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We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism
To his fellow conservatives, John Derbyshire makes a Don't be seduced by this nonsense about "the politics of hope." Skepticism, pessimism, and suspicion of happy talk are the true characteristics of an authentically conservative temperament. And from Hobbes and Burke through Lord Salisbury and Calvin Coolidge, up to Pat Buchanan and Mark Steyn in our own time, these beliefs have kept the human race from blindly chasing its utopian dreams right off a cliff.
Recently, though, various comforting yet fundamentally idiotic notions of political correctness and wishful thinking have taken root beyond the "Kumbaya"-singing, we're-all-one crowd. These ideas have now infected conservatives, the very people who really should know better. The Republican Party has been derailed by legions of fools and poseurs wearing smiley-face masks.
Think rescuing the economy by condemning our descendents to lives of spirit-crushing debt. Think nation-building abroad while we slowly disintegrate at home. Think education and No Child Left Behind. . . . But don't think about it too much, because if you do, you'll quickly come to the logical We are doomed.
Need more convincing? Dwell on the cheerful promises of the diversity cult and the undeniable reality of the oncoming demographic disaster. Contemplate the feminization of everything, or take a good look at what passes for art these days. Witness the rise of culturism and the death of religion. Bow down before your new master, the federal apparatchik. Finally, ask How certain am I that the United States of America will survive, in any recognizable form, until, say, 2022?
A scathing, mordantly funny romp through today's dismal and dismaler political and cultural scene, We Are Doomed provides a long-overdue dose of reality, revealing just how the GOP has been led astray in recent years–and showing that had conservatives held on to their fittingly pessimistic outlook, America's future would be far brighter.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to embrace the Audacity of Hopelessness.
Recently, though, various comforting yet fundamentally idiotic notions of political correctness and wishful thinking have taken root beyond the "Kumbaya"-singing, we're-all-one crowd. These ideas have now infected conservatives, the very people who really should know better. The Republican Party has been derailed by legions of fools and poseurs wearing smiley-face masks.
Think rescuing the economy by condemning our descendents to lives of spirit-crushing debt. Think nation-building abroad while we slowly disintegrate at home. Think education and No Child Left Behind. . . . But don't think about it too much, because if you do, you'll quickly come to the logical We are doomed.
Need more convincing? Dwell on the cheerful promises of the diversity cult and the undeniable reality of the oncoming demographic disaster. Contemplate the feminization of everything, or take a good look at what passes for art these days. Witness the rise of culturism and the death of religion. Bow down before your new master, the federal apparatchik. Finally, ask How certain am I that the United States of America will survive, in any recognizable form, until, say, 2022?
A scathing, mordantly funny romp through today's dismal and dismaler political and cultural scene, We Are Doomed provides a long-overdue dose of reality, revealing just how the GOP has been led astray in recent years–and showing that had conservatives held on to their fittingly pessimistic outlook, America's future would be far brighter.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to embrace the Audacity of Hopelessness.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
18 people are currently reading
366 people want to read
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September 11, 2022
3.5 stars
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June 29, 2016
Besides wanting to put a gun in my mouth after reading this depressing book, there are some good ideas here and there located in paragraphs or small chapters within the chapters "micro chapters?", but the book is a bit scatter brained in topics (example: The author states: "I will explain in the next chapters" or "I explained in previous chapters"; Confusing! why not just explain right away and organize your chapters better??? A lot of jumping around, etc).
There are bursts of good ideas in these "micro-chapters", but then he goes on some 10 page rant and kind of loses me. Sometimes being too existential and annoying (abstract metaphysics is boring). The jumping around of topics can make the book a bit difficult to follow. Stick to one idea and don't "digress", Derbyshire! The chapter "Culture: Pooped out" is spot on and absolutely fantastic! I got a lot of good book references and authors from this book. There are some humorous parts also. I would have given more stars if the construction of the book, flow, format were better organized and not a collection of daily journal entries.
Also, President Bush the second was a dick; this book makes it abundantly clear and evident he was.
Don't worry about reading the book, I summed up the best quotes below for your "cliff notes"(you're welcome). You can use these "cliff notes" as you see fit:
"To be fair to happy talkers, their movement arose from a perceived need, as all intellectual and social movements do, and in the vigor of its youth it contributed to some necessary reforms. The social condition of women improved, slavery was abolished, gross and promiscuous drunkenness was abated, and a more humane attitude to our vanquished aborigines emerged.
All good ideas are of their time, though, and are liable to turn from blessings into blights if persisted in too long. The justifiable right of workers to organize in protection of their interests turned at last into featherbedding, the Teamster rackets, auto companies made uncompetitive by extravagant benefits agreements, and government-worker unions voting themselves ever-bigger shares of the public fisc. The campaign for full civil rights and racial justice turned into affirmative action, race quotas, grievance lawsuits, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and everlasting racial rancor.
The point of diminishing returns for American progressive optimism had long since been reached by the time Prohibition came along to demonstrate beyond any doubt that the optimists' program had turned into a war on human nature." p.9
"A pessimistic president knows that, as the great Calvin Coolidge told his father, 'it is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.' Mos of what legislators legislate and executives execute is foolish, counterproductive, or downright wicked, so the less they do the better."p10
"One of Coolidge's greatest admirers was...Ronald Reagan. On entering the White House in 1981, Regan had Coolidge's portrait hung in the Oval Office, replacing Harry Truman's."p11
"Diversity seems to affect every kind of social connection. In places with more ethnic diversity, people have fewer friends, watch more TV, are less inclined to vote, trust local government less, and rate their personal happiness lower. As a conscientious social scientist (Robert) Putnam of course controlled for income, home ownership, crime rates, and so on. Same results."p19
"That was not what Professor Putnam's results were telling him. What they were telling him was, as he put it in the Uppsala paper, that 'people living in ethically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down'- that is, to pull in like a turtle"p20
"Meritocracy only makes matters worse. 'He's better off than me because he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth' is a more palatable thought than 'He's better of than me because he's more capable than I am.' It's so much more palatable that the second opinion is always pulled gravitationally toward the first. People rationalize high achievement as being the result of unfair advantage even when it's not"p38
"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder- George Washington, about 1780"p40
"All this has come upon us quite quickly, in just a couple of generations. Overnight, as historical processes go, we have lost our republican virtue, and shall lose our republic, unless we return to the unillusioned view of human nature subscribed by the Founders. That view was the common one of their century, a far wiser century than ours. Perhaps never in human history did civilized men expect less of each other."p41
"As a result, the conservative movement has turned inward, away from being the promoter of smaller government, toward being the promoter of traditional values. It has always been both, of course; only the components of the mix change. With the antistatist cause apparently lost American conservatives have little to occupy in their time but right to-life issues, squabbling over Middle East policy, and some v-e-r-y cautious, halfhearted, Diversity-whipped support for 'national question' issues- immigration, citizenship, border security, visa integrity, mulitculturalism, assimilation. And the state keeps on growing.
Yet can the federal government really run the United States? It's not obvious. Next to India, which I don't think is a very happy model, we are the biggest- the most extensive, most populous- free nation in the world. Centralized government, of the top-heavy European kind that is being imposed on us, may not work. We don't know. We have never tried it.
Certainly our federal government inspires little confidence. I have a sheaf of credit cards in my wallet, any one of which my local merchants can validate with a quick swipe. Why can't a person's social security card similarly be validated, to assure prospective employers or welfare agencies that he is a legal resident of the country? Because private corporations are approximately 100,000 times better- more efficient, more capable- of doing anything than is the U.S. government, that's why." p53
"And big government is big. Federal spending grows by leaps and bounds. The first few years of the twenty-first century have seen massive expansion of federal power over education (the No Child Left Behind Act, 2001), the biggest new entitlement program since Lyndon Johnson's administration (the Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2003) and the biggest program of public works in U.S. history (the 2005 highway bill). And all this, from a conservative president!"p57
"These are our masters: lawyers, bureaucrats, and race hustlers who regard creators of wealth as the enemy. By looking for too much from politics, by putting our optimistic faith in their bogus stories about expertise and competence, in their promises to 'fix' things and 'improve' things, in their vapid talk of bringing us 'hope' and 'change,' we have sold our birthright to hacks, frauds, and cynical time-servers- 'public servants' who don't even pay their income taxes. Feugh!"p61
From the "Culture: pooped out chapter":
** "Twenty-two hundred books of poetry in one year! You'd have to read six of them every day to get through them all. I recommend, for the sake of your sanity, that you not try it. A high proportion of current poetry is solipsistic twaddle, with victimo-logical (race-conscious or feminist) whining much favored"p78
**"The modern college and Diversity rackets have provided a cozy home for legions of parasitic subintellectuals like Ms. Alexander. You go to college; you graduate; you do a year or two of some kind of marginally useful desk work, probably editing or lawyering; then you get yourself back into the academy for life teaching some fluff nonsubject, or go run one of the Diversity shakedown scams under some such title as "community organizer" or "community affairs adviser." There must be other prominent examples of this career path, though none comes to mind just at the moment.
