Reviling the West Peter Wood
EXCERPT:
The story Murray tells here is less about the old fault lines in our civilization than it is about our strange susceptibility to believing the worst about ourselves. He doesn’t really venture an explanation of this pathology, though he locates its essential basis in the willingness of Westerners to credit the idea that white people are somehow transcendentally racist — unlike the rest of humanity, which is apparently graced with innate tolerance and respect for human difference.
As a compendium of the absurdities of our age, The War on the West would be hard to surpass. As an explanation of our descent into this Boschian hell-scape, Murray’s book is circumspect. He calls attention to how those who revile our civilization steadfastly refuse to apply the same standards to any other culture or society. He observes — as have many others — that many people outside the West see with perfect lucidity that the West is both fundamentally different from and better than their own cultural legacies, and for that reason they seek to come to Western societies. They are immune to the cultural self-loathing invented by Western intellectuals, so rampant in all our key institutions.
Murray lays out the optimistic possibility that we will discover a way “to make our multi-ethnic realities work.” But he worries that something like the opposite is taking shape: a form of Western identity along “exclusionary lines,” i.e., meeting hatred of the West with reciprocal hatred of those who slander it. Of course, the third possibility is that those who foment anti-Westernism will prevail and impose their own oppressive dystopia, not unlike what already exists on many college and university campuses.
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