Read the full transcript of British commentator and cultural critic Douglas Murray’s talk titled “The Truth About Our Decline” at The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) 2025 on Feb 18, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
DOUGLAS MURRAY: Thank you, thank you and good morning, so good to see all of you here and thank you to the organisers of ARC for inviting me. Perhaps I could just start by saying that I think that the challenge that Philippa and the organisers of this conference have laid out is much bigger even than we speakers have been told. It’s a sort of challenge upon a challenge to be invited to be optimistic about the future from the wastelands of East London.
And I’d like to tell all foreign visitors to this conference that if you go just a few miles from this conference centre you’ll find a most charming and historical city with many landmarks worth seeing.
The Age of Reconstruction
One of the questions I think that all ages ask themselves is what do they call the age that they are in? Almost every age has had this question. Most recently the age of modernism asked what comes after modernism and the rather unoriginal idea was postmodernism. Postmodernism of course included its offspring of deconstructionism and nothing came from that.
But I would like to suggest a name for the age that we should be in and the age that this conference can help bring in. The age of reconstruction. We should be the reconstructionists. The deconstructionists knew something about how to take things apart but like children with bicycles had no idea how to put them back together.
So it’ll be the job of people like those in this room to try to put that civilisation back together and I’m delighted that that’s one of the things that we’re gathered here to do.
I wanted to lay out two broad ideas of what we can do to bring that to pass.
Learning from American Innovations
First let me just give an example since we are in Britain and there are many Europeans here I might just make reference to the fact there seems already to be not in this room but in Europe widely a certain contempt for innovations that are occurring in the US not least at governmental level. There is a whining and a howling about for instance Doge’s attempts to not just stop government waste but actually to reform by exposing government waste.
One of the great advantages of Doge so far is you don’t only see a way in which a country like America might balance the budget but in stripping away all those layers of bureaucracy and budget you also unveil underneath it the kind of rot that our societies have been willing to put up with along the way. I gather that the administration in DC is looking to do after USAID something which was found to be so rotten that it had to be gotten rid of in its entirety is looking at doing the Department of Education.
In America as in the rest of the West there is no greater task to do in New York State where I spend much of my time. An average spend at a state school is now per pupil around $35,000 a year. For that sum K-12 students finish with only just about half of them with basic literacy and half with basic numeracy.
So nobody can tell us that money is the problem. Money is not the problem. You could keep throwing money at this problem and you can still create more and more illiterates.
Innovation and Risk-Taking
So I just wanted to mention briefly the two things I think that can be looked at. The first is of course innovation. Again for those of us in Europe and in Britain there is an enormous amount to learn rather than to scorn the American experience. There are reasons why so many of the unicorn startups are from America, why disproportionately they are still from America. There must be something that they are doing right.
In this country we still have a situation where one in five of the working age population simply do not work and we the rest of the taxpayers subsidize those people not to work and this seems to me to be a great national scandal but still something which our governments don’t care to address. To my mind one of the great explanations for this disparity in innovation between Europe and America is a very simple question.
It’s our attitude towards risk. The idea in America remains that life is indeed risky, that success is risky and in much of the rest of the West we have fallen into a kind of complacency which is a sort of welfarism.
When I returned to the UK recently I discovered that the great debate in the UK was about how to kill the elderly more efficiently and I was struck that the only argument that any Labour minister could make against euthanasia coming online with the NHS was that she didn’t think that the NHS was capable of performing euthanasia efficiently. I mentioned in The Spectator at the time that this was I think wrong in one important degree.
The NHS is a world leader in killing the elderly. It’s just that they only kill the people who don’t want to die. The NHS through which endless governments in this country pour money is always told to us to be the envy of the world and yet of course none of us can find a GP appointment.
Extraordinary People and Extraordinary Culture
But I wanted to mention one other main thing and to do so I just want to reflect on something that’s been much on my mind in the last couple of years. I spent most of the last couple of years in Ukraine and a much lengthier time in the Middle East covering the wars there.
