The War on the West | Douglas Murray | EP 247

I think it, by this stage, it is clear that there is not an aspect of Western culture that has not been assaulted at such a fundamental and dishonest level that if you were to continue this game, there’s just nothing left. Nothing.

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Hello everyone, I'm pleased to be talking today to Mr. Douglas Murray, who is associate editor of The Spectator and is now based in New York. His latest publication, The Madness of Crowds, was a bestseller. His last publication, The Madness of Krauts, was a bestseller and Book of the Year for The Times and The Sunday Times. The book before that, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam was published by Bloomsbury in May 2017. It spent almost 20 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list and was the number one bestseller in non-fiction. Douglas and I have spoken several times before publicly on my podcast and for Unheard, and he also moderated a discussion I had with Sam Harris.

I've just finished his latest book, which is not out yet, The War on the West. When is it out, Douglas?

It's out on the 26th of April, so um, hopefully by the time people see this it will be out.

Yeah, so um, that's what we're going to talk about today, your new book. I read it yesterday, and I thought I might start with something technical in some sense, terminological. It might be regarded as a pretty inflammatory title, The War on the West, and maybe we'll start with that. What do you mean by "war" and why use that term?

Um, essentially the— that’s interesting, I thought you were going to start with "the West," which is well, we'll do that naughty one next.

Yeah, well, we'll do that next for sure.

Uh, war, uh, because what I say in the book is that this is what we've been going through. We've been going through a war on everything to do with the foundations of the West—everything to do with the results of the Western inheritance. And when I say that, of course, I mean the war, as I do it, bit by bit on Western history, a war on Western peoples, a war on Western culture, a war on Western religion and philosophy. This position that I argue that we've come to in the present age, where everything is bad if it came from us—let me say "us" in the West—and everything is good so long as it hasn't come from us.

Now, I should stress, by the way, that what I'm describing here is Western anti-Westernism. There are plenty of other forms of anti-Westernism—Russian anti-Westernism, there's Chinese anti-Westernism, all sorts of other kinds—but the one that I think is most interesting, partly because it's so pathological, is what I'm really writing about here, which is Western anti-Westernism. Why we in the West have arrived at this strange place where we venerate everything so long as it's not our own. We respect things so long as it hasn't been produced by the society that also produced us.

And I do think this is a fundamental assault. I think it's a fundamental assault, as I try to demonstrate in the book, on all of the foundations, the principles, the foundational figures, the heroes, the great stories, the great themes of the West, even. I have all come in recent decades under this just relentless assault and I try to explain why I think that's happened. It's not an entirely new phenomenon, as you know. I mean it's been a strain of Western thought, arguably, for some centuries, if not longer. But that in recent decades it's picked up a pace, and it's picked up a pace for some very obvious reasons.

After the colonial era, it was inevitable that there was going to be an anti-colonial backlash, a post-colonial movement, but that's lingered and turned into something else, as have all of the other backlashes that I lay out. So I do think it's a complete and fundamental assault on everything that the West has produced, and I think that's why it's deserving of the term.

So, to what end?

Well, that's a very interesting question because, of course, it’s a different aim for different people. I mean, one of the people I write about at one point in the book is Fanon, Franz Fanon, a distinguished and highly cited postcolonial author who, like Edward Said, had a profound influence in the academy. The forward to his last book was written by Sartre. He was a very, very impressive in many ways figure.

Um, but his version of what should happen in the post-colonial era was for instance— I mean, basically entirely Marxist. And it’s one of the ironies I try to tease out about this— that, for instance, if in the post-colonial era, people had argued that societies that have been colonized should be returned to a pre-colonial condition with a return to, let’s say, more of the native political and other habits, then that would have been one thing.

But writers like Fanon were not doing that; they were arguing that the answer to the colonial era was Marxism. And, of course, that has this tremendous irony, doesn’t it? Which is that they say, well, this one form of Westernism—Western colonialism—must be replaced because it's Western. And what we'll replace it with is Western Marxism.

And so that’s just one of the motivations I think was a very strong motivation, certainly in the immediate period of the post-colonial era. There are different versions of it now; of course, there’s the, let’s say, the social one, the one where it’s just rather gauche. I mean, of course, famously, writers like Orwell pointed this out many decades ago—rather gauche to celebrate anything about your own society and indeed regarded as being slightly backward—a sign of a sort of low-resolution figure that you would do such a thing.

Whereas the veneration of other cultures was a demonstration of sophistication—a sophisticate would do that. But we do end up in this position, today, which is much more dangerous than that.

One of the reasons I do the assault on Western history—and I do do it also by individuals, you know, the figures—is that it used to be, and suddenly in my own lifetime, I'm sure in yours, Jordan, that some of the absolutely foundational heroes of Western history have come in for specific assault.

And you could ask yourself, well, maybe that's because they're overdue some reckoning, and I think it's far more than that. And I try to show that. I try to show, for instance, that the interpretation of, say, Thomas Jefferson or Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln has actually become an assault based on the following premise: that if we can take down Churchill, we sort of can get to the roots of taking down British patriotism. If we assault Abraham Lincoln, essentially we’ve not just assaulted them; we’ve actually assaulted something that is the absolute root of the American ideal—the heroic story, the heroic figure.

And then there’s this further layer of that, which is not just with individuals, but with whole societies. So that, for instance, instead of understanding the history of racism as, well, racism is a highly regrettable and ugly human trait which is consistent across all human societies that we know about, and it is a part of Western history. Instead, the whole of Western history is made into a history of racism in which racism was the guiding force when, as I explained in the book, or any fair estimate would see it as being an element within Western history, but by no means the thing that drove Western history.

So, it's this sort of thing.

Okay, so let’s concentrate on that then. In terms of the values that you regard as being under assault in this war, what do you think the canonical values are that are the subject of this intense criticism now? And you described Marxism itself, which is also a branch of Western thought, interestingly enough, as fundamental to this criticism. So, what if it isn’t?

The Marxists basically make the claim that something like the claim that history and human institutions and perhaps individuals as well are to be understood as manifestations of their class identity. So, some form of group identity—for the classical Marxists it was class identity—and then history is to be viewed as the battle between an oppressor class and an oppressed class, and the oppressor class is motivated by the desire to exploit the victimized class. And that’s base.

And then that’s been transferred, I would say, to some degree in recent years to terminology that replaces economic class with race, but basically makes the same arguments. Does that seem okay, so far?

The claim then is that the central motivation is something like the will to use compulsion in the service of group-centered goals, I guess. What’s the Western counter claim, and why? So, that’s one question: is there a Western counter claim, and why should we reject that analysis of history, given that things do get corrupted by power?

Well, I quote in the opening, and um, and later on in the book, as you know, a phrase of Nietzsche which I sort of add to from The Genealogy of Morals when he refers to it in passing. But I think it’s such a remarkable phrase; I wanted to bring it out and throw it to the forefront. He talks in The Genealogy of Morals of people who talk about justice but mean revenge.

Now, this seems to me to be an extraordinarily pertinent insight to our era when you actually—when you talk about some of the scholars and writers that I try to tear into in this book—they have—I’m thinking of figures like Ibrahim X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, quite a number of others, like you could go on listing, but these are some of the main ones—they're simply not interested, it’s clear, in a sort of fair analysis of the West or its history or its traditions or its claims. They’re interested in a form of revenge.

