Here is a Review From National Review.
There are a lot of tabs in my copy, which means that Murray covered a lot of points that I find important.
As I got to the afterward, I was struck by Murray's observation that while he had stepped on some of the most contentious issues of our time (gays, women, race, and transexuality), he had largely been treated "fairly", and the book was popular. My view is that the fact that he considers himself to be gay is the reason for that ... as he covers in the first section of the book, gay is the "foundation" of Identity Politics -- a member of that identity can pass through the "minefield" of identity if they step carefully. Murray seems to have largely achieved that.
He does a good job of pointing out the absurdities of our age relative to his four categories. One of the themes is; what is "hardware" in humans ("nature" -- wired in, part of DNA); vs what is "software" ( "nurture", changed by environment, learnable, teachable).
The base of this discussion ... "hardware is fixed and therefore morally OK" seems fatally flawed. Certainly sexual drives are "hardware", however there is such a thing as celibacy, and monogamy, which are socially (imperfectly) standards. In the age of "if it feels good, do it", it seems that the "hardware vs software" a distinction without a difference. It seems applicable to many things ... obesity, addiction, pedofillia, ...
He arrives at essentially the same conclusion as Christ as in "man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God", ie, a fixed unchangeable morality is what we need. Nietzsche says we have culturally killed God, so we seek to create a new "god" via science, culture ... POWER. Thus the fight. From this review:
Murray spends a significant amount of time considering how we got to this stage and declares that it derives from an absence of meaning from the loss of “grand narratives.” Presumably, by this he means the loss of a conviction that our great, Liberal utopia is no longer worth saving, let alone maintaining. Tantalizing as this may be, the loss of this conviction is not discussed at much length in The Madness of Crowds, although it does feature extensively in The Strange Death of Europe.
On page 256, he takes a shot at this; "A sense of purpose is found in working out what is meaningful in our lives and then orienting ourselves over time as closely as possible to those centers of meaning".
Although he doesn't admit it, he is basically declaring what everyone since Nietzsche has discovered -- we try valiantly to pull ourselves up to meaning by our own bootstraps, and discover that it comes back to FAITH ... in something that we are going to make to be "transcendent" ... therefore an idol. This is covered very well in "Moral, Believing Animals".
His closing sentence is; "To assume that that sex, sexuality, and skin color mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything will be fatal."
Eternally, "sex, sexuality and skin color" DO mean nothing. We are all equally sinful, and equally redeemable in the eyes of God. There was even once a country called "america" that declared that:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
No creator, no "unalienable". Or on the terms of the "leader" of Wokeistan, "endowed by the thing" ... the once shining nation on a hill is gone.
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