Once this was a nation of farmers, builders, inventors, creators, explorers, and thinkers. Now we are a nation of bubblehead, academic poseurs, race-guilt hucksters, and keening middle-class 'victims' of imaginary wrongs. Pah!"p 81 !!DAMN!!!
**"The MFA programs are the engine of modern literary livelihood. A lot of people you never heard of are making a modest middle-class living at poetry. You get a couple of books intot htat pile of twenty-two hundred. You have a poem or two published in one of the tiny-circulation literary magazines. You pick up an award or two- there are dozens- and soon you can sink happily into a slot as instructor in an MFA program, though you will most likely have gotten an MFA yourself somewhere along the way. From then on, you work to feed more condemned souls into the MFA furnace. Hey, it's a living."p82
**"The most worrying aspect of art at the beginning of the twenty-first century was...the decline, and in some cases the disappearance, of effective training in art skills...Many art schools do not actually teach pupils how to draw or paint. Teaching of sculpture in its traditional forms, as opposed to unskilled constructions, is even harder to obtain...The studio chain, stretching back to the early Middle Ages, along which knowledge was passed from master to assistant or apprentice over countless generations, has been broken. At the heart of the process whereby beautiful objects are produced there is an abyss. ART: A New History 2003."p85
"The 'gender gap' in political attitudes has been remarked on since at least 391 BC. That was the year Aristophanes staged his play 'The Assemblywomen' (Ecclesiazusae). In the play the women of Athens, disguised as men, take over the assembly and vote themselves into power. Once in charge, they institute a program of pure socialism.
Everyone is to have an equal share in everything and live on that; we won't have one man rich while another lives in penury, one man farming hundreds of acres while another hasn't got enough land to get buried in...No one will be motivated by need: everybody will have everything...the children will regard all older men as fathers..."p87-88
"The strongest opposition to the scientific study of human nature has come from a small number of Marxist biologists and anthropologists...They believe that nothing exists in the untrained human mind that cannot be readily channeled to the purposes of the revolutionary socialist state. When faced with the evidence of greater structure, their response has been to declare human nature off limits to further scientific investigation."p145
"Much of the nervousness about speaking of immigration issues arises from discrimination being a key feature of any immigration policy. Just as a nation can't not have a population policy, so immigration laws- if there are any- can't not discriminate. Any immigration policy short of completely open borders must select immigrants somehow, thereby discriminating against the unselected!"p201
"Are there reasons to think otherwise? Well, yes. As immigration scholar Mark Krikorian says in his recent book The New Case Against Immigration: 'Americanization is much more difficult under the modern conditions than in the past.' The United States of 2009 is unlike the United States of 1909 is some important ways.
- It is a welfare state. One little-remarked feature of the earlier Great Wave of immigration is the many of the immigrants eventually went home- as many as a third of the 1890-1924 immigrants did so. Immigrants who fail here nowadays have no incentive to go home. The welfare state will care for them.
-We have diminishing number of low-skill jobs in manufacturing and agriculture. The number would likely be diminishing even faster- yielding to automation- without a plentiful supply of cheap, low-skill immigrants.
-Large segments of the elite culture- in the universities, for example- are hostile to the naive "Americanism" of our great-grandfathers, and to the assimilationist ethic what went with it."p210
"My 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica lists 152 countries in the world. Question: How many of those countries made it from 1911 to today, nearly a century later, with their systems of government and law intact (allowing for minor constitutional adjustments like expansion of the franchise), without having suffered revolution, civil war, major dismemberment, or foreign occupation?" p213
"The assumption here is that like the buggy-whip makers you hear about from economic geeks, like dirt farmers migrating to factory jobs, like the middle-class engineer of1960, the cube people of today will go do something else, creating a new middle class from some heretofore-despised category of drudges. But...What? Which category of despised drudges will be the middle class of tomorrow? Do you have any ideas? I don't. What comes after office work? What are we all going to do? The same thing Bartleby the Scrivener did, perhaps, but collectively and generationally. What is the next term in the series: farm, factory, office...? There isn't one (when I posed this question in some internet commentary once, the most popular suggestion in readers' emails was "community organizer"). The evolution of work has come to an end point, and the human race knows this in its bones. Actually, in its reproductive organs: the farmer of 1800 had six or seven kids, the factory work of 1900 three or four, the cube jockey of 2000 one or two. The superfluous humans of 2100, if there are any, will hold at zero. What would be the point of doing otherwise?" P243-244
There are bursts of good ideas in these "micro-chapters", but then he goes on some 10 page rant and kind of loses me. Sometimes being too existential and annoying (abstract metaphysics is boring). The jumping around of topics can make the book a bit difficult to follow. Stick to one idea and don't "digress", Derbyshire! The chapter "Culture: Pooped out" is spot on and absolutely fantastic! I got a lot of good book references and authors from this book. There are some humorous parts also. I would have given more stars if the construction of the book, flow, format were better organized and not a collection of daily journal entries.
Also, President Bush the second was a dick; this book makes it abundantly clear and evident he was.
Don't worry about reading the book, I summed up the best quotes below for your "cliff notes"(you're welcome). You can use these "cliff notes" as you see fit:
"To be fair to happy talkers, their movement arose from a perceived need, as all intellectual and social movements do, and in the vigor of its youth it contributed to some necessary reforms. The social condition of women improved, slavery was abolished, gross and promiscuous drunkenness was abated, and a more humane attitude to our vanquished aborigines emerged.
All good ideas are of their time, though, and are liable to turn from blessings into blights if persisted in too long. The justifiable right of workers to organize in protection of their interests turned at last into featherbedding, the Teamster rackets, auto companies made uncompetitive by extravagant benefits agreements, and government-worker unions voting themselves ever-bigger shares of the public fisc. The campaign for full civil rights and racial justice turned into affirmative action, race quotas, grievance lawsuits, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and everlasting racial rancor.
The point of diminishing returns for American progressive optimism had long since been reached by the time Prohibition came along to demonstrate beyond any doubt that the optimists' program had turned into a war on human nature." p.9
"A pessimistic president knows that, as the great Calvin Coolidge told his father, 'it is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.' Mos of what legislators legislate and executives execute is foolish, counterproductive, or downright wicked, so the less they do the better."p10
"One of Coolidge's greatest admirers was...Ronald Reagan. On entering the White House in 1981, Regan had Coolidge's portrait hung in the Oval Office, replacing Harry Truman's."p11
"Diversity seems to affect every kind of social connection. In places with more ethnic diversity, people have fewer friends, watch more TV, are less inclined to vote, trust local government less, and rate their personal happiness lower. As a conscientious social scientist (Robert) Putnam of course controlled for income, home ownership, crime rates, and so on. Same results."p19
"That was not what Professor Putnam's results were telling him. What they were telling him was, as he put it in the Uppsala paper, that 'people living in ethically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down'- that is, to pull in like a turtle"p20
"Meritocracy only makes matters worse. 'He's better off than me because he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth' is a more palatable thought than 'He's better of than me because he's more capable than I am.' It's so much more palatable that the second opinion is always pulled gravitationally toward the first. People rationalize high achievement as being the result of unfair advantage even when it's not"p38
"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder- George Washington, about 1780"p40
"All this has come upon us quite quickly, in just a couple of generations. Overnight, as historical processes go, we have lost our republican virtue, and shall lose our republic, unless we return to the unillusioned view of human nature subscribed by the Founders. That view was the common one of their century, a far wiser century than ours. Perhaps never in human history did civilized men expect less of each other."p41
"As a result, the conservative movement has turned inward, away from being the promoter of smaller government, toward being the promoter of traditional values. It has always been both, of course; only the components of the mix change. With the antistatist cause apparently lost American conservatives have little to occupy in their time but right to-life issues, squabbling over Middle East policy, and some v-e-r-y cautious, halfhearted, Diversity-whipped support for 'national question' issues- immigration, citizenship, border security, visa integrity, mulitculturalism, assimilation. And the state keeps on growing.
