Gratitude - Western Civilisation's indispensable virtue
Reflections on Douglas Murray's new book, 'The War on the West'
How about feeling grateful? For what we have, is a blip in Human History…And we would be so damn stupid to give it away, for nothing.
-Douglas Murray
Last month, on the invitation of Common Sense Society, I was in Virginia to hear two men of different generations, of different continents, make their claims to the leadership of Western Civilisation’s defence.
One was Yoram Hazony, the 57 year old Jewish political philosopher and leader of America’s nascent National Conservatism movement. The other was 42 year old British commentator Douglas Murray, author of The War on the West, and associate editor of The Spectator.
Both were there to discuss their new books, which together might be seen as a kind of diagnosis and antidote to the ills of the modern age.
For Hazony’s part, his book, Conservatism - a Rediscovery, is a masterful historical analysis of political philosophy, and provides an adumbration of a way forward for those who would seek to conserve, not to destroy that which the West inherits from its greatest thinkers.
Douglas Murray’s book, The War on the West is an altogether more simple, but perhaps more critically needed work. It has a plain functionality, in that it clearly sets forth the mountain of moral and logical errors flowing from the West’s latter day loss of self-confidence. It is, in essence, a veritable catalog of sins against the true, the good, the beautiful (and in many cases, the simply logical).
In writing this way, Murray makes the best kind of argument. His meticulously researched work speaks for itself. The reader can make a personal judgment on a common sense pathway out of the malaise in which the West finds itself. By and large, he does not prescribe solutions, as his purpose in highlighting the sheer scale of our drift from historic wisdom speaks powerfully without the need for further explanation.
There is one short section however, in which Murray is prescriptive. This is the penultimate chapter, entitled ‘Gratitude’. This a remarkable and moving essay, in which the author reflects on the functioning of Gratitude not just as a preferable way of personal life, but as a disposition essential to the broad-scale human flourishing which the West holds as its distinct and singular achievement.
Murray’s elevation of Gratitude is a critical intervention in the fight to save Western Civilisation. It marks a progression from viewing thankfulness as a mere residual product of a privileged life. Murray repositions Gratitude as an utterly indispensable part of man’s historically acquired wisdom.
This is because without Gratitude’s wisdom, as Murray argues, man cannot maintain the equilibrium of the soul required to do good in the world. Without Gratitude, man individually and collectively slips into what the philosophers have called ressentiment.
It is this ressentiment that provides a permissive, but subterranean fertile field, in which the evil of civilisational destruction is allowed to grow. Though an ungrateful society in and of itself may temporarily concrete over these fields of sin and chaos, absent the antidote of gratitude it cannot long withstand the weeds which threaten to split open its hardened cracks.
In so framing the consequences of an ungrateful society, Murray takes aim at the anarchists who would raze cities to the ground. He pulls back the veil of ostensible reasons for why protestors might seek to tear down statues, or burn churches in the night. Actions like these are not justified reactions to the sins of the West, but rather manifestations of ingratitude, the violent end-game of a mentality that seeks redress for perceived slights and personal failings not through self-reform, but through outward destruction of an imagined enemy.
Importantly, Murray does bring our attention to the fact that one has a choice when it comes to how we apprehend the past. We don’t have to just be grateful for all we inherit. We could dwell on the ideological sins of great artists (Richard Wagner comes to mind). We could fret about whether or not Cecil Rhodes, in providing a remarkable legacy to the University of Oxford, was motivated by an unjust imperial inclination. We could, in fact, manifest pain, sin, angst and disgust in our apprehension of almost anything handed down to us in history.
But wouldn’t that be saying to us that as human beings, we lack the capacity to learn from that history?
For if we are compelled to be hamstrung by all of history’s incorporated sins, then we are in effect, too dumb to divide our apprehension of a particular artwork, political theory, or historical event, so that we can discard the bad, and move forward with that about it which is good.
That, I think, is the essence of what Douglas Murray wants us to realise about Gratitude. Gratitude itself is a mediating institution, which cleanses us of the poison which would otherwise overwhelm our souls, and see us reverting to an animalistic, base, and savage view of everything that has come before, and of everything that we must contend with in our own time.
Being thankful is something we teach to children in the most simple way. But as Douglas Murray points out, Gratitude itself, as it functions in history, is a far more sophisticated Civilisational tool than we may otherwise realise.
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Benjamin Crocker is a Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation Postgraduate Scholar at St John’s College, Annapolis. He is a constitutional fellow at the American Conservative, and writes for The Spectator Australia. Ben has previously taught at The University of Sydney, conducted the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and recorded new music for radio, for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC Classic FM).
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Watch the full discussion between Douglas Murray, Yoram Hazony, and Common Sense Society President and CEO, Marion Smith (The Lyceum, Alexandria, VA: May 12, 2022)
I was at the Common Sense event in Alexandria! You may recall, I was the guy who asked the question about how to deal with "anti-racist" nonsense being pushed on people in the workplace.
I completely agree with this piece. As Heather Mac Donald says, we should be down on our knees in gratitude at the magnificence of the civilizational patrimony we have inherited.