When I returned to the UK in December I bumped into a politician friend from Westminster who and I was extolling the virtues of the IDF who might have been embedded for much of the last year in Gaza and Lebanon and elsewhere and she said to me isn’t it remarkable that extraordinary events throw up these extraordinary people. I was singing the praises of the amazing young men and women of the IDF as they battle the death cults of Hamas and Hezbollah.
And this politician said to me “It is amazing isn’t it Douglas that this young generation has stepped up to the challenge has answered that question of whether or not their generation is fit for the civilizational challenge” and she said “it’s extraordinary the way in which events throw up people” and I said to her there’s a tweak we need to do to that analysis which is it’s not just extraordinary events that throw up extraordinary people.
It’s extraordinary events when they come up against people who have been extraordinarily well cultured. And what I mean by that is that it’s not enough that a civilization or a generation comes across a defining moment. It is that when that happens you know what you’re fighting for. It is that you know you’re fighting for your faith, for your family, for your people, for your tradition, for your way of life and very much more.
The Importance of Looking Back
Clever people can sometimes say very stupid things and in a recent interview Yuval Harari who wrote Sapiens was asked if there was any book that he would recommend that people could read in the present to understand the future that’s coming and he said no he couldn’t think of such a book because change was going to be so incredibly fast and I said a couple of days later at an event in Jerusalem that’s flat out wrong.
Change has always happened and if you want a book to guide you how about having the book that guided your forebears.
Now to do that you have to come to the second thing I wanted to mention this morning that you need for civilizational renewal and that’s the ability to look back. To look back. We’ve wasted so much time in recent years. We’ve wasted so much time.
People have made us move at such a retarded speed. We’ve had years of talking about the most basic things that our species need, men and women. What are they? Come on.
Who had time for this? And the problem is that there is a cost to this. There has been a civilizational cost to be made to go at the speed of the slowest kids in the class.
The Deculturation of Societies
Now one response to the era of mass migration that I’ve written a great amount has been what I’ve described as the deculturation of our societies. The idea that in order to welcome people into our societies we effectively have to pretend that we are uninteresting places, unimportant places until migration makes us interesting.
And I just wanted to mention an analogy here which my friend Eric Weinstein who’s come in today from LA gave me this idea a while ago. He said as a boy he had the impression that ice cream was something whose base flavour was vanilla and all other flavours were added on top of vanilla.
And he said it was only at some point in his youth that he discovered that vanilla itself is a flavour and a very complex flavour.
Now we in the West have created an extraordinarily complex and rich flavour and we have spent recent years pretending that we have no flavour or that flavour is something that only other people bring to us.
And this, this is of course flat out wrong but it’s been something that we have told more than one generation of young people in the West. We’ve told them that we don’t really have anything very great or if we do we oughtn’t to talk about it too much.
Rebuilding Our Civilization
And I believe that that is flat out wrong because what we have in cities like that just a little way up the road and in the cities of Europe and the West are the greatest civilisation that the world has known.
And we have the choice, we have the choice either to live in the wastelands or to rebuild them.
Now there are cities in Europe, I think of cities like Budapest, I think of many German cities where the idea is that you actually can restore beauty to the built environment, that people do not need to wander like lost souls around the wastelands of East London looking for meaning against buildings that tell them you are nothing, you do not matter. We have the opportunity to restore not just in the built environment but in the educational environment, to make sure that when we talk about our culture we don’t just talk about it but we also do it.
For people to realise that our culture is not just something they revere but something that young people can add to. To understand the conversation, the poetry of mankind. To understand that just because Mozart is great does not mean you cannot build on Mozart. That just because the great buildings are great does not mean you cannot add to them. I would urge in the age of reconstruction that our great task is not just to break through with innovation but to reclaim what is ours.
To say that we love it and that if people wish to join us in the veneration of this civilisation they are very, very willing to do so. If they don’t wish to join us there are other places they can be. Everybody knows that those of us who revere T.S. Eliot revere him in part because he told us and indeed tells us still that a civilisation can be reclaimed even at the eleventh hour.
But even in this hall I would say that there is another possibility as well which other philosophers, Strauss and others also give us, which is the possibility that civilisation can also be reclaimed even at the thirteenth hour, even in the most inauspicious circumstances and most importantly today, from the most inauspicious of locations.
