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69 of 76 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Decent Sense of Despair, October 10, 2009
This review is from: We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (Hardcover)
Most American conservatives, especially since Sept. 11th, exhibit signs of brain damage. And John Derbyshire diagnoses the problem: too much happy talk, too much optimism and not enough pessimism. There are limits about what man can do with himself and the natural world. Humans are not blank slates that can be remade to fit whatever utopian scheme can be dreamed up. Conservatives are supposed to know this and see things as they are. Liberals are there to take care of the happy talk and wishful thinking.
Now this is not an all purpose gloomfest. Derbyshire acknowledges all sorts of apocalyptic possibilities of the natural sort - resource depletion, climate change, and asteroid strike, but he doesn't talk about them. Rather he restricts himself to the social and political disasters that await America in the future. And he talks directly to conservatives. Wipe that smile off your face, he tells them. Get your mind around the fact that America does not and cannot exist outside the currents of history, that America has not been given a pass by God to do whatever it wants without horrible consequences.
And the particular delusions of optimism Derbyshire attacks? Diversity is not our strength, quite the opposite. It corrodes national identity. That presidents and legislators are not deserving of the respect, power, and money we give them. Harry Truman had to borrow money to write his memoirs. High culture has produced nothing of value after the 1950s. Pop culture has produced little of worth. A world of female empowerment is a world nudged closer to totalitarianism. Women are generally fanatical and unthoughtful about their politics. Education has become a cultish object of worship which assumes any child can become anything - if enough money is spent. Evolution is, of course, real, but it miraculously came to an end 60,000 years ago and humans never, never exhibit signs of inherited racial differences in mental aptitudes. Inside every foreigner is an American trying to get out - said transformation only needing billions of taxpayer dollars and the occasional occupation by American troops. Particular scorn is saved for conservatives who oppose immigration restrictions out of nostalgia, faulty notions of human nature, and bad historical analogies. Finally, the dismal science gets smacked around for claiming that the chaos of globalization and free trade will build a better world - a faith based assertion merely based on historical analogy.
All this is delivered in chapters of concise prose full of quantative and historical arguments. If, like me, you are already a fan of John Derbyshire's writing, you will recognize several sections. (And Derbyshire freely acknowledges the work of Steve Sailer in shaping this book too.) The only material that was new to me was from cognitive science in Chapter 7. It's some of the bleakest material here. After all, virtually every flavor of conservatism is based on the idea of humans having free will. But then, we probably have no choice but to believe that.
It's all stitched together with wit and conversational style. This is bracing despair. Congenitally optimistic conservatives will likely find something that darkens their world a bit. At least I hope so.
And if you find the whole package convincing and are tempted to use this book to convert liberals, just remember, as explained in the chapter on human nature, humans habitually deceive themselves. Indeed, it seems evolution rewards self-deceit. You probably won't get anywhere.
And the same chapter also notes that the depressed, the melancholy are the ones that most know the true lay of the land. It seems Socrates might have been wrong. It's the unexamined life that's worth living.
I recommend reading this book. After its bitter cup of truth, retire to listen to some depressing music of your choice. Personally, I recommend Warren Zevon's The Wind. And then a chaser of one of the 20th century's great pessimists, H. P. Lovecraft.
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39 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointed, February 13, 2010
This review is from: We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (Hardcover)
I am a fan of John Derbyshire; I regularly listen to his "Radio Derb," and I generally appreciate his perspective. I was, however, disappointed with this work, for the following reasons (I read it in a Kindle edition on my iPhone, so I won't give page numbers).
1. First, oddly enough, he is too optimistic! He attacks Mark Steyn on a few statistical issues for Mark's views on overpopulation, but Derbyshire's own views are hopelessly rose-tinted. Steyn argues that the population collapse of the western and industrialized world guarantees social chaos and cultural catastrophe in the years ahead. I think he is right. Derbyshire has the notion that some technical advance in Japan or China will solve the problem before we get there. This is nonsense. There is no technical advance that can solve the problem of having a tiny base of young adults supporting a massive population of aging, non-productive, and increasingly needy seniors. No technical advance can solve the problem of there being too few consumers to buy the next generation of iPads and other consumer products (this will create enormous economic problems). Derbyshire seemed to enjoy picking a few little holes in Steyn's work, but in the big picture, Steyn is right and Darbyshire is dead wrong.
2. Derbyshire goes on a rant against "Islamophobia." His main point is that he considers any belief in heaven, be it Christian or Muslim, equally absurd. So, he says, he has no reason to prefer one superstition to another. This completely misses the point of our current crisis. Whether he believes in any supernatural reality does not matter where the issue is public policy and the survival of our culture and civilization. I don't know whether he has noticed it or not, but Christians won't pronounce a fatwa against him for denying that Jesus was the son of God. Christians won't throw acid on his daughters for wearing clothes they consider too revealing. Christians aren't in the business of enacting laws, wherever they are in the majority, that force everyone to observe lent with fasting, or impose the death penalty for apostasy from the faith. Christians don't feel that God wants them to bring down airliners over major cities. Muslims do. As long as he is in a country that is Christian/Jewish/secular, he can go on proclaiming he is an atheist or agnostic, and more power to him. Let him move to an Islamic country and try the same thing, and see what happens. That is why he should fear, as in phobia, Islam, and that is why his personal religious views are irrelevant in this matter of public policy.
3. Sometimes he just comes across as a curmudgeon. He mentions certain "art" works that are truly disgusting, but gives them too much attention. For some reason, he rails against Camille Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn. I, too, don't like the modern "poetry" that she analyzes, but she also analyzes a great deal of classic English poetry, and she does so in a manner that I found very sympathetic and not at all "deconstructive." So I could not see why he was so upset about her, or how she was contributing to our "doom."
So, are we "doomed"? Yes, I think so, but I think that one gets a much better analysis of it in the writings of Thomas Sowell, Mark Steyn, and Charles Krauthammer.
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32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Humorous, depressing, not for the easily offended - Great!, October 12, 2009
This review is from: We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (Hardcover)
Not for the politically correct or easily offended. The author does not hesitate to smack around certain attitudes, and those attitudes tend to be held by persons whom most of us do not dare offend nowadays. It's bracing, refreshing, and has the ring of truth. I read the book's chapters alternating with a book of short stories in the genre of H. P. Lovecraft; Chthulhu and Dagon provide light relief to what you will find in We Are Doomed.
Actually, the author exhibits the same kind of good cheer as the bomber pilot did when riding an A-bomb down, in the movie Doctor Strangelove.
Get the book, and pay particular attention to the discussion of Kansas City schools. Pay particular attention to the discussion of property values here and there. If you are offended, ask yourself why.
Many readers (including a reviewer here) will fault the book for its "Nineteenth Century values." Yes and no. The author does indeed hold many of those values in high esteem, and mourns their passing. But that is not uniformly the case. Most important is not the values, per se, but the consequences in terms of our livelihoods and lifestyles, particularly for the near future. That is, this is a book of consequences, not of values except insofar as values have consequences.
I would normally buy this kind of book via Amazon, but this one was prominently featured at a local bookstore, even in an area where the politically correct folks run the place. That tells you something.
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