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We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism Hardcover – September 29, 2009
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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 conclusion: 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 yourself: 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.
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCrown Forum
- Publication dateSeptember 29, 2009
- Dimensions6.75 x 1.25 x 10.25 inches
- ISBN-100307409589
- ISBN-13978-0307409584
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
—George F. Will, Pulitzer Prize—winning columnist and author of One Man's America
"John Derbyshire contends that a comprehensive pessimism is the natural home for realistic conservatives, a breed that understands human nature better than utopian liberals and 'happy talk conservatives.' His argument is wide-ranging, erudite, and invigorating, but, paradoxically, delivered with cheerful panache."
—Judge Robert H. Bork, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Tempting of America and Slouching Towards Gomorrah
"Just when you thought there was nothing to American conservatism but a bunch of blue-blazered fuddy-duddies who talk about global democracy, here comes John Derbyshire, who reminds us all of the place of pessimism and skepticism in the Western tradition. Not a moment too soon."
—Taki Theodoracopulos, cofounder of The American Conservative and editor and publisher of Taki's Magazine, takimag.com
"A funny and brilliant call to pessimism, Man's last, best hope for a tolerable life. Pessimists are not only the only realists; they have all the best jokes."
—Theodore Dalrymple, author of Not With a Bang But a Whimper and Our Culture, What's Left of It
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A Call to Pessimism
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
—Ecclesiastes 7:4
The Politics of Despair
This book is addressed to American conservatives. Its argument is that things are bad and getting worse for our movement, for our nation, and for our civilization. A large part of the reason they have gotten so bad is that too many of us have fallen into foolishly utopian ways of thinking.
Those ways of thinking are false because they are too optimistic about human nature and human affairs. The proper outlook of conservatives, I shall argue, is a pessimistic one, at least so far as the things of this world are concerned. We have been misled, and the conservative movement has been derailed, by legions of fools and poseurs wearing smiley-face masks. I aim to unmask them.
I have both a diagnosis and a prognosis to offer. The diagnosis is that conservatism has been fatally weakened by yielding to infantile temptations: temptations to optimism, to wishful thinking, to happy talk, to cheerily preposterous theories about human beings and the human world.
Thus weakened, conservatism can no longer provide the backbone of cold realism that every organized society needs. Hence my prognosis; hence my title. We are doomed.
By abandoning our properly pessimistic approach to the world, conservatives have helped bring about a state of affairs that thoughtful persons can only contemplate with pessimism. If we’d held on to the pessimistic outlook that’s proper for our philosophy, the future might be brighter!
This looks like a paradox, but really isn’t, as I’m using the word “pessimism” in two slightly different senses: to indicate low expectations of one’s fellow men, and to name a belief about the probable future. If we expect too much of people, we’ll be disappointed, and our schemes will fail. Heady optimism about human nature leads directly to disaster. To put it in the style of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: the Road of Denial leads to the Precipice of Destruction. Didn’t the great utopian experiments of the twentieth century teach us that? We’ve repeated those experiments—in a less brazen way, to be sure, but with the same inevitable result now coming upon us.
By embracing a proper conservative pessimism, we may yet rescue something from the coming ruin. At the very least, by returning to cold reality after our recent detour into sunny fantasy, we’ll put ourselves in the right frame of mind for our new life in the wilderness.
The winning candidate in the 2008 presidential election promoted something called “the politics of hope.” Ladies and gentlemen of conservative inclination, I call you to our true, our proper home. I call you to the politics of despair!
The Scope of the Argument
This book is about what we have done to ourselves, to our society and culture. It’s about the hopelessness of any project to save the situation based on current conservatism, perverted as it has been by smiley-face schemes of human improvement. It’s about composing ourselves to a true view of humanity and human affairs, so that we can get through our individual destinies usefully and with maximum peace of mind in the dark age to come, preserving as much as can be preserved. Who knows? Once back in touch with truth, we might even see a revival of real conservatism: self-support, patriotism, limited government, federalism . . . though of course, I don’t hold out much hope.
Please be clear about the scope of the pessimism I urge on you. Don’t mistake my thesis for any of those tabloid Chicken Little prognostications about particular economic, ecological, military, or cosmic misfortunes we may be able to science our way out of.
Have we reached Peak Oil? I don’t know. (Neither, so far as I can gather from some extensive reading in this area, does anyone else.) Will global warming melt the polar ice caps? Sorry, I have no clue. Are suitcase nuclear weapons secreted in our cities awaiting a word of command from some terrorist mastermind or malevolent dictator? I really couldn’t say. Shall we fall to some plague, some runaway particle-physics experiment, some asteroid strike or other celestial mishap? Or will human nature itself disappear into a “singularity” around the middle of this century, as futurologist Ray Kurzweil predicts? Beats my pair of jacks.
My book is not primarily about any of those things, though speaking as a constitutional pessimist, I’d lay odds that one or other of them is lurking just round the historical corner. Things are bad and getting worse, any fool can see that, but I pin my dark banner to no one particular prediction. Despair should be large and general, not petty and particular.
Nor does my scope extend beyond this human state and this earthly life. Possibly there are other states and other lives. Though no longer an adherent of any religion, I maintain an open mind on these issues. They are in any case outside the purview of this book. I’m writing about the communal arrangements of a particular social mammal on a particular planet. Believe what you like about matters beyond that; this book isn’t concerned with them.
The happy pessimist
That’s all very well, you may say, but isn’t pessimism enervating? If all is for the worst for us in this, the worst of all possible worlds, why bother? Why not sit around vegetating in a state of glum melancholia, like the angel in Dürer’s fine engraving of that name?
That would be to misunderstand the nature of a thoughtful, considered pessimism. There is no necessary connection between a pessimistic outlook and a melancholy temperament. At most I’ll allow that having a naturally glum disposition makes it easier to attain an understanding of human depravity, contrariety, mental incoherence, and imperfectibility. I myself do have such a disposition, and won’t be trying to hide behind any fake jollity. Later in this book, in fact, I shall present some actual science suggesting that a glum melancholic is just the person you want to go to for the truth about human affairs. Yet plenty of active, convivial, and useful people have a pessimistic outlook. Some of them have done important things to improve their societies and lift up their fellow men.
Here are some of the gloomiest lines in all of English literature. They are by the poet Matthew Arnold:
. . . the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Arnold was a witty and sociable man who loved sport and companionship. He worked hard at useful employment, was happily married to the same lady for thirty-seven years, and was a loving father to his six children.
Enervating? Not at all: Pessimism is bracing, like foul weather. (Arnold and I were both raised in England.)
It also makes you a better person. Consider the optimist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed human beings to be innately good and who laid the philosophical foundations for progressive, “child-centered” methods of education. Rousseau was, by his own admission, a thief, a liar, a sexual exhibitionist, and a philanderer. He cohabited with a coarse and illiterate woman, to whom he was not faithful, and deposited the five children he gave her in orphanages because he did not want the trouble of raising them.
We pessimists, you see, are not only wiser than the smiley-face crowd; we are better people. This is no mere biological accident. We are better people because we know that most of the improvements that can be made in human affairs must be made by us ourselves—by individuals and small voluntary associations. Efforts at improvement by organizations much larger than that will come to naught, or even make things worse, if not based on a clear understanding of human ignorance and weakness.
That’s the core of a proper conservative pessimism: the recognition that there is little hope for improvement in this world; that such small hope as there is should be directed toward the actions of one, or a few; and that most of what governments do is wicked, when not merely pointless and counterproductive.
There is work to be done; there is life to be lived; there are children to be raised, friendships to be cultivated, bills to be paid, and many pleasures to be enjoyed. You may feel, after reading my book, that there is no point in bothering with any of those things. You may even decide to head for the exit. If so, I hope you’ll drop me a line, care of my publisher, before doing so, in order that I might have a chance at dissuading you. I’d be sorry to think that my book, in its modest passage through the world, had left widows and orphans in its wake.
Should you choose to stick around, I hope that you’ll keep yourself busy with something useful, and try to be a good citizen. There is no reason not to. Jails and asylums are uncomfortable places, life on the streets is unhygienic and dangerous, and nobody will pay you a salary to sit around brooding in melancholia. That figure in Dürer’s engraving is a symbolic personification, not an Employee of the Month.
It’s only natural
I understand, of course, that many American conservatives will hesitate to accept my argument. Isn’t this the country of infinite possibility, where all problems are solvable and all futures bright? Isn’t optimism a part of the American creed, part of our very national essence? Yes, we can!—Can’t we?
To the degree any of that is true, it is because liberals have declared it s...
Product details
- Publisher : Crown Forum; First Edition (September 29, 2009)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307409589
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307409584
- Item Weight : 1.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.75 x 1.25 x 10.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,826,114 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #18,106 in Political Ideologies & Doctrines (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Customers find the writing style witty and cerebral. They also describe the book as a very good read that leaves them feeling happy. However, some customers feel the book is terribly pessimistic.