And some of them are perfectly open about that. I mean, Kendi is perfectly open about the fact that in response to one thing, it might be necessary to punish another group. He says it completely frankly in his most famous book, ironically titled “How to Be an Anti-Racist.”

Um, so, and it’s extremely clear from the work of other people in this movement—people like Hannah Nicole Jones of the 1619 Project—what you’re really talking about, you’re certainly talking about with the people tearing down the heroes of the West, is that people are saying, okay, you had your go, and now we're going to have ours, and we’re going to see how you like it. How you like being talked about in extraordinarily racist terms, how you like being lumped in and homogenized as a group— for instance, white people or Western people, Western traditions.

And again, this isn’t an entirely new thing. I point out again with one of the most prominent postcolonial writers, Edward Said, who every benighted student has had to study, and almost any university has come across Orientalism at some point. And one of Said’s fundamental critiques of the West is that it essentializes people in the East.

And, you know, there’s quite a lot of points to make about that, but one of them is he’s extremely good at decentralizing people in the West. You know, he’ll refer in passing, Said, to for instance your average 19th-century European. What the hell was an average 19th-century European any more than an average 19th-century person in Africa or the Arabian Peninsula?

You know, people of this revenge kind were extraordinarily keen to use tools which they claimed to deprecate so long as they furthered their particular political goals. And I think that they exposed themselves again and again, and the problem in recent years, as I see it, in the West is that this process of revenge has taken on this exceptionally gleeful attitude.

People like DiAngelo visibly, audibly cannot believe the luck they have that they can get away with saying the things that they do. And when asked to provide evidence, they say things like DiAngelo did recently in an interview: “there's a collective glee in the white body when black bodies are punished.” You know, and her interviewer, who happens to be black, asks her for evidence of this, she has none, so she just makes another outrageous claim, and this has become part of it.

Okay, so let’s go into this as deeply as we can. So I was thinking when reading your book about—let’s start with the issue of slavery. And it’s certainly the case that the people that you’re describing and the intellectual and Marxist-influenced types who criticize the more traditional institutions of the West accept it as a given that slavery is wrong.

And so you could imagine there might be two reasons for that. One reason would be one group should not have the upper hand over another, or at least if you're the group that's in the oppressed class, you might not want that to be the case. And the other argument is there's something intrinsically wrong with slavery as such. But that—at the individual level—and so I guess one of the things that struck me is that unless you believe the second, you’re just trying to swap one form of slavery for another, and it isn't also clear why it's wrong.

And slavery is wrong if you believe that the individual should be sovereign, able to make choices, able to make free and unconstrained choices that aren’t subject to the arbitrary will of another. But to believe that, you have to believe that there is such a thing as the individual. That’s the right unit of analysis. And that the idea that that individual is valuable and sovereign in some fundamental sense is true.

And then when I think that, I think there isn't anywhere in the world where that idea has been expressed more clearly than in the West. And so it's so interesting to see people object to slavery and object to the use of arbitrary power by one group over another, but also to reject wholesale the individualism, the notion of individual value that's at the heart of the Western enterprise.

That seems to be the basis for the rejection of slavery per se. You do point out, for example, that it wasn't obvious that Karl Marx objected to slavery on moral grounds. So, so it seems it's too obvious to even be asked, “Why is slavery wrong?”

But when everything obvious is up for grabs, then it's perfectly reasonable to ask that. And so part of the problem with setting the group against the individual is that you see that the people who do that seem to invalidate their own moral claim that what they're opposing is wrong. Like, on what basis is it wrong?

And does that seem like a reasonable position to you?

Yes, I mean one of the most fascinating things about this—I go into it in the section on slavery in the book—is that, of course, historically speaking, it would have been highly unusual to be opposed to slavery in almost any era. And there were lots of reasons for that. I mean, you first of all have the—one of the questions, as you know, that I delve into at one point in the book—is why are the Enlightenment philosophers under particular attack at the moment?

And there are various explanations you could give for that. One is that there is a genuine overdue reckoning—that there is a form of Enlightenment, let’s say, fundamentalism at the moment that views figures of the Enlightenment as particularly needing this sort of scouring and reappraisal.

Another is that they happen to have the misfortune to live in an era in which both the slave trade and colonialism are currently seen as the two great wrongs of history of the West were going on, and that they didn't spend enough of their time countering them.

And that Emmanuel Kant should have spent more time addressing slavery and less time addressing all of the questions that he addressed. And that, rather than talking about superstition and trying to pull that apart, David Hume should have been interested in colonialism and on and on.

So that's another explanation. And a third explanation, which I think is perhaps more persuasive, is that actually if you go for the Enlightenment philosophers, you get to one of the absolutely key things to assault if you're going to assault the West, which are the ideas of rationalism and reason and the application of the scientific method and much more.

But the reason I mention this is that there is a—there are two aspects of the slavery thing in particular that need to be delved into. One is that thing of, well, everybody did it throughout history. And there’s a counter which, Kendi among others do, which is, well, Western slavery was worse because it was race-based. And by the way, that’s absolute nonsense.

I mean countless societies had effectively race-based slavery, and indeed it’s going on today in the Middle East and in Africa. But there was a specific reason actually why during the Enlightenment period—and I cite Thomas Jefferson on this because he’s a very interesting figure trying to think this through as they were going through it—one of the reasons why Thomas Jefferson is so insecure, interesting, because he is one of the most thoughtful people of his era, was still not aware of whether or not there was an answer or which way the answer went to what was still a live conversation then, which was the monogenesis and polygenesis argument.

That was the argument over whether or not all the human races were from the same stock, as it were, or whether we were all from different lines. That debate seems obvious to us now because it got answered later in the 19th century; it wasn't obvious at that time. And people like Jefferson were trying to do what they could with it.

So there was a sort of—there was one version of the defense of slavery which was, well, these are all totally different people. But then, of course, you have to counter that with the fact that—and again Voltaire made this point—what is the greater evil? To sell somebody and buy somebody of a different country, a different race, and so on; or to sell your neighbor or your brother or the member of your community.

Now, of course, this is just as it was when Voltaire asked the question. It's an exceedingly uncomfortable question to ask today, and I don't ask it in order to say, well, there's an obvious answer. But, as everybody knows, the slave trade only existed because people in Africa were selling their brothers and their neighbors and raiding neighboring towns of people who looked exactly like them and selling them to other black people in Africa, some of whom ended up in the slave trade going across the Atlantic, many more of whom went through the slave trade that went to Arabia.

So, it took an awfully long time for our species to even begin—and we're not there yet, by any means. I've met people in my own life who are slaves, were born slaves in Africa and elsewhere. This is by no means solved by our species. But we look back at it now as if it was perfectly obvious. Well, look, okay.

So, my understanding of the history of ideas in the deepest sense is that it's very difficult for people, first of all, to understand that there is a universally valid human essence across cultures, right? And so, most isolated peoples have regarded their own citizens as human and everyone else who isn’t part of that group as not fully human.

