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We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism

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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.

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.

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.

In "We Are Doomed", John Derbyshire asserts that the American conservative movement is in peril because it abandoned its healthy pessimism about the world, the same pessimism that undergirded the nation's founding, and embraced some of the wishful thinking about human nature, life, and the world normally found on the Left. This led, he believes, to critical errors in fiscal, foreign, and social policy that he believes will likely lead to a diminished future for our country over the next few decades.

Derbyshire discusses many of the problems extant in the country today that are symptoms of a lack of healthy pessimism, such as the desire for diversity merely for diversity's sake, the decline of our culture, the seemingly intractable problems in our educational system, and the scourge of illegal immigration. The author opposes the notion that the immigration of today is similar to the immigration of the early part of the last century and lists the reasons why today's immigration is destructive.

The author includes absorbing chapters on religion and the nature-nurture conflict in regards to human nature. The author makes a good case for taking the nature side of this conflict, although one can think of some individuals, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who took on the fierce challenge of essentially transforming their personalities by relentlessly attacking their weaknesses.

Derbyshire examines the debt time bomb our country faces, and if you have seen the figures concerning government debt, corporate debt, and family and individual debt, they are sobering indeed. However, some futurologists such as Ray Kurzweil (whom Derbyshire mentions in the book) think that the pace of technological change in the twenty-first century will be exponential, not linear. If this is the case, advances in areas such as nanotechnology could raise living standards to such a now-unthinkable degree that the debt bubble might be nullified for the most part. I can remember a time near the end of my college years, in 1992, when we were not emerging from the early Nineties recession very vigorously and many thought we were in for a long period of slow or no growth...and then along came the Internet. Healthy pessimism is wise, but while life does not turn out as well as it does in your fondest hopes, life does not turn out anywhere nearly as bad as it does in your worst fears, either.

As an added bonus, the author hammed it up for the picture on the book jacket, striking a pose as the archetype of a pessimistic curmudgeon, replete with bow tie and extremely forbidding frown. This thought-provoking book would be a very worthy addition to the fall reading list of any conservative in America.

In spite of the theme of pessimism proclaimed on the cover, I laughed out loud at several sections of this delightful book. I have several of John Derbyshire's other books on mathematics and am aware of his prickly view of contemporary life. Several sections of this enjoyable tour d'horizon of modern life showed me new interests I share with him. He complains about the dismal state of culture, especially music and literature. Poetry has been moribund since the days of Robert Frost (And I would add DH Lawrence) and music since Turandot. Art is worse, if anything. I actually spent a day at the London Museum of Modern Art with my daughter, and amused myself with wondering at the plight of curators who must maintain these ridiculous artifacts of the declining western canon. Derbyshire provides a few hilarious examples I had missed, including leaking cans of the artist's excrement and a rotting tiger shark in a container of formaldehyde (Sold at auction for $9 million, I believe). This chapter was one of the places where I was required to wipe tears from my eyes, no, not in despair but from laughing.

He plows into the "Edbiz" as he calls it and no prisoners are taken. I read the Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) during a period when I was a graduate student at Dartmouth and had several colleagues ask to read it when I had finished as they did not care to be seen buying a copy at the Dartmouth Bookstore. Amazon.com has solved that problem, at least. He recounts in some detail the story of Kansas City and its school system experiment of the 1970s. If that didn't prove the futility of throwing money at inner city schools, no hope is left for the future.

I'm hoping to get a couple of my children to read this little book for the slight possibility that a seed of reality might still be planted in soil plowed, disced and harrowed (How many could describe those processes anymore ?) by the education leviathan? I have recently been demoralized by my examination of the college curriculum inflicted on my youngest child. This little book has served as an antidote although I fear there is no cure.

I should add that Democrats and Republicans are equally skewered and no cultural hobby horse is unscathed. Culturally, I am one of the scorned Biologians he writes about. If you don't know what that is, read the book.

John Derbyshire, or "Derb" as his fans know him, has fired a shot across the bow of those political parties, politicians, academics and unthinking people who have gotten us into our present politically correct quagmire. (When I first began reading the book I thought of arguments begun by Lord C. P. Snow in his "Two Cultures.") However, Mr. Derbyshire then bravely forges into social, economic, moral, artistic and international questions faced in our world today. Mr. Derbyshire's background as a mathematician, world traveler and factual reporter/journalist keeps him grounded in looking at data, people, politics in a logical, factual manner.

