May as well put up the speech of this young man from New Plymouth Boys High School, courtesy of The Platform and Sean Plunket. Maybe we’re not lost yet.

Douglas Murray thoughts likely provoked by the recent riots in Britain and the British government’s resulting crackdowns on social media commentary about them.

Over on the objectivist blog, Not PC, is a post about this based on a response by a philosopher named Stephen Hicks, who agrees with Murray but places the blame not on modern ideas like Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism, Critical Theory or Identity Politics but…

Truly, it is absurd.
Yet … reflect upon that moral tradition within the West that has urged us to SACRIFICE SELFLESSLY FOR THE SAKE OF OTHERS, ESPECIALLY WEAKER OTHERS. Take those words seriously and you get part of the causal explanation for the absurdity. It is a moral battle, and much of the West has internalised a self-destructive morality.

Well naturally I expect Objectivists to object to the concepts of altruism  and self-sacrifice since those things are all about The Collective being placed supreme above the individual. As Peter Cresswell himself goes on to say:

It’s the ethic of self-sacrifice that underpins the phoney idea that all cultures are equal, except this one. It’s that ethic of altruism that needs to be abandoned.

I think that’s a stretch, especially given the other modern philosophies mentioned above which have been joyously hammering the West – its ideas, beliefs, institutions and actions – for decades now.

For example we could look at the “sacrifice” of thousands of Royal Navy sailors in destroying the Atlantic slave trade. I’m sure those men did not think in those terms; they followed orders; I doubt they considered sacrificing themselves for the slaves (though there may have been some who did think in those terms).

But our modern society certainly does look back and says that it was a sacrifice by British society. And it was, but I don’t see that such damns the notion of altruism, or self-sacrifice for that matter. And with slavery we are once again talking of what is required to end a system of force applied to other men just as Western men sacrificed themselves – or at least risked that – to put an end to the systems of force applied by nations such as Nazi Germany and Japan in WWII. Yet none of that destroyed British or Western culture; even with the terrible damage of WW1 and WW2 wrought on the West, it’s peoples continued to believe in themselves, their ideas, institutions, and the actions they had taken.

But what Murray is describing surely will destroy us. What it ties back to is a loss of belief and confidence in ourselves and our Western societies.

And there are other ways of looking at the West’s decline at the moment, as James Lindsay points out. While I’ve long been aware of Deng Xiaoping, given his key role in launching China into its post-Mao world of economic growth, success and power, I didn’t know that he’d also had an “ism” named after him.