The War Against the West. Middle Nation Podcast (E:23)

Everyone. This is Shahid Bolson. Welcome to the Middle Nation podcast. This is episode number 23. Do you remember one of the reasons Abu Jahil refused to acknowledge the prophethood of Rasulullah It was because his branch of the tribe of Quraysh was competitive with the branch that the came from.

Banu Abdmanah fed people and gave charity, so Banu Mahzum, Abu Jahal's tribe fed people and gave charity. That's what he said until the two tribes became equals. And then Banu Abdmanaf said, a prophet has come from them. So Abu Jahil said, they would never recognize Rasulullah because there was no way that Banu Mahzum could compete with that. It was his extreme chauvinism and tribal pride that prevented him from acknowledging the truth and saving himself from the hellfire.

I want you to remember that while I review a recent discussion between Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray because it was a truly revealing discussion which highlighted to me the extent to which this particular brand of conservative is encased inside an impenetrable tomb of cultural bias that reminds me of why Malcolm x once said that the only way America could ever overcome its bigotry would be for the American people to embrace Islam on mass. But more importantly, it indicates to me why Muslims should not be holding their breath for people like Jordan Peterson to ever convert to Islam. The framework of the discussion was the promotion of Murray's latest book, The War Against the West, and both men seem so blinded by their own cultural biases that they continuously contradict themselves and exhibit an amazing degree of stupidity for being otherwise intelligent men. Honestly, there's simply too much to respond to here, so I'm just gonna take a few excerpts from the nearly two hour conversation and try to explain why it is an embarrassing mess. For anyone who is under the impression that Peterson and Murray are intellectual titans of our age, my apologies.

They are articulate and verbose, but their thinking skills are mediocre at best. They are both essentially cultural bureaucrats, deeply embedded in and defensive of the mythologies of Western civilization.

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 and why use that term?

Essentially, the as interesting, I thought you were going to start with the with the West, which is

Well, we'll do that next.

A really not naughty one to untangle.

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

Now they never actually do define what Murray means by the West, but it does become clear that he means white people, which presumably is why they never actually decide to spell it out. This will become a bit messy later on. Now the gist of Murray's book is that the West is under attack by westerners themselves who feel disgusted and angry about the crimes of colonialism, slavery, and white supremacy, and he believes that this is unjust and confused. He also appears to believe that even anti colonialist movements were themselves ironically inspired by western civilization, essentially hinting that the vitality and superiority of the West is simply irresistible. But what he actually displays here is a profound lack of understanding of anti colonialist movements as well as a deeply racist conception of colonized peoples.

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 had been colonized should be returned to a precolonial 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 they they were arguing that the answer to the colonial era was was Marxism. And, of course, that that that has this tremendous irony, doesn't it, which is that they say, well, this one form of of westernism, western colonialism, must be replaced because it's western.

And what we'll replace it with is western Marxism.

Okay. Look. European colonization of Africa and Asia began in the fifteen hundreds and continued for over four hundred years radically intensifying in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the help of industrialization. Murray appears to believe that the anti colonialist movements opposed colonialism purely because they were western and apparently not because they were exploitative, oppressive, brutal, dehumanized, and traumatized entire nations and severely undermined the development of colonized countries. He thinks colonialists were opposed simply because they were foreigners, and he imagines that in order for them to have any integrity, postcolonialist societies were obliged to revert back to the way they had functioned four centuries earlier and just pretend that colonialism had never happened.

In his mind, it is ironic that thinkers like Fanon would determine that something like Marxism could be beneficial since Karl Marx was a westerner, and he thinks anti colonialist movements were supposed to reflexively reject anything and everything originating from the West and not that they simply wanted to be able to decide for themselves what sort of system to adopt for the benefit of their own societies regardless of where those models might have first been thought up. He seems to be oblivious to the vicious role of capitalism in the colonialist project and the catastrophic impact it had on colonized people. This obliviousness therefore also prevents him from understanding why Marx's views on capitalism would greatly reflect the experience of colonized people and resonate with them. The bourgeois collaboration with imperialists and colonizers lent further credence to the Marxist critique and again made that critique all the more attractive because of how accurately it depicted the social and economic conditions created by colonialism. There is no irony here.

