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NOTE: At the 50 minute mark Douglas briefly mentions historian Niall Ferguson, and we use an incorrect overlay of Niall's photo. This is a good opportunity to mention two things. First, we have amazing folks helping with this podcast, and they might make mistakes sometimes, as do all of us. Thanks for your understanding on that. Second, Niall Ferguson is a great historian, please check out his work and his conversation with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF6x1ftN-H4

EPISODE LINKS:
Douglas's Twitter: https://twitter.com/DouglasKMurray
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Douglas's Website: https://douglasmurray.net
The War on the West (book): https://amzn.to/38L7B36
Madness of Crowds (book): https://amzn.to/3MShBpX
Strange Death of Europe (book): https://amzn.to/3OnYmEX

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:47 - Western civilization
10:28 - Slavery
14:04 - Reparations
19:09 - Institutional racism
26:22 - Lived experience
35:47 - Resentment
47:53 - Critical race theory
1:02:26 - Racism
1:21:24 - Stalin
1:25:58 - Churchill
1:32:01 - Marxism
1:48:40 - Madness of Crowds
1:57:13 - Ego
2:04:20 - Donald Trump
2:11:04 - America's future
2:18:31 - Advice for young people
2:27:15 - Love

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I think that some people are deliberately trying to completely clear the cultural landscape of our past in order to say there's nothing good, nothing you can hold on to, no 1 you should revere, you've got no heroes, the whole thing comes down, who's left standing, oh we've also got this idea from the 20th century still about Marxism.

And no, no, you will not have the entire landscape deracinated and then the worst ideas tried again.

The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray, author of The Badness of Crowds, Gender, Race, and Identity, and his most recent book, The War in the West, How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason.

He's a brilliant, fearless, and often controversial thinker who points out and pushes back against what he sees as the madness of our modern world.

I should note that the use of the word Marxism and the West in this conversation refers primarily to cultural Marxism and the cultural values of Western civilization, respectively.

This is in contrast to my previous conversation with Richard Wolff, where we focused on Marxism as primarily a critique of capitalism and thus looking at it through the lens of economics and not culture.

Nevertheless, these 2 episodes stand opposite of each other with very different perspectives on how we build a flourishing civilization together.

I leave it to you, the listener, to think and to decide which is the better way.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, Here's Douglas Murray.

You recently wrote the book titled The War on the West, which in part says that the values, ideas, and history of Western civilization are under attack.

Historically and today, what are the ideas that represent Western civilization?

I actually don't get stuck on definitions, precisely because, as you know, once you get stuck on definitions, there's a possibility you'll never get off

Firstly, obviously the Western tradition is a specific tradition, a specific tradition of ideas, culture, well known to be perhaps easily defined by the combination of Athens and Jerusalem, the world of the Bible, and the world of ancient Greece and indeed Rome.

Effectively creates European civilization which itself spawns the rest of the Western civilizations, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and others.

But these are the main countries that we still refer to as the West.

So there's a specific tradition and all the things that come from it.

My shorthand cheat on this answer is to say, you know when you're not in it.

So if you've ever been to Beijing, Shanghai, you know you're not in the West, somewhere else, you know you're not in the West.

When you're in Tokyo, somewhere extraordinary, but you know you're not in the West.

Obviously there are, let's say, borderline questions like is Russia in the West?

Which I sort of leave open as a question.

If you were placed into Moscow blindfolded and you woke up and you couldn't hear the language or maybe you didn't know what the language sounded like, would you guess you were in the West or not?

I mean, you know, Tulsa asks the question, doesn't he, whether it's European?

And I think the answer to that is not really, although massively influenced by Europe, but at times wanting to reach towards it, at times wanting to stay away, but a part of the West, possibly, yes.

But anyway, it's a very specific tradition.

It's 1 of a number of major traditions in the world, and Because it's hard to define doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Are there certain characteristics and qualities about the values and the ideas that define it?

Is the type of rule, the type of governmental structure?

