We Are Doomed Review
by Patrick Allitt
Editorial Note: We are inaugurating this year the practice of bringing to our readers a brief selection of Faculty writing—review, article, or other short form—published during the last year. The following essay is a review by Patrick Allitt.
As my name became more widely known among conservative intellectuals, I was invited to contribute reviews to conservative journals. Here is my review of John Derbyshire’s We Are Doomed, written in the summer of 2009 for The American Conservative.
John Derbyshire, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (New York: Crown Forum, 2009)
Imagine a cheerful, observant, talkative man who, as he advances into late middle age, becomes impatient with much of the world around him and starts complaining about it. Yes, he’s an immigrant from Britain, but that doesn’t mean he approves of an open immigration policy. Sure, he has a Chinese wife, but that doesn’t mean he favors diversity as a social goal. Certainly he thinks America draws its strength from religion, but that doesn’t make him a believer in God. He is most definitely a conservative, but much of what passes for conservatism these days fills him with dismay.
Imagine further that during a few memorable weeks after the election of President Obama he records his remarks to friends about all the things that annoy him, then transcribes and prints the lot. That’s the feeling you get from We Are Doomed. It’s a book that feels like conversation, and it has all the quips, gags, and digressions that you get from a natural chatterbox at the height of his powers. Undisciplined, amusing, full of exaggerations and flights of fancy, it’s also the work of a voracious reader, a man who’s interested in everything. He thinks he’s a pessimist, but actually he’s an indignant optimist. His spluttering objections to various aspects of the contemporary scene bear witness to his belief that things don’t have to be the way they are, and that they could be a whole lot better. A real pessimist would survey each new catastrophe, sigh, and take it as further confirmation that civilizations only decline and individuals only die.
If the book has a central theme, it is that the American conservative movement has succumbed recently to a facile, bright-eyed cheeriness, forgetting its long heritage of skepticism about the human condition. Too many conservatives, he writes, welcome the ideology of diversity, embrace big government, support a foreign policy of global democratization, and believe that the nation has an almost infinite capacity to absorb culturally alien immigrants and refugees. They’re wrong on every point, in his view, though he shows a strange reluctance to name any of them, other than outgoing president George W. Bush. Not surprisingly he deplores the incoming Obama crowd too, especially their faith in big and costly projects, but he sees them as different only in degree, not in kind, from what all too many conservatives have supported in recent years.
Once you realize that you’re not reading a pessimistic manifesto in the tradition of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but merely a long pamphlet urging conservatives to be more skeptical and to remember the need for prudence, everything falls into place. You’ve heard it all before: from George Gilder on masculinity, from Allan Bloom on high culture, from Roger Kimball on education, from Pat Buchanan on foreign policy, and from dozens of lesser lights. The indictments are familiar: of federal bloat, cultural decay, feminization, barbarian invasion from South of the border, and overconfident military adventures in distant lands. What’s new is the idiom. Where Bloom was solemnly apocalyptic and Kimball fretful and feverish, Derbyshire makes his case in a long succession of wisecracks.
Like many of his British ancestors, he is good at picking up insults and giving them a positive spin (that’s how the terms “Puritan,” “Whig,” and “Methodist” all started out). In a clever rhetorical move he borrows Professor Leonard Jeffries’ terms about the “Sun People” and the “Ice People,” but only so that he can sing the praises of those chilly white northerners. He also enjoys inverting the Obama administration’s new clichés, and readers will smile at his references to “the audacity of hopelessness” and his periodic refrain “No we can’t.” He calls politics “show business for ugly people,” and describes the annual State of the Union address as a “disgusting spectacle.”
Derbyshire, for all his levity, is genuinely alarmed about the state of conservatism, but recognizes that his position in the movement is paradoxical. A few years ago he dreamed up the neologism “metrocons” as a name for conservatives who live in New York, Chicago, or inside the Beltway and spend their lives among urban sophisticates, even while sympathizing with the “heartland” people who constitute the movement’s electoral backbone. He goes into more detail here about life as a metrocon, admitting that in most respects the company of educated urban liberals is much more congenial to him than that of rock-ribbed Republicans. They’re certainly more likely to appreciate his jokes.
Among the complications he has to face is the fact that he’s an atheist. He finds religious faith delusional but also thinks of it as essential to the future of conservatism. He warns that America’s exceptional religiosity is not something that will necessarily persist. After all, he has witnessed the drastic secularization of both Ireland and Wales in his own lifetime; it could happen here too. Intellectually he would approve, presumably, though emotionally he would be dismayed.
