5,0 van 5 sterren
extremely good read
Beoordeeld in Italië op 25 januari 2024
As a person of a certain age, I have been baffled by the constant decline of the social discourse in recent years.
It has been increasingly difficult of late to understand my fellow man (and woman).
I grew up in the world that Douglas Murray describes: long-due civil rights were being obtained by categories of people who for centuries, millennia, had been treated as second-class citizens, and they were doing so in a world (the Western world) overwhelmingly in agreement that this was right, that reason, goodwill and justice were finally prevailing over bigotry, racism, stupidity.
I have traveled a lot in my life and this has always given me the sense of how incredibly lucky I am. You only have to go to certain parts of the world to see how terrible it must be to be gay in certain countries in Africa, a woman in rural Pakistan, or a black person in parts of the United States. I could return to my expat home in Italy and enjoy a society where all these problems had vastly been overcome.
I grew up in the eighties in a world where the only way you judged a person was by what they brought to the table. Yes, if you were gay you left your small town and moved to the big city, if you were a woman some occasional catcalling would occur (not the drama it is made out to be today and sometimes quite funny really). People of colour never, at the time, faced any particular threat, and in my world, nobody would have even mentioned the colour of someone's skin in a conversation, though in more provincial parts of the country foreigners would be addressed with "tu" instead of "lei", mainly because of the conviction that they didn't understand the language. More a matter of provincialism than actual racism.
Then something happened and the world went completely bonkers.
As Douglas Murray says, we were nearly there. It wasn't perfect, we were collectively working on making it better, we felt heard, one sometimes had to take to the streets, referendums on weed smoking came and went, funds were raised for the AIDS epidemic victims abandoned by bigoted families, but they were raised, and perceptions were changed. And despite the failings, it was the best the world had ever seen.
In this book, the author picks apart the various themes that are the battlefield of discussions today, discussions that inevitably, always, alarmingly, immediately get completely out of hand, take surreal turns, and are hijacked by shrill, shrieking, deranged, aggressive, obsessed people who in a few strokes make it completely impossible to have any reasonable conversation, over anything at all, ever.
Reading the book, I of course didn't agree with everything he writes, but the overall description and analysis of the state we are in today is lucid, and finally gives me a way to interpret what we are experiencing.
He does so with humour (another victim of our age is the terrible, depressing soul-numbing lack of any irony and cheerfulness of the typical millennial social justice warrior) and compassion.
It is an ideology, it is a religion, this fanatical search for a culprit, for someone to blame, for someone to burn at the stake.
And I feel even more lucky today for having lived in a world that wasn't like this, where people were just people, who happened to be gay, woman, coloured, trans, men, heterosexual or whatever, but didn't think that this was the only thing worth mentioning about themselves. You had to try harder than that. And of course, whining and being a victim was so uncool, and we wouldn't have been caught dead being uncool.
O tempora. o mores.
Highly recommend.