And to develop a universal system of value despite that proclivity has been extraordinarily difficult. And then to further make the case that each person, regardless of their social status and power and all of that, is also characterized by something that is best termed intrinsic worth that is associated with their personal sovereignty is—or their individual sovereignty—is also an extraordinarily difficult idea to conceptualize.

But so, first of all, we shouldn’t be lulled into thinking that, as you pointed out, those are human norms in some sense; they’re not. Quite the contrary. And then I do believe it is the case that, first of all, perhaps in the religious domain—we can talk about that later—and then later in the political domain, that notion of divine individual worth was developed and instituted in social institutions most effectively and in some sense solely in the West.

And yes, and we could get into that in one angle. You talk about the British Empire’s attempt to eradicate slavery worldwide, and also that that was driven by Christian notions and by Christians specifically, and that it also occurred at great expense in relationship to the British Empire’s function.

Yes, so maybe you could just walk through that a bit; we could delve into that.

Yes, this is an important—particularly important one because, yes, first of all, as you well know, many of the people like William Wilberforce, who are most prominent in arguing the case for the abolition of slavery were driven comprehensively by their Christian faith. And so, you know, as my late friend Rabbi Jonathan Sacks used to say, that the claim that morality is self-evident is self-evidently untrue.

These people were driven by a specific idea of morality and a specific set of values and indeed virtues, and it’s a modern myth that we would have got there anyway. But the sanctity of the individual, the sanctity of the individual life and the autonomy of every individual, the necessity of every individual having autonomy, was at the absolute base of the desire, first of all, to ban slavery in the British Empire.

And it was a—I guess maybe people would say, well, you would say that, wouldn’t you, Douglas, having been born and brought up in the UK, but a pretty remarkable thing that the British Empire then decided to spend a considerable amount of blood and treasure policing the high seas in order to stop slavery elsewhere—British sailors losing their lives—boarding ships without sails that they would search the cargo holds for and discover were, for instance, a Brazilian slave-trading ship trying to sneak through in disguise because Brazil didn’t get rid of slavery until the 1880s, formally.

And Britain policed the seas for this for many years—thousands of sailors lost their lives. And in the end, as I cite in the book, the actual cost of eradicating the slave trade has been shown by a number of modern historians to have actually cost Britain more, first of all in the actual endeavor, secondly, most importantly, in the paying out, the buying out effect for your companies engaged in the slave trade in order to make sure that they didn’t continue their trade, and thirdly in the increased prices that everybody in Britain had to pay throughout the 19th century because of the need to pay for goods that were coming from non-slave trading places.

These ended up being an exercise more costly than the benefits accrued during the period of slavery. So, the reason why I mention this isn’t actually just because of the way I speak or the fact that I happen to come from the UK; it’s because it then gets us to this very interesting question, which is what would restitution ever look like?

And what I've noticed—and what I, as you know, Jordan, a number of times in the book go into—is this question of reparations, as it’s currently called. What we might also call a sort of what would restitution look like on a number of historic wrongs? And I’ve been very struck in the last two decades, in particular, by the fact that we have people—and again Nietzsche puts his finger on it with uncanny precision.

I’m struck by the number of people who rip at long-closed wounds, rip them open, and then scream at everyone about how hurt they are. Because, in actual fact, on a whole range of issues of what we're now reminded are historic wrongs, something like considerable restitution happened an awfully long time ago.

I mean, you still hear people saying—it’s extremely popular in American discourse that America never addressed the issue of slavery and, you know, you think, well, fighting a long and bloody civil war about it would have been one obvious way that they clearly tried to address it. And even that, today, is pooh-poohed. A number of condemned historians say, oh, it wasn’t really about slavery; it was a different power struggle; it never is about the thing that the thing was about.

But I’m very keen to address these ugly, difficult corners of it because I say if you are interested in restitution, making atonement for any wrongs in the past, you have to look at what actually has already happened in the past by way of atonement.

Well, there’s also a Christian/slash Western or Judeo-Christian/slash Western philosophy of atonement and that is that you atone for your shortcomings, and perhaps for the unequal distribution of talents, by trying to live a responsible, generous, productive, and honest life. And that it’s actually a matter of individual moral striving rather than something that should be conceptualized at the group level.

And so I’m struck again, and still, I mean it—I cannot understand—if you accept the notion that the willingness of one group to oppress another is in some measure a human universal, it's deeply characteristic of our history, and that the reason that that's wrong is that individuals shouldn't be subject to arbitrary compulsion partly because it deprives the rest of us of their potential value as free agents, and partly because it's that—and partly because it transgresses against part of their essential nature that’s intrinsically valuable—you can't oppose slavery on moral grounds, as far as I can tell, without implicitly accepting those axioms.

And so then it's so striking to me that the people who are simultaneously accusing the West of these uniquely awful predilections accept one of the great propositions of the West as central to their entire moral doctrine. And then they accept it so centrally they don’t even notice that it's true; they just think it’s self-evident. Well, it's not so self-evident: why shouldn’t I oppress someone if I can get away with it? And why shouldn’t my group, right?

And then we have the one now, which is the form of oppression that presents itself in the guise of the victim. I constantly come back in this book to the people who present themselves as victims and are clearly the bullies—people who claim to be suffering from historic wrongs because it gives them a dominance that they would not otherwise have.

I mean, let me give you two quite significant examples of this. Two of the most celebrated writers of the last generation in America are Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibrahim X. Kendi. Both of them have been recipients of MacArthur genius awards. Kendi is now the only holder, apart from the late Elie Wiesel, of the late Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, of one of the most prestigious chairs in an American Ivy League university.

Both of them have written memoirs that have been bestsellers and are highly fated and cited everywhere. And both of them have an origin story of racism that is absolutely risible. In the case of Coates, he describes a moment in one of his memoirs of getting into an elevator with his young child, and a white woman gets into the elevator, and he says behaves dismissively towards the child.

And Coates describes how he wants to sort of fling this woman against the wall and sort of throttle her for this act of racism. And at no point suggests that actually it’s possible that the woman was having a bad day, and it didn’t matter who the child was, or that she was partially sighted or anything. You know, this immediate assumption—this is racism we’ve suffered it, and we suffered it so appallingly. I’m going to get a chapter of my book out of it.

And Ibrahim X. Kendi’s origin story of racism is equally visible, and it’s that when he was at primary school in the US, as a child on one occasion, a teacher in the classroom called on a white girl when a quiet black girl in the class also had her hand up and wasn’t called upon. And Kendi gets an entire chapter out of this.

And my suggestion on these cases is these people are presenting extremely minimal stories, reasonably small stories of, I don’t, by the way, and I don’t deny that racism exists in some forms today in America as in all societies. But they present these reasonably small examples of racism in order to present themselves as a victim, and then present themselves also as the judge and jury over everybody else currently alive.

There’s, it’s also very different to say that institutions are corrupted or tempted by the willingness to use power; the motivation to use power; and that one of the manifestations of that is various forms of arbitrary oppression; and to claim that that’s the central guiding principle of the institutions and the societies.

And then—and that also begs the question, well, if you criticize the West, let's say, for its grounding in a willingness to use arbitrary power and compulsion, what do you propose as an alternative, and why do you believe that alternative exists? Does the alternative only exist outside of the Western structure somehow? What's their ex—what's there except power?

