You Will Not Have the Landscape Cleared

Lex Fridman opens with the question hanging over Douglas Murray’s then-new book, *The War on the West*: historically and today, what ideas represent Western civilization, the good, the bad, and the ugly? Murray refuses to get stuck on definitions, because once you do, he says, you may never get off them. The Western tradition is still a specific one, and the usual coordinates are Athens and Jerusalem — the world of the Bible plus the world of ancient Greece and Rome. That mix, in his telling, created European civilization, which then spawned the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the other countries still referred to as the West.

His cheat for the unanswerable seminar is simpler. You know when you are not in it. Beijing and Shanghai are not the West. Tokyo is extraordinary, and it is not the West either. Russia he leaves half-open: drop someone blindfolded into Moscow with the language stripped out, and they might guess they were somewhere near it, massively influenced by Europe, sometimes reaching toward it and sometimes pushing it away. Hard to define, he insists, does not mean it does not exist. Among the traits he will name are the rule of law, property-owning democracy, and forms of representative government that America developed and then gave back to much of the rest of the West.

He adds attributes he knows are more controversial. One is a ravenous interest in the rest of the world, which he says is not shared by every culture. The late philosopher George Steiner could never get out of his head “the haunting fact that the boats only seemed to go out from Europe” — explorers, scholars, linguists, people who wanted to discover other civilizations and even resurrect lost ones. There were never boats, Murray says, coming from Egypt to help the Anglo-Saxons discover the origins of their language. He immediately prefixes the downside: the boats carried armies as well as scholars, looking for resources, markets, and the imperial imperative to conquer and expand. Expansion itself he calls nearly universal. The Ottomans wanted it badly and did terribly well for centuries. The West simply went further, faster, and technological efficiency helped.

The trait he cares about most is self-criticism. Not every society lets even its most vociferous critics become rich. Representative government, at its best, lets you attempt to sort problems by peaceable means: you listen to arguments. His exhibit is the American civil rights movement of the late 20th century, which achieved its aims by force of moral argument and persuaded the rest of the country that it had been wrong. That, he says, is not common. The Western mind is not entirely unique, but those habits are not as commonplace elsewhere as people now pretend.

Fridman turns to the starkest form of power asymmetry: slavery. Murray’s answer is blunt. Everyone in the world had it, and he does not regard it as a unique Western sin. It is rather hard, he says, to think of a civilization in history that did not have slavery of some kind. The oddity of the present is a Western ignorance that imagines “our societies were the only ones who ever engaged in any vices.” He calls that a Rousseauian mistake, blossomed since Rousseau: the idea that everybody else was born into Edenic innocence, and only the West had the evil that caused it to do bad things to other people.

Then the number he wants in the room. There are 40 million slaves in the world today, more than there were in the 19th century, so “it’s clearly not something that the species as a whole has a problem with.” The interesting fact about the Western mind, as he sees it, is that this was the civilization that did away with it. The American founding fathers are now routinely lambasted for acquiescing in the trade, engaging in it, owning slaves. Almost nobody bothers to recognize, Murray says, that Jefferson and Washington wanted the trade done away with, could not have held the country together at the origin if they had forced the issue, and hoped it would be dealt with after their time.

The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, in this reading, set up the conditions under which slavery would be impossible. “All men are created equal” is “a time bomb under the whole concept of slavery,” ticking away, and it detonated in the next century. Asked what slavery teaches about human nature, Murray offers two possibilities: it is what people think they can do when God is not watching, or what they can do if they think God allows it. The economic lure is obvious — people who work for free — but almost always the enslaved had to be a subjugated people, or people regarded as different.

He tries to inject a piece of 18th-century intellectual history that he thinks the present has forgotten. At the time of Jefferson, nobody knew whether the human races were related. Monogenesis said they were; polygenesis said they were not, that Black Africans — often then called Ethiopians — were simply not related to white Europeans. “That makes it easier to enslave people if you think they’re not your brother. Am I my brother’s keeper? No, he’s not your brother.” It was also a theological problem: people literally debated whether there was a Black Adam and Eve, a Native American Adam and Eve. Darwin did not solve it alone, Murray says, but by the late 19th century the claim that we were not all related had suffered so many blows that you had to be willfully ignorant to ignore it. The question stopped being theological and became moral. You were no longer subjugating some other people. You were subjugating your own kin, and that became morally unsustainable.