Yet can the federal government really run the United States? It's not obvious. Next to India, which I don't think is a very happy model, we are the biggest- the most extensive, most populous- free nation in the world. Centralized government, of the top-heavy European kind that is being imposed on us, may not work. We don't know. We have never tried it.
Certainly our federal government inspires little confidence. I have a sheaf of credit cards in my wallet, any one of which my local merchants can validate with a quick swipe. Why can't a person's social security card similarly be validated, to assure prospective employers or welfare agencies that he is a legal resident of the country? Because private corporations are approximately 100,000 times better- more efficient, more capable- of doing anything than is the U.S. government, that's why." p53
"And big government is big. Federal spending grows by leaps and bounds. The first few years of the twenty-first century have seen massive expansion of federal power over education (the No Child Left Behind Act, 2001), the biggest new entitlement program since Lyndon Johnson's administration (the Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2003) and the biggest program of public works in U.S. history (the 2005 highway bill). And all this, from a conservative president!"p57
"These are our masters: lawyers, bureaucrats, and race hustlers who regard creators of wealth as the enemy. By looking for too much from politics, by putting our optimistic faith in their bogus stories about expertise and competence, in their promises to 'fix' things and 'improve' things, in their vapid talk of bringing us 'hope' and 'change,' we have sold our birthright to hacks, frauds, and cynical time-servers- 'public servants' who don't even pay their income taxes. Feugh!"p61
From the "Culture: pooped out chapter":
** "Twenty-two hundred books of poetry in one year! You'd have to read six of them every day to get through them all. I recommend, for the sake of your sanity, that you not try it. A high proportion of current poetry is solipsistic twaddle, with victimo-logical (race-conscious or feminist) whining much favored"p78
**"The modern college and Diversity rackets have provided a cozy home for legions of parasitic subintellectuals like Ms. Alexander. You go to college; you graduate; you do a year or two of some kind of marginally useful desk work, probably editing or lawyering; then you get yourself back into the academy for life teaching some fluff nonsubject, or go run one of the Diversity shakedown scams under some such title as "community organizer" or "community affairs adviser." There must be other prominent examples of this career path, though none comes to mind just at the moment.
Once this was a nation of farmers, builders, inventors, creators, explorers, and thinkers. Now we are a nation of bubblehead, academic poseurs, race-guilt hucksters, and keening middle-class 'victims' of imaginary wrongs. Pah!"p 81 !!DAMN!!!
**"The MFA programs are the engine of modern literary livelihood. A lot of people you never heard of are making a modest middle-class living at poetry. You get a couple of books intot htat pile of twenty-two hundred. You have a poem or two published in one of the tiny-circulation literary magazines. You pick up an award or two- there are dozens- and soon you can sink happily into a slot as instructor in an MFA program, though you will most likely have gotten an MFA yourself somewhere along the way. From then on, you work to feed more condemned souls into the MFA furnace. Hey, it's a living."p82
**"The most worrying aspect of art at the beginning of the twenty-first century was...the decline, and in some cases the disappearance, of effective training in art skills...Many art schools do not actually teach pupils how to draw or paint. Teaching of sculpture in its traditional forms, as opposed to unskilled constructions, is even harder to obtain...The studio chain, stretching back to the early Middle Ages, along which knowledge was passed from master to assistant or apprentice over countless generations, has been broken. At the heart of the process whereby beautiful objects are produced there is an abyss. ART: A New History 2003."p85
"The 'gender gap' in political attitudes has been remarked on since at least 391 BC. That was the year Aristophanes staged his play 'The Assemblywomen' (Ecclesiazusae). In the play the women of Athens, disguised as men, take over the assembly and vote themselves into power. Once in charge, they institute a program of pure socialism.
Everyone is to have an equal share in everything and live on that; we won't have one man rich while another lives in penury, one man farming hundreds of acres while another hasn't got enough land to get buried in...No one will be motivated by need: everybody will have everything...the children will regard all older men as fathers..."p87-88
"The strongest opposition to the scientific study of human nature has come from a small number of Marxist biologists and anthropologists...They believe that nothing exists in the untrained human mind that cannot be readily channeled to the purposes of the revolutionary socialist state. When faced with the evidence of greater structure, their response has been to declare human nature off limits to further scientific investigation."p145
"Much of the nervousness about speaking of immigration issues arises from discrimination being a key feature of any immigration policy. Just as a nation can't not have a population policy, so immigration laws- if there are any- can't not discriminate. Any immigration policy short of completely open borders must select immigrants somehow, thereby discriminating against the unselected!"p201
"Are there reasons to think otherwise? Well, yes. As immigration scholar Mark Krikorian says in his recent book The New Case Against Immigration: 'Americanization is much more difficult under the modern conditions than in the past.' The United States of 2009 is unlike the United States of 1909 is some important ways.
- It is a welfare state. One little-remarked feature of the earlier Great Wave of immigration is the many of the immigrants eventually went home- as many as a third of the 1890-1924 immigrants did so. Immigrants who fail here nowadays have no incentive to go home. The welfare state will care for them.
-We have diminishing number of low-skill jobs in manufacturing and agriculture. The number would likely be diminishing even faster- yielding to automation- without a plentiful supply of cheap, low-skill immigrants.
-Large segments of the elite culture- in the universities, for example- are hostile to the naive "Americanism" of our great-grandfathers, and to the assimilationist ethic what went with it."p210
"My 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica lists 152 countries in the world. Question: How many of those countries made it from 1911 to today, nearly a century later, with their systems of government and law intact (allowing for minor constitutional adjustments like expansion of the franchise), without having suffered revolution, civil war, major dismemberment, or foreign occupation?" p213
"The assumption here is that like the buggy-whip makers you hear about from economic geeks, like dirt farmers migrating to factory jobs, like the middle-class engineer of1960, the cube people of today will go do something else, creating a new middle class from some heretofore-despised category of drudges. But...What? Which category of despised drudges will be the middle class of tomorrow? Do you have any ideas? I don't. What comes after office work? What are we all going to do? The same thing Bartleby the Scrivener did, perhaps, but collectively and generationally. What is the next term in the series: farm, factory, office...? There isn't one (when I posed this question in some internet commentary once, the most popular suggestion in readers' emails was "community organizer"). The evolution of work has come to an end point, and the human race knows this in its bones. Actually, in its reproductive organs: the farmer of 1800 had six or seven kids, the factory work of 1900 three or four, the cube jockey of 2000 one or two. The superfluous humans of 2100, if there are any, will hold at zero. What would be the point of doing otherwise?" P243-244
November 2, 2009
The style is sprightly and witticisms abound, concealing the fact that the arguments are deep and the conclusions founded in considerable erudition.
The conceit is the familiar one that conservatism is founded in a belief in the fallenness, or at least the imperfection of human nature, and the complexity and proneness to error inherent in social arrangements. Hence impulses to uplift frequently cause trouble, and social experiments regularly fail.
Running through diversity, foreign policy, immigration and economics, Derby serves up a healthy dose of pessimism. The one consolation is that when market observers are uniformly optimistic, the bubble is often about to burst, and when the bears rule, prosperity is just around the corner.
When it comes to public policy, however, fuggedabadit. The lampreys have battened on the entrails of the body politic, and will not be easily dislodged.
The conceit is the familiar one that conservatism is founded in a belief in the fallenness, or at least the imperfection of human nature, and the complexity and proneness to error inherent in social arrangements. Hence impulses to uplift frequently cause trouble, and social experiments regularly fail.
Running through diversity, foreign policy, immigration and economics, Derby serves up a healthy dose of pessimism. The one consolation is that when market observers are uniformly optimistic, the bubble is often about to burst, and when the bears rule, prosperity is just around the corner.
When it comes to public policy, however, fuggedabadit. The lampreys have battened on the entrails of the body politic, and will not be easily dislodged.