It’s only power! It’s only power! And power, in this era, as you know, Jordan, comes through the claim of oppression—the power is best exerted in our era first of all by claiming that the person has been a victim of oppression, and secondly by wielding that alleged oppression—sometimes true oppression—but by wielding it as a tool to beat others.

So that, for instance, it's also interesting that the only reason that works—let’s say I claim moral virtue because I’m an anti-racist rather than a non-racist—well, why does that work for me? Why do I have a platform? Why do I have it?

If people were psychopathic expressers of power (and that was particularly true of Western people), they would just say something like, well, yeah, what’s your point? Try to do something about it if you think that's wrong; it’s just because you’re weak, and I’ve got the power, and I’ve got you under my thumb, and to hell with you and your stupid ideas.

But that isn’t what people do. And when they’re accused of being racist in the West, they’re struck to the heart; generally speaking, they’re ashamed of themselves. They scour their conscience to see if they can find any example of where they might not have abided by the principle of divine sovereignty somehow and make obeisances in every possible direction.

And so that in itself seems to indicate that the primary claim is fundamentally untrue, which—and as you know, I mean, I write a chapter in the book, as you know, on them—well, what everyone else in the world is doing whilst we’re doing this to ourselves.

And, you know, one of my favorite examples—I quote a lay colleague of mine’s work on this—is racism within China and racism from China about the rest of the world. But there’s a term that the Chinese use of white people that roughly translates as ghosts, the idea being that I think it’s way, and the idea is, of course, is that white people aren’t really human, like the simulacrum of a human being, but not the real thing—only the Chinese people are the real thing.

Well, well, that’s really racism for sure, and from the most heavily populated country on earth; and there’s no one certainly willing to use power. And one’s certainly willing to use power.

So, this is an oddity. So, it looks to me, for example—I’ve tried to make this case that the central animating spirit of the West is something like the spirit of voluntary association, the spirit of voluntary cooperation, uncompelled choice, recognition of universal human dignity.

Now, we all fall short of acting that out and instilling it in our institutions, but—and I see that as a reflection of a deeper—of that deeper theological claim that we discussed earlier—that each individual is, in some sense, of divine worth intrinsically.

And that, and out of that, as far as I’m concerned, emerges the entire tradition of natural rights, and they’re a delineation of the notion of that intrinsic worth. That’s not the expression of the will to power; it’s the precise opposite of that.

And so, yes, why are we so loath to give ourselves credit for the emergence of that idea in our attempts to abide by it? Why are we so prone to guilt in this regard?

Firstly, because we go about that thing that it’s regarded as being somewhat gauche and backward and unsophisticated to take such an attitude, and the second is that we—ge is a sec—and there are many other reasons, but a second is the completely misinformed idea—and this comes from America in particular, I’m afraid. It’s what America has been pumping around the world in recent decades—the idea that what is bad in the West is uniquely bad.

And that comes from a complete and wholesale ignorance, not just of history in the rest of the world, but the rest of the world now. I mean, a total startling lack of context. I mean, if anything ever suffered from context collapse in our era, it is everything to do with the West.

So that it is seen as—there’s another element, sorry, there’s another element that seems to be worthy of note too. We’re tortured for our moral insufficiency because of the existence of demonstrable inequality, and the call for equity is part of the clarion call for the people who are conducting, let’s call it, the war on the West.

And the proposition there is essentially Marxist—that wealth tends to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people, which happens to be true although those people differ—the proportion is small but the people change. But what’s so faulty about that, in my estimation, isn’t the claim that that inequality exists or even the claim that there are negative aspects of that that might need to be addressed, but the notion that that is somehow unique to the social institutions and the economic institutions of the West.

I hate that most particularly because I think it underestimates the problem. You cannot blame inequality on capitalism.

No, I mean it’s foolish.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, let's take the other options on the table. The remaining flotsam and jetsam of the Cold War—let’s say you could say maybe you could say Putin’s Russia, you can certainly say Cuba and a few other places. What do we reckon is the inequality of wealth in these countries between, let's say, the oligarchs and the average Russian?

There was a documentary Alexander Navalny bravely made before going back to Russia and being imprisoned, and he had it released after he got back to Russia the other month and was promptly imprisoned. He had the release of this documentary called Putin’s Palace, and one of the extraordinary things—which did a lot of harm for Putin at home because people were genuinely shocked and upset about this—was that Putin’s palace on the Black Sea, which he’s been building for years, the costs of hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, has among other things a vineyard attached to it, and there’s a guest area—a guest room near the vineyard, and there’s a guest lavatory in the guest room, the vineyard.

And there’s a lavatory brush there made of gold that costs the same as the average Russian makes in a year. So there’s just one example of inequality in Russia. We could do the same thing for Cuba, and let’s look at all of the other examples.

Look at North Korea. I’ve seen myself in a country, which I visited many years ago, but in a country where the general population starved by the millions in the 1990s, and the military elites were able to get hold on the black market of blue label Johnny Walker, on the most expensive whiskies on the planet.

Take any of them, because everyone talks about the post-colonials. I mean, of course, post-colonial societies that haven’t gone well, they’ve been post-colonial societies that have gone very well, like Singapore, in terms of productivity. You could say that Hong Kong until very recently was the same thing. But let’s talk about the post-colonial societies that didn’t go well—Zimbabwe, for instance. What was the wealth inequality in Zimbabwe between the wealth of Mrs. Mugabe, say, and the average Zimbabwean?

The average life expectancy in Zimbabwe during Robert Mugabe’s reign halved. He’s one of the very few leaders in the world where life expectancy actually declined faster than people were living. People were on a treadmill that was getting shorter and shorter with every step.

Well, what was wealth inequality like that? What’s wealth inequality like in Angola these days? I mean, go anywhere, and it is so obscene to present this as, as you say, as some kind of phenomenon of Western capitalism. And present it as though any other system around could be better.

And to present it as some sort of rigorous theory. So all economic systems produce inequality. It seems to be the reflection of a deep underlying law that we don’t understand that well about how advantage tends to accrue as you accrue advantage, and disadvantage tends to accrue as you accrue disadvantage—positive feedback loops of some sort.

Yes, all economic systems result in inequality. And different societies have evolved different mechanisms to deal with that. But the only system that we know of that’s also produced inequality but also produced the cessation of absolute privation are free market systems, and China didn’t manage that until they instituted free market systems.

And free market systems work because sovereign individuals exercise choice over not only purchase but also employment. And so people in the West are guilty about inequality and liable to rape themselves over the coals when its existence is pointed out, but it’s partly because they don't understand how pernicious the problem really is, and they don’t take credit for the fact that free markets have stopped people from starving.

You know, it’s only 8 percent of people now live below the UN line for absolute poverty compared to 40 percent in Ronald Reagan’s time—that’s only 40 years! And you can go back to that phenomenon that, again, I don’t think there’s any evidence that in modern China the people involved with the Politburo and the people who’ve done terribly well out of the last 20 years since particularly since China entered the WTO, I don’t think there’s any evidence of significant fears about inequality between the Chinese elite and the average person.

