Two more books join the medley of volumes published in the last decade seeking to explain why the West has lost its cultural footings. Matthias Gisslar and Frank Furedi agree that “modernity” must be implicated somehow but on little else. Gisslar’s “anthropology of the West” maintains that rationality, equality, and individualism are exhausted and have taken on entirely different meanings, while Furedi concludes that the Left's success in rewriting history threatens Western cultural identity and core principles.
U.S. colleges are in trouble—financially, demographically, academically, politically—and two recent volumes offer answers to some of the most pressing problems. While one volume, by Brian Rosenberg, longtime Macalester College president, is more serious than the other, Robert Maranto points out that both fail to address the problems of burgeoning bureaucracies, ideological uniformity, and “the empirically verified free speech crisis on campus.”
Edward S. Shapiro’s dissects Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message, in which Shapiro discovers that Coates is an “ideologue awash in his grievances,” basking in the undue adulation effectuated on American campuses.
On January 5, 2025, the attendees at the American Historical Association convention in New York City voted to approve a resolution strongly condemning Israel for its response to the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Despite the lack of evidence, the resolution accused Israel of something called “scholasticide” and framed the conflict as an episode of “Settler Colonialism,” an empirically vacuous theory that distorts the past, erases 2,000 years of Jewish history, and justifies the murderous slaughter of Jews, Israel, and all Western nations and people.
Books by Adam Kirsch and Margaret D. Jacobs offer contrasting views on the fraught topic of what the Left has termed “settler colonialism,” allowing James W. Springer to expose the intellectual muddle at the core this ideology, its hollowness as a tool for understanding the past, and its efflorescence as a weapon in today’s culture wars.