August 14, 2015
It is interesting that an atheist presents a better understanding of human nature and potential than many nominal Christians, but National Review contributor John Derbyshire does that in his call to a return to pessimism. In We Are Doomed, Derbyshire lambasts happy talk, including from too many conservatives, that lacks foundation in reality. He moves swiftly and deftly through a broad range of topics -- diversity ("nothing to celebrate"), politics ("show business for ugly people"), culture, education, human nature, religion, war, immigration, and the economy among them. As he notes, things are getting worse, they have been for some time, and human efforts to intervene and make them better have the opposite effect. Too many conservatives, among other things, "are fully invested in the wrongheaded educational theories of our time" and "were made fools of by George W. Bush's grand world-saving project." Derbyshire is even the rare atheist who laments the decline of religion, at least the right kind. Somehow Derbyshire's pessimism is refreshing rather than depressing. After reading this book, I read an interview of former U.S. representative Dick Armey in WORLD. "It's a prudent thing for a man to know his limitations," said Armey. "When you're in a position of authority like public office, it's a moral imperative.... I'm amazed at how little introspection I see from privileged people." Both pessimistic and true, things that often go hand in hand.
July 27, 2011
A skeptic's and pessimist's dream of a book. What's happened to the healthy pessimism and realism of our founding fathers? John Derbyshire says "It's gone, bleached and parched by the false sun of optimism, then blown away by the cold winds of reality, leaving all the roots of our liberty exposed to the colorless, featureless glare of infantile cheeriness, to wither and die." He further states that "Happy talk and wishful thinking are for children, fools, and leftists." So, it comes as no surprise that the book is addressed to American conservatives, too many of whom the author believes "have fallen into foolishly utopian ways of thinking." Therefore, Derbyshire is very critical of George W. Bush, and even Ronald Reagan in a few instances. Essentially, most of the book serves as big truth sandwich on a variety of topics. Derbyshire says you can either be "Wrong but Wromantic" or "Right and Repulsive." His is an argument for a more intelligent, realistic and pessimistic conservatism, with the firm understanding that a pessimistic outlook is NOT necessarily connected to a melancholy temperment. Only 261 pages in length and a pretty quick read, the book contains chapters on Diversity, Culture, Sex, Education, Religion, War, Immigration, The Economy and others. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It doesn't have much good news, but I prefer unvarnished truth. And if 21st century America is on the precipice like 4th century Rome, then I want to know it.
May 26, 2010
Mark Steyn caused a stir a while back with a book he published called America Alone which predicts that Europe will soon be overcome demographically and become part of the international Islamic Caliphate leaving the US as the last refuge of Western Civilization. John Derbyshire is not so optimistic. In page after page of masterful moroseness he laments all the areas where the US has embarked on the road to irreversible ruin, pointing the finger at third world immigration, a broken education system, racial "absimilation", foreign military escapades, debt, loss of faith, cultural degradation and plain old human nature. His main complaint is that neither liberals nor "happy talk conservatives" are willing to face grim reality. A good subtitle for this book would have been "The Audacity of Hopelessness" because Derbyshire holds nothing back. Anyone who is made uncomfortable by frank talk about racial issues should be warned that John Derbyshire views political correctness as the main threat to national survival. His Britishness helps him come across as less bombastic than an American would, but none of his chapters are understated. He definitely has a refined sense of humor, however dark, but he really seems to believe that the world is going to get a lot worse in the near future.
March 4, 2015
Note: I am reading this on the recommendation of a respected friend. Please, draw no inferences from this selection.
Okay, kind of like torture at some points, but articulate and more ideological than partisan. Not for reading by people prone to depression or (extreme) angst.
I care even less about politics right now. I care more about positive psychology and listening to Motown, which is rather inexplicable, but...hey, I'm okay with that.
Okay, kind of like torture at some points, but articulate and more ideological than partisan. Not for reading by people prone to depression or (extreme) angst.
I care even less about politics right now. I care more about positive psychology and listening to Motown, which is rather inexplicable, but...hey, I'm okay with that.
March 10, 2023
Derbshire's We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism could also be subtitled claiming conservative secularism. Most of the book reads as a collection of essays on various topics such as diversity, education, sex, culture, immigration, and foreign policy as Derbyshire's profession has been journalism.
What makes John Derbyshire unique among conservatives is that he isn't religious and he takes a more biological view of human nature. His view of human nature is presented in chapter 7, Human Nature: Ask Your Aunt. There are three views of human nature he presents: the religious, the culturalist, and the biologian. Religion is rooted in enduring features of human psychology, Culturism is rooted in blank slate psychology and continental European idealist philosophy, and biologism is application of the scientific method to humanity which is derided today as social Darwinism. The religious view is the most widespread around the world and with conservatives, particularly in the United States. Culturism is de facto state ideology in the west among our elites and particularly among the left, being based in social (pseudo) science. Biologism is almost exclusively held by those with a background in hard/natural science and by those who are usually irreligious and is the least popular, for different reasons among conservatives and the left. The two aspects of the biologian view which are the most anathema and make Derbyshire unique are heredity and population differences. These are downright heretical. Seek no more than the storm raised by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein's The Bell Curve. Conservatism biologian or otherwise however is an empirical worldview rather than an ideology so doesn’t have to be incompatible or undermine moral or religious ideals.
Though taking the biologian view himself, Derbyshire himself respects religion as an institution. As such it is a bulwark against the state and for tradition, even to a non-believer. Religious belief isn't left or right, but within a population those who are more religious are more conservative. He cites Calvinism which had a pessimistic view of human nature as an early influence on American society via the puritans. Derb's favorite president Calvin Coolidge is an exemplar of this attitude. In the 19th century the progeny of the protestants introduced happy talk and social justice politicking. Important social reforms were effected but overstayed their welcome. Evangelical Christianity is the main culprit on the right, with its explicit rejection of Darwinism and its charismatic approach. When Robert Bork expressed more traditional Christian social views in his Slouching Toward Gomorrah, he was publicly condemned by compassionate conservatives such as George W Bush. We Are Doomed I see as an attempt to translate such views into secular language appropriate for what he calls "metrocons", metropolitan conservatives, such as himself.
Citing political scientist Robert Putnam's research which he held onto for several years, diversity means less social cohesion and trust. Diversity is not an unqualified strength but also a challenge, particularly for the United States which from the outset has had a significant nonwhite population. Derb also draws on Samuel Huntington's Who Are We. The American creed derived from Anglo-Protestantism was challenged by the radical changes set in motion in the 1960s in particular the 1965 immigration bill which ended quotas favoring northwest Europe put in place for forty years (signed into law by Coolidge) while opening the door for family based chain migration while the civil rights acts intended to do away with legal segregation ended up promoting discrimination in favor of protected classes. Derbyshire's conclusion is that we should've learned to live with the considerable diversity we had rather than invite more people to have obligations with, and use mechanisms developed largely between whites and blacks and native Americans to absilimate (opposite of assimilate). Nationalism built on general homogeneity can be a force for peace by disaggregating multiethnic nations with internal conflict, as happened after the Versailles conference of World War 1 which dissolved the Austrian-Hungarian empire. This also was the case after World War 2 when millions of Germans in central and Eastern Europe left or were forced out to Germany. The collapse of multiethnic Yugoslavia after the Cold War led to ethnic warfare without a strong central government and unifying communist ideology. Most such cases are in Europe and due to wars or ethnic cleansing rather than restricting migration or voluntary separation.
What makes John Derbyshire unique among conservatives is that he isn't religious and he takes a more biological view of human nature. His view of human nature is presented in chapter 7, Human Nature: Ask Your Aunt. There are three views of human nature he presents: the religious, the culturalist, and the biologian. Religion is rooted in enduring features of human psychology, Culturism is rooted in blank slate psychology and continental European idealist philosophy, and biologism is application of the scientific method to humanity which is derided today as social Darwinism. The religious view is the most widespread around the world and with conservatives, particularly in the United States. Culturism is de facto state ideology in the west among our elites and particularly among the left, being based in social (pseudo) science. Biologism is almost exclusively held by those with a background in hard/natural science and by those who are usually irreligious and is the least popular, for different reasons among conservatives and the left. The two aspects of the biologian view which are the most anathema and make Derbyshire unique are heredity and population differences. These are downright heretical. Seek no more than the storm raised by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein's The Bell Curve. Conservatism biologian or otherwise however is an empirical worldview rather than an ideology so doesn’t have to be incompatible or undermine moral or religious ideals.