There is something very specific about the Western worry about inequality, which, again, like the worry about slavery, like the worry about guilt and historical guilt, is a product of a thing that ought to be recognized as being a good part of the machine. If the machine was so pernicious, we wouldn’t care about inequality. We would simply say, as I’m afraid—or we’d celebrate it even more, which is a perfectly easy thing to do—which is, well, if I have more, it’s because I’m better.

And the evidence that I’m better is clearly that I have more—and what’s your evidence for the contrary claim? Well, people have intrinsic worth. It’s like, yeah. And you could go to another of the world's biggest economies, India. I don't know if you’ve ever been there; it’s an extraordinary culture—a very, very rich, a wonderful culture of just the most extraordinary place to visit.

But it also has a form of inequality which is grotesque to any Western visitor. I’m talking, of course, about the caste system, which exists this day and which regards people if they’re born into the wrong class as being literally untouchable. The untouchable class in India is something you’re born into and you will be in for your whole life.

Now, is that inequality? Oh yes. Is it systemic? Hell yes. Is much being done about it? Not really. People take a sort of view that, well, there’s an old joke about Princess Margaret once being asked—once hearing somebody refer to an extraordinarily grand English country house and the person says, imagine this coming as just an accident of birth, and Princess Margaret saying, “Birth is no accident.”

Now, but actually, that view, whether it was correctly attributed or not, is regarded by us as being laughable and visible. It’s not being regarded as being laughable at all, visible in one of the most important societies in the world today, India.

And historically, that certainly wasn't regarded as laughable in any sense. The notion that you didn’t have divine value in some sense or ultimate value as a consequence of your birth—that was an extraordinarily difficult idea to supplant, uproot, and transform because it also seemed in some real sense self-evident.

And then the evidence was your success. And I’m afraid here we also get to what I regard as being one of the hardest to discuss but most necessary to identify aspects of what I’m trying to tackle in this book, which is what I go straight on to in the first chapter, which is what I regard as being and describe as a now outright war on white people.

Now, of course, this is very difficult to talk about because people say, first of all, you're guilty of self-pity of some kind, or, you know, boohoo, poor you. But as I show, I think in some remorseless detail in that chapter, if you want to—if you wanted for some reason to attack Africa or everyone from North Africa downwards, you would at some point, if you were to be driven by such an animus, you would be attacking black people.

If you decided to turn on everything to do with Chinese culture, at some point you would be attacking Chinese people. And so it is in the case of the West that since historically the West has been predominantly populated—not entirely, but predominantly populated—by white people, the assault on the West has to include—and now does include—an extraordinarily ugly and increasingly ugly assault on white people, whereby the only—in societies which quite rightly abhor racism, the only group of people against whom racism is completely acceptable has become white people.

And this is, to my mind, one of the great unsavables but necessary to address issues of our time because it seems to me that this can’t go on much longer. It’s an extraordinarily dangerous game that’s being played, and one with such negative consequences, not least the consequences of likely backlash, that it has to be had out in the open.

At the point at which you are deciding people’s futures in the workplace based on their—on whether they’re white or not, and that being white means you’re marked down, but application to schools and universities involves you being marked down if you’re white, but access to medical care—as I give examples of in the book—you will be deprived of it if you happen to be white in certain jurisdictions.

And this—and very much more—is absolute poison in our societies. And I think it is one of the things that has to be addressed. If we really don’t like racism, we have to tackle the rise of this new racism which has become totally acceptable and every day.

Well, to also identify Western ideas, let's say, as somehow white means that you—to the degree that those ideas have a universal value—which might even be the universal value, say, of making the case that slavery is wrong—you have to deny them to other people who aren’t of that race, right? You contaminate them irretrievably.

I’ve seen attempts, for example, to make the case that the emphasis on logic and excellence is somehow white, and that to accept those values as paramount means that you’ve just fallen under the sway of a certain kind of racism. And to the degree that that’s faulty in its essence—I mean, if the thing is worth doing, then by definition it’s worth doing well.

And if nothing is worth doing, then we don’t do anything, and there’s nothing to talk about. And so the notion that excellence is somehow associated with a given race or a racial view is preposterous and demoralizing and, but, and also something that's greatly detrimental, at least in principle, to the very people that are supposed to be helped by such doctrines.

Well, yes, it’s possible that the whiteness—the assault on white people, the assault on the Western, let’s say, the Western legacy, and that what is happening is a desire to enact that revenge I referred to earlier, and a desire to take apart what some of us thought was actually an ideal, which is the ideal that the Western tradition is not actually the preserve of white people, but it’s a universal inheritance.

And I say this repeatedly in the book. This is one way of looking at it. One of the interesting things about so-called white culture, Western culture, one of the remarkable things about it has been, yes, in its negative forms, it has attempted to force itself upon people; in its positive forms, it invites anyone who wants to be part of it to share in it, which is again not the case with other cultures.

There is no way, even in let’s say in the political systems of any other country outside of the West, if you were to migrate there from a Western country, you would not be able to work your way up to the prime ministership, presidency, or even the cabinet of most other countries in the world if you were an outsider.

The West is specifically, in our era, exceptionally open and believes that its own inheritance, its own traditions, its own political order, its institutions—not just should be open but have to be open to anybody who wants to be a part of them.

So that—and that ideal is one of the ones that, in the name of anti-racism, is being taken apart in our time. She’s saying, no, no, no. These things only belong to white people. And as I say, toward the end of The War on the West, wow, are the conclusions that you get to from their negative— I mean, wow, are the consequences of that down the road negative. Because, and as I lay out, as you know, in quite a lengthy passage, there is a response to that just waiting to be said.

So, do you think that the core values of the West are tenable and maintainable in the absence of the underlying religious substrate? So I’m thinking about Jacques Derrida, for example, and Derrida criticized what he called the logocentrism of the West and its emphasis, for example, on binary oppositions. And binary oppositions are the foundation of computation, so maybe criticizing that too deeply is unwise.

But in any case, it seems to me that the notion of individual sovereignty is, in some sense, a religious claim, and this gets you—can think about the West. One stream of Western thought is the Enlightenment, and there’s a secular element to that, but it emerged out of a deeper religious tradition that has this universalizing tendency and this universalizing claim.

Is it possible for the… then I would say, to what degree are the assault on values that you see and diagnose an assault on religious values? And is it possible to formulate a defense without simultaneously defending some of these underlying religious presumptions?

No, I mean, this is a—this is a German journalist Balthazar’s dilemma, isn’t it? The—can you sustain a system that isn’t willing to nurture the roots that gave birth to the system?

And it’s probably the biggest underlying question of our era. The claim has been some time. Yes, of course. And I think that that “yes, of course” has been coming under significant strain in recent years as I said. I mean, it’s not clear that the sanctity of the individual is something that is enforceable purely through human rights doctrine and the court and the international court system.

Well, it’s not self-evident that it’s fundamentally a rational claim. It might be instead something more like the precondition for all claims that we regard as rational, which is a whole—an axiom rather than a conclusion.

And axioms have to be accepted on faith by definition, right? If you define faith as operation within the system that the axioms give rise to. And I’ve been trying to puzzle this out deeply.

