A Defence of the West
My latest book review – from Saturday’s print edition – is up on the Telegraph website. It also serves as a brief statement of the case for defending the West against the accusation that it is nothing but a morally bankrupt fiction.
“Inaccurate as our postwar narratives of the West may have been, they helped secure an order that was free, open and peaceful as never before. By contrast, the tales that have been in the ascendant ever since have helped undermine free speech and taken an illiberal, racialised campus-culture mainstream. Today the platitudes of the anti-Western grand narrative are exploited, in the mouths of Putin and Xi, to justify genocidal regimes and imperial crimes.”
[…]
“The term ‘Western Civilisation’ has become so contaminated and inaccurate it may not be of much use today. The idea that the West should be a focus for a politics of white identity is repugnant. But the West is real, and so are its accomplishments. To defend what we have against illiberal voices without and within, we need to carry forward that saga of human hope, just as much as we need an honest accounting of our failings.”