Though taking the biologian view himself, Derbyshire himself respects religion as an institution. As such it is a bulwark against the state and for tradition, even to a non-believer. Religious belief isn't left or right, but within a population those who are more religious are more conservative. He cites Calvinism which had a pessimistic view of human nature as an early influence on American society via the puritans. Derb's favorite president Calvin Coolidge is an exemplar of this attitude. In the 19th century the progeny of the protestants introduced happy talk and social justice politicking. Important social reforms were effected but overstayed their welcome. Evangelical Christianity is the main culprit on the right, with its explicit rejection of Darwinism and its charismatic approach. When Robert Bork expressed more traditional Christian social views in his Slouching Toward Gomorrah, he was publicly condemned by compassionate conservatives such as George W Bush. We Are Doomed I see as an attempt to translate such views into secular language appropriate for what he calls "metrocons", metropolitan conservatives, such as himself.
Citing political scientist Robert Putnam's research which he held onto for several years, diversity means less social cohesion and trust. Diversity is not an unqualified strength but also a challenge, particularly for the United States which from the outset has had a significant nonwhite population. Derb also draws on Samuel Huntington's Who Are We. The American creed derived from Anglo-Protestantism was challenged by the radical changes set in motion in the 1960s in particular the 1965 immigration bill which ended quotas favoring northwest Europe put in place for forty years (signed into law by Coolidge) while opening the door for family based chain migration while the civil rights acts intended to do away with legal segregation ended up promoting discrimination in favor of protected classes. Derbyshire's conclusion is that we should've learned to live with the considerable diversity we had rather than invite more people to have obligations with, and use mechanisms developed largely between whites and blacks and native Americans to absilimate (opposite of assimilate). Nationalism built on general homogeneity can be a force for peace by disaggregating multiethnic nations with internal conflict, as happened after the Versailles conference of World War 1 which dissolved the Austrian-Hungarian empire. This also was the case after World War 2 when millions of Germans in central and Eastern Europe left or were forced out to Germany. The collapse of multiethnic Yugoslavia after the Cold War led to ethnic warfare without a strong central government and unifying communist ideology. Most such cases are in Europe and due to wars or ethnic cleansing rather than restricting migration or voluntary separation.
October 20, 2013
Fantastic book. A conservative atheist lays into just about everyone in an impassioned rant about the terminal decline of America. He casts blame far and wide, though he in fact mostly goes after his fellow conservatives, who he says have fallen into a pit of magical thinking that comes from having an overly elevated opinion of human nature. A summary of his argument appears in the intro, where he states: "Heady optimism about human nature leads directly to disaster." In the past, conservatives were known for skepticism and caution, whereas nowadays, Derbyshire says, conservatives are engaged in the same Kum-ba-ya thinking that has doomed liberal utopians for centuries.
The crux of the book is that there are three ways of viewing the world ... religious, scientific, and cultural construction. He, as an atheist, does not hold the religious view, though he doesn't seem to find it all that troubling. His big complaint is with conservatives that, as they have abandoned the religious view, have moved to the cultural instead of scientific view.
As a result of this, conservatives have bought into a great deal of incorrect philosophy... gender, race, intelligence, art, and many more things are all social constructs and thus all are equally gifted and should be able to obtain equal outcome if the system treats them equally.
A biologist looking at the world would not expect different breeds of dogs or different species of bears, for example, to behave in precisely the same way, and yet conservatives have absorbed the liberal idea that all humans will act identically if the government treats them equally. In effect, everything is nurture, there is no nature, and genetics don't matter for anything.
With this false idea in place, conservatives end up making bad policies about many policy issues, though the book hones in on education. Interestingly, Derbyshire extensively cites liberal scholars who have been disappointed at their inability to close gender and race gaps in achievement regardless of what sorts of controls have been put in place to equalize performance.
As a result, American schools remain highly segregated (in fact more so than pre-civil rights era), with the typical pattern being that many high schools in a city will be 90%+ white for example, while one or two will be 90%+ black/Hispanic. When a city attempts to force the races to mingle, the more wealthy folks move farther out into the suburbs to get back to their racial enclaves.
This problem of self-selecting segregation seems quite impossible for the government to fix, and Derbyshire doesn't in fact provide any (in my opinion) plausible solutions. His approach seems to involve closing the border, and sending immigrants back home. I'd like to think that diversity can work on some level, though I'm sure Derbyshire would accuse me of magical thinking. I, as a white dude who voluntarily taught himself Spanish and lives in an 80% Hispanic neighborhood, am definitely not representative of the typical American, I admit.
While I don't much care for Derbyshire's solutions, it may just be that there aren't any good ones. The underlying chasm between classes and races in the U.S. is, if anything, getting worse, and having white folks walk around in their segregated suburbs while smiling and saying "we love diversity" while they do everything to shelter their children from actual minorities (i.e. the liberal approach) certainly won't work either.
Is Derbyshire's pessimism too great? I certainly hope so! That said, I fear that his central conceit... that the U.S. cannot survive in its present form as a multi-party democracy will be proven right sooner than later. I, for one, am emigrating.
Highly recommended reading, though prepare to be offended, his views will almost certainly conflict with yours numerous times throughout, regardless of your political orientation.
The crux of the book is that there are three ways of viewing the world ... religious, scientific, and cultural construction. He, as an atheist, does not hold the religious view, though he doesn't seem to find it all that troubling. His big complaint is with conservatives that, as they have abandoned the religious view, have moved to the cultural instead of scientific view.
As a result of this, conservatives have bought into a great deal of incorrect philosophy... gender, race, intelligence, art, and many more things are all social constructs and thus all are equally gifted and should be able to obtain equal outcome if the system treats them equally.
A biologist looking at the world would not expect different breeds of dogs or different species of bears, for example, to behave in precisely the same way, and yet conservatives have absorbed the liberal idea that all humans will act identically if the government treats them equally. In effect, everything is nurture, there is no nature, and genetics don't matter for anything.
With this false idea in place, conservatives end up making bad policies about many policy issues, though the book hones in on education. Interestingly, Derbyshire extensively cites liberal scholars who have been disappointed at their inability to close gender and race gaps in achievement regardless of what sorts of controls have been put in place to equalize performance.
As a result, American schools remain highly segregated (in fact more so than pre-civil rights era), with the typical pattern being that many high schools in a city will be 90%+ white for example, while one or two will be 90%+ black/Hispanic. When a city attempts to force the races to mingle, the more wealthy folks move farther out into the suburbs to get back to their racial enclaves.
This problem of self-selecting segregation seems quite impossible for the government to fix, and Derbyshire doesn't in fact provide any (in my opinion) plausible solutions. His approach seems to involve closing the border, and sending immigrants back home. I'd like to think that diversity can work on some level, though I'm sure Derbyshire would accuse me of magical thinking. I, as a white dude who voluntarily taught himself Spanish and lives in an 80% Hispanic neighborhood, am definitely not representative of the typical American, I admit.
While I don't much care for Derbyshire's solutions, it may just be that there aren't any good ones. The underlying chasm between classes and races in the U.S. is, if anything, getting worse, and having white folks walk around in their segregated suburbs while smiling and saying "we love diversity" while they do everything to shelter their children from actual minorities (i.e. the liberal approach) certainly won't work either.
Is Derbyshire's pessimism too great? I certainly hope so! That said, I fear that his central conceit... that the U.S. cannot survive in its present form as a multi-party democracy will be proven right sooner than later. I, for one, am emigrating.
Highly recommended reading, though prepare to be offended, his views will almost certainly conflict with yours numerous times throughout, regardless of your political orientation.
October 4, 2018
'the heart of the wise is in the house of morning but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth' Ecclesiastes 7:4
The book makes a convincing case that the traditional conservative movement in the USA is doomed. The main topics discussed are diversity indoctrination, ever bigger governmental encroachment, feminism, false educational theories, biological limits of people, secularization (The Great Falling Away), US international interventionism (democracy building), third world immigration, expanding debt. Topics are fleshed out with statics, case studies, books on the relating subject, news articles and few personal experiences.
Derb doesn't go for sentimentality and keeps washing ones brain with cold water in each chapter. Besides collecting fantastic quotes relating to pessimism, humor abounds.
As a work it holds force like Arthur Schopenhauer's Studies in Pessimism.
Recommended to anyone who thinks that things are getting better or to those who suspect the termites may well be entrenched.
The book makes a convincing case that the traditional conservative movement in the USA is doomed. The main topics discussed are diversity indoctrination, ever bigger governmental encroachment, feminism, false educational theories, biological limits of people, secularization (The Great Falling Away), US international interventionism (democracy building), third world immigration, expanding debt. Topics are fleshed out with statics, case studies, books on the relating subject, news articles and few personal experiences.
