Western civilization is coming unglued. That’s Douglas Murray’s thesis in The War on the West, though to be a little more precise, he holds that the glue isn’t merely deteriorating naturally, like the binding of a cheap paperback. Rather, it is being blowtorched away by malevolent experts working in concert.

These include race experts, deconstructing historians, despoilers of religion, and ravagers of culture. Murray devotes one of his four long chapters to each, and also slips in three short “interludes” on China, reparations, and gratitude. The book is unlikely to occasion surprise for readers of Murray’s other books, including The Madness of Crowds, The Strange Death of Europe, and Islamophilia, nor does it unveil a wealth of new details about how the anti-Western animus of today’s progressive ideologies manifests itself. Each chapter gathers a profusion of examples of the handiwork of those intent on demolishing the West. Most of these examples will be familiar to anyone who watches the day-to-day immolation. Still, Murray’s decision to draw them together on a single canvas yields a picture that, like Hieronymus Bosch’s vision of hell, is more than the sum of its parts.

Murray is not putting forward a Spenglerian thesis that the collapse of the West is inevitable or that it is the result of internal dynamics set in motion ages ago by nominalism, the Reformation, science, the rise of the nation-state, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, colonialism, the First World War, or the Sixties, to mention some of the culprits others have proposed. He sidesteps that kind of macro-historical explanation in favor of attention to what he calls “two key ideas.” Idea no. 1 is that those who revile the West “venerate every culture so long as it is not Western.” Idea no. 2 is that the attack on the West is comprehensive. It spares nothing: “Everything connected with the Western tradition is being jettisoned.” This includes the scientific method, politics, the arts, the ideals of freedom and self-government, and reason itself.

These are big claims, but I am not the reviewer who would strongly dispute them. As an anthropologist who has been immersed in the study of American society for several decades, I could add abundant detail to idea no. 1. Admiration to the point of veneration of non-Western societies is as widespread as are shops selling native handicrafts from around the world. “Indigenous peoples” are regarded as the font of wisdom, both spiritual and earthly. We treat everyday aches and pains with remedies borrowed from shamans or traditional Asian pharmacopoeia. We trace breakthroughs in Western art to our encounters with the aesthetics of far-flung non-Westerns, as when Picasso emulated African art from several tribes, notably the Fang people of Cameroon. “Ethno-tourism” is a major form of Western travel. Upscale décor in Western homes often includes homages to other cultures, from statues of Buddha (in non-Buddhist households) to Navajo rugs hung on walls.

I don’t exempt myself from this fascination. I have African masks aplenty; Polynesian war clubs; Amazonian bark-cloth paintings; Trobriand bowls, and so on. The more exotic the better. But I don’t venerate non-Western cultures. They are as rife with human folly as the West ever was, and they lack (at least in their pre–Western influenced forms) some of the important gains that the West over long centuries of “development” achieved.

I put the word “development” in quotes because it lies at the heart of the disputes that Murray puts on display. Development in the West has meant various forms of progress: the progress of civilization, as we used to put it. Greece Hellenized a good portion of the ancient world. Rome subdued Italy, then much of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. These were not happy marriages of cultures learning to live in harmony and to “celebrate diversity.” They were bloody conquests and involved a great deal of slavery and oppression. Still, one result was the dissemination of a common language, massive expansion of trade, and the spread of learning. An abundance of writing that included law, literature, philosophy, theology, sacred scripture, and treatises on all manner of practical subjects from agriculture to architecture became part of a common literate culture.

The West arose from this basis, progressively infused with Judaism and Christianity, as monotheism replaced the old gods and as confidence in the knowability of God’s creation became an embedded premise. It isn’t my purpose here to say exactly what the “West” is, but because Murray doesn’t address this question, I thought it might be useful to lay down a few markers. The West didn’t just happen. It arose over millennia of complicated struggle.

Other societies around the world also “developed.” Polynesian cultures developed when they acquired the South American sweet potato around a.d. 1200. Mayan civilization began to develop when ancient peoples in Belize acquired maize about 5,600 years ago. Peoples around the world were never frozen in time. But none that we know of self-initiated that restless quality of self-conscious discovery and progress that became characteristic of the West.

Of course, the progress of the West through Christendom was far from a smooth glide to utopia. It was a frequently nasty affair, interrupted by such matters as the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) and myriad other devastating conflicts, continuing into the wars of the 20th century. So we take our “progress” as paid for by a full measure of savagery towards one another in the West and towards many of the non-Western people we encountered. Along this path, conflict with Islam stands out as principal. Islam represents an anti-West that from nearly its beginning sought to subjugate and destroy the West — and that now stands within striking distance of doing just that, though the danger is more apparent in Paris than in L.A.

Murray devotes one of his chapters to history, but the history wars he has in mind focus more on Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times’ egregious 1619 Project than on the legacy of Europe’s internal wars or that of the French Revolution. He also recounts the efforts of Sartre and other European intellectuals to promote revulsion in the third world against Western colonialism; Edward Said’s postcolonial abhorrence of “orientalism”; and the more recent effort to scrub Cecil Rhodes (“Rhodes must fall”) from his honored place in Western history. Churchill has likewise come in for ritual excoriation. Murray provides a reasonable, concise account of all this reframing and dethronement, actions aimed not only at inculcating through schools a false history but also at demoralizing Westerners. A fair amount of this anti-history turns on the idea that the West bears a unique responsibility for slavery, a thesis that ignores that the West’s main contribution to this near-universal human malady was to abolish it within the dominions it controlled.

In his chapter on religion, Murray deals with the long effort of Western intellectuals to idealize forms of belief at the greatest extremes from Christianity. He quotes a work written in 1516 by a Catholic prelate who denounced the Spanish conquistadors for their greed and cruelty and contrasted them with naked natives “living in a Golden Age, without laws, without lying judges, without books, satisfied with their life, and in no wise solicitous for the future.” This embodied, of course, utter ignorance of what the inhabitants of the New World were actually like, but it is not far from the romanticized views promoted nearly 500 years later by figures such as Howard Zinn and David Graeber.

The story Murray tells here is less about the old fault lines in our civilization than it is about our strange susceptibility to believing the worst about ourselves. He doesn’t really venture an explanation of this pathology, though he locates its essential basis in the willingness of Westerners to credit the idea that white people are somehow transcendentally racist — unlike the rest of humanity, which is apparently graced with innate tolerance and respect for human difference.

As a compendium of the absurdities of our age, The War on the West would be hard to surpass. As an explanation of our descent into this Boschian hell-scape, Murray’s book is circumspect. He calls attention to how those who revile our civilization steadfastly refuse to apply the same standards to any other culture or society. He observes — as have many others — that many people outside the West see with perfect lucidity that the West is both fundamentally different from and better than their own cultural legacies, and for that reason they seek to come to Western societies. They are immune to the cultural self-loathing invented by Western intellectuals, so rampant in all our key institutions.

Murray lays out the optimistic possibility that we will discover a way “to make our multi-ethnic realities work.” But he worries that something like the opposite is taking shape: a form of Western identity along “exclusionary lines,” i.e., meeting hatred of the West with reciprocal hatred of those who slander it. Of course, the third possibility is that those who foment anti-Westernism will prevail and impose their own oppressive dystopia, not unlike what already exists on many college and university campuses.