Douglas Murray, Reflecting on the Strange Death of Europe

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Discussing western culture and the nature of the void and nihilism that's embraced us as well as the rather bizarre naivety that's accompanied it.

Weird. He doesn't say anything about how the economy crashed, the governments bailed out the billionaire's assets, and the rest of the world's population is expected to pay for it.

I feel inclined to say 'ok boomer'

But, he's not a boomer.

I enjoyed this. I wonder how much of his spreading sentiments have to do with Brexit? I feel like Britain is already getting wise.

It is interesting, and for whatever reason I'd agree he's much more focused on the cultural aspects (not necessarily new). He doesn't do a bad job for what it is and his Madness of Crowds (his newer book) touches on a lot of the social entropy, mass hysteria, etc.

The more I think about it though - I think it's about where and when he caught surface or what he was doing, ie. a lot of travel with respect to rearching the refugee crisis and increasingly coming away with the idea that cultural enrichment via migration has a particular sweat spot that when passed can hit diminishing returns and one even finds that people coagulate, keep their own customs, and create enclaves rather than assimilating. While that's not new I think his observation that western culture is already a bit peaked (ie. the circus or spectacle - funny how Situationist metaphors are coming up from everyone now...) does suggest that there should be real policy introspection to match influx.

At the same time - it's true that this started in 2015, went through 2017, and in the past few years I've heard far less about it. It seems like Brexit was actually born of the sense that British citizens didn't want the experiments of other countries or regions tampering that much with their future.

The polar opposite of migration concerns is in 'Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline' by Darrel Bricker and John Ibbitson where the concern is that we're so short on repopulating that it's not just the credit cards trying to find more debtors or groups cynically trying to bring in voters but it's about some attempt to prevent the US, Europe, etc. from becoming Japan - and at the same time it seems like almost every place but Africa, and only certain places in Africa, actually aren't on the population decline track.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 21 Nov 2019, 10:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm going to check and see if we carry his book. I guess I could order it. I would like to know more. He nailed the 'guilt' issue. Angela Merkel took in enough refugees for all of Europe combined.

I could be wrong on this but it seems like her antics had a fair amount to do with Orbon's election and the way Poland, Austria, and some of the other former eastern blocks went. On the economic side of it Mark Blyth expertly hammers the economic regime between the late 1970's and 2008 which brought the west where it is in terms of disquiet, populism, and there's a lot to be said to the effect that many of both the left and right wing populist uptick has to do with neoliberalism grinding the working class into the dirt - but it does seem like the migrant crisis back in 2015 really turned things up to 11 as well. It would be great if this, this meaning not just elected officials but the elites and then the Fraggles running around telling people that if they talk about certain quite real issues that they're... well... fill in the -ist or -phobic label that could be chucked out.

It's one of those moments where, despite some of my sense that Steven Pinker is a different kind of Ray Kurzweil, he was right a couple winters ago when he said that if you take certain critical issues that need to be discussed delicately and then ban discussion on them - it's a freebie for the far-right and it extends an unwarranted legitimacy based on legitimacy that was abdicated and freely given to them. I think that's some of what Douglas Murray was actually hinting at - ie. that people are getting that the side effects of cancel culture, peppering people with -ist or -phobe labels rather than actually dealing with the ideas or crushing the ideas if they're that crap has side effects that make it little more than an immediately self-gratifying and pyrrhic tactic. It's not surprising to me that this would be revealed not by a resurgence of common sense but by people overplaying their hand and burning out their credibility.

Very worth thinking about... We are isolated for the most part, but I would love to hear more about intelligent ways to approach these issues from folks who don't have the luxury (or curse, as it may be) of isolation. I'm interested in being more open minded for the sake of being open minded, not because someone is trying to shove it down my throat. I would like civil discourse. I don't yet possess those skills though.

This is part of why I could listen to Bret and Eric Weinstein all day, that's the drum they're beating.

Since Germany is really close to Japan's age distribution, that explanation for Merkel's choice has come up in public discussion, yes.
Have young people without economic future come to an economy that has no young people. And tax them.