Derb doesn't go for sentimentality and keeps washing ones brain with cold water in each chapter. Besides collecting fantastic quotes relating to pessimism, humor abounds.
As a work it holds force like Arthur Schopenhauer's Studies in Pessimism.
Recommended to anyone who thinks that things are getting better or to those who suspect the termites may well be entrenched.
February 4, 2010
An incredibly entertaining and insightful polemic pie-in-the-skyism of shapes and sizes. Derbyshire argues quite persuasively that undue political optimism leads not merely to disappointment, but to overreach, excess, and harm. If Bobby Kennedy dreamed of things that never were, and asked "Why not?", Derbyshire entreats us to look at them as they are, make the best of them, and to tell the Bobby Kennedy's of the world to stuff it. Not that he expects many to follow his advice because, well, We Are Doomed.
My one complaint is that, in the interests of being controversial, Derb gets selective. One often gets the sense that one might come to -- if not different -- more thorough conclusions if he had looked harder for other angles or viewpoints.
Regardless, a total hoot and highly recommended. You'll want to slit your wrists by the end, but at least you'll have some interesting conversation starters in the hereafter.
My one complaint is that, in the interests of being controversial, Derb gets selective. One often gets the sense that one might come to -- if not different -- more thorough conclusions if he had looked harder for other angles or viewpoints.
Regardless, a total hoot and highly recommended. You'll want to slit your wrists by the end, but at least you'll have some interesting conversation starters in the hereafter.
November 5, 2009
John Derbyshire takes a very dim view about the future of America and conservatism - it will be destroyed by fuzzy-headed multiculturalism, a horrible education system, and other changes in culture. In the future, business will be gone and the government will provide the only good jobs.
While I'm not sure the future is quite as grim as he sees it, he does raise some very good issues, and they are issues that will cause problems if they aren't addressed.
While I'm not sure the future is quite as grim as he sees it, he does raise some very good issues, and they are issues that will cause problems if they aren't addressed.
June 17, 2021
Something to offend everyone – a cosmopolitan, atheistic, English self-identified conservative, from a working class background, who lives in the US with his Chinese wife & American children, and believes “human biodiversity” is obvious to anyone not brainwashed and economics is not a science. I enjoyed the book but it’s not for the easily offended.
November 17, 2012
Claims to be "addressed to American conservatives," yet promotes "federalism" and "pessimism" about "human nature."
September 2, 2017
Supposedly pessimistic, I found this book to really contain quite a bit of common sense.
December 12, 2024
John Derbyshire is what you end up reading when you suffer the real life consequences of third world inmigration, inflation and so on. Described as "ultra racist" and whathever by your mainstream journals...the thing is that to me "Radicals" don't sound so radical when you in fact, face the real life consequences of "wishful-thinking" or "culturalism".
The takes on human nature are harsh, but true. For these last years i'been very skeptical of so called "rationalism" or "progressisms" when it comes to humanity, universally speaking. Let's take birthrates in poor areas for example, culturalists insist that poor people have kids because they are not being educated, in sexual protection or whathever...for culturalist is never an option that "humans make stupid decisions when they are horny" inluding "sun" and "ice" people. This is because, stupidity and irrationality is inherently a biological trait directly related to our sexual condition, that culturalists won't recognize because they see human as a "blank slate", thus, more goverment spending is necesary in sexual education programs! more! more money has to be spent!
The only thing were i may disagree with Derbyshire is when he talks about "culture", he makes a fair point where pop culture is in fact in decline, but the boomer points of view come clearly when he states:
“Babbitt’s music is difficult and not very often listener friendly. Terribly bright guy, though.” Hngh. Isn’t music supposed to be listener friendly" of course, as a jazz-head i would disagree with these definitions, for my experience, when your average listener dislikes maj7s or #11 in the chords you use, they are being pussies, i understand that conservatism is all about tradition and structure, but this principles should not be applied to music.
When you average leftard makes a shitty paint on a local goverment museum, you are in all right to be hateful, but only because your money is being used to pay for minorities (or just the fact that your money is being stolen by the goverment) but conservatives tend to justify that this goverment use of public money is wrong, because the art being funded is bad, they are trying to make a case of objective art values, which i've seen by many so called art theorists or whathever, from the left and the right that they always contradict themselves, specially when it comes to music, there is nothing worst in our academia and intelectual field thant "music critics", because most of them they are not even musicians!! they just write stuff like "i like the production, i like the cover art" they never talk about music, about scales, chords, time signatures, dynamics, they never talk about music!! So i'm very skeptical of boomer music critics, conservatism would work a lot better if they only talk about the issues they know best, family, freedom, values and religion, let people play whathever music they want,
My theory is that, if people have the right values and right lifestlye, their music will somehow reflect exactly that, at least, that's what i try to do with my music.
Anyways a great book i would recommend to anyone that needs a reality check about how our instituions work
Reality shows that humans are prone to violence, inequality and chaos ---> Culturalists want to fix those gaps spending goverment money in social programs--->Turn to 1
The takes on human nature are harsh, but true. For these last years i'been very skeptical of so called "rationalism" or "progressisms" when it comes to humanity, universally speaking. Let's take birthrates in poor areas for example, culturalists insist that poor people have kids because they are not being educated, in sexual protection or whathever...for culturalist is never an option that "humans make stupid decisions when they are horny" inluding "sun" and "ice" people. This is because, stupidity and irrationality is inherently a biological trait directly related to our sexual condition, that culturalists won't recognize because they see human as a "blank slate", thus, more goverment spending is necesary in sexual education programs! more! more money has to be spent!
The only thing were i may disagree with Derbyshire is when he talks about "culture", he makes a fair point where pop culture is in fact in decline, but the boomer points of view come clearly when he states:
“Babbitt’s music is difficult and not very often listener friendly. Terribly bright guy, though.” Hngh. Isn’t music supposed to be listener friendly" of course, as a jazz-head i would disagree with these definitions, for my experience, when your average listener dislikes maj7s or #11 in the chords you use, they are being pussies, i understand that conservatism is all about tradition and structure, but this principles should not be applied to music.
When you average leftard makes a shitty paint on a local goverment museum, you are in all right to be hateful, but only because your money is being used to pay for minorities (or just the fact that your money is being stolen by the goverment) but conservatives tend to justify that this goverment use of public money is wrong, because the art being funded is bad, they are trying to make a case of objective art values, which i've seen by many so called art theorists or whathever, from the left and the right that they always contradict themselves, specially when it comes to music, there is nothing worst in our academia and intelectual field thant "music critics", because most of them they are not even musicians!! they just write stuff like "i like the production, i like the cover art" they never talk about music, about scales, chords, time signatures, dynamics, they never talk about music!! So i'm very skeptical of boomer music critics, conservatism would work a lot better if they only talk about the issues they know best, family, freedom, values and religion, let people play whathever music they want,
My theory is that, if people have the right values and right lifestlye, their music will somehow reflect exactly that, at least, that's what i try to do with my music.
Anyways a great book i would recommend to anyone that needs a reality check about how our instituions work
Reality shows that humans are prone to violence, inequality and chaos ---> Culturalists want to fix those gaps spending goverment money in social programs--->Turn to 1
June 4, 2023
9/10.
This book will bring you peace, peace in the fact that, at the end of the day, we cannot direct Fate. Fate is going to destroy the liberal democratic order of the West soon, and that is perhaps the greatest thing we can look forward too. We have had our rulers’ “ideals” forcefully imposed on us. We are now realizing these “ideals” were a subtle mask for cultural-ethnic hatred of our people. Though they may be in power, everything our rulers do is based on a lie. And these lies, piled up over time, will cause the whole structure of our civilization to collapse.
Perhaps that is a good thing. I think we may need to hit the restart button. We don’t have a nation anymore. Nor do we have a culture. Everything has been lost — no, buried. We can individually reclaim the lost puzzle pieces of who we are, but for most, all is lost. The future lies in the microsphere, the community. Our massive states — utter failures, at this point — will break down, and all we will have left is those like us. Cultivate those connections because you will need them.
This book will bring you peace, peace in the fact that, at the end of the day, we cannot direct Fate. Fate is going to destroy the liberal democratic order of the West soon, and that is perhaps the greatest thing we can look forward too. We have had our rulers’ “ideals” forcefully imposed on us. We are now realizing these “ideals” were a subtle mask for cultural-ethnic hatred of our people. Though they may be in power, everything our rulers do is based on a lie. And these lies, piled up over time, will cause the whole structure of our civilization to collapse.