There’s the idea of the divine individual in the West associated with the idea of logos, and it’s associated with the notion as well that there’s something about speech in particular, truthful speech that is fundamentally redemptive. And it’s recognition of that, I think, that gives rise to our notion that freedom of speech is a cardinal value—not because it gives you the freedom to speak exactly, but because without that freedom we can’t think, we can’t improve our institutions and we can’t get to truth.

That it isn’t a merely theoretical exercise; the point of freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry and all these things was to get to a truth. It wasn’t a game in itself, right? It was a belief that there was something to uncover at the end of that process that was more than worth it.

Well, when I talked to Richard Dawkins recently about such things—and of course he’s arguably the world’s most famous atheist—but I like talking to him, and I think Dawkins is possessed by the spirit of the truth to a remarkable degree.

And so then one of the things I wonder is, is science itself possible in the absence of the proposition that the truth will set you free? I don’t think that’s a scientific proposition. I think it’s a—it’s a philosophical or a theological proposition.

I mean, this comes to one of the great jokes against conservatives in recent years. I think I’ve said it to you in private before, Jordan, but not publicly, but that—I mean, one of the great jokes against conservatives was that they tended to think that the deconstructionists, for instance, would inevitably stop at the borders of STEM. Remember for years people sort of had risks and the fact that, well, you know, your degree in lesbian dance theory, you know, you just wait till you have to go out into the market and find a job with that useless degree.

But these people actually—the joke was on the conservatives, saying that they did all fine—did work their jobs. They found them in HR departments and they told everyone else how to behave for the next generation.

So, and then there was this sort of joke that the conservatives, again, had of sort of, you know, it’ll stop at the borders of STEM because at some point the bridges need to stay up.

No, no, turns out that if you’ve got a more overriding theory and claim and ambition and drive in your era, if the bridges do fall down, it’ll be because of institutional racism and constructional racism and much more, and it’ll be because you didn’t do it hard enough.

It’ll be just like the nonsense that everyone said in communism, look at look at the stuff of different ways of knowing.

I mean, this goes back—I have a deep, deep contempt for Derrida, as I do for all of the deconstructionists, not just because it’s so easy to deconstruct and so hard to construct, but because, of course, the deconstructionists always tried to deconstruct everything apart from their own university positions.

And Derrida and Code definitely started some of this, and it’s led to this thing we now have—one of the things I describe in the book of the equitable maths nonsense, where we come once again to the anti-white, anti—I would say also anti-black, actually—but certainly anti-Western idea that mathematics is a Western construct.

And that there are other ways of knowing that exist and which must be brought forth. And you don’t just get this in maths. And by the way, I mean, as again, as I lay out in remorseless detail in the book, this is being taught in American schools.

This is being rolled out in school district after school district in the U.S.: the idea that in maths, in STEM in general, there are other ways of knowing other than the scientific method. Accurate mathematics—things like showing your workings is an example of white supremacy, and on and on and on.

And this is completely mainstream today to an extent that I think will shock many readers. These things are effectively in the realm of voodoo because nobody ever explains what the other ways of knowing are.

Let me give you an example. If you don’t believe in the mathematical method, that actually happens to have been refined in the West but poses some of its ancestry to a considerable indeed bewildering array of cultures around the world, why you can’t say, oh, that’s interesting, the West may have refined it, but it’s got its heritage elsewhere, hurrah, we’re all able to own it.

Why, instead of that, do you have to say, no, this is a white supremacist thing, so we’re going to come up with other ways of knowing instead of addition and subtraction in the normal way of things? What are the other ways of knowing?

What is this voodoo we’re being told? Never explained! Never explained other than you get this little hint sometimes that it has something to do with a better intuitiveness about the concerns of others.

And I give examples of this, and basically, you could also argue it’s a sort of feminization of certain things for certain realms of study, but essentially, that the white supremacists, the male patriarchal thing is all about the answers and about accuracy and about being on time—even—I mean, all of these, to say that they’re racist, I hardly need saying, but all of these things are white, and therefore we need to look at these other ways of knowing, which are never explained.

But there’s something which we’re all meant to go along with. I mean, to say that this doesn’t bear examination is to vastly understate the matter.

Yeah, well, I think the STEM types are completely defenseless against all of this. They tend to be apolitical in their machinations if they’re credible scientists, incredible researchers, almost by definition, because they’re busy obsessively detailing out their specialized concerns and not paying attention to the broader context.

Which works fine if the broader context is one in which their narrow and specialized productive pursuits are valued but fatal when that isn’t the case.

And so one of the questions that we’re facing now is what are the invisible ethical preconditions for the successful practice of science itself? And weirdly enough, that’s kind of a postmodern question, you know, because the postmodernists did insist to some degree that we exist within stories, although they don’t believe in grand unifying narratives, which begs the question for me then, what unites us internally, psychologically or socially, if there’s no unifying narrative?

If narrative is the fundamental answer, the narrative in which science operates is something like, well, the pursuit of truth is valuable in and of itself, and it’s valuable because it's a benefit to people at the individual level.

And as long as that’s in place, it can all be ignored, and science can act as if it’s something unto itself. And I know that’s a tricky argument because it does veer in somewhat into the postmodern direction, but we wouldn’t pursue science if we didn’t think the pursuit was valuable and redemptive.

Yes, right.

And it was heading towards something, but yes, yes.

That can be attained by—go ahead.

Can you say the same thing about the humanities? Can you say the same thing about art? Can you say the same thing about metaphysics? Can you say the same thing about politics or economics or anything else?

And I think the answer in all of these things is that the priority of the era is representation, not attainment of a goal that is worth attaining other than representation.

And this is where we get to this—what I say in The War on the West is one of the deep underlying just questions we have to address, which is, is the game that our societies have decided to play worth playing?

And does it mean that we effectively win out in the end or not? And let me flesh that out by saying what I mean is let’s say that across America and all other Western societies, we managed to completely nix the representation game and that the diversity inclusion equity game was just solved and that every board in America and every other Western country, Canada, Britain, you name it, every board had exactly the right representation or over-representation of minority groups so that there were more trans people on every board, more black people, more minority ethnic people on every board, or exactly the percentage that replicated the percentage in the country.

And that every board and every workforce across every imaginable discipline and every industry exactly replicated, of course, I don’t need to tell you the absurdity of this, but that you had exactly 50 percent female firefighters and exactly 50 percent of the police were women, and if in America 13 percent of the population are black, and 13 percent of the police are black, and on and on and on, and the same with engineers and the same with electricians and the same with absolutely everybody—computer programmers, a lot.

Let’s say you get to there. Do you beat China? I don’t know that the question’s at all clear. The answers are all clear to that question.

My own suspicion is actually it’s a game that we’re playing for politeness reasons and for some justifiable reasons in certain areas. I give the example in the book saying actually it makes sense to have, for instance, a police force that represents the community pretty accurately.

But do you actually need your, for instance, your basketball teams, or your computer programmers, all to also completely accurately represent the population and to have complete representation? It doesn’t seem to me that you’d win any particular game from doing so other than satisfying the game that the West has decided to play for the time being.

But at the end of that game, well, you win if you win if you regard holding those positions as a reward that's equivalent to privilege rather than as the opportunity to do something productive in and of itself, right?

