Western Self-Contempt

* Book: Western Self-Contempt. Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations. BY BENEDICT BECKELD. Cornell University Press,

URL = https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501763182/western-self-contempt/

Contextual Quote

"We in the West continually come across oikophobia. We see it when a schoolteacher tells the students that Western civilization has been uniquely evil in its pursuit of colonialization and slavery, with the implication that other civilizations have not engaged in such things; when a school named after Thomas Jefferson seeks to change its name because of concerns about racism; when a commercial for a Scandinavian airline insists that nothing is truly Scandinavian; when Western universities “decolonize” their departments to make them even less Eurocentric than they have already become; when the waving of one’s own flag is decried as xenophobic while other nations are encouraged to display pride in their cultures; when wild crowds tear down statues of their country’s founders."

- Benedict Beckeld [1]

Description

"Western Self-Contempt travels through civilizations since antiquity, examining major political events and the literature of ancient Greece, Rome, France, Britain, and the United States, to study evidence of cultural self-hatred and its cyclical recurrence. Benedict Beckeld explores oikophobia, described by its coiner Sir Roger Scruton as "the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours,'" in its political and philosophical applications. Beckeld analyzes the theories behind oikophobia along with their historical sources, revealing why oikophobia is best described as a cultural malaise that befalls civilizations during their declining days.

Beckeld gives a framework for why today's society is so fragmented and self-critical. He demonstrates that oikophobia is the antithesis of xenophobia. By this definition, the riots and civil unrest in the summer of 2020 were an expression of oikophobia. Excessive political correctness that attacks tradition and history is an expression of oikophobia. Beckeld argues that if we are to understand these behaviors and attitudes, we must understand oikophobia as a sociohistorical phenomenon.

Western Self-Contempt is a systematic analysis of oikophobia, combining political philosophy and history to examine how Western civilizations and cultures evolve from naïve and self-promoting beginnings to states of self-loathing and decline. Concluding with a philosophical portrait of an increasingly interconnected Western civilization, Beckeld reveals how past events and ideologies, both in the US and in Europe, have led to a modern culture of self-questioning and self-rejection."

(https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501763182/western-self-contempt/)

Discussion

Scruton on Oikophobia

Daniel Mahoney:

"Scruton was the first to apply the term oikophobia (widely used in psychiatry) to the realm of politics and political philosophy. Scruton does not succumb to Carl Schmitt’s troubling reduction of the human and political world to deep and abiding enmity between friends and enemies, nation and nation; with the Christian tradition he affirms the moral priority of “neighbor love.” But to love one’s neighbor one needs neighbors. That means, at a minimum, a political or national home to which we belong together. Charity begins at home and no one is a truly a citizen of the world, except in an abstract or metaphorical sense. The late modern world is riddled with ideologues who “loved humanity” while despising and degrading real human beings. A morally conceited but empty humanitarianism (and globalism) is thus the other side of totalitarianism.

In Scruton’s rendering, oikophobes deride “all the ordinary forms of patriotism and local attachment as forms of racism, imperialism or xenophobia.” An occupational hazard of the intellectual class, oikophobia mocks the concrete attachments and loyalties of decent citizens and human beings (the ground of all larger loves and loyalties) while lauding distant cultures and regimes about which they often know little. The student rebels in Paris in May 1968, and their assorted philosophical instructors from Sartre to Foucault, celebrated Chairman Mao in the midst of the murderous terrorist craze of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Ignorance thus combined with moral and political obscenity. In the United States, Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States continues to sell like crazy and miseducates each rising generation in a mix of self-hatred and imbecilic para-Marxism that is truly worthy of contempt. As Scruton points out, political correctness is nothing other than mandatory anti-Americanism and Western self-contempt, and is tied to a “culture of repudiation” and negation “which spreads through school and academy all but unresisted by the guardians of traditional knowledge.” It is by no means a new phenomenon.

The true intellectual and moral antithesis of oikophobia is not xenophobia but oikophilia, a love of one’s own, tied to liberty and law, that actualizes the affections of citizens for a country and civilization worth preserving and passing on to new generations. For example, command-and-control approaches to ecological matters will inevitably be coercive and counterproductive, and necessarily ignorant of the “local” facts on the ground. But a patient and reasonable love of home can inspire common efforts rooted in social trust and local knowledge. Self-contempt can only lead to debilitating civic and moral indifference if not a totalitarian effort to negate everything good that has been passed on to us. Hatred inspires nothing constructive; the cultivation of civic affections allows even strangers to build a common world and to live in peace with one another. Conservatism, not humanitarian abstractions and virtue-signaling, promotes true neighbor-love and responsible civic engagement.

In an article in the Spectator from 2018, Scruton took aim at the cult of victimization (and the art of taking immediate offense) that is at the heart of oikophobia and the culture of repudiation. If one uses the wrong pronoun, beware; if one compliments or offends the wrong person, be prepared to have one’s personhood potentially expunged. The easily victimized lie around every corner. Even as our elites declare the West to be guilty of crimes and sins without precedent, the norms and decencies of our own tradition of civilized liberty must give way, in the dominant account, to everything foreign, transgressive, and contemptuous of common sense and received wisdom.

Scruton gives the instructive, and provocative, example of the burka—the covering of a woman’s face and body promoted by certain Islamic fundamentalists throughout the world. As Scruton puts it, we live in a “face-to-face society, in which strangers look each other in the eye, address each other directly and take responsibility for what they say.” To hide the face, to make it completely inaccessible, is to prevent access to the personhood—the soul—of another. It is also radically at odds with “the rights and privileges of citizenship.” Elsewhere, the contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent notes that in the Christian West, only the executioner covered his face. Scruton and Manent agree that the face-to-face encounter is at the heart of civic freedom and mutual moral accountability. It is a non-negotiable good of civilized existence."

(https://americanmind.org/salvo/dont-hate-yourself/)

Rene Girard on how Political Correctness radicalizes the scapegoating mechanism

Daniel Mahoney:

"The Franco-American literary critic and social theorist Rene Girard is famous for making scapegoating and “mimetic desire,” as he called it, a central theme of contemporary philosophical and cultural discourse. Girard saw scapegoating and victimization everywhere but, unlike the postmodernists and oikophobes, he emphasized the need for forgiveness rather than eternal enmity and strife. But in an interview in 2008, he denounced politically correct ideology as radicalizing the scapegoat mechanism. Political correctness, Girard charged, puts its proponents in the position of accusing their opponents of creating scapegoats, of victimizing others, as they reproduce the exact dynamic they denounce. Girard added that the politically correct say nothing about the victims of abortion and euthanasia, except to cheer their destruction. This movement of super-victimization that Girard diagnosed was nothing but “Christianity turned upside down,” scapegoating at the service of hatred and the negation of moral decency and civilized life. It was something that true Christians and all persons of good will must vigorously oppose."

How the Helical View of Historical Development is Related to the Return of Self-Contempt

By Johan Gärdebo:

"By tracing the idea of intellectuals’ self-contempt back to the beginning of Western civilisation, Beckeld shows how the phenomenon recurs cyclically: from ancient Greece and the Roman Empire to early modern France and England, up to today’s United States in its role as world hegemon. Since technological development increases societal cultural mobility, which in turn breaks down traditions, Beckeld suggests that historical development be viewed as helical — with each cycle becoming more progressive than the last.

To explain this cyclical pattern, Beckeld starts from the assumption of the historian Thucydides that human nature is fundamentally constant. Human nature and mass psychology remain the same, and therefore the same symptoms recur: a successful society enables a societal elite that does not have to work and can educate itself. This elite becomes aware of other people’s attitudes and over time distances itself from its own culture. Thus, successful societies bear within them the seeds of self-contempt, fragmentation and a return to smaller social communities.

In this cyclical pattern, we come to recognise self-contempt as a kind of career path for the societal elite. When external enemies have been defeated, and society becomes richer and the state stronger, the easiest way to gain prestige and money is to find enemies within one’s own culture. By identifying “the enemy”, we strengthen our own identity. By exposing people as phobic, sexist or racist, intellectuals get to feel like magnanimous promoters or defenders of justice. In reality, these people have stopped taking responsibility for any common society. According to Beckeld, it is the lack of positive projects that reveal societal elites as having become self-serving."

(https://thecritic.co.uk/the-anatomy-of-oikophobia/?)

More information

• short video presentation by the author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkOnjS2XJJ0