Yes, I mean the rule of law, property-owning democracies, and much more, I mean these are, of course, things that ended up being developed in America and then given back to much of the rest of the West.

I say there are other, perhaps more controversial attributes I would give to the West.

1 is a ravenous interest in the rest of the world, which is not shared, of course, by every other culture.

The late philosopher George Steiner who said he could never get out of his head the haunting fact that the boats only seemed to go out from Europe.

You know, they didn't, the explorers, the scholars, the linguists, the people who wanted to discover other civilizations and indeed even preserve ancient civilizations and lost civilizations.

These were scholars that were always coming from the West to discover this elsewhere.

By contrast, there were never boats coming from Egypt to help the Anglo-Saxons discover the origins of their language and so on.

So I think there is a sort of ravenous interest in the rest of the world, which can be said to be a Western attribute, although it of course also has, I should immediately preface it, some downsides and many criticisms that can be made of some of the consequences of that interest, Because of course it's not entirely lacking in self-interest.

So it's not just the scholars, it's also The armies.

The armies, and they're looking to gain access and control over resources elsewhere.

Although that itself of course is a universal thing.

I mean, no civilization I think that we know of doesn't try to gain ground from its neighbors where it can.

The Western ability to go further, faster, certainly gave an advantage in that regard.

Do some civilizations get a bit more excited by that kind of idea than others?

Because you could say it's the Western civilization because the technological innovation was more efficient at doing that kind of thing.

Well, the Ottomans wanted it an awful lot and did terribly well for many centuries.

I'd also say, by the way, and again, it's a very broad 1, but it's worth throwing out there, I think self-criticism is an important attribute of the Western mind, 1 that, as you know, is not common everywhere.

Not all societies allow even their most vociferous critics to become rich.

So, you know, criticism is a negative sounding word.

It could be self-introspection, self-analysis, self-reflection.

You know, and in the Western system, I'd argue that 1 of the advantages of the system of representative governance is that where there are problems in the system, you can attempt to sort them out by peaceable means.

We listen to arguments, most famously in America in the late 20th century.

The Civil Rights Movement achieved its aims by force of moral argument and persuaded the rest of the country that it had been wrong.

That's not common in every society by any means.

So I think there are certain attributes to the Western mind that you could say are, they're not entirely unique, but they are not as commonplace as well.

What about the emergence in hierarchies of asymmetry of power, most visible, most drastic in the form of slavery, for example?

Well, I mean, everyone in the world is slavery, so I don't regard it as being a unique Western sin.

It's rather hard to think of a civilization in history that didn't have slavery of some kind.

1 of the oddities of the Western ignorance of our day is that people seem to imagine that our societies in the West were the only ones who ever engaged in any vices.

It's a sort of Rousseauian mistake, or at least 1 that's blossomed since Rousseau, that everybody else in the world was born into sort of Edenic innocence and only we in the West had this sort of evil in us that caused us to do bad things to other people.

Slavery was engaged in by everyone in the ancient world, of course, and through most of the modern world as well.

Of course, there are 40 million slaves in the world today, so it's clearly not something that the species as a whole has a problem with.

That's more slaves, of course, than there were in the 19th century.

And I'd say, on top of that, that the interesting thing about the Western mind as regards to slavery is that we were the civilization that did away with it.

And by the way, the founding fathers of America who today are lambasted routinely for being acquiescent in the slave trade, engaging in it, owning slaves.

There's not, people almost don't even bother now to recognize the facts that Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, all wanted to see this trade done away with.

Couldn't hold the country together at the origins if they'd have made such an effort and believed and hoped that it would be something that would be dealt with after their time.

So the founding ideas had within them the notion that we should, as a people, get rid of this.

The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence set up the conditions under which slavery will be impossible.

Once you've put that, that's a time bomb under the whole concept of slavery.

And sure enough, it detonated in the next century.

If we just step back and look at the human species, what does slavery teach you about human nature?

The fact that slavery has appeared as a function of society throughout human history.