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Customers find the book very readable and good.
"...Simply put, this book is simply a pleasure to read...." Read more
"...This was a very good read that left me feeling, if not happy about the country's prospects, wiser and better able to approach these vexing issues..." Read more
"...toss whether you like him or not and this gives his book an oddly exhilarating quality...." Read more
"...Worth reading, worth giving as a gift, and the cover alone is enough to spark a conversation with good people." Read more
Customers find the writing style witty, cerebral, and well-written.
"...Derbyshire delves into this, and other party issues with intelligence, wit, and a unique perspective...." Read more
"...his willingness to gore anyone's ox, and to do so with gracefully dry and understated wit...." Read more
"...And he does this in conversational, unselfconsciously epigramatic prose with a mordant humour that often threatens to break out into uproarious high-..." Read more
"...true nature of the matter, "We Are Doomed" gives us insights and pithy phrasing in an information-dense (but enjoyable) format...." Read more
Customers find the book style terribly pessimistic, inconsistent, and too optimistic.
"...1. First, oddly enough, he is too optimistic!..." Read more
"...At times I felt the quality of chapters was inconsistent with some chapters coming across as better researched than others...." Read more
"This is a terribly pessimistic book. Reading it will - guaranteed - make you feel worse about our culture than before...." Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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Be warned: if you are an Evangelist or a frothing Sarah Palin fan, you probably won't like this book. Don't get me wrong, the author doesn't say anything at all about Mrs. Palin, but he does absolutely dessimate the myth that the GOP "owns" Religious People. And that "fact", in fact, has become a Deal With The Devil for the Reps. Mr. Derbyshire delves into this, and other party issues with intelligence, wit, and a unique perspective. So, right out of the gate, this isn't your usual "Republican" book. So be warned.
But I'm getting out of order here.
The main theme of the book is "Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism", which isn't exactly the central theme of the book. Sure, it's IN there, and the opening and closing certainly make a good case for "embracing pessimism". But if I were his publisher, I would've tweaked that tagline and perhaps renamed the book, having more to do with "confronting reality". Because that's what this book really is: an outright assault on the pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking and Good Intentions(tm) that have put the World in it's current precarious position.
And, aside form the setup and conclusion, this book is simply an uppercut to the millions of people in the world -many of whom are in power- who simply ignore reality, make up their own facts, and are steering our ship of humanity into a proverbial iceberg of ignorance.
Right away, Mr. Derbyshire takes on perhaps the biggest taboo in politics today: Multiculturalism, and the idea that a "melting pot" is always 100% awesome, 100% of the time. While even the most ardent Right Winger would wince at even discussing this topic (Racist!), he tackles the issue with aplomb, using careful research (from the UN, and proponents of Multiculturalism, no less), and makes a fascinating case against something that is more universally "accepted" as fact than Global Climate Change. Not to spoil the read, but his point here is not that we can't learn from other cultures, enjoy their influence, or even live together in relative harmony; rather that we're simply not being realistic about human nature. Again, the true central theme of this book.
You might not agree with everything in this book. In fact, you might not agree with MOST of it. But Mr. Derbyshire takes aim at the most Politically taboo subjects of our time -subjects that nobody else will even touch- and makes cogent, informative, and witty arguments about them.
Simply put, this book is simply a pleasure to read. And no matter where you land on the political spectrum, if you're an intelligent person, who enjoys a good debate, you will gobble up this book.
True to the book's theme, however, Mr. Derbyshire holds out little, if any, hope that such clear and honest thinking is anywhere in our nation's future this side of the Apocalypse. Thus, he counsels individuals to approach the ongoing civilizational collapse with something like the attitude represented by his Mother Country's WWII slogan, "Keep Calm and Carry On", with gratitude (towards whom it is left unsaid - Mr. Derbyshire is, as he mentions in the book, a fallen away Anglican) for the small pleasures in life to be found in the company of family and friends.
I don't agree with Derb on every point - come to think of it, perhaps I do; he's surely given me much to ponder these last several years in his Radio Derb podcasts and now this book - but I greatly admire his willingness to gore anyone's ox, and to do so with gracefully dry and understated wit. He wears his tremendous erudition oh-so-lightly as he dispenses, in conversational prose, straightforward wisdom that earlier generations would have recognized simply as common sense. This was a very good read that left me feeling, if not happy about the country's prospects, wiser and better able to approach these vexing issues for having read it.
Top reviews from other countries
I follow him regularly on the Web, always with pleasure. Unfortunately, this book repeats much that I had already read there.