It only seems ironic to someone who has such profound disregard for colonized people that he imagines them incapable of discerning for themselves what is in their own interests and that they are unequipped to do anything for themselves but to adopt this or that set of ideas coming from the West. He is almost saying here by the way that anti colonialist movements were essentially insincere and hypocritical for not reverting to the precolonialist ways of life as if that was even possible. And that they were not genuine in their anti western stance because they found value in Marxist ideas. He is low key suggesting that opposition to colonialism was an ill advised mistake committed by unthinking natives who ultimately just sabotaged themselves by rebelling against their benign masters as if they foolishly chose to oust the good cop of the West for the bad cop of the West because they're just not a people who think rationally and have no ideas of their own. If pressed, I'm fairly certain that Douglas Murray would say that both Africa and Asia were better off under white European colonization.

Murray objects to what he sees as the overemphasis on western racism, asserting that racism is not unique to the West and that western civilization is ever so much more than the racist elements in its history.

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.

Now he's being overly modest here about the West's contribution to racism as well as the extent to which the West was guided by racism and utilized it in pursuit of empire. While color, ethnicity, and nation based biases and bigotries did always exist, sure, the West literally developed a scientific argument for classifying black people as subhumans, and those arguments survive in one form or another until today. And look, the West's practice of slavery added many elements of brutality and inhumanity that had never existed in history. They innovated rationales and approaches to slavery that truly surpassed the way the institution operated everywhere else in the world. And yes, it was all fundamentally built upon radically racist ideas.

And these ideas again flowed through the veins of western imperial imperialism making it also distinctly cruel and barbaric. And this barbarism is largely what enabled the western imperialist nations to ascend to global power and dominance. You cannot really compartmentalize away this savage inhumanity from what you want to call Western civilization. That would be rather like wanting people to admire a trophy you won without mentioning the competition itself for which you won 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 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 who's had to study at almost any university has come across orientalism at some point.

And one of Saeed's fundamental critiques of the West is that it sort of essentialises 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 essentialising people in the West. You know, he'll refer in passing, Saeed, to for instance, your average nineteenth century European.

Now here we're beginning to get into the mess of what Murray means by the West or Western civilization. Here he is saying that western civilization should not be racialized as white, but of course that was always the intellectual and moral basis of western colonialism. White civilization against the darker savages of the world who were essentially subhuman. The notion that racialization should not be done is an entirely new phenomenon for the West's understanding of what western civilization means and to whom it belongs. Here he's blaming Edward Said for taking the same approach to the West that the West took towards the peoples of the East, but he is disingenuously overlooking the fact that the West took this approach to itself.

To the West, it has always been white. Now over time, they developed a concept of sharing western culture with non white outsiders, immigrants, and so on, but there was never any question in their minds that this was white people's culture, white people's civilization, white people's contribution and achievements and so on. It has always been racialized and racialized by the West itself. This becomes clear further into the conversation with Murray saying

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.

So you see, he is talking about white people. When it suits him, he wants to say that western values and western culture and so on are universal. But when push comes to shove, he affirms the idea that these things belong to white people, and you cannot critic ize them or reject them without attacking white people, and you cannot attack white people without rejecting western culture and values. To him, in actuality, western civilization is white. When others make this conflation, he recoils, but it is a conflation that has always been championed by the West itself.

You can't have it both ways. For centuries and even now, you equated western civilization with whiteness, and everyone got that message loud and clear. You cannot now be offended simply because everyone believed you meant what you said. Now let me here just address what both Peterson and Murray claim to be uniquely Western values and ideas.

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.

If you go for the enlightenment philosophers, you get to the 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.

The fact that they imagine rationalism, reason, the scientific method, and the importance of the individual are all inventions of western civilization just shows how blinded they are by their own mythologies. The matter of reason and rationalism emerged in the Muslim world at least eight hundred years before the enlightenment. And the role of reason in life, culture, and law was sorted out long before the West ever even began thinking about these issues. The scientific method was pioneered by the Muslims, which is why you have masjids and aqueducts and other buildings still standing today centuries after they were built. We were developing architecture, engineering, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics when the West was still in the dark ages.