His remarks on education, like those on religion, are gloomy but not really pessimistic. He faults the expensive and bureaucratically cumbersome “No Child Left Behind” legislation as the kind of fantasy project that conservatives ought never to have endorsed. It implied that the expenditure of enough money would solve all educational problems, even though a generation of studies had already shown, beyond a reasonable doubt, that family background was the decisive variable in predicting students’ success or failure. Now we have a situation in which far too many young people are stuck in educational institutions where they suffer “innumerable hours of boredom and frustration” (113) because they are completely unsuited to the work they’re being asked to do. It would be better, he believes, to permit youngsters to leave school early (perhaps even at age 12) and move straight to practical, on-the-job training.
Meanwhile, white and Asian-American families do everything they can to get their children into schools where their own groups dominate, and to avoid schools with majority black and Hispanic student bodies. Realtors know that this is true; house prices reflect their knowledge that it is true, the whole social geography of America reflects this great truth, yet everyone denies it or talks about it in euphemisms. Derbyshire comments: “Mainstream conservatives approach this whole issue . . . with the whimpering terror they bring to all matters racial: ‘Oh please, mister, please don’t call me a racist! Beat me with this steel rod if you like, but for pity’s sake don’t call me racist!” (123). After a few devastating illustrations of his point, notably one about the failure of Kansas City’s herculean efforts to improve its inner-city schools, he predicts that entrenched educational bureaucrats and the powerful teachers’ union will block all serious reforms.
Cultural decline, no less than religious and educational decline, upsets him. He admits that he catches sight of popular television shows only while trudging from his study to the living room to fix himself stiff drinks. Not knowing the shows doesn’t prevent him from passing judgment on them, however, and the judgment he passes is very far indeed from positive. He particularly hates the “girly shows” in which “estrogen is practically oozing out of the TV screen and dripping down onto my carpet” and in which “competitors [sit] around primping while shrieking ‘Oh my God!’ at each other” (68). He doesn’t even like Sponge Bob Square Pants, and may not realize the significance of the fact that his kids (clearly a capable twosome) call him Squidward. Then he shows his true old-fogy colors by claiming, apparently seriously, that he got a big kick recently out of watching a re-run of Saturday Night Fever and that it’s a good film.
He cites the case of the Italian artist Piero Manzoni whose Merda D’Artista consists of high-priced cans of his own “solid waste,” which prestigious American galleries and collectors now covet, especially if they can’t spend their millions on one of Damien Hirst’s works made from rotting fish and maggoty dead cows. I laughed over his savaging of contemporary poetry, especially the kind of poetry that gets declaimed at Democratic presidential inaugurations. He describes Maya Angelou’s contribution to Bill Clinton’s first big day as “gassy drivel,” (77) and Elizabeth Alexander’s role in Barack Obama’s inauguration as “the monotonous, structureless, subliterate whining of nursed and petted victimhood” (81). Derbyshire’s conclusion about American high culture is that it is arid, academic in the worst sense, and completely devoid of imagination.
Next he gets crotchety about gender relations, and complains that these days women are better than men at everything. He speculates that sooner or later a female-dominated society is going to phase out men altogether, and manage reproduction by parthenogenesis. That would be a good joke except that, briefly, the light-heartedness disappears and he offers a bizarre (and surely unnecessary) lament for the eclipse of the martial virtues:
Even war, that most quintessential of masculine activities, is probably a thing of the past. For war you need a large supply of young men. With the great demographic collapse of modern times, that supply is drying up. Soft, feminized, overcivilized, undermilitarized societies of the past were likely to be jolted back into vigor, or just overrun, by warriors from the wild places. Now there are no more wild places . . . (92-93)
Hasn’t he seen a newspaper for the last couple of decades? War is in no danger at all of disappearing from this world, and a quick survey of contemporary geopolitics discloses plenty of “wild places.” Parts of the Middle East and most of Africa are getting wilder all the time. It may be true that conservatives look back with longing to earlier times but Derbyshire here tiptoes up to the brink of being nostalgic for the days (World War I?) when men by the tens of thousands were turned into cannon fodder.
By the later chapters you might find yourself running out of patience. The gags keep coming and I certainly won’t deny that he had me chuckling all the way to the end, but now and again I couldn’t help thinking: true, there are reasons to be concerned, but that’s not 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 five hundred 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.