How, Fridman asks, should a country fold past atrocities — American slavery, the Holocaust — into policy, schooling, and the way people treat each other? Murray calls it a moral question long after the fact. He first knocks down the claim that reparations are a fringe argument. Every contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, he says, was willing to talk about the possibility; some were eager that America go through what he calls an entirely self-destructive exercise.

Refine the problem to one thing, he says, and it is this. Two hundred years ago it could have been a wealth transfer from a group who did something wrong to a group who were wronged. Today it is not even descendants of wrongdoers paying descendants of the wronged. “It’s a wealth transfer from people who look like people who did a wrong thing in the past to another group of people who resemble people who were wronged.” That, he is completely clear, cannot be organized on moral or practical grounds. America is filled with people of the same skin color who have no connection to the slave trade, and with ethnic minorities who arrived after slavery and would not be due reimbursement.

He leaves a door open. Residual inequities exist in American life, and the consequences of slavery could be one factor. What he denies is a single-issue answer. Black underachievement, he says, is multi-dimensional; much of the left wants it to be only about racism. That story cannot explain why Asian Americans, who arrived more recently, are not held down by “white supremacy” — he puts the phrase in quotes — and in fact have higher household earnings and home equity than white Americans. Racism is part of the picture. It is not, on the merits, the explanation for ongoing underachievement in some sections of the Black community.

Could fatherlessness and family breakdown themselves be long-term consequences of slavery? Possibly, he says, but “it’s being awfully generous to people’s ability to make bad decisions.” His analogy is meant to sting. How many generations after the Holocaust would you allow people to claim that everything that went wrong in the Jewish community was a result of it? Is there a term limit? He thinks most people, if they are honest, believe there is. The details matter, and the ocean under this debate is dark. He would rather not pretend a simple formula can swim it.

The American argument, Fridman restates, is that deep institutional racism against African Americans is rooted in slavery and still lives in culture, institutions, and the allocation of resources. Murray calls it unquantifiable and reaches for shortcuts. If a white person late at night crosses the street when a group of young Black men approaches, is that because of slavery? He says no: it is a calculus based, not entirely unfoundedly, on crime rates — an ugly fact that city statistics bear out, not reasonable every time, and a stretch to hang on slavery. In a city like Chicago, where homicide had shot up, mainly Black-on-Black, other factors besides a memory of bondage kick in.

He had just been writing a New York Post column on a cousin of the same habit: obesity. America, he says, is the most overweight country in the world, about 40 percent obese, with New Zealand next at 30. During COVID, obesity was the clearest factor likely to lead to hospitalization — he cites a figure that 80 percent of those hospitalized with the virus were obese — yet almost no public-health message focused on it. Schools were locked and cloth masks were worn on thin evidence, while a massive evidence base on obesity went unaddressed. Why? Not only fat-shaming. To a great extent it is a racial issue, and a University of Chicago publication had made the claim explicit: negative views of obesity come from racism and slavery. Anything you want to stop in America, he says, you declare is about racism and slavery. Performing that kind of brain surgery on a society, in mittens, is a good way to kill the patient.

Fridman steel-mans the objection he has heard on Clubhouse: two white men have no right to talk about race in America; it is “our struggle,” and they cannot know what it is like to walk down the street as a Black man or woman. Murray’s first answer is not a steel-man. “Fuck that.” He has the right to talk about whatever he wants, and the reverse — telling someone they cannot criticize Murray because they do not share his skin color — would be equally reprehensible. If nobody can comment without having lived another person’s entire life, “we might as well pack up, go home, and isolate ourselves.” He will grant civility: do not talk over a Holocaust survivor with geopolitics. He will not grant it endlessly. Some people who never experienced the Holocaust have written about it better than some who did. “Lived experience,” a phrase he calls terrible modern jargon, does not always triumph, and nobody’s experience is completely understandable by another human being.

