The irony is that all these culture war commentators whinge about moral panics without realising that their own crusade is a confected moral panic (ok, they probably do realise it, there’s a lot of grifting in these quarters). Neither side has answers, one side merely clings to a comforting old myth that’s already dead, and the other seeks to invent new myths to take the strain and it will take time to find the one’s that can. All in the hope of persuading the peoples of the West not that they were better than anyone else or that they were the same as anyone else, but that they were uniquely evil and therefore worse than everyone else. His answer is an astonishing several pages long monologue that encapsulates the source of Murray's angst. Yet Murray deserves credit for not retreating into the embittered fatalism of the prophet of despair.

In some respects this is the right-wing version of Peter Mitchell's Imperial Nostalgia, where Mitchell examined nostalgia, Murray picks up on Scruton's idea of a culture of repudiation.This ignores the fact that they’re part of an incredibly venal, corrupt and incompetent cabinet of banally evil morons, but we’ll let that slide, shall we? People do discuss these issues, but at the same time, what can a western state do about the Indian caste system?

Whether I in my ramblings have managed to pull up anything more insightful than Murray is debatable, but I’ve tried to approach the subject from the perspective of making sense of the phenomenon rather than merely seeking to play the blame game. The eagle-eyed Deverell was quick to point out that many of these plants had been known about by Indigenous communities for years before Western botanists and explorers came across them. Murray succeeds in combining this somewhat high-temperature argument with a looming sense of racial threat.In an interlude on China, Murray goes over the rise of the CCP in international economic affairs and as a serious contender to American hegemony.

This is a sleight of hand because in juxtaposing the two quotes, Murray is trying to suggest a connection. Similarly, it does not denigrate our history to point out that Euclid’s Elements—the most influential mathematical work in history—only entered western civilisation because Adelard of Bath translated it from the Arabic in the 12 th century, or to point out that Adelard’s translation introduced Arabic numerals into the west, the numerals that form our current number system.I liked the use of humour in the book, It helps lighten the tone of an otherwise very negative book. Western self-flagellation, Murray claims, plays into the hands of the Chinese, allowing them to dismiss any charges against themselves as coming from countries with their own serious issues with regards to racism; that the west has no moral high ground and cannot criticise China. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn't we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism?