Skip to main content
Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2020
This past week I finally got round to reading We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, which I purchased a couple years ago after discovering John Derbyshire at VDARE.com in 2015. It's very much like reading a series of topical Radio Derb episode transcripts - e.g., on "diversity", politics, sex, education, human nature, religion, war, immigration, foreigners, economics - framed around the idea that a healthy dose of pessimism and skepticism in these areas from self-described "conservatives" is what the United States needs in order to recover from the deleterious effects of 60 years of happy-clappy liberalism and kumbaya conservatism.
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.
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.