Perhaps that is a good thing. I think we may need to hit the restart button. We don’t have a nation anymore. Nor do we have a culture. Everything has been lost — no, buried. We can individually reclaim the lost puzzle pieces of who we are, but for most, all is lost. The future lies in the microsphere, the community. Our massive states — utter failures, at this point — will break down, and all we will have left is those like us. Cultivate those connections because you will need them.
November 5, 2025
Derbyshire is not a true conservative. I would describe him as a materialist-pragmatist. True conservatism believes in a transcendent order worth preserving (see Russell Kirk's "permanent things"). This author is actually secular and wishes merely to conserve what true conservatism has built or has built from: family order, civil society (the "imago Dei"), individual liberty (truly, religious liberty)/ ordered liberty, and the free market. He is very much like "King Log" or Louis XIV ("apres-moi, le deluge"), hoping that true believers (realists, but not pessimists) will do the yeoman's work of conserving what he cherishes. Recommended, but with the above caveats.
May 19, 2018
Not worth reading, another example of how little conservative the American Righ is.
Derbyshire is not an authentic conservative, he knows that yet persists to call himself one.
There are some fun jokes and a couple pages of good writing, nothing more of value. There are books and blogs that give a way better treatment of the facts.
Derbyshire is not an authentic conservative, he knows that yet persists to call himself one.
There are some fun jokes and a couple pages of good writing, nothing more of value. There are books and blogs that give a way better treatment of the facts.
June 28, 2017
Entertaining yet straining at the end. Like the Author wanted to have a few more pages.
His recommendations is pretty much how I live life anyway.
And man do I feel lucky!
His recommendations is pretty much how I live life anyway.
And man do I feel lucky!
November 30, 2024
I went into this book knowing that I would have disagreements with the author, but I expected to at least be challenged or, failing that, entertained. Needless to say, agreements were few, challenges were fewer, and entertainment was virtually nonexistent.
The author opens up his book with an attempt to remind readers that dreams are for wishy-washy liberal types, while conservatives would do well to heed the many pot holes that await us on the road to Utopia, assuming that such a place could ever exist. All well and good, until he reminds us that pessimism also has the benefit of making us better people. He has a sample-size of 2 people (3, if you include Derbyshire himself); Matthew Arnold ("pessimist") and Jean-Jacques Rousseau ("optimist"). Setting aside the fact that labeling Rousseau an optimist is something of a mischaracterization (it's not for nothing that Rousseau has his own entry in Dienstag's book on pessimism), one should also take note of Derbyshire's own qualities; this guy got sacked from National Review for being too much of a bigot! When he's not hyperventilating about racial differences in IQ scores over at VDare, a white nationalist website, he's complaining about Jews having too much influence in western institutions and cozying up to people like Kevin MacDonald. This is not the kind of bigotry that one simply happens to absorb through cultural osmosis, but is rather the result of a practiced, nurtured, finely-crafted bigotry; Derbyshire is no "bigot page," but a "bigot sage." He's the kind of guy who gets his exercise goose-stepping around the park.
When he's not busy making poorly-researched claims (this book lacks notes and bibliographies, just so you know), he's busy letting his own motivated reasoning get the best of him. Early on, he reminds us that diversity is a bad thing because, as he has read in one of Robert Putnam's studies, ethnic and cultural diversity decreases the overall feelings of trust in a community, and all sorts of things, from balkanization to violence increase. All well and good, but he goes on to contradict himself in a later chapter when he bemoans the increasing influence that women have over the political, cultural, and economic life of modern times. His principle complaint? There's just not enough room for men to be men in this society, with "feminized" society depriving men of the opportunities to use violence and competitive group loyalties to solve their problems. He even goes on to complain that the possibility of being ransacked by barbarians is increasingly remote in our modern world, meaning that we can't rely on a more violent society to invade us and restore more patriarchal norms. My own conjecture is that he was so motivated to prove that his antipathy towards "Sun People" (referring to people from warmer climates, aka Latin Americans, Black people, Middle-Easterners, etc) and women is the result of objective analysis and not mere bigotry that he found himself using any arguments that he could to confirm his prejudices, with no regards to whether or not they were logically consistent with one another.
His best chapter is the one on education, where he sites a study published by the Cato Institute, which details government failure to teach inner city students in Kansas City, even after being given exorbitant amounts of money with which to do so (the actual study is more interesting than the chapter itself, though). Unfortunately, Derbyshire has to pad the rest of the chapter with less-than-stellar original material, containing diatribes about an apparent liberal conspiracy to bury the work of one La Griffe de Leon, and some gushing about Charles Murray.
He goes on, of course, to complain about a good many other things in the text, from people dancing in the streets all over the Muslim world after the plane hit the twin towers (he makes no effort to provide evidence of this happening) to blaming ethnic minorities for the subprime mortgage crisis and financial meltdown of 2007 - 2008, noting that economic downfalls were virtually unheard of before activists (read: brown people) began messing things up in the government. By this time, I was getting bored, and, judging from his increasingly pitiful attempts at humor and phoned in hysteria, so was Derbyshire. The later chapters are like being a frustrated motorist struggling with a cantankerous automobile that just can't run without getting stuck, leaving the reader with the choice to either abandon the hunk of junk or start pushing.
In the final chapter, he is still an atheist, but he finds Samuel Beckett, and he urges readers to do the same. If I have any reason at all to be a pessimist after all of this, it's not because some do-gooder leftist or desert-dwelling religious maniac has ruined my day, but because there is so much out there to be pessimistic about, and yet so few people can write compellingly about it. Derbyshire does not qualify as one of the few.
The author opens up his book with an attempt to remind readers that dreams are for wishy-washy liberal types, while conservatives would do well to heed the many pot holes that await us on the road to Utopia, assuming that such a place could ever exist. All well and good, until he reminds us that pessimism also has the benefit of making us better people. He has a sample-size of 2 people (3, if you include Derbyshire himself); Matthew Arnold ("pessimist") and Jean-Jacques Rousseau ("optimist"). Setting aside the fact that labeling Rousseau an optimist is something of a mischaracterization (it's not for nothing that Rousseau has his own entry in Dienstag's book on pessimism), one should also take note of Derbyshire's own qualities; this guy got sacked from National Review for being too much of a bigot! When he's not hyperventilating about racial differences in IQ scores over at VDare, a white nationalist website, he's complaining about Jews having too much influence in western institutions and cozying up to people like Kevin MacDonald. This is not the kind of bigotry that one simply happens to absorb through cultural osmosis, but is rather the result of a practiced, nurtured, finely-crafted bigotry; Derbyshire is no "bigot page," but a "bigot sage." He's the kind of guy who gets his exercise goose-stepping around the park.
When he's not busy making poorly-researched claims (this book lacks notes and bibliographies, just so you know), he's busy letting his own motivated reasoning get the best of him. Early on, he reminds us that diversity is a bad thing because, as he has read in one of Robert Putnam's studies, ethnic and cultural diversity decreases the overall feelings of trust in a community, and all sorts of things, from balkanization to violence increase. All well and good, but he goes on to contradict himself in a later chapter when he bemoans the increasing influence that women have over the political, cultural, and economic life of modern times. His principle complaint? There's just not enough room for men to be men in this society, with "feminized" society depriving men of the opportunities to use violence and competitive group loyalties to solve their problems. He even goes on to complain that the possibility of being ransacked by barbarians is increasingly remote in our modern world, meaning that we can't rely on a more violent society to invade us and restore more patriarchal norms. My own conjecture is that he was so motivated to prove that his antipathy towards "Sun People" (referring to people from warmer climates, aka Latin Americans, Black people, Middle-Easterners, etc) and women is the result of objective analysis and not mere bigotry that he found himself using any arguments that he could to confirm his prejudices, with no regards to whether or not they were logically consistent with one another.
His best chapter is the one on education, where he sites a study published by the Cato Institute, which details government failure to teach inner city students in Kansas City, even after being given exorbitant amounts of money with which to do so (the actual study is more interesting than the chapter itself, though). Unfortunately, Derbyshire has to pad the rest of the chapter with less-than-stellar original material, containing diatribes about an apparent liberal conspiracy to bury the work of one La Griffe de Leon, and some gushing about Charles Murray.