And so, because that seems to be part of the conceptualization is while your job is a reward to be doled out rather than something that’s productive in relationship to valuable ends, and you mentioned the humanities earlier too: I don’t think there is humanities outside of the canon, so science is nested inside an underlying ethic that presumes that, let’s say, the universe is understandable, that there’s some association between that and logic, that pursuing the truth in relationship to knowledge of the world has this redemptive quality.

And that there are very careful ways of doing that. But the humanities is also nested, but even in some sense more self-evidently inside the idea of a canon, and that canon is traditional. And if you throw out the traditional canon, I think by definition you throw the humanities.

And, well, I mean, as you know, in the chapter on culture I go into this because I think by this stage it is clear that there is not an aspect of Western culture that has not been assaulted at such a fundamental and dishonest level, but if you were to continue this game, there’s just nothing left.

Nothing.

The British Library, in 2020, announced that they were going to create a list of authors whose work was in the British Library, including manuscripts and important documents by these authors who had some connection to the slave trade or colonialism, and they produced this sort of blacklist of authors, including the late poet laureate Ted Hughes, who died in 1998, who was born in considerable poverty in Yorkshire in the 1930s, who had nothing to do with the British Empire.

And the British Library claimed that one of his ancestors in the 17th century had benefited from the slave trade. I mean, this isn’t even the sins of the father debate anymore; this is the sins of the ancestor four centuries earlier debate.

And by the way, it turned out, among other things, that the British Library can’t even get researchers these days because the researchers turned out to have selected a person called Nicholas Ferrer, who actually was opposed to the slave trade and wasn’t an ancestor of Ted Hughes.

So, they weirdly just decided to posthumously defame somebody. And this isn’t at all uncommon. The Tate Gallery in London—I give an example of one that I might come on to that’s particularly painful to me—but there’s an example of one of the masterpieces they have in there. I don’t know if you know the work, but it’s a beautiful painting called The Resurrection Cucumber by Stanley Spencer, one of the great mid-century British artists. And it’s a huge, vast canvas, which the Tate is exceptionally lucky to have, painted in the 1930s.

And it is a depiction of the physical resurrection of the dead at the day of judgment, and they’re all coming out of their tombs in the graveyard of his local church in the village of Cookham.

And it’s a profoundly moving painting to me; I’ve always been—I used to occasionally, my lunchtime, just go to sit in front of this canvas. Some of the dead coming out of the tombs are recognizably apparently neighbors of Spencer’s from his village. But he wanted to show the resurrection of all humanity, so he also includes, you know, there are black men and women coming out of some of the graves as well. He didn’t have to do that, but he wanted to show the literal representation of the actual physical resurrection.

Well, the Tate now has a descriptor beside this sublime painting saying that it is a racist painting because whereas Stanley Spencer accurately depicts his neighbors from his village in England, the black people in the painting are generic black people copied from National Geographic magazine of the time.

Well, Stanley Spencer didn’t have any black neighbors, you know? So what? So what? There weren't any black people in his village in the 1930s in England.

And how dare these people—but they’ve done it now on everything. Yet to be morally superior to a genius, they get to be morally superior to a genius.

And, but what concerns me is that they pull down a sublime thing into their banal, monotone, utterly monomaniacal view of the world, which is that race is the only thing that matters.

Let me give you one example, if I may, because it’s particularly painful to me. There’s a wonderful painter I’m very fond of called Rex Whistler, an English artist from the early 20th century. Everybody adored him; he was clearly an exceptionally lovable human being and an exceptionally talented artist, and his first artwork was a mural for the Tate that he did in his early 20s.

He worked all around the clock for months and months on end to complete this mural called In Pursuit of Rare Meats. It’s a fantasy, a beautiful fantasy landscape and an Arcadian landscape that goes around all four walls of the gallery. And a couple of years ago, a group whose name was White Pube, only consisting of a couple of people, decided that this mural was racist, and they decided it because of two figures, one of whom was a Chinese figure they said was generic, and the other was because in one corner of the forest, in one of the bits of the rest, a tiny figure about two inches high is a is a young black boy clearly in distress being pulled on a chain by a woman in a white frock.

Now, clearly Rex Whistler, he always included sort of ugly things like this, as a drowning child, a white drowning child elsewhere in it; it’s clearly Et in Arcadia Ego. You know, that's clearly what he’s saying. He was always saying this.

All of his work always included this, you know, and he had a wonderful sense of humor and a wonderful and dark sense of the carbon nature of all things, even in Arcadia. This was decided two years ago by the Tate to be a racist painting, and they have closed the room until further notice.

They looked into whether or not they could actually remove, after 100 years, actually remove this from the walls of the gallery, and they—it seems that they can’t because part of it’s on plaster, so they’ve locked the room.

And the reason I mind this, among many other reasons, is because they have posthumously declared Rex Whistler to be a racist. They said that he has—he reflected the racist attitudes of his time. Rex Whistler died on his first day in action in Normandy in 1944.

How dare these people do this? How dare they do this to everybody in our past, to all of our heroes, to all of our artistic heroes? How dare they say that the story of the West is purely a story of racism and xenophobia and colonialism and slavery? How dare they not even bother to weigh that up?

As I say in one point in the book, weigh it up against just, let’s name a few cities: Paris, Florence, Rome, Venice, just for starters.

How dare they not be able to even weigh up the achievements that have come from this allegedly unremittingly terrible past? But worse than that, and the point I really wanted to make, Jordan, is what they are driving us to—and I feel it very, very strongly myself—is how dare you do this to our ancestors?

How dare you do this to all of our heroes? And then the follow-on thought is this: if you have no respect for my ancestors, I see no reason why I should have respect for yours. If you have no respect for my past and my culture, I don’t see why I should continue to say that I have respect for yours. If you have nothing good to say about me, why should I have anything good to say about you?

And what I suggest is that in the West at the moment we are in a potentially short holding pattern—a holding pattern based on politeness, or as Kenneth Clark, Lord Clarke of Civilization, put it, that fundamental aspect of Western culture—courtesy.

We are in a period of courtesy where we have been willing to say, “Okay, you can keep rampaging through the past of the West and assaulting my ancestors, insulting my predecessors and saying all of these negative things about my past.” And I am pretending for the time being, or saying out of courtesy, that you can do this and I will put up with it for a time, and I will even say—and there are these other ways of knowing and so on.

But there is a moment there where that absolutely stops. And as I say at the end of the book, as you know, Jordan, I say there’s a very clear place where you can do that. The courtesy stops at a certain point, and it stops when you say, you know what, this politeness seems not to be working for us, so let’s go for the impolite things, and the impolite things that can be said are legion, and nobody should want to go there.

So these great cities that you point to and the great achievements that went along with them, to me, they’re the consequence of the manifestation of the best of the human spirit, universally speaking, that was made possible by societies that recognize the existence of such of the best.

And so that was a precondition. And to associate them, in some sense, with Western culture, with white culture, and then to associate them with nothing but the spirit of oppression is to simultaneously deny that that spirit exists and can produce things of universal transcendent value.