1 is it's what people think they can do when God's not watching.

Another is it's what they can do if they think that God allows it.

And the fact that they want to do this kind of subjugation, what does that mean?

Well, I mean, it's pretty straightforward in a way.

There are people who get to work for free.

Yes, but in order to do it, I mean, almost always, there are some examples in the ancient world where this wasn't the case, but almost always it had to be a subjugated people, or people regarded as different.

1 of the things, actually, I've tried to sort of inject into the discussion through this book among other things is a recognition that there were very major questions still going on in the 18th and early 19th century that were unresolved, which were 1 of the reasons why slavery was not as morally repugnant to people then as it is to us now.

And that's the question of polygenesis and monogenesis.

At the time of Thomas Jefferson, the founding fathers were thinking and working.

They didn't know, because nobody knew, whether the human races were related or not.

There were arguments, the monogenesis argument, that we were all indeed from the same racial stock.

Polygenesis argument was that we weren't.

Black Africans, Ethiopians, and they're often referred to at the time because they provided some of the first slaves, were different from white Europeans, simply not related in any way.

And that makes it easier, of course, that makes it easier to enslave people if you think they're not your brother.

And it was a very troubling argument in the 18th and 19th century also because there was a biblical question.

It threw up a theological question, which was, I mean, people were literally debating this at the time.

Was there an Indian Adam and Eve, the Native American Adam and Eve?

This was a serious theological debate because they didn't know the answer.

It wasn't just Darwin, of course, but by the late 19th century, the argument that we were not all related as human beings had suffered so many blows that you had to really be very, very ignorant, deliberately, willfully ignorant to ignore it by then.

So it no longer was, after Darwin, a theological question, it became a moral question.

It was already a moral question, but it clarified, Darwin clarifies it definitely.

And then you're in this, as I say, you're in this situation of, you're not subjugating some other people, you're subjugating your own kin.

So, given that slavery in America is part of its history, how do we incorporate into the calculus of policy today, social discourse, what we learn in school.

We can look at slavery in America, we can look at maybe more recent things like in Europe, other atrocities, the Holocaust.

How do we incorporate that in terms of how we create policy, how we treat each other, all those kinds of things?

What is the calculus of integrating the atrocities, the injustices of the past into the way we are today?

That's a very complex question because it's a moral question at this point, and a moral question long after the fact.

I say at 1 point in the war in the West that the argument for instance on reparations now that goes on and is not a fringe argument anymore.

Some people say oh you're pulling up this fringe argument, it really isn't.

I mean every contender for the democratic nomination for the presidency in 2020 was willing to talk about the possibility of reparations.

Some very eager that this country America goes through that entirely self-destructive exercise.

I say that there's a lot of problems with this, but if I could refine it down to 1 thing, I'd say this.

It's no longer about a wealth transfer from 1 group of people who did something wrong to another group of people who were wronged.

It would have been that, could have been that 200 years ago.

Today, it's not even the descendants of people who did something wrong giving money to people who were the descendants of people who were wronged.

It's a wealth transfer from people who look like people who did a wrong thing in the past to another group of people who resemble people who were wronged.

There is no way in which you could organize such a wealth transfer on moral or practical reasons.

America is filled with people who are, have the same skin color as us for instance, who have no connection to the slave trade and should not be made to pay money to people who have some connection.

And then the country is also filled with ethnic minorities who have come after slavery, who would not be due for any reimbursement as it were.

The problem with this is though is that there are, I'm perfectly open to the possibility that there are residual inequities that exist in American life and that the consequences of slavery could be 1 of the factors that result from this.

The thing is I don't think it's a single issue answer.

I think it's a multi-dimensional issue, something like black underachievement in America is obviously a multi-dimensional issue.

Much of the left and others wish to say, it's not, it's only about racism.

And they can't answer why Asians who've arrived more recently don't, for instance, get held down by white supremacy, but actually, I say white supremacy in quotes obviously, but don't get held back by it, but actually flourish to the extent that Asian Americans have a higher household earnings and higher household mean equity than home equity and so on than white Americans.