The cultural issues are there and need to be talked about, but Germany currently has 6%uslim population. That's mainly Turkish, and that also constitutes the largest minority.
Does one more percent induce the islamification of the occident? I think not.
There's certainly hysteria involved, political opportunism, and it is a nice narrative building block the surging populists can integrate into their story about evil globalists. ...

When Murray argues that the German guilt is infecting all of Europe, he's just displaying the finest British upper-class tossery.
I mean... Britain is well engaged militarily all over the world, carrying significant tesponsibility in upholding the American neoliberal empire, extracting resources and value from everywhere, engaging in military coups against democratically elected governments etc. - it's not 16th to 20th century British imperialism, but if you're born in Afghanistan's Helmand province, you'll grow up learning how Britain swings by twice a century to try and conquer the place.
The British are quite immune to German guilt, I can assure you.
And it was Churchill who advocated for a pan-European government to avoid the rivalry between European nations that sparked two world wars.
Oh, and finally: the German 'never forget' Holocaust awareness is good and necessary. It is a reminder that one can live in a perfectly functikning society, with a nice givernment job and pension plan and everything is on 1st world level, and one could still be part of a genocide.
Maybe infecting Britain with some German guilt isn't such a bad idea.

So I'd fully agree with you on the behavior of America and Britain internationally as the primary delivery agents of neoliberalist globalism and the military enforcement of that, I'd also have to agree with Murray to some extent that there are classes - particularly in the media - who seem to project almost oversteering in the the other direction and here in the US as well there are all kinds of highly polarized regions and in similar fashion such as the media and academia.

I think the trick is, sort of like what Persephone was getting at, trying to pull as much of that out of the way and talk about events lucidly as well as their implications. The trick seems to be with most regimes is that there's always something that could be improved and ideally that would come in the form of productivity tweaks, waste decreases, etc., things we can do to avoid foreign adventures as well as getting too foolish at home in either conservative or progressive directions that haven't been thought out well. It's not easy to parse because there are so many variables on the table and one of the things that hurts is that I can indeed listen to Murray and agree with him, then listen to Darrel Bricker and John Ibbitson and agree with them or listen to how raising GDP in developing countries helps fight terror and save the environment and I can at least agree with the half of the equation mentioned, and to really reflect on that it almost feels a bit schizophenic to hold that many differing opinions at once but it seems like they need to bake together for a good long while before the most easily assailed tensions become apparent (and even there it's not exactly low-hanging fruit).

First order of business might indeed be figuring out a new way to do capitalism, a manner which can buffer lack of growth a bit better at the private level to - at minimum - avoid revolutions and wild swings of populism to the left and right. I think Mark Blyth was suggesting that the next economic regime would be something with a lot of the 1945 to 1980 features and I'm hoping he's right. If that at least squares the populism issues we can then maybe take a long look at neoliberalism, try to separate the wheat from the chaff rather than act like it's an unabated good, and find a better way to do it where developing world GDP keeps going up and western countries don't go to collapse or dictatorship in the process.

I know what you mean by holding all those differing views at once... It's just that these guys aren't being interviewed all that well, so rather than figuring out what of all the things the say is useful, and to what degree - the thing you and I are doing - they air this, uninterrupted or commented...
So, anyone not looking for merely useful bits might just as well adopt the whole of what Murray says and use it in xenophobic and nationalist arguments - and I"m not all that sure Murray didn't mean the things he says that way...

From a lot of his conversations with Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein, and anytime I've heard him before that he sounds like he's somewhere between the skeptic category and the sort of poetic center-right conservative that Roger Scruton is. He's a bit to the right of most of the IDW but not to the point that it really jumps out much in their conversation. I know he's a fan of Scruton's and the concern over culture and whether we might be taking it for granted seems like a concern he's either inherited at least some of his phrasing from reading his work. I'm also not sure if part of this is his sexual orientation and seeing the left rush to the defense of mass-importing fundamentalist Abrahamic theism, some of his first interview with Sam Harris suggests that, although on that note people's reactions and how seriously they take that concern seems to vary across a lot of dimensions.