And I can’t see that that’s going to be good for anyone except for people who can make moral hay of that in the short term to ratchet themselves up, what—to produce for themselves positions of authority that would not be available to them if they weren’t able to weaponize guilt and claim the moral upper hand.

Yes. Well, so, let me ask you another question. One of the accusations that’s levied at me from fairly frequently is that my concern about such things—which I would say in many ways is similar to yours—isn’t—is evidence of my—I'm exaggerating, this is illusory, none of this is actually happening. Point to the evidence exactly. And I think, well, I see it in the spread of such ideas in the universities and then downstream into culture.

But people aren’t particularly awake to that fact. I mean, in my home province in Ontario, there’s a bill that purports to be anti-racists that’s going to transform the entire education system by fiat into a system that is part of the war on the West, let's say, and that—and people who conduct that war will be rewarded for that.

How do you know that? Why do you believe that this is a serious concern?

Well, because, as I say, they decided to come for absolutely everything. Because it’s not just a Judeo-Christian tradition of the West, but the Enlightenment tradition of the West, too—it’s the religious tradition and the secular tradition.

It’s the—they’re the American politicians and leaders and presidents who were on the side of the South in the Civil War and the ones who were on the side of the North. It comes for people who owned slaves and those who were opposed to slavery. It comes for those who lived in the Arab empire and everyone who lived before it and everyone who lived after it—the people who lived in the era of slavery and all of the people who live after it.

It’s so comprehensive. And I mean, you mentioned Canada just now; there’s a highly pertinent example, which is the—that insane spate of church burning that went on in your native country a year ago.

Just to remind people, as a clay, there was a claim that graves of indigenous children were found beside what had been a school and it had been run by the Catholic Church, and that these were graves of children, therefore murdered by the Catholic Church. And in no time, prominent figures in Canada, I list some of them in the book and you know some of them as well, Jordan, start to tweet out things like “Burn it all down,” and churches—including indigenous built churches in Canada—go up in flames across parts of the country.

Well, in what other situation would that have been regarded as being something you just shrug off? And, by the way, to date, no evidence has been produced of these alleged mass graves. It happened on the basis of an investigation using ultrasound that turns out not to have yet produced one grave.

So we are so primed. We are so primed at this idea that, for instance, the Catholic Church, which I am not a defender to the death or anything, but the institutions like that are so evil that they deliberately killed children in countries like Canada and hid them in mass graves, and now you can burn down the churches if you want.

What other religious tradition in Canada would be allowed to be treated like that in the present or would it be just sort of brush it off that it happened? It happens all around us, and it’s not just in the academies, as you know. It’s spilt out many years ago. It’s everywhere.

And it now has this completely physical manifestation on the streets when the so-called 1619 riots kicked off. And just to remind us, this is the 1619 Project, which tries to completely reframe all of American history to say that the heroic story of America is not a story of heroism. It’s one of slavery and subjugation, which is why they start in 1619 when the riots after the death of George Floyd began—the murder of George Floyd began in 2020.

Somebody says they should be called the 1619 riots. And the woman who fronted the 1619 Project at The New York Times—so we’re not talking about some kooky far-out fringe publication—says the 1619 riots? I’d be honored.

And these are the riots where, sure, they start to pull down statues of General Lee. Okay, wouldn’t go to—the wouldn’t go to the wall for that one at all.

But then it’s Jefferson, and then it’s Lincoln, and then it’s absolutely every damn figure in American history who ends up getting assailed.

Well, that’s no longer a theoretical thing. That’s not just students reading Derrida; that’s not just papers on Foucault. This is the manifestation of some of their thought, often by people who’ve never read them, but this is long ago the spilling out even of their own thought simply into this thing where the era decides everything in our own past must be scoured.

What’s to come after? They don’t tell us any more than they tell us what the other ways of knowing might be.

What are you trying to accomplish with the book, Douglas? Do you think—apart from clarifying your own thoughts—quite a number of things. One is to alert people to the scale of what is being attempted against Western countries. Another is to point to the unfairness of it, the simple unfairness of it, the unjustness of it.

Another is to arm people with the—I think—reasonable and correct rebuttals to it, to remind people of the context of history and the context of the rest of the world so that we get ourselves and our own past in a proper light and get the rest of the world in a proper light.

I mean, you have an interesting interlude in there. So, there’s four chapters: race, history, religion, and culture. And there are three interludes: China, reparations, and maybe the most interesting, or one that struck me most particularly, was an interlude on gratitude.

And so you elevate that as a moral virtue and it’s the antithesis, in some sense, of resentment for history. Gratitude: talk about that for a bit. Why that value particularly?

Well, as you know, it’s one you’ve thought about a lot and spoken and written about a lot. It’s one that a number of my friends have. And I just— it’s been one of the underlying things in my life, and whenever I’m asked to sort of explain, as it were, why I come to some of the conclusions I come to on things, I come back to this term.

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Our late friend Roger Scruton, one that I think actually the last thing he wrote, I quote in the book, was a diary for The Spectator where he reflected on his last year of his life.

And Roger said, to approach death is to approach what life really means, and what it means is gratitude.

Now, that was the last thing he wrote. I thought about it a lot. I quote Dostoevsky, as you know, from The Brothers Karamazov, where the devil is incapable of—is incapable of gratitude.

Which is a deeply telling and brilliant—right, exactly. Well, that was also penned at about the same time that Nietzsche was pointing to resentment as the driving force behind movements, for example, that later became revolutionary Marxism.

Yes. And the more—and outlining the moral hazard associated with that.

Exactly. And Nietzsche and some other writers who come after him on resentment—I've spent a lot of time reading in recent years. I think it's—I think that resentment is, along with that desire for revenge in the name of justice, one of the absolutely underlying drivers of our time.

Many of the great philosophers realize this. Resentment is a terrifically strong driver, and, again, as Nietzsche and others said, it’s a terrific way to avoid any culpability because the only way, as you well know, the only way to turn around resentment, apart from gratitude, would be for the person of resentment to recognize that there is a reason why they feel resentment and that there is a person who is responsible for the things that they are angry about.

But that the person is themselves. This is, of course, such a profoundly disturbing life-disturbing thing to acknowledge that almost nobody deeply embedded in resentment can.

Why? We always look for excuses. We always put it on other people. It’s so hard to take responsibility ourselves for what has not gone wrong in our own life; so much harder compared to putting it on any other group of people or another individual.

A person we believe has done us wrong, or a group we believe have done us wrong. It’s so easy to manipulate our species against other groups of people. My God, what’s the history of the Jews but a history of people pouring their resentments onto this tiny group of people for daring to continue to exist and thrive across societies?

You know, the history of anti-Semitism is that, as it is in our own days, the great explanation for how where some people can pour their resentment.

But the main thing that you have to count—and I've long said this to conservatives in my own country and elsewhere—is that you have to address things at an equally deep level.

And when people say, I can’t remember if we’ve talked about this before, but when people say, for instance, “How will the right respond to the left on this issue?” You very often see things like, “They know, well, we’ll need to do more house building on brownfield sites,” or something like this.

And I think, you’re mad! I mean, you’re countering resentment; you can’t do that with a bit of bureaucracy!

Now, how can you counter resentment? It is only, I