Douglas Murray Challenges Us to Oppose Identity Politics and ‘Live in Truth’
by Jeremy Carl, National Review:
The ‘Great Awokening’ is a reign of lies masquerading as a religion, Murray says in The Madness of Crowds.
In Pascal’s Pensées, the great polymath refers to a void that man “tries in vain to fill with everything around him . . . though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words, by God himself.”
Douglas Murray’s new book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity, is, at its essence, about the things that the Left has used in vain to attempt fill that God-shaped hole of Pascal’s imagining, and in particular how the postmodern Left has given birth to an identity politics that serves as a quasi-religion.
Referring to the current culture wars sometimes known as The Great Awokening, Murray writes:
These wars are not being fought aimlessly. They are consistently being fought in a particular direction. And that direction has a purpose that is vast. The purpose — unknowing in some people, deliberate in others — is to embed a new metaphysics into our societies: a new religion, if you will.
And as he notes, the pace of this radical transformation is accelerating: “What had been barely disputed until yesterday became a cause to destroy someone’s life today.”
Murray himself is an unlikely participant on the right wing of those wars. A gay British man, a former practicing Anglican who now refers to himself as a “Christian atheist,” Murray first came to public prominence in America with his book The Strange Death of Europe, a devastating portrait of European cultural collapse that focused in particular on the role of Islam and uncontrolled immigration in European decline.
Blunt and clear-sighted, it predictably caused both outrage and admiration on both sides of the Atlantic. What made that book particularly noteworthy was that Murray didn’t just attack the predictable litany of problems — open borders and lack of cultural confidence. He also attempted to get to the root causes of European decline, producing a book that was as critical of Europeans and their spiritual malaise as it was of outsiders.