He goes on, of course, to complain about a good many other things in the text, from people dancing in the streets all over the Muslim world after the plane hit the twin towers (he makes no effort to provide evidence of this happening) to blaming ethnic minorities for the subprime mortgage crisis and financial meltdown of 2007 - 2008, noting that economic downfalls were virtually unheard of before activists (read: brown people) began messing things up in the government. By this time, I was getting bored, and, judging from his increasingly pitiful attempts at humor and phoned in hysteria, so was Derbyshire. The later chapters are like being a frustrated motorist struggling with a cantankerous automobile that just can't run without getting stuck, leaving the reader with the choice to either abandon the hunk of junk or start pushing.
In the final chapter, he is still an atheist, but he finds Samuel Beckett, and he urges readers to do the same. If I have any reason at all to be a pessimist after all of this, it's not because some do-gooder leftist or desert-dwelling religious maniac has ruined my day, but because there is so much out there to be pessimistic about, and yet so few people can write compellingly about it. Derbyshire does not qualify as one of the few.
January 2, 2012
John Derbyshire has written a wonderful novel (Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream), a popular math book, and in We Are Doomed has added political polemic. We Are Doomed is addressed to fellow American conservatives whom Derbyshire has diagnosed with an illness shared by those on the left, namely "foolishly utopian ways of thinking." What Derbyshire calls pessimism is simply a realistic view of human nature although his prognosis is pessimistic in a different sense. The book after all is titled We Are Doomed.
He takes conservatives to task for adopting the wishful thinking of the left, the notion that people will behave how policy makers want them to provided the proper policies are instituted. Derbyshire wants to reclaim the pessimism of our Founders who created a government that accounted for man's intractable nature, what might be a called a politics of low (realistic) expectations. He even takes to task the notable Cassandra Mark Steyn for being too optimistic (Derb wrote this before Steyn's latest doom and gloom book After America). Needless to say, if Derb finds Steyn insufficiently realistic, he sees very few allies in the cause to reverse even the conservative drift toward "happy talk."
The doom and gloom comes in the form of recounting the disaster of the utopian projects of the 20th century, but also the failure of less radical, creeping statism of the West as well in education, economic regulation, foreign policy, and especially immigration. Derbyshire scoffs at America's persistence in pursuing policies wholly fantastical if one takes into account the mounting evidence in the sciences and social sciences that what we call human nature is actually that and can't be nurtured away with the "right" environment or policies.
The gloomiest portion is perhaps Derbyshire's discussion of biological determinism to which he has increasingly come to subscribe. He is not didactic about the subject. He is in fact quite humble about it except that he is a bit condescending about religion although sympathetic to the West's Judeo-Christian tradition. This subject, like criticism of the cult of diversity and mass immigration, is strictly off limits among our public intellectuals and especially our politicians. Honest contemplation of these issues, he tells us, is not likely to happen especially when even conservatives cannot speak honestly or freely about them.
Despite the doom and gloom, Derbyshire is very amusing and entertaining. One can still laugh despite our descent into political correctness and soft despotism even if resigned to the notion, as Derbyshire concludes, that his lifetime occurred during a brief golden age in American history that is coming to an end.
He takes conservatives to task for adopting the wishful thinking of the left, the notion that people will behave how policy makers want them to provided the proper policies are instituted. Derbyshire wants to reclaim the pessimism of our Founders who created a government that accounted for man's intractable nature, what might be a called a politics of low (realistic) expectations. He even takes to task the notable Cassandra Mark Steyn for being too optimistic (Derb wrote this before Steyn's latest doom and gloom book After America). Needless to say, if Derb finds Steyn insufficiently realistic, he sees very few allies in the cause to reverse even the conservative drift toward "happy talk."
The doom and gloom comes in the form of recounting the disaster of the utopian projects of the 20th century, but also the failure of less radical, creeping statism of the West as well in education, economic regulation, foreign policy, and especially immigration. Derbyshire scoffs at America's persistence in pursuing policies wholly fantastical if one takes into account the mounting evidence in the sciences and social sciences that what we call human nature is actually that and can't be nurtured away with the "right" environment or policies.
The gloomiest portion is perhaps Derbyshire's discussion of biological determinism to which he has increasingly come to subscribe. He is not didactic about the subject. He is in fact quite humble about it except that he is a bit condescending about religion although sympathetic to the West's Judeo-Christian tradition. This subject, like criticism of the cult of diversity and mass immigration, is strictly off limits among our public intellectuals and especially our politicians. Honest contemplation of these issues, he tells us, is not likely to happen especially when even conservatives cannot speak honestly or freely about them.
Despite the doom and gloom, Derbyshire is very amusing and entertaining. One can still laugh despite our descent into political correctness and soft despotism even if resigned to the notion, as Derbyshire concludes, that his lifetime occurred during a brief golden age in American history that is coming to an end.
Read
July 26, 2013'Derbyshire seems to be missing the whole story. University English and women’s studies departments may be ideological minefields, but not the departments of physics, biology, history, computer science, and math. “American Idol” may be vulgar trash, but TV at its best (“The Wire”) and cinema at its best (“The Reader”) are incomparably better than all the 1970s disco films made and unmade.
Despite everything, there’s still a bit of space left in this world for men as well as women. Derbyshire really shines as a columnist, making his deliberately provocative and pungent points in essays of 500 words. At times, We Are Doomed feels like a string of such columns, each rising to its own crescendo of shock and horror. The whole is, in the end, rather less than the sum of its parts.'
Read the full review, "Demolition Derbyshire," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...
Despite everything, there’s still a bit of space left in this world for men as well as women. Derbyshire really shines as a columnist, making his deliberately provocative and pungent points in essays of 500 words. At times, We Are Doomed feels like a string of such columns, each rising to its own crescendo of shock and horror. The whole is, in the end, rather less than the sum of its parts.'
Read the full review, "Demolition Derbyshire," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...
December 30, 2009
Derbyshire is my favorite gloominary, but he still seems a bit unbalanced in his antipathy towards organized religion. He spends much too much time trying to push his own biological/physical interpretation of the universe, and he tries to show himself at ease with the pessimistic conclusion of that way of viewing life. I would have much preferred a stricter adherence to the theme of negative trends in our world. He has much to say that is insightful and causes the reader to pause and reflect on his own assumptions. For this, I was grateful. Also, parts really are very funny reading. The section on education was especially good. Still, the book as a whole was not all I had hoped it to be.
April 24, 2010
Derbyshire's erudite and delightful style always makes his writing a pleasure to read, even when his subject is a bracing and sober look at the present and future of the USA. Derbyshire is more than anything a member of the "reality-based community", and the reality of our national predicament, from immigration, to education policy, to economics, to cultural decline, is one that most of us would shrink to face directly. But face it Derbyshire does, and with great style. A joy to read, though sobering and rather bleak, in the final account.
December 17, 2009
Derbyshire's become one of my favorite political and cultural commentators. I can't say I disagree with very much in this book... American conservatism got swept up in completely irresponsible Utopian pipe dreams ("the freedom agenda", "compassionate conservatism") over the last generation or so, and as a result has failed in its proper restraining role. Had we been more pessimistic then, there might be some reason for optimism now. But we weren't, and so there isn't.
November 22, 2010
The Derb is a wonderful writer, and as a natural pessimist, I find myself nodding along almost incessantly. Where we part ways is at religion: He is most emphatically NOT a believer. Still, I think that the conservative, non-militant atheist and the conservative Christian can both agree that there's plenty to be pessimistic about here on planet Earth. After all, Jesus Himself said, "In this life, you will have troubles." So...there you go.
June 4, 2013
This book was an eye-opener, a hoot, and a slap in the face all in one. Derbyshire's style is as enjoyable as they come, and his pessimistic attitude awakens the realist in all of us to the idolatries of American optimism. A must-read, with one caveat: Derbyshire is an atheist, and although his critiques and commentary are often spot-on, his solutions and suggestions often miss the boat. But don't let that keep you away.
December 24, 2009
An interesting and entertaining read. The underlying philosophical message I think is a good one (human nature is real and ignoring it leads to disaster). But it is a sort of popular essay - or survey - style book not a detailed argument. Lots to argue with but that also makes it interesting, IMO.
Want to read
October 29, 2009Through John Walker (Fourmilog).
The book apparently doesn't suggest any measures that can be used to change course. Might be too depressing to read. Read only to understand if there is any sound logic.
The book apparently doesn't suggest any measures that can be used to change course. Might be too depressing to read. Read only to understand if there is any sound logic.
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