The one thing that stands out about Mr. Derbyshire is he has got lots of guts to address really tough issues. (An aside: Mr. Attorney General, there are folk out here who aren't cowards when it comes to debating race and Mr. Derbyshire is at the head of the pack. Along with Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson and the list goes on, but Derb is in there hooking and jabbing with the best!) His discussion on race, education, affirmative action and diversity uses facts to draw logical, common sense conclusions from the supporting data. He points out easily observable truths which are often glossed over, hidden and denigrated because they don't fit a politically correct framework. That we are still pouring billions down these bottomless ratholes (following the already spent billions and billions, if not trillions) is illogical and cannot be supported by fact based beneficial results.

In his chapter discussing "Religionists", "Culturalists" and "Biologians" he has a fabulous summation paragraph (pg 142 of the hardback) when he states: "......There IS an objective reality; we CAN uncover it by methodical inquiry; it DOES embrace human nature; and we MUST face it unblinkingly and courageously if it tells us that Culturism is false. It does." This point is crucial and universal in measuring our world today. One must absolutely strive to find the objective reality in all of our problems and issues discussed in this book and in our own lives, not just when addressing "Culturalism."

Mr. Derbyshire covers Religion; Immigration; the Iraq War; the Middle East (the Levant, which has been a problem for decades if not centuries)and Africa, focusing his "unblinking" eye to get to basic facts and observations which will make many uncomfortable. All the while he encourages pessimism when coming up with means of dealing with these problems. Of necessity, the devlopment of "pessimism" requires honesty; a commodity in short supply (as Derb frequently points out with todays politcal classes, as well as academics, race hustlers, internationalists and others who try to influence issues/programs under discussion.)

This book will make you laugh, while also making you uncomfortable and will, at times, agree that "We Are Doomed." Mr. Derbyshire has distilled facts and presented them in a logical sequence which support his arguments. No politically correct bias, just the facts. This is where his mathematical/scientific grounding is most evident. Science (and scientists) should not "care" what the conclusion/outcome of an experiment is--only that it is factually supported while being objectively and honestly determined. Alas, there is the rub with a huge majority of what passes for "science" today (particularly in the "social", "human", "environmental", and "political" "sciences.")

No doubt detractors will loudly declare Mr. Derbyshire to be a racist, bigot, and every other epithet used by those who disagree with liberal/progressive dogma. (Maybe the name callers are the "cowards" the Attorney General was talking about?) Mr. Derbyshire is in the arena actually looking at facts and drawing rational, logical conclusions. We need more of that in our debates today, not less. So, do not let such histrionics silence Derb.

Mr. Derbyshire has a bit of difficulty in concluding his book and I found that slightly discomforting--but what the hell--the book is titled "We Are Doomed", so what do you expect??

(Note: I have both the hardback and Kindle editions. When on the road it is helpful to have the Kindle book, so I don't have to tote the hardback.)

The gloomocrats of conservativism have put out a book here and there. Usually though they have focused on a particular subject interpreted through the pessimistic lens, such as Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization and Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. John Derbyshire decides to bring the various strands together and sees, surprise, surpise, a pattern, a direction. He sees us - heading straight for the abyss. He sees that . . . WE ARE DOOMED!!!

The book is more polemic than scholarly (by a longshot). But the outlook, the issues, the evidence. The Derb brings together the facts, social trends, political developments and scientific discoveries to justify, indeed mandate, the sour outlook he prescribes.

Diversity? Garbage! . . . as any decent conservative worth his salt already knows, but is often too cowed down to admit. The educational system? Despite an excellent track record of failure, nothing seems to shake the belief held by so many people, including `happy talk' conservatives, that there is no need to pay attention to what actually works when we can just ignore the evidence and keep doling out the dollars. Immigration? Well, it worked well in the past, so no need to engage in the smallest iota of critical thinking about it today, right? Wrong.

Issue after issue, Derbyshire takes aim at the trends in American culture, holds them up to the evidence, and finds them lacking. What distinguishes The Derb from others, though, is that he does not argue for a corrective course. In a refreshing display of frankness, he simply acknowledges that, despite the clear evidence, we will continue along the same path of failure and social decay. It is hard to think of how long and how clearly we have known certain things (more money does not mean better schools, immigrants from non-Western cultures do not assimilate to the same degree as those from Western Europe did), recognize that we have done basically nothing to change social policies to make them comport with what we know, and not feel some painful truth in Derbyshire's position.

WE ARE DOOMED often goes into seriously dangerous territory. Even more flammable than The Derb's take on the diversity cult is his view on human nature. Stripped of the polemical tone, it points down the road to a complete overthrow of large and deeply held belief systems held by, well, almost everyone. His subsection Left Creationists, Right Creationists in this chapter is the single most succinct and basic exposition of the issue of human differences this armchair and amateur reviewer has read.

