Tgk1946's Blog

From The War on the West (Douglas Murray 2022) pp174-83

There is one other possibility to explain the oddity of the Enlightenment thinkers ending up so prominently in the firing line of our era. And that is this: The European Enlightenments were the greatest leap forward for the concept of objective truth. The project that Hume and others worked away on was to ground an understanding of the world in verifiable fact. Miracles and other phenomena that had been a normal part of the world of ideas before their era suddenly lost all their footholds. The age of reason did not produce the age of Aquarius, but it put claims that were ungrounded in fact on the back foot for the best part of two centuries.

By contrast, what has been worked away at in recent years has been a project in which verifiable truth is cast out. In its place comes that great Oprah-ism: “my truth.” The idea that I have “my truth” and you have yours makes the very idea of objective truth redundant. It says that a thing becomes so because I feel it to be so or say that it is so. At its most extreme, it is a reversion to a form of magical thinking.

Precisely the thinking that the Enlightenment thinkers chased out. And perhaps that is why the Enlightenment thinkers have become such a focus for assault. Because the system they set up is antithetical to the system that is being constructed today: a system entirely opposed to the idea of rationalism and objective truth; a system dedicated to sweeping away everyone from the past as well as the present who does not bow down to the great god of the present: “me.”

WHY DO THEIR GODS NOT FALL?

Yet there are many oddities in all of this. Kant, Hume, Jefferson, Mill, Voltaire, and everyone else connected to racism, empire, or slavery must fall. And yet a strange selection of historical figures does not, And in this fact, we get to the roots of something that is happening in the anti-Western moment.

In Highgate in London, one of the largest monuments in the cemetery is a great bust on top of a huge stone pillar. On the front are quotes from The Communist Manifesto (“Workers of all lands unite”) and from the Theses on Feuerbach (“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it”). The man whose tomb this is—paid for by the Communist Party of Britain in the 1960s—is of course Karl Marx. To this day, it remains a place of pilgrimage for people who think that Marx changed the world in a good way. All have their own spin for dealing with the fact of the roughly one hundred million people who were killed in trying to change the world along Marx’s lines.

Yet it stands there still, and there have been no serious efforts to topple it or destroy the bust. Occasionally it has been daubed in red paint—with such vandalism always condemned by cultural and political figures alike. But through the events of recent years, there have been no online petitions or crowd efforts to pull it down and kick it into a nearby river. There may be a reason for that, of course, which is that it is a tombstone, and even the most doctrinaire people might find it distasteful to desecrate a grave. Yet the monument in Highgate is not the only memorial to Marx or Marxism that stands. As recently as 2016, Salford University unveiled a new memorial on its campus, The huge bust of Friedrich Engels—coauthor of The Communist Manifesto—was made into a feature of campus life. In part to commemorate the fact that Marx and Engels used to drink in a nearby pub when they lived in the area in the 1840s. The university authorities paid for the vast five-meter-tall sculpture as a tribute to the two men.

As recently as 2018, on the two hundredth anniversary of his birth, a vast new larger-than-life statue of Marx was unveiled in the town of Trier in the southwest of Germany, just near the borders with Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. The fourteen-foot-tall bronze statue was donated by the authorities in China, and the hundreds of guests at the unveiling included a delegation from the Chines Communist Party, It seems as though a connection with Marx on Marxism is no ethical problem, perhaps even a plus, In April 2021, when students at the University of Liverpool forced the university authorities to rename a building named after the ninetcenth-century prime minister William Gladstone (because of his father’s links with slavery), they renamed the hall after a civil rights campaigner and lifelong Communist Party member called Dorothy Kuya.

There is no special effort to eradicate, problematize, decolonize, or otherwise act in an “antiracist” manner against the legacy of Karl Marx and his circle. And this is strange because as anybody who has read the work of Marx will know—especially anyone who has read his letters with Engels—Marx’s reputation by the lights of our own age ought to be toast by now.

Consider the racism in Marx’s letters to Engels, where the two great communists converse privately about the issues of their day Here is a letter from Marx to Engels written in July 1862:

The Jewish nigger Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation … It is now quite plain to me—as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify—that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like.

Of course, this is not a nice way to speak about anybody. But a charitable interpretation, such as has been denied to David Hume, might say that this is just one ugly thing said by Marx in a private letter and that we shouldn’t judge him harshly on it. Yet this is not the only occasion that such a sentiment came from Marx’s pen. Here is another letter to Engels, written four years later (in 1866), in which Marx describes a recent work he believes Engels might benefit from, By this stage, both men are aware of the discoveries of Charles Darwin, whose work on the origins of species, natural selection, and much more were of course unavailable to the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Marx is interested in Pierre Tremaux and his Origine gt transformations de l’-homme et des autres étres (Paris 1865). By now the monogenesis argument (that is, that human beings are all rejated and are not different species) was winning the intellectual war. Frederick Douglass and others had made highly persuasive, and ultimately successful, interventions into the debate. And yet even now still Marx is playing around with the polygenesis argument. As he tells Engels of Trémaux’s work: “In spite of all the shortcomings that [have noted, it represents a very significant advance over Darwin. .., E.g.,… (he spent a long time in Africa) he shows that the common negro type is only a degeneration of a far higher one.”