The invitation he refuses is the one he attributes to a formulation he has adopted in recent years: spend an inordinate amount of your life trying to understand me, and simultaneously accept that you will never understand me. That is an unwinnable game. If someone has a legitimate point, they should make it and win through, whatever their race. Plenty of white people experience racism too, he says, and in 2022 America the only group you are allowed to be consistently, vilely racist against is white people — “white tears,” “white guilt,” “white privilege,” “white rage,” all fine even from a chairman of the Joint Chiefs or a Yale lecturer. He is not asking white people to dominate the discourse with their wounds. That way lies competitive victimhood. Nietzsche, handled carefully, gave him a phrase he has stolen: people who tear at wounds long since closed and then cry about the pain. How do you know whether the pain is real, a reason for failure, or a reason not to try? “Who are we to constantly judge in this society other people who we don’t know and attribute motives to them based on racial or other characteristics?”

One driver of evil, Murray writes, is resentment: blaming someone else for having something you believe you deserve more. Everybody feels it. His small contemporary example is Vladimir Putin as a young KGB officer in Germany, nursing, in Alexei Navalny’s telling, his first wife’s resentment that a colleague’s apartment was a few meters bigger. Murray is not saying Putin invaded Ukraine because of floor space. He is saying the sentiment is ordinary, deep, and in political terms deadly. Hitler played on it. The French revolutionaries had cause: Versailles was not listening to Paris in the 1780s. It is understandable, sometimes justifiable, and it has the potential to be endless. You can do it your whole life.

More interesting to him is that resentment crosses every boundary, not only race. It crosses class and money. You have known someone with almost nothing who is generous, kindly, even cheerful, and someone who seems to have everything and is filled with the sense that a sister got what they should have got. That distribution suggests a choice, not a limitless one. A friend falls asleep at the wheel and you spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair: justified resentment, and at some point a decision — am I going to be that person or a different one? Even when the case is sound, it rots you, “because the best you can do is to eke out your days unfulfilled.” The antidote is gratitude.

He was floored, reading *The Brothers Karamazov*, by the scene in which Ivan’s visitor — the devil, in the French style of the early 19th century, cross-legged and urbane — mentions in passing that gratitude is not an instinct given to him. Only a genius of Dostoevsky’s stature, Murray says, could throw that insight away because he still had an abundance of riches to get through. Why would the devil be incapable of gratitude? Because if he were capable of it he would not be the devil. He would be somebody else. Fridman hears the same idea in *Notes from Underground*: how could I be happy when there is unhappiness in the world, and why should I not join the ranks of the unhappy? Nietzsche had already described the revenge of the men of resentment: to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves, until the healthy become ashamed of their health. “The sick must not make the healthy sick, or make the healthy confuse themselves with the sick.”

He wants the era now ending to be called the era of deconstruction: from the 1960s onward, first an academic game, then a culture, of taking everything apart. Children discover they can take a bicycle apart and cannot put it back together. You can look at a society, show systemic problems, interrogate a text or a piece of music, and at the end of it — what have you got? Ask questions, he says, endlessly. “Interrogate” assumes the thing is a criminal in a cell, guilty, and must be taken apart. That is a by-product of resentment: you cannot build the thing, but you know how to dismantle it. A little poison in the drink depends on the poison, and on knowing not to have another. Deconstruction is a slippery slope. You would have to wean yourself off it and start putting things together again.

Fridman, an engineer who had not been paying attention, asks what critical race theory actually is. Murray says people in STEM assumed it was a Harvard-and-Yale fight that would not come for them, and then it did. It started in the law, roughly in the 1970s, and the foundational texts say what later denials deny: this is activist academic study. We are not just looking at the law; we seek to change it. It spilled into other disciplines because the humanities were weak, needed new games, and needed tenure. Niall Ferguson’s observation, which Murray seconds, is that when a great scholar of Russian history or literature dies, they are often replaced not by an equal but by someone who does theory. Specialization sent dissertations further and further from Hobbes, Kant, and Hegel. Murray watched his friend Roger Scruton flown in, even by enemies, to teach the basics because nobody in the department still could.

