Paul Gottfried reviews John Derbyshire’s latest book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism
Although We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism
would appear to be a light read, brimful of anecdotal asides, first impressions can and, at least in this case, do deceive. Derbyshire’s work is fraught with carefully researched information about the failures of public education, the egalitarian assumptions informing our educational-political establishment, the feminization of American society, and the increasing irrelevance of any form of culture except for crude entertainment to American life.
Gottfried then contrasts Derbyshire’s science-based perspective with the religious and cultural (100% environmentalist) views that dominate today’s conservative and liberal elites:
Derbyshire cites Charles Murray’s research in underlining the effects of immutable differences among individuals and ethnic groups. But his tone is very different from Murray’s, insofar as he does not follow Murray in Real Education
by patting public educators on the head for making modest gains with cognitively weak students. He is full of obvious contempt for the egalitarian aims and crass hypocrisies of the “edbyz” crowd, and in this respect he seems to have taken his lead from Brimelow’s battle against mendacious, grasping teachers’ unions in The Worm in the Apple.
Derbyshire’s perspective seems to call for a revival of what the conservative author Sam Francis has called counter-modernism, a worldview shaped by the secular and scientific views of the Enlightenment but without its naive egalitarian and emancipatory tendencies. Gottfried writes:
Only by accepting the utter folly of the project of reconstructing human beings, and by acknowledging the reality of inherent human inequalities, can conservatives have anything to contribute to the political discussion. Otherwise they are merely confirming the errors of the other side, while claiming to represent an alternative.
John Derbyshire also writes for the blog Secular Right.