Not long ago, I watched Douglas Murray give the same talk three times. On Mondern Wisdom, on Triggernometry, and with Jordan Peterson. He had a new book coming out, The War in the West. Before he went on his press tour, I could tell that he’d been busy doing something, because he seemed to be unusually absent for a while, and suddenly he was back on the scene being interviewed by everyone.
I’ve done a brief review of this book on my YouTube channel. So check that out if you want to know what I thought. Murray has clearly been reading his Thomas Sowell, and it’s nice to see a short, easy to read book that brings some of the same ideas to a broader audience. Not everyone is going to read Sowell, because his books are older and longer and so full of detail. Douglas has managed to craft a shorter, simpler take on some of the same material that’s easier for people to access, and that’s great.
But this isn’t another review of the book or a discussion of the themes or arguments in it. Instead, I want to talk about one question that people kept asking Douglas during his interviews. Why now? Why this? Why is all this happening at this point in time, in this way? What is the underlying cause of all this controversy, derangement, and distress?
Of course there are a thousand tiny answers to the myriad specifics of how any moment in time became just the moment it is. But people want to know what the source of all this madness (of crowds) is, in some meaningful human sense we can grasp. What drives it? Yes, there are many factors, but what motivates such conflict, such animosity, such a desire to destroy? It’s a long way, after all, to go from from criticizing something to wanting to see it all torn down and swept away. And Douglas clearly makes the case in his book that that is exactly what so many people are feeling and demanding. That is a sickness of the heart that demands explanation.
Many different contemporary thinkers have offered their own explanations for the craziness that’s infected our civilization. Jordan Peterson would describe it, I think, as the spirit of Cain vying to assert itself, the innate instinct to resent and destroy, when our sense of meaning cannot be captured by a more positive and productive vision. Douglas, perhaps, sees it as another attempt by the spirit of Marxism (which may be an avatar of the spirit of Cain) trying to bring down the West again.
Bret Weinstein and Heather Haying would probably say that it’s a symptom of the derangement caused by unregulated hyper-novelty unmooring us from the institutions that previously regulated our emotions and sanity (and Jonathan Haidt would probably agree). Ben Shapiro would say it’s a consequence of our becoming unmoored from the foundational religious ideas that provide the background value system that undergirds Western society and institutions. Mary Eberstadt would say that it’s the result of us becoming estranged from the stabilizing and productive influences of our natural familial pack structure, leading to deranged behavioral expressions like animals kept in a bad zoo.
Thomas Sowell might say that it’s the natural historical result of the unconstrained vision being put into unregulated practice again, this time in the highly-connected Western democracies, particular the English-speaking brethren. Camille Paglia would say that it’s the political and cultural culmination of Western decadence, revealed in the degradation of its art and central mythological and socio-sexual concepts, which cut the heart out of the culture decades ago. Theodore Dalrymple would probably say that it’s the result a sort of blind, adolescent destructiveness resulting from the squalor that arises when Civilization is betrayed by those who should have been its defenders.
Larry Elder would say that it’s the short-term profiteering of hustlers looking to purchase their own power and enrichment at the expense of the genuine wellbeing of the disadvantaged. Revolutions are a chaos in which the canny can get rich. Alan Bloom would say that it’s the natural consequence of the death of virtue and reason, which go hand in hand. Gad Saad would say that it’s the inflammation resulting from a terminal infection of our culture by ideological pathogens, which infected us because we were decadent and unconcerned with our own health and wanted easy answers and simple solutions.
Victor Davis Hansen and Nial Ferguson would probably both say that it’s the result of ignorance of the past, because the people of the present are absolutely drowning in the sea of their own busy monent in history and all the distractions and impulsive pleasures it affords, making the modern citizen easy to mislead and irresponsible. Sam Harris would say that people are always at a risk of falling back into primitivism, if they lack respect for reason. John MacWhorter would say, maybe, that people don’t know how to realize when they’ve had too much of a good thing and don’t know when to stop.
These explanations read like the explanations of the Old Testament, when the prophesied disaster has finally befallen and the people are crying out and wondering why. The prophets give various answers. You forgot the lessons of the past, you forgot the duties laid on you, you forgot your God, you forgot to keep watch, you forgot to keep the knowledge alive, you forgot how you got here, you forgot who and what made all this possible, you forgot about others, you forgot about yourself, you forgot about your enemies, you forgot to read, you forgot to listen, you forgot to practice what you knew, you let your guard down, you let in things you knew were dangerous, you indulged in your own pleasures and distractions to the detriment of guarding the future, you were selfish, you were greedy, you were dissolute. It’s a familiar litany.
Above all else, the prophets say that “You forgot the Lord your God.” And for the Jews, that meant everything. Their faith was the foundation of their culture and what sustained it. Not a place, because they often lost it, not wealth, because they rarely had it, not power, because they were always a small people among giants, not a royal line because they didn’t even have one for large parts of their history, not even a racial lineage, because most of the tribes were lost and even those that weren’t mixed with and even welcomed other people among them as full members.