Everything called “studies” in the humanities, he says, should be shut down because it is activist — gay studies, queer studies — and mixing activism with academia is “fantastically anti-academic.” You could just as well go in wildly right-wing and only prove your priors. The most generous account of CRT he will give is that it tries to look at everything through the lens of race and to add race into conversations, including history, where it may not have been. Like feminist studies looking for the silent female voice in male-dominated histories, that can have a utility. It is not endlessly interesting, and activist academia has no obvious place to stop, because the job, the pension, and the only esteem in society depend on keeping the gig going. The end of every conference, the old joke runs, is that we must have another conference like this one. CRT, he says, assumes we are always living on the cusp of the return of the Klan, which is “totally wrong.” Being always in 1938, primed by a school term on the war and the Holocaust to do constant Hitler-spotting, is not healthy either. “If you hear the whistle, you’re the dog.”

Racism, in his shorthand, is the belief that other people are inferior to you simply by dint of a different racial background. There could be a form that sees others as superior, but that is rarer. Antisemitism is the weird exception, a “quantum racism” that does both at once. He sends Fridman to Vasily Grossman’s *Life and Fate*, a 900-page novel of Stalingrad that a Persian friend of his called one of only two great novels of the 20th century (the other, obviously, *The Leopard*). Grossman, a Ukrainian Jew, spent about a thousand days at the front for the Red Army paper, wrote a devastating account of walking into Treblinka, and in the darkest hours of that book suddenly spends three pages on antisemitism. Jews are condemned for being rich and for being poor, for assimilating and for not, for succeeding too much and not enough. Gregor von Rezzori’s *Memoirs of an Anti-Semite* is the only other thing Murray thinks is in that league. Ordinary racism, apart from that, he calls one of the stupidest things the species is capable of: guessing a person in their entirety from skin color. Bits of it are coming back, which is why antennae should work — not overactive, not underactive.

Fridman asks whether there is significant racism toward white people in the United States. Murray’s starting claim is specific: white people in the United States are the only people told they have hereditary sin, strictly based on skin color. He would find it repugnant if any school of thought with a public grasp said Black people were born into evil because of something their ancestors had done, the mark of Cain, and must spend their lives atoning for what they did not do. Nobody in the mainstream would dare say that about any group other than whites. He is not making it a misery competition, and he does not claim whites are more disadvantaged. He is begging people not to accept hereditary sin by racial background. Giving a minority disproportionate power to attack a majority in order to keep that majority in check is, he says, a very dangerous game. A slice of gay activism that wants to make straight people feel uncool is unwise when two or three percent of the population is actually gay. Third- and fourth-wave feminists asking whether men are needed is a move first-wave suffragettes, who needed men to win the vote, did not make. Richard Wrangham can argue that removing men would remove most physical violence; Murray’s reply is “who says you need to get rid of violence in society?” If New York were invaded he would want some violent men around. It is highly unwise to war on a majority population. “I’m not guilty of anything because of my skin color. I’m not guilty of anything. My ancestors didn’t do anything wrong, and even if they had, why would I be held responsible for it?”

A detour to Gori, Stalin’s birthplace in Georgia, gives Murray the tone he wants for historical memory. Years after the Georgia war he found a museum that had been unadulteratedly pro-Stalin and was being awkwardly turned into a museum of Stalinism, complete with a replica interrogation cell under the stairs and then a gift shop selling red wine with Stalin’s face on it. The guide, who had clearly been doing the tour for decades, would not judge. “It was like a hurricane. It happened.” Stalin, Murray notes, keeps winning greatest Russian of all time in parts of the country. Human memory forgets the details of atrocities and keeps the statue. The French still enormously admire Napoleon, brute though he was. Then Fridman puts Churchill on the table: a great representative of Western civilization to some, “not a good person” to a friend in London, and lately a target of the same spirit that wants yesterday’s heroes recast as villains who accidentally did the right thing.