So I don't think that on the merits the evidence is there that you know racism is the explanation for black ongoing black underachievement in some sections of the black community in America.

Could you say that even those things like fatherlessness and similar family breakdown issues are a long-term consequence of it?

Possibly, but it's being awfully generous to people's ability to make bad decisions.

For instance, how many generations after the Holocaust would you allow people to claim that everything that went wrong in the Jewish community was as a result of the Holocaust.

I mean, is there some kind of term limit on this?

And I think most people probably think that's over.

Although I'm terrified of what's lurking underneath in the darkness.

Okay, it's really complicated calculus with the Holocaust and with slavery.

So the argument in America is that there's deep institutional racism against African Americans that's rooted in slavery.

So however that calculus turns out, that calculation, it still persists.

In the culture, in the institutions, in the allocation of resources, in the way that we communicate in subtle ways, in major ways, all that kind of stuff.

of how much institutional racism there is that's rooted in slavery?

And I'd like to apply some shortcuts to some of this, and the following.

Are, for instance, all, let's take the 1 that's most often cited.

If a white person is walking down a street in America and they see a group of young black men coming towards them and it's late at night and they cross the road, Is it because of slavery?

No, it's because they've made a calculus based not entirely on unfounded beliefs that given crime rates it's possible that this group of people might be a group of people they don't want to meet late at night.

That's an ugly fact but as crime statistics in American cities, Afro-American cities bear out, it's not an entirely unreasonable 1.

It's not reasonable every time, obviously, obviously, but is it attributable to slavery?

If you're in a city like Chicago where the homicide rates shot up in the last 2 years, albeit again as always has to be remembered, mainly black on black, gun violence and knife violence.

Nevertheless, if you're in a city like Chicago and you make that calculus I've just suggested, the cliched 1, the street late at night, There are other factors other than a memory of slavery that kick in.

And I'm afraid it's something which people don't want to particularly acknowledge in America for obvious reasons because it's the ugliest damn debate in the world.

But I was actually just writing in my column in the New York Post today about a very interesting case, it's sort of similar, which is the question of obesity in the US.

As you know, America's the most overweight country in the world.

America has, I think, 40% of the population is obese in medical ways.

And the nearest next country is a long way down.

That's New Zealand at 30% of the population.

Why, during the coronavirus era, when we know that obesity is the 1 clearest factor that's likely to lead to your hospitalization if you also get the virus, why did almost no public health information in America focus on obesity?

80% of the people who ended up hospitalized in America with coronavirus were obese.

We locked the schools when there was no evidence that the coronavirus was deadly for children.

We all wore cloth masks when there was very little evidence that this was much use in stopping the spread of the virus.

We had massive evidence about obesity being a problem and we never addressed it.

Is it just because we worried about fat people?

No it's actually because about fat shaming as it were.

No, it's also because to a great extent it's a racial issue in America as well.

And actually I quoted this new publication from the University of Chicago as it happens, which makes that claim explicit.

It says, the reasons why people have views that are negative about obesity is because of racism and slavery.

This is what everything is drawn back to in America.

Anything you want to stop, you say it's because of racism, it's because of slavery.

How about it's actually because you mind the hospitals getting clogged up, you mind people dying, you mind ethnic minorities disproportionately dying, and you'd like to say something about it.

Once again, as in everything in America, it's cut off by some poorly educated academic saying it's about slavery.

So we're really not, I mean, this requires a kind of form of brain surgery to perform it on a society, probably 1 that's not possible without killing the patient and it's being done by people who are wearing mittens.

So I'm sure that there's a few folks listening to this that are rolling their eyes and saying, here we go again, 2 white guys talking about the lack of institutional racism in America.

First of all, what would you like to tell them?

So our African American friends who are looking at this and I've gotten a chance to talk to a bunch of them on Clubhouse recently.