Perhaps this was just a blind spot for Marx? Perhaps he had a problem with black people but not with other groups?

Here is Marx in another letter to Engels, where he manages to get onto the subject of Jews: “The expulsion of a Leper people from Egypt, at the head of whom was an Egyptian priest named Moses. Lazarus, the leper, is also the basic type of the Jew.”*4

Of course, there is another way in which this also could be defended. It might be said that Marx was not writing for public consumption in these letters. His reflections on the “degenerative” nature of the “common negro” and the “leprous” nature of the Jewish people are ugly, certainly, but they are private reflections in a private letter written privately to a friend. Like the letter that Thomas Jefferson sent to the Marquis de Chastellux. But the problem with Marx is that he didn’t just keep his racism to his private correspondence with his coauthor on The Communist Manifesto.

In 1853, in one of his pieces for the New York Tribune, Marx Wrote of the Balkans that it had “the misfortune to be inhabited by a conglomerate of different races and nationalities, of which it is hard to say which is the least fit for progress and civilization.” In 1856, he could be found writing in the same paper that “we find every tyrant backed by a Jew” and claiming that there exists always “a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.” Starting from the time of Jesus and the throwing of the moneylenders out of the Temple, Marx tells his audience that “the loan-mongering Jews of Europe do only on a larger and more obnoxious scale what many others do on one smaller and less significant. But it is only because the Jews are so strong that it is timely and expedient to expose and stigmatize their organization.” And these proto-Hitlerian views are not from a single period of Marx’s life. Rather, they are consistent throughout it. Over a decade earlier, in 1843, Marx writes in “On the Jewish Question”: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. … Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist.”*

Well, you might say, perhaps Marx simply didn’t like Jews very much? Except that he didn’t seem to like other races very much either and had just as little respect for their great histories as he did for the history of the Jews. In 1853, he is telling his audience in America, “Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history.” And while Marx is simultaneously damning and utterly ignorant of Indian civilization, he does seem to favor British rule in India. “The question,” he says, “is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton.” One role of Britain in India, Marx asserts, is to lay “the material foundations of Western society in Asia.” He is inclined to think that they can do it. For although Marx notes that other civilizations had overrun India, these earlier “barbarian conquerors” had been unequal to the task. Whereas “the British were the first conquerors superior, and therefore, inaccessible to Hindoo civilization.”™

Still, Marx may have been antiblack, anti-Semitic, anti-Indian, procolonialist, and racist both in public and in private, But at least he cannot be connected with the other great sin of the West. Alas, as though proving to posterity that Marx could get every issue wrong, here he is writing about slavery in 1847, ahead of the American Civil War and already very much on the wrong side of that conflict: “Slavery is an economic category like any other.”

Marx weighed up the bad side and what he called “the good side of slavery.” And he found a lot of good to say about it: “Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy—the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”*

Why is it worth reeling off this incomplete list of what are—in our own era—an almost clean sweep of offenses? Not simply because they demonstrate that the most significant figure in the history of left-wing thought, indeed its genesis figure and prophet, perhaps even its god, was guilty of every one of the vices leveled at all nonMarxists in the West. But in any analysis, Marx was far worse than any of the people who largely leftist campaigners have spent recent years lambasting. Marx’s anti-Semitism is more noxious than Immanuel Kant’s. His career-long record of racism makes a single footnote in the work of David Hume look very slight. His language of superior and inferior races was of a kind that progressive thinkers such as John Stuart Mill already abhorred and worse than anything Thomas Jefferson engaged in.

The only defense that might be made of him by his defenders and disciples is that he was a man of his time. That Marx lived in the nineteenth century and therefore held on to a number of the era’s more unpleasant attributes. And yet this defense is packed with explosives waiting to go off in the face of anyone hoping to use them. First, because who is not a man of their own time? Every person whose reputation has been brought down in the cultural revolution of recent years was also a man or woman of his or her own time. So why should this excuse be successful when used in defense of Marx, yet dismissed when used in defense of Voltaire or Locke? With Marx, there is another problem in his defense, which is that for his defenders, he is not simply another thinker. He is not even to be compared with Hume or the sage of Kénigsberg. For his followers, Marx is the last or (depending on how you count it) the originating prophet. He was not just a thinker or a sage—he was the formulator of a world. revolutionary movement. A movement that claimed to know how ta reorder absolutely everything in human affairs in order to arrive at a utopian society, a utopian society that has never been achieved and has cost many millions of lives in not being achieved but that activists across the West still dream of instituting next time: always next time.

It may be said that a prophet should be held to a higher standard than a mere philosopher, antiquarian, or botanist. A 2019 biography of Marx was reviewed in the New York Times under the headline “Karl Marx: Prophet of the Present.” The paper’s reviewer (while noting in passing some of Marx’s less seemly comments about Jews) concluded that the work “makes the case for taking Marx seriously today as a pragmatic realist, as well as a messianic visionary” who “never lost his belief in a redemptive future.”*” Which is a beautiful idea, of course. And entirely divorced not just from every detail of the consequences but from the reality of the man in question.