The real criticisms, Murray says, are easy to sum up, and he does so in the book. Churchill did not do enough to avert the Bengal famine of 1943: shot down, he says, by numerous historians including Indian ones. In the middle of a world war Churchill did what he could to divert grain from Australia to Bengal; the famine was caused by a typhoon, not by Winston Churchill, and the claim that he wanted Indians to die is “total calumny,” not least because the Indian population boomed in the period in question. Second, he had views now regarded as racist: different racial characters, superior races, the white European as a superior culture, Victorian attitudes from Victorian England. Those belong on the negative side of the ledger. The positive side includes that he almost certainly did more than any one human being to save the world from Nazism. Murray does not want to stop the revisionism. He finds it interesting, not least because it is so sloppy. People should be seen in the round, and that includes the positive column. If you cannot recognize it, “you’re doing something else. It’s not history.” The same, he says, for Jefferson and the Sally Hemings story pushed since the 1990s, and for the New York council members who removed a Jefferson statue because he no longer represented their values.

Fridman throws the curveball: what about Karl Marx? Murray goes for him “with some glee.” Marxism has had a resurgence whenever capital is hard to accumulate and people reach for other options. His argument is simply: point me to one place that worked. The usual reply is that it has only really been tried once. The Soviets, Cuba, Venezuela: they failed so grossly that they threw millions of people into thwarted lives much shorter than they should have been. A critique of capitalism is not a bad thing; he would rather it showed how to improve capitalism, how young people get onto the property ladder. People who say we must have Marxism “don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.” You could pretend fascism has never been properly tried. Nobody would have time for that crap, and those who try it are reviled. Why tolerate the same move with Marx? George Orwell, arguing in the early 1940s with a Stalinist after the show trials, the Ukrainian famine, and the purges, finally heard the line he knew was coming: you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. Orwell’s reply: “Where’s the omelette?”

Marx, Murray adds, is not as nice as he sounds. Letters to Engels and 1850s pieces for the American press contain horrible views on slavery, colonialism, and Black people, including constant use of the n-word and a gorilla comparison for mixed-race people. Recording the audiobook, Murray almost read the quotes aloud so he could say he was only quoting Marx, then thought better of it, knowing he would be cancelled for the slurs. Since the book appeared, Marxists have said two things: he was a man of his time, and we do not go to him for his racial views, we go to him for the economics. Fine, Murray says. Then we do not go to Jefferson for his views on slaves, or to Churchill for the precise language he used about Indians in the 1910s. Have some standards. He does not think it is a conspiracy so much as a project: some people are deliberately trying to clear the cultural landscape of the past, until there is nothing good, no one you should revere, no heroes, the whole thing comes down — and who is left standing? Marxism, still from the 19th and 20th centuries. “You will not have the entire landscape deracinated and then the worst ideas tried again.” Post-colonial movements, when European powers left Africa and the Far East, could have returned to pre-colonial life. Almost uniformly they instituted, via Frantz Fanon and intellectuals like Sartre, a Western Marxism. Find him one in a hundred American students who can name the communist despots. A UK poll found schoolchildren’s name recognition for Stalin, let alone Mao — perhaps 65 million Chinese dead — near nothing. The 20th century had two nightmares. The West learned, a little, not to treat people as less because of race. It has not learned the other lesson at all, which is why American politicians can still talk about collectivization as if they would know exactly where to stop.

Fridman puts the socialist sales pitch in its fairest form: the working class does the work and gets a fraction of the output, so it seems more fair if workers own the value. Murray prefers “fairness” to “justice” because everyone can recognize it, even if the concept is still amorphous. Should the boss earn a million times the lowest-paid employee? That does not seem fair. Five or ten times possibly could. The real problem in capitalism as he sees it is not untrue: a tiny number accrue a lot of the benefits, the middle is squeezed, and the danger of falling all the way to the bottom is always there. In the snakes and ladders of American capitalism, the snakes go down awfully far. The deal was that the ladders took you high, and the perception — “not entirely wrong” — is that the ladder system on the board is broken. Fridman jokes that Murray is a Marxist. Murray, who can already see the out-of-context blog post, says the way to critique capitalism gone bad is better capitalism. Free markets where they are not fair should be made fair. Never decide that the answer is the thing that has never produced any human flourishing.

