from Issachar People
Douglas Murray is deservedly an international bestselling author and cultural commentator. His previous books such as The Strange Death of Europe, The Madness of Crowds, and The War on the West are essential reading for their incisive analysis of our present cultural crisis.
Journalistic venture
Murray’s latest output, On Democracies and Death Cults is not the same kind of book. It is more of a journalistic account of what happened in Israel on 7 October 2023 and how the world reacted to it. The story is told in graphic detail. Murray has visited the places and personally met and interviewed victims and relatives of victims. He has also been with the IDF into Gaza and interviewed senior military and government officials about it all. This makes him well-placed to document what happened and how it has affected people and governments.
Objective morality
Murray summarises the book at the end of his introduction:
“The story of the suffering and the heroism of 7 October and its aftermath is one that spells not just the divide between good and evil, peace and war, but between democracies and death cults.” (p.xxvi).
Just a few pages earlier he described how “Many people in the West today are not comfortable talking in terms like good or evil.” (p.xxiii). Yet, he insists: “Evil does exist as a force in the world. Indeed, it is the only explanation for why certain people do certain things.” (p.xxiv). The horrors of 7 October are one example.
He also insists that “such a force as ‘good’ also exists in the world.” (p.xxiv), and here his examples are the heroism exhibited by many in response to the atrocities of 7 October. Murray is right, of course; there is objective good and objective evil in the world, whether our cultural elite recognise it or not. It is very hard, in the face of such evil as the massacre of 7 October not to recognise the objectivity of evil.
But such objectivity can only be grounded in a transcendent source of morality, and this points to the moral legislator – God himself. Perhaps it is because recognising objective morality points to a moral legislator that our culture resists that recognition. Even though Murray recognises this objectivity of morality, he resists that logical step.