It's an absolute zoo of an app as far as I can see.

Because you get to talk to, as somebody who's an introvert and doesn't socialize much, I enjoy talking to people from all walks of life.

So it gave me a chance to first of all, practice Russian and Ukrainian, so I get the chance to do that.

Then you get a chance to talk about Israel and Palestine with people who are from that part of the world and you get to hear raw emotion of people from the ground where they start screaming, they start crying, they start being calm and collected and thoughtful.

And this is as if you walked into a bar with custom-picked regular folks, in quotes, regular folks.

Just people that have, quote unquote, lived experiences.

Real pain, real hope, real emotions, biases, and you get to listen to them go at it with no, because it's an audio app, you're not allowed to start getting into a physical fist fight.

So even though it really sounds like people

Yeah, and so you get to really listen to that feeling.

And for example, it allows a white guy like me from another part of the world, coming from the former Soviet Union, to go into a room with a few hundred African Americans screaming about Joe Rogan using the N-word.

There's very different perspectives on that in the African American community, and it's fascinating to listen.

So I don't get access to that by sort of excellent books and articles written and so on.

And I'm just saying, there's a few of those folks listening to this with that real raw emotion.

And 1 argument they say is you, Douglas Murray, and you, Lex Freeman, don't have the right to talk about race and racism in America.

You are from a privileged class of people that don't know what it's like to be a black man or woman in America walking down the street.

I really resent that form of argumentation.

I have the right to talk about whatever the hell I want, and no one's gonna stop me or try to intimidate me, or tell me that I can't simply because of my skin color and I think that if I said to somebody else the other way around it would be equally reprehensible.

If I said shut up you have no right to criticize anything that Douglas Murray says because you've not got my skin color.

Okay it's not an exact comparison but seriously is that a is that a reasonable form of argument?

You haven't been through everything I've been through in my life, therefore you can't comment, no.

In that case, nobody can talk about anything.

We might as well pack up, go home, and isolate ourselves.

Strong words, but can you try to steal me on the case?

Not in this particular situation, but there's people that have lived through something that can comment in a very specific way.

There is a sense in which maybe a basic sense of civility when a Holocaust survivor is speaking about their experience of the Holocaust, then an intellectual from a very different part of the world as simply writing about nuanced geopolitics of World War II just should not interrupt the Holocaust survivor.

We physically interrupt them if they're telling their story.

With logic and reason that the experience of the Holocaust survivors somehow fundamentally has a deeper understanding of the humanity and the injustice of that.

First of all, again, we're in even deeper waters now, But in terms of wanting to listen to another person who has experienced something, yes, yes.

I mean, there are some people who've written about, I mean, there are people who've written about the Holocaust who didn't experience the Holocaust and have written about it better than people who did.

It's not, this idea that the lived experience, to use this terrible modern jargon, as if there's another type, this idea that the lived experience has to triumph over everything else is not always correct.

If you are sitting in a room with a Holocaust survivor and somebody who'd never heard about the Holocaust and wanted to kind of, you know, shoot out their views on it, yeah, 1 of those people should be heard more than the other, obviously, obviously.

If there's somebody who's experienced racism firsthand and there's somebody else who has never experienced it, then obviously you'd want to hear from the person who has experienced it firsthand, if that is the discussion underway.

I don't think that it's the case that that is endlessly the case.

I'm also highly reluctant to concede that there are groups of people who by dint of their skin color or anything else get to dominate the microphone.

Now of course we're literally both speaking into microphones at the moment so there's an irony to this but let's skate over the irony.

What I mean is people saying you don't have the right to speak, I have the right to take the microphone from you and speak because I know best.

And someone will win, long or short term.

But the almost aggressive tone in which this is now leveled, I don't like the sound of.

Nobody's experience is completely understandable by another human being, Nobody's.

And what many people are asking us to do at the moment, us collectively, is to fall for that thing.

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Douglas Murray: Racism, Marxism, and the War on the West | Lex Fridman Podcast #296