How, then, does an individual think independently inside a crowd — Soviet, Nazi, or Twitter? There is a cost to going against the herd on any silly thing, Will Smith slapping Chris Rock included, though that crowd split. Michael Jackson is his harder case: most people who are not die-hard fans would concede a strange relationship with children, “almost certainly a pedophile,” and the crowd has not agreed because he is too famous and everyone loves *Thriller*. There is a genius opt-out in all cultures. Lord Byron slept with his sister; it does not hurt his reputation, and may add to it. In the present war on the West, genius makes you more likely to be cancelled. If you have done nothing remarkable, nobody will come looking. Sidle through life, be harmless, die, hope you have not used any carbon. Survival advice for social media is shorter: do not overrate the significance of the unreal world. Like a small number of people and ignore the rest. Storing your sense of self-worth in absolute strangers is a big mistake.

Fridman, self-critical, says he still finds a depth of connection online. Murray calls it shallow. If you became very ill tomorrow, would any of them help? No. Then you cannot store significant trust, faith, belief, or self-worth in places that will not return it. Writing *The Strange Death of Europe* put Murray in a dark place, not because his life was dark but because the book was: the death of religion, the death of God, the loss of meaning, the void. Readers still stop him to say it was depressing; he tells them they should have tried writing it. His source of strength is stubborn and small. He cannot agree to go along with a lie if he has seen something with his own eyes.

Fridman presses on ego. Smart people hold Murray up as their example of a very smart person. Does that swell until what he thinks is the truth is no longer the truth? Does the thrill of pointing out that the emperor has no clothes become an addiction to friction? It could, Murray says. Early in his career he decided not to make enemies beyond the large number already necessary, and told himself not to be the sort of person forever creating storms. Two reasons he thinks he has not fallen in: he does not think of himself as wildly intelligent, because the gaps are in front of him every day — finance, economic theory in detail, the periodic table — and he has a disproportionate admiration for people who understand money, biology, medicine. He turned down a *University Challenge* alumni special, even though Louis Theroux would be on the team from his old college, after watching past episodes and realizing he would sit mute. From Kipling’s “If—” , a poem he has heard at too many memorials, he keeps the line about meeting triumph and disaster and treating those two impostors just the same. When *The War on the West* went straight in at number one, there was a moment of elation. It did not last. He has a superstition about the old gods: at the moment of triumph the Fates hitch up their skirts and run at you at a million miles an hour.

Murray has tried for years not to talk about Donald Trump, the same way he tried not to write about Brexit. People who know Trump, he says, told him Trump is running. Republicans have a choice. A friend put it as: you have got to go in with your toughest fighter. Murray understands the instinct and thinks it is dangerous, because the toughest fighter may also be the biggest liability. What better way to get out the Democratic vote in 2024 than to have Trump running? Everybody knows what Trump is, and Murray feels sorry for conservatives who had to pretend he was a devout Christian, a man of faith, a man of great integrity. In the public eye for years, that was obviously not the case. What Trump does have is a method of communication you cannot look away from.

Watching him clear everyone out of the way in 2016 was, for Murray, thrilling, because those people needed clearing away. Another Bush? Another Clinton? Mark Steyn’s joke was that we only had to wait for the families to marry and we would have a monarchy again. Murray was pleased to see Trump raise issues that needed raising — a breath of fresh air — and wished it were not him doing it. Then came governing, and it was perfectly clear he did not know how. He had an incredible ability to fight. The forces arrayed against him would have taken down anyone else; they would have run the same racism and misogyny charges at Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio that they ran at Mitt Romney and John McCain. Trump was ugly enough and bruising enough to fight, and unwilling to play the polite game that, Fridman suggests, can land you on an island with Jeffrey Epstein. He still screwed up. With both houses for two years he did not know what levers to pull. Sitting in the office behind the Oval Office, tweeting and watching the news, “that’s not a president.” Loyalists he would use and then destroy.

Murray covered the 2020 election, went to Trump rallies, and was in Washington on election night. When Florida came in and it looked as if Trump might win, Black Lives Matter Plaza got very ugly; Antifa people started getting into black bloc, and he thought the town would burn. In the aftermath, people told him they had great evidence of vote-rigging. He is one of those who does not believe the evidence presented is good enough to justify the claim that Trump won, *2000 Mules* included. What Trump did on January 6 was unbelievably dangerous. Two ideas can be held at once: January 6 was not nothing, and it was not an insurrection or an attempt to stage a coup. Eric Weinstein’s image, which Murray borrows, is a roof you have to walk along, the sides very steep. Fall off either edge and you are done.

Is the feeling that the town will burn only a war on Twitter, Fridman asks, or is something real brewing? “It’s real.” The hopeful question is the one Murray wants: ten years from now, if the United States turned it around, what would have been the reason? Since the book came out, two kinds of specialist have told him his themes had more application than he knew. People who have been through Alcoholics Anonymous asked, a little personally, whether he had ever been, because recovery asks you to list what you are grateful for. Marriage counselors said the same about couples therapy: find things you agree on. Murray thinks that is crucial in America, and much harder now, because having different opinions is last century. The two sides have different facts.

One segment of the country believes Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and the Russians put Trump in. Another half believes Trump won in 2020. If you cannot agree on who wins elections, it is very hard to see what you agree on as a country. That is why he minds the war on American and Western history. The public square has to have public heroes, warts and all. If half the country thinks the founding fathers were pretty good and the other half thinks they were rotten racists; if half thinks it would have been better if Columbus had turned around, and the other is glad, in the end, that there is an America — you have got to agree on something. He is not saying everything in the American past was good. God knows that would not stand a second’s scrutiny. Nor was it all bad. This was not a country formed in sin, founded in 1619 in order to make it wicked and incapable of escaping that wickedness.

If you cannot agree on who your heroes are, the whole thing is one massive division. He thinks we are already seeing people move to states that look like the life they want. Some tell him that is the genius of the founding. It is also, he says, an eradication of part of American public life: the ability to look at each other and discuss face to face. The leaked Supreme Court draft he calls a bomb placed on America. He is very worried, because if America screws up, everything else in the world goes. The country is still the beacon of the ideas on which it was founded, living them out in better forms, an imperfect union with a desire to improve. His hope is that people know how good gratitude feels, and that resentment destroys you from within. That, he says, is the American way. Some of the present tear is a new toy, social media, as relatively new as nuclear weapons, and we have to find a reasonable attitude toward it without going mad. His minimalist call to friends in this era: the main job is not to go insane.

Advice for the high-school and college listener who has just put down TikTok: Murray can speak most concretely to people who want to write. The main thing is to read. As a schoolboy he always had a book in the side pocket of his jacket, not out of swottishness but because in his early teens he discovered that books were dangerous — a thrilling discovery. They could contain anything, and people did not know what you were reading. He got to Huxley’s *The Doors of Perception* far too young, made neither head nor tail of it, and knew it was about something interesting and forbidden. Poetry and history left him constantly wanting more. If you want to become a writer you have to be a reader of the best stuff. When you find the people who knock you off your feet, read everything, cling on, and follow the circles of history and scholarship to the next ones.

The first book that threw him was William Golding’s *Lord of the Flies*, a set text people get snotty about because it is popular. He had been used to children’s literature, in which everything ends up fine and the lost all get found. This was the first adult book in which the world turns out differently. For days afterward he was in shock, partly because he intuited it must be true. That was his introduction to the adult world, shocking and thrilling, and he wanted more of it. When he became interested in sex, and when he knew he was gay, books were a very good way to learn what he was, which was even more dangerous. One psychologist called the gay child’s predicament “the little boy with a big secret.” Discovering that other people had the same secret was a thank-god. It is also a version of what everybody gets from reading: the thrill that somebody else thought something you thought only you had thought.

One of the greatest thrills in literature, he says, is when a voice comes from across the centuries and seems to leave a handprint, and you feel a little less alone. C.S. Lewis is supposed to have said we read to know we are not alone. Murray’s addition: we do not only read to know we are not alone. We read to become other people. He saw in books the version of the life he wanted — ideas, debate, the arguments of his time — and then decided to live it. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” a poem Auden hated and everyone knows, has a line about sitting in a dive at the end of a low dishonest decade. The problem with the line is that you kind of want to be living at the end of one; it sounds cool, as if you were the only person who sees it.

Books and articles now fall, for him, into two categories: I know how you did that, and I do not know how you did that. The best feeling as a writer is the second, and it happens in the moment of writing. Years ago he finished a long piece about Jean-Michel Basquiat and gasped. The workshop advice that you must write in order to know what you think is, he says, very bad advice for writers who do not know what they think; typing will not make it clearer. Sometimes a thought is waiting, a sentence emerges, and by the time you have typed it you just go yes. That is the greatest feeling in writing, almost as if it came from somewhere else.

Fridman asks a question he admits is too personal for a Brit: the role of love in the human condition, and what it was to discover, and tell the world, that he was gay. Murray has a rule that he does not talk about his personal life, then breaks it a little. One way growing up gay differs from growing up straight is that your first passions are almost inevitably unrequited. There is plenty of unrequited love among the young either way, but if you are gay the odds are that the person in question will not be. The first experience of love is mostly heartbreak and disappointment. Heartbreak can be beautiful, and if you are a writer you can always do something with it, which is why writers are not to be trusted. A friend wrote a poem about a man who died in a motorcycle accident in Sydney in the 1960s and admitted that a tiny bit of him, in the moment he was told, thought: I could use this. He did, and the poem was wonderful, and the guilt is always there. The more obvious version is reporting from war zones and wanting the bad stories because they are useful. The worse the situation, the more useful.

That delay, he thinks, is why most gay men of his generation came to sexual and romantic maturity later. Perceived promiscuity among gay men is more easily explained, in his view, by the fact that gay men behave as men would if women were men. What, broadly, is the role of love? It is the nearest thing we have to finding the point. “What is the meaning” is a hard question; “where is the meaning” is slightly easier. You gravitate toward the places you find it. The conservative answer, which he finds more useful than any other, is to find meaning where people have found it before. If your ancestors found it in a place of worship or a particular canon, go there, because time has proven it can give you the goods — much more sensible than inventing new ways of meaning from scratch. Love is probably the nearest thing we can have to the divine on earth. Sexual love with another person is the greatest intimation you can have of what might otherwise only be superseded by divine love: the sense young lovers have of having walked through a low door in the garden.

He answers the rest by reading Philip Larkin’s “High Windows.” Larkin was straight, had a rather unhappy sex life, and came of age in the 1940s and 1950s. Most older people of his generation resented the young their sixties freedom and pretended it was terrible. Larkin, a conservative, took another view. Seeing a couple of kids, guessing at the pills or the diaphragm, he knows “this is paradise,” everyone old has dreamed of it, bonds and gestures pushed aside like an outdated combine harvester, everyone young going down the long slide to happiness endlessly. Then, rather than words, the thought of high windows, the sun-comprehending glass, and beyond it the deep blue air that shows nothing and is nowhere and is endless. Murray’s gloss: Larkin found the divine in a young couple and a diaphragm, which is counterintuitive until you remember how tightly sex had been tied to misery. Stefan Zweig’s *The World of Yesterday* describes pre-1914 Vienna, men ending up with prostitutes, so many getting syphilis on their first experience and being stuck with it for life. A lot has gone better in the last century, and that is one of those things. Sexual liberation, Murray adds, does not buy you love. It throws in another set of problems. If there is a meaning on top of all that, it is that the species likes to find problems and solve them, and sometimes even to create them.

Fridman thanks him for highlighting the problems of civilization and still leaving a glimmer of hope. The sign-off is Murray’s own, which Fridman reads back. Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words, even provocative and repugnant ones, are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech. The standard Murray has asked for all evening is the same standard: the ledger with both columns, the same test for Churchill and Marx, the same refusal to assign hereditary sin by skin color, and gratitude practiced as if it were a technique, because resentment will eat you from the inside even when you have a case. You can take a bicycle apart for a very long time. The question is what is left to hold onto when you cannot put it back.