing to profess them. According to Mark Regnerus, when it comes to the specific traditional values of chastity and stable family formation, while both tribes are far from paragons, on average the red tribe fails a lot harder than the blue tribe does, even though it’s the red tribe, not the blue, which promulgates language like “chastity” and “family values”. If you stop looking at averages though, something interesting happens: the red tribe splits. Red-tribe children who inherit exceptional amounts of social capital (which arises from networks of shared social norms, including trust and reciprocity) are more sexually virtuous than their blue peers, while red-tribe children with low social capital are so much less sexually virtuous than their blue peers that it drags the whole red average down below that of the blue.

This sexual split points to a more general split among conservatives: the red tribe can be crudely divided into two tribes, both of whom profess a zeal for cultural capital, but only one of which has secure access to cultural capital. (There’s not complete agreement on what social and cultural capital are, but for this essay, cultural capital includes social capital, along with other accumulated cultural riches.) As much as blue-tribe language tends to denigrate the value of the West’s cultural capital, blue-tribe children enjoy better access to that capital than many red-tribe children do. However, there’s a class of purple children – typically red-tribe children raised in blue milieus – who achieve cultural-capital royalty: whatever struggles they face, access to cultural goods, whether moral, intellectual, or aesthetic, isn’t really one of them. They inherit not just the red-tribe zeal for cultural capital, but blue-tribe access to it, an access which differs not only in quantity (more of it) from average red access, but also in kind (probably less NASCAR and more Shakespeare – brows a little higher rather than lower).

Blue-tribe access to it. How does the blue tribe maintain good access to something it publicly professes not to value much? Evidently, it must be by doing rather than saying. Culture isn’t just something you have worthy or unworthy opinions about, it’s also something you do. And a lot of blues still do it, even if their opinions about why it’s worth doing are unworthy. To be too much in enmity with the blues is to put yourself at odds with many of the vehicles still left for passing on the great achievements of our culture. Reds routinely decry the corruption of academic and arts organizations, for example, but so far have had scanty success forming organizations of their own to pass down the treasure of Western knowledge and beauty. For all the nonsense on college campuses, for all the schlock modern arts organizations promote, colleges still harbor teachers with genuine love for whatever little corner of Western heritage is their expertise and arts organizations still exhibit works of transcendent beauty. These dreaded blue, “elitists” milieus might make piss-poor advocates of the traditions they enjoy, but many in these milieus still enjoy aspects of those traditions, and in enjoying them, keep them going, at least for another generation.

Book Review: The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray

 

In the year that terrorist attacks in the UK start to resemble those suffered recently on the European continent, Douglas Murray’s new book, The Strange Death of Europe—Immigration, Identity, Islam, captures the zeitgeist perfectly. For those acquainted with Mark Steyn’s warnings in America Alone, Murray’s work is the bookend. Steyn and many others from Salman Rushdie to Pope Benedict were ignored, this is now the new reality. Murray discusses his book on the Mark Steyn Show for those interested and on a podcast with James Delingpole.

As Steyn notes this is not really a book about Islam, though it is in the subtitle. And while there is a quiet yet deepening anger which builds with Murray’s narrative, one never feels it directed at the immigrants themselves, Islamic or otherwise. It is aimed rather at the politicians, officials and intellectuals who blithely assured anyone who asked that there was nothing to worry about and that you are a bigot to even think about the subject. Murray argues that this is a cultural masochism due to existentialism and a guilt that has so permeated the continent that even neutral Sweden shares the blame for the crimes of the 20th century.

Having traveled all over Europe, speaking with both locals and recent arrivals from Lampedusa to Lesbos and from Malmo to Marseille, Murray writes a vivid account of how a long process culminated in a crisis. There is no lack of pathos for the migrants, refugee or not, but Murray’s main plea is for Europeans who are “losing the only place they have to call home.”