What becomes clear in analyzing the differences between the treatment of Marx and the treatment of almost every other thinker of the West is that the game is worse than inconsistent. It exists to cut a swath through every thinker or historical figure in the Western tradition. To lambaste them for holding on to one or more of the attitudes of their time that our own age holds to be abhorrent. And at the same time to ensure that figures whose work is helpful in pulling apart the Western tradition, even to the point of demanding revolution to overturn it, are never treated to this same ahistorical and retributive game. Marx is protected because his writings and reputation are useful for anyone wishing to pull down the West. Everybody else is subjected to the process of destruction because their reputations are useful for holding up the West. After all, remove every other philosopher from the field, take down all their monuments and the tributes to them, and ensure that their thought is taught primarily (and ahistorically) as a story of racism and slavery and what is left standing in the Western tradition?

For anyone who doubts that this is the game that is being engaged in, perhaps one other example may suffice. Among the modern thinkers who have the most impact on contemporary thought almost none sits higher than Michel Foucault (1926-84). He remains the world’s most cited scholar, across an array of disciplines. His work on sexuality, and especially on the nature of power, has endeared him to generations of students. His ideas make him the most important name to drop for any scholar engaged in the activist studies of recent decades. For black studies, queer studies, and others, he is the indispensable figure. Among the reasons is that, taken in its totality, his work is one of the most sustained attempts to undermine the system of institutions that had made up part of the Western system of order. Foucault’s obsessive analysis of everything through a quasi-Marxist lens of power relations diminished almost everything in society into a transactional, punitive, and meaningless dystopia. Among those to push Foucault’s work from an early stage was Edward Said. The two would inevitably have been attracted to each other because underneath the work of both men was an effort to destabilize if not deconstruct the idea of the Western nations as having almost anything good to be said for them.

It is always unpleasant—as well as unwise—for thinkers to lambaste each other because of the habits of their personal lives. The personal is not always political and is certainly not always philosophical. Yet in March 2021, a most interesting fact emerged about the personal life of Foucault. During an interview, his fellow philosopher Guy Sorman revealed a fact that had long been rumored. Sorman revealed that in the late 1960s, when Foucault was living hear Tunis, Foucault would have sex with the local children. Sorman taid that on a visit to Sidi Bou Said, near Tunis, he witnessed young children running after Foucault asking him for the money he offered other children before raping them. According to Sorman these boys of eight, nine, or ten years of age would have money throw at by Foucault, who would arrange to meet them fate at might a usual place.” The usual place turned out to be the local cemetery where Foucault would rape the children on the gravestones. As Sorman said, “The question of consent wasn’t even raised.” Foucault would not have dared to do this in France, according to Sorman, but there was “a colonial dimension to this. A white imperialism.”

One of the many oddities of these revelations is that, to date, they seem to have done nothing to dent Foucault’s reputation. Nor has the fact that along with other French intellectuals, he once signed a letter recommending the age of consent in his country be lowered to twelve. His work continues to be cited. His books continue to be published, and there is no significant campaign to have them pulled. Indeed, a final, previously unpublished volume in his History of Sexuality was published after these revelations came out. The repercussions of Foucault’s theories continue to be felt, and nowhere has there been any recantation by his disciples in disciplines across America or anywhere else because of the revelations of racially motivated child rape.

Like the double standard over Marx’s racism, this fact is suggestive. For it would surely be different if it had worked the other way around. If one of the twentieth century’s great conservative thinkers had been revealed to have traveled to the developing world in order to rape young boys on a tombstone in a graveyard at night, it might be considered suggestive. The political Left would likely be unwilling to let the issue slide by completely, Nor would they be willing to pass up the opportunity to extrapolate some extra lessons, They might say that this habit was revealing of a wider conservative mindset, That it revealed the pedophilic, rapist, racist tendencies at the heart of traditional Western thought. They might even try to point out that a whole cultural movement or societal tendency was tarred by association with this nocturnal and noxious habit, But with Foucault, no such thing has happened. He remains on his throne, his work continues to spill out. And nobody to date seems to think there is anything especially telling about one of the founding icons of the antiWesternism of our time having found personal pleasure in purchasing native children of foreign countries to satisfy his sexual desires.

It is in such omissions and double standards that something crucial can be discerned. Which is that what is happening in the current cultural moment is not simply an assertion of a new moral vision but the attempted imposition of a political vision on the West. One in which only specific figures—whom the West had felt proud of—are brought down. Meanwhile, those figures who have been most critical of the Western traditions of culture and the free market are spared the same treatment. As though in the hope that when everyone else is brought low, the only figures who will still remain on their pedestals (both real and metaphorical) are those figures who were most critical of the West. Meaning that the only people left to guide us would be the people who will guide us in the worst possible directions.