With the exception of some fellow pessimistic literature, the whole lot of Americana gets sucked into the pyre of despair. Believe it or not, though, WE ARE DOOMED is not really that much of a downer to read. Anyone who has read The Derb knows that the guy is often laugh-out-loud witty. WE ARE DOOMED is often funny, but always quite serious. Let the Gloom Fest begin.

Derbyshire has heard the liberals singing their happy hopey inanities, then studied what's really going on, and has concluded they are singing as the ship sinks.

Derbyshire is at his pessimistic best when glaring at the utter destruction of western culture. Artists packing their personal waste in boxes and making millions! The "gassy drivel extruded by Maya Angelou" (p 77). And about Elizabeth Alexander: "I had never heard of the lady....Taking a wild shot in the dark, I guessed her to be a whiny left-wing black feminist, as most female poets nowadays are" (p 79).

Everywhere are signs of the culture falling apart. Time magazine, whose front cover used to be graced by the faces of authors, hasn't seen fit to put an author on its cover since 2000. And schools...one winces even to think of our current educational system...can only be filed under the 'dumb and dumber' category.

Even low brow culture has sunk to new depths. From the John Wayne males in movies of the past, films now wallow in the likes of "Cruise, Pitt, and Damon...essentially boys" (p 91).

And in that sink of horrors, TV, Derbyshire nastily notes about those ghastly girly shows: "Estrogen is practically oozing out of the TV screen and dripping down onto my carpet. I warn my son sternly that if he watches one of these shows all the way through he'll start menstruating" (p 68).

In Europe, not only has high culture pretty much dried up and blown away, but so has religion. Derbyshire, no believer himself, gloomily notes "The determination of conservatives to see humanity plain, and not in terms of some City of the Sun, New Soviet Man, 'blank slate', wish-fulfillment fantasy, obliges us to respect the religious impulse" (p 161) which has always regarded mankind as hopelessly fallen and not to be trusted.

It's one bracing, witty, slap in the face.

Many oppose Mr. Derbyshire on grounds that he is an old, elitist conservative who seeks racial and social domination by white men. This is a straw man erected by utopianist liberals, who are afraid to meet his arguments head on. Derbyshire presents numerous logical, reasoned and practical views in this book, and on his radio talk show. His primary concern with respect to politics and society is being pragmatic and realistic. These values are perhaps more important in today's America than ever before. Liberal wishful thinking and irrational longing for a utopian future are at their height. Derbyshire's book is an effort to halt this dangerous trend of American degradation. President Obama, and the liberal movement at large, are not evil, and for the most part, do not desire the downfall of American socio-political prominence. However, much of their naive and juvenile policy is leading right down that road. Read Derbyshire, and you'll understand why conservativism, pessimism and realism are the keys to a successful nation, and why America's current political climate and today's geopolitical issues may push our nation to the breaking point.

If you revel in hearing somebody say things that you would secretly like to say but won't - out of fear of becoming a social pariah - then this is the book for you. John Derbyshire has a knack for saying things that will get up pretty well everyone's nose, even the olfactories of his more sympathetic readers. You will be rolling along happily, tittering merrily at one or another of the author's frequent bon mots, murmuring "attaboy John" as he slaughters yet another of your most hated sacred cows, and then out of the blue he will say something that will get up even your own mucho simpatico nose.

But then that's John Derbyshire for you. He really doesn't seem to give a toss whether you like him or not and this gives his book an oddly exhilarating quality. It's liberating to hear Things That Should Not Be Said and Derbyshire is fearless about giving them utterance. And he does this in conversational, unselfconsciously epigramatic prose with a mordant humour that often threatens to break out into uproarious high-spirits. Despite the Breaking Taboos tenor of the book, Derbyshire doesn't seem as if he's out primarily to shock people. Making shocking statements is merely a by-product of what he sees as his central purpose; telling the unvarnished truth about things without any smiley-face concessions to optimism, hope, or wish-fulfillment fantasy. His metaphysics is S-C-I-E-N-C-E (or in human affairs B-I-O-L-O-G-Y) and his prognosis is D-I-S-M-A-L. If you want nuanced positions, humm-ing and ha-ing, equivocating, compromising, and trying to please everybody, look elsewhere. This is not a scholarly work but a full-on statement of a point of view and it will excite polarizing reactions. If you're a Big-Government Liberal, a believer in the perfectibility of Man, religious, prickly on questions of race, a military Hawk, a proponent of Diversity, and/or a supporter of education for the advancement of Mankind, approach with extreme caution.

Which leaves just me and maybe a couple of hundred others.......