And as for the sovereignty of the individual, let me just mention one point. Nothing emphasizes the importance of individual rights more than the principle of. If an individual person is wronged, they and they alone have the right to against the offender regardless of that offender's status, their tribe, their wealth, their class, or any other collectivist grouping, And the individual alone has the right to forgive. Islam emphasizes over and over again that every individual person will stand alone on Yom el Qiyama, that every individual person earns their own reward or punishment, that every individual person must be respected, must be honored, and that each person must follow their own conscience individually. The West did not invent the individual.

Every concept that they associate with the enlightenment was developed by others before the enlightenment. The only thing that the West invented, it's fair to say, is the habit of claiming to have invented what they did not. The same way that they discovered lands that were already inhabited by other people, so too they discovered other people's concepts and claimed to have come up with them themselves. Sure, after discovering other people's ideas, they developed them and made them their own. But in the process, they pretty uniformly deformed those ideas and misapplied them until they actually became detrimental.

Now again, there's really just too much in this conversation for me to address, like how Murray is angry that the mythological heroes of the West are being torn down. And by torn down, he means being spoken of honestly. And we can see from this that Murray does not actually value the quote unquote western virtues of reason and rationality because he thinks that they should be allowed to believe in legends and false stories about their heroes and hold on to a whitewashed largely fictional version of history instead of coldly and rationally examining the actual facts. He is essentially saying that westerners should be allowed to lie to themselves about their own history in order to be proud of it. Because, yes, perhaps they have done awful things and perhaps they never lived by the philosophies and morals they espoused, but let's all just appreciate the grandeur of the societies built by this incessant duplicitousness and hypocrisy.

Because if we acknowledge that these societies were actually built by exploitation and brutality, it dampens the mood.

You could stand in front of Michelangelo's Pieta and you could think about what the workmen who got the piece of marble out of the quarry went through and whether they were adequately paid and whether they had all of the life choices necessary to for them to be able to decide whether they wanted to be quarriers in Marvel, or you can stand back and marvel at Michelangelo's Pieta. And I just say, how about turning that around and saying, just have some damn gratitude for what you found yourself living among.

And notice here in Murray's example that the value of the individual quarrymen is minimized in relation to the collective good of the art work his labor produced. When the individual's rights are sacrificed in order to create something of which his society can be proud, then his individual rights can be easily shrugged off. So where is the value of the individual here? And in what is a truly remarkably oblivious comment, Murray, has spent the entirety of the conversation blaming others for tearing apart the lives of orthodox western history and exposing the crimes of western civilization, all of which he resents so deeply that he wrote a book about it. Murray says that people should take responsibility for causing the things that they resent.

The only way to turn around resentment is 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.

Murray, Peterson, and people like them absolutely created what they are angry about precisely by lying about the past, lying about the West, remaining thoroughly embedded in western racism and white supremacist views and by peddling fantasies to the public about western civilization. People like Murray created this backlash because they consistently espouse values. They do neither actually understand, internalize, nor actualize. Now if westerners today are trying to objectively examine their history and call out the flagrant and continuous hypocrisy, good for them. This is not a war against the West.

It is a war against western lies and western myths that have been promulgated for centuries to deflect from their own crimes. They are exposing the fact that the West has been passing counterfeit checks in the form of values and philosophies they do not believe in and have never followed. And perhaps some segment of the population is finally realizing that the West's cultural bank account is empty. They are the victims of a moral Ponzi scheme, and people like Peterson and Murray are upset that the jig is up, and they're waxing nostalgic about the days when everyone believed the Khan. So again, remember Abu Jahl.

These types of people are highly unlikely to accept Islam precisely because it would mean admitting that their cultural myths and imagined prestige are false. They are too heavily invested in delusions of superiority to acknowledge the superiority of Islam, foolishly believing that acceptance of the truth would diminish them. So Muslims who are holding on to the hope that American or European conservatives may be closer to Islam just because they espouse more traditional values, you are misreading them. They are deeply hostile to Islam as a rival belief system particularly because it is true. Course, you can make dour to them, but just be aware that no matter where you stand, you are always going to be in their blind spot.

Western liberals may well be lost and wandering in chaos, but Western conservatives are extraordinarily committed to upholding falsehood as this conversation makes abundantly clear. So it is appropriate that Peterson and Murray see themselves as defenders of the West because they indeed embody everything that has made the West so uniquely atrocious. A lot of nice clever words glossing over barbarity and moral bankruptcy. This is the true Western heritage.