Sohrab Ahmari > Quotes

“What unites the identitarians who lord over the art world is the belief that art is primarily, even solely, a political enterprise. That was also the premise of Socialist Realism, the theory and style of art promoted in the former Soviet Union. One could fairly contend that identitarian art is something like our era’s version of Socialist Realism.”
― Sohrab Ahmari, The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts

“This last is identitarian art’s greatest injustice against the culture: since social power dynamics and collective identity are all that such art knows and cares about, its practitioners can’t grapple with individuality, with things of the soul, with the inner life – the very things that draw most of us to art in the first place.”
― Sohrab Ahmari, The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts

“The general public long ago stopped looking for beauty in high culture. But it still has TV and the movies....you are far more likely to find genuinely mesmerising images and real beauty in big-budget Hollywood movies -- think of, say, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar or his Dark Knight Trilogy -- than in any European art-house”
― Sohrab Ahmari, The New Philistines

“Say what you will about the Soviet critics, at least they were erudite. Not so with today’s identitarian critics, who care little for art history and aesthetics. What they are blessed with is lots of opinions about everything – all of which invariably revolve around race, gender and class, power and privilege.”
― Sohrab Ahmari, The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts

“How could I permit my conversion to be reduced to politics and identity, when in fact it had been sparked by the opposite idea: that there is such a thing as truth, truth that is eternal and universal and isn’t circumscribed by politics, history, genetics, language, geography, or identity?”
― Sohrab Ahmari, From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith

“Liberal, free-market societies can, and do, grant visibility and representation to the hitherto invisible and unrepresented, in other words, without radically changing the social structure. Marginal groups and peripheral movements rise up; they win legal emancipation and cultural acceptance; and then they are absorbed into the fabric of liberalism. At its best – or worst, depending on your outlook – liberal capitalism can defang even its most ardent enemies, rendering them into harmless kitsch like so many Che Guevara T-shirts.”
― Sohrab Ahmari, The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts

“I longed for some cosmic and moral absolutes. Yet the only absolute command that my father handed down to me was: “Be yourself.” It was maddening. Who was this “self” dwelling inside me, to whom I owed such fidelity? My father wouldn’t say.”
― Sohrab Ahmari, From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith

“I have come to believe that the very modes of life and thinking that strike most people in the West as antiquated or 'limiting' can liberate us, while the Western dream of autonomy and choice without limits is, in fact, a prison; that the quest to define ourselves on our own is a kind of El Dorado, driving to madness the many who seek after it; that for our best, highest selves to soar, other parts of us must be tied down, enclosed, limited, bound.”
― Sohrab Ahmari, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos

“It is almost inconceivable that so many filmmakers could think of nothing -- be inspired by nothing -- nothing, nothing, nothing -- but the politics of representation, 'performitivity', gender, race, queer theory etc. There must be other subjects, in the world outside or in their inner lives, which belong on the silver (or digital) screen. This degree of conformity is unsettling. It should alarm cultural elites rather than comfort them. Yet the art world's ideological atmosphere is so thick and pervasive that those inside of it don't even realise it as the air they breathe."
"Forgive me, I forgot to mention the other permissible topic: 'consumptive capitalism', that oppressive economic system which creates vast sums of taxable wealth, which in turn allows the UK government to fund even this nonsense.”
― Sohrab Ahmari, The New Philistines

“liberal culture insists there is something in each of us, something unique and immutable, that can’t be reduced to group identities such as race, nationality, gender, sexuality – in short, to collectivity. And great art has long made it its business to articulate that irreducible something. Think”
― Sohrab Ahmari, The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts

“the world we inhabit today: a system that allows the asset-owning few to subject the asset-less many to pervasive coercion—”
― Sohrab Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty--and What to Do About It