The Jewish people were defined by a covenant with God. That was their ultimate origin. They were founded upon a contract, an idea enclosed in a matrix of mutual obligation and action between themselves and the nature of being. They were a constitutional people. One defined by free association, and contingent on choice and honoring the terms of the agreement. And it was continually brought home to them that their identity and all the benefits they derived from it were dependent on knowing and understanding and executing on that contract. This was the contract that defined them. This was the contract on which everything depended. And if they forgot it, if they forgot their God and forgot the terms under which their kingdom was founded, it crumbled.
America isn’t a theocracy, per se. But it does have a certain idea of what the founding metaphysical and moral and epistemological order is, a guiding idea, as well as a practical vision of how to relate to that idea. It’s much more ideological and therefore theological than an alternative founded in something more tangible like race or land or a royal lineage. America is a constitution, a contract between the people and the nature of world (which they held to be self-evident), certain truths and moral realities, that spells out how that relationship will be structured in the state and what the obligations of the parties are.
The constitution tells us its theory of who we are and what sort of world we live in, then prescribes how we might live in it and lays certain duties and responsibilities on us, while granting us the freedom to pursue them. It’s a covenant, a kind of wedding agreement. It is a bargain, a contract. Not a land, because most of America didn’t exist yet, and it was new, and furthermore belonged to another country. The foundation of America wasn’t wealth or a heritage of tradition because those had yet to be won. It wasn’t a race, because it set itself apart from its own founding race and declared a new identity that included new members. It wasn’t a ruling dynasty, because America didn’t have one. It was a contract. And contracts only last and only function as long as they are understood, as long as they are honored. They are contingent upon the choice of free association and the assumption of a matrix of ideas and obligations that must be performed. There was no guarantee other than faith that the contract would hold together then, and nothing else to hold it together now
America no longer knows nor wants the burden of its bargain, no longer wants to be held to the terms of a contract that no one alive devised or consented to. We’ve forgotten it, or not forgetting, reject its obligations. It is a marriage of inheritance, and the civilized world wants a divorce. We have fallen out of love with western civilization. All we can see are its faults. All we can remember are its wrongs. And yet we are bound to it. And that proximity breeds disgust, abuse, exploitation, and hatred. The God of the West has fallen, and with him his empire. Life yearns to be thrown back into the primordial chaos of destruction and renewal. There is a hunger for suffering, even for punishment, born out of the need to survive in a world where survival has become too easy.
The things we have to take for granted are too big to be comprehended, so they must be erased, thrown back into the chaos of something more comprehensible and malleable. The very greatness of it is an offense that cannot stand upon the rotten timbers that have lain long forgotten beneath its weight, unwatered like the sunken timbers of an Indian monolith. (Many massive stone Indian buildings are supported by wooden foundations that have resisted crumbling because immersion in water prevented their decay. But as the water table has fallen, they begin to dry out and to rot.) We are condemned to the ruin of a paradise that hasn’t made a paradise of our hearts. We are ruined by a heaven that remains corrupted by our humanity. We feel a desperate need to test the claims of its eternity. We long to wage war in heaven.
I don’t really think that our problems are all that complicated. Society is made up of people. And whatever deranges them does so by the means that afflict all people, and that falls upon hearts much as we all possess. Our problems are very simple, but no less immense for being simple. We’re unhappy. Unhappy with the world, unhappy with the past, unhappy with the present, unhappy with our comforts, unhappy with our opportunities, unhappy with our safety, unhappy with each other, unhappy with men, unhappy with women, unhappy with wealth, unhappy with poverty, unhappy with life, unhappy with death. We’re unsatisfied, and we don’t know how to be content.
The very fact that we have so much and need to do so little makes our unhappiness an even more despairing problem. It doesn’t matter what we do or don’t do. We don’t matter. God and his world offend us. We keep gathering more and doing more and seeing more and hearing more and building more. But for what? There is a suicidal instinct in our culture. We long to be destroyed, if only for the chance for history to begin again. If only to forget. If only to pay the price of all the guilt and arbitrary suffering we all feel crushing down upon us. Like all cultures that have ever lived, we feel the burden of blood upon us, the desperate need of sacrifice. The horror of being that cannot be hidden by comfort, but only recognized with the unleashing and placation of nightmares. If no suitable subject can be found, we will sacrifice ourselves. If only to see if anyone cares, if some better world can be bought.
Personally, I think what we’re most unhappy with is ourselves and other people. That probably sounds idiotic. Isn’t that everyone? I think we’re unhappy with the fact of ourselves and the fact of other people. I think we’re unhappy with ourselves specifically and with the people close to us (or that should be close to us) in particular. And we don’t know what to do about it. So we will look anywhere and chase anything and blame anyone and try anything and endure anything rather than have to sit and just be alone with ourselves. Because if it all stopped for just one day we wouldn’t know who we were or where we were going in this universe. And it’s better to burn out than to fade away.
Making Nobody Happy 