“From existentialism to deconstruction,” writes Pascal Bruckner in his broadside, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, “all modern thought can be reduced to a mechanical denunciation of the West, emphasizing the latter’s hypocrisy, violence, and abomination.” 
I wouldn’t say that John Rawls or Jürgen Habermas or Benedict XVI fit that description. Yet Bruckner, one of the so-called “new philosophers” in France who made a big stir in the 1970s when they criticized the habitual Marxism of French intellectuals, points to a very real and powerful trend in contemporary Western culture. We seem to love to hate ourselves.
The self-accusations are familiar. We are imperialists, racists, and purveyors of unsustainable consumption that threatens to engulf the world in an environmental disaster. The colonization of the New World amounted to genocide. Our greed supports brutal tyrants. Capitalism depends upon the exploitation of the world’s poor. On and on goes the litany of shame.
To a certain extent, our present self-laceration reflects one of the virtues of Western culture. Socratic philosophy and Old Testament prophecy combined to create a strong impulse toward self-criticism as a way to overcome self-deceptions and false loyalties. It was not an accident that St. Thomas began his analysis of the truths of Christianity by surveying the objections. As he knew, the pressure of criticism pushes us toward a fuller and more self-aware grasp of the truth.
Yet, as Bruckner recognizes, our postmodern age does not seem to view criticism as a way of refining and deepening our loyalty to the real achievements of Western culture, not the least of which is the freedom to criticize. We seem to relish denunciation for its own sake.
Why? To begin, the notion that the West is the Great Satan feeds our egoism. As Bruckner explains, “This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history.”
For a long time the liberal establishment in America believed that our society was the source of good in the world. The traumas of the 1960s undermined this complacent belief in American exceptionalism. But it did not lead to a more nuanced view of America's place in the world. The vanity remained intact, transforming itself into a belief that America is the exceptional source of evil in the world.
We are still the great exception, but now we're exceptionally bad. Our litanies of shame differ from Woodrow Wilson’s naive Americanism only in the conclusions they draw. Islamic terrorism? Caused by Western imperialism. African kleptocracy? Caused by the legacy of colonialism.
There are other enticements to orgies of self-criticism. For example, Bruckner overlooks the joys of destruction. Blowing up buildings is thrilling, and so is deconstructing cultural institutions. To show that America was founded on the slaughter of Native Americans, the evil of slavery, and a naked quest of profit–what a delicious prospect. In their small way, the postmodern intellectuals whom Bruckner quotes so extensively share in an eroticism of demolition. It’s an excitement of the soul familiar to adolescent males, and one central to the early years of Nazi hegemony in Germany.
Slashing self-criticism also creates a slapstick, carnival atmosphere. Showing how the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet operates according to a hidden suppression of otherness is like throwing cream pies at the school principal. Demonstrating the sexism of the church fathers is akin to giving the finger to a policeman as you drive by. It’s titillating to flaunt authority, especially when you are applauded for doing so. High fives all the way around.
In the main, however, the tyranny of guilt tends to please because it feeds our moral conceit. As St. Augustine recognized, all societies are deeply implicated in human sinfulness. We may achieve a degree of justice, but our common life remains haunted by perverted desires. Hyper-critique promises to lift us out of our fallen condition. We ascend to a place were we imagine that we can see all the evils–and we assume, falsely, that such a place must be good, and that our residency there makes us good in turn.
It’s not surprising that we are tempted by the illusion of purification-by-self-criticism. As I observed a couple of weeks ago, we often take the same approach to knowledge, thinking that if we can see all the errors, then we’re on our way to truth. But it is not so. In fact, if we paralyze ourselves with fear of error, then we end up isolated from the real drama of the intellectual life, which involves drawing closer to what is true.
The same holds for justice. Cultures and societies can be conquered and subjugated from the outside, but they only be reformed from within. It’s not an accident that Charles de Gaulle was able to end France’s colonial fantasies in Algeria. His loyalty to France was primitive, and although he had many ideological enemies, few doubted his visceral patriotism. He could steer the ship, because the sailors knew he would not abandon them.
Or take an American example. Lyndon Johnson had an acute sense of the failures of American society–racism most poignantly, and neglect of the poor as well. And yet no one doubted his loyalty to the American project. When he declared a war on poverty, it was not seen as a war on American culture, but an attempt to reform and improve it.
Today, the greatest impediment to justice in the West may be a growing lack of patriotism among elites: captains indifferent to the ships they command. Hyper-critique breaks the bonds of solidarity that bind our hearts, offering nothing to love, no loyalty to place or people or history in its place.
The West has much to regret, as do all societies, all cultures. The critical moment remains necessary, otherwise we make an idol of our worldly loves. Yet, as Pascal Bruckner recognizes, today we gorge on critique. We need to recover the affirmative moment of solidarity, rededicating ourselves to what we have inherited rather than imagining ourselves at a denouncing distance. For gratitude and loyalty bind the heart, motivating us to restore, renovate, and reform.
R.R. Reno is a senior editor of First Things and Professor of Theology at Creighton University. He is the general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible, to which he contributed the commentary on Genesis.
Comments:
Put quite simply, all of these have been nonstop cheerleaders for the ruling oligarchs of their respective countries. George Orwell was very clear on this point. Now, we know that the world is by and large the beneficiary of the Western movement that smashed local tribal walls and began to make this a single world. We also know that these, our ancestors, were well paid for their sometimes-noble efforts. How well paid is not as obvious as it might have been in Britain, because of the English tradition by which the adventurers simply decided to settle and stay in obscure corners like Australia. The true magnitude of the rewards is blindingly obvious in France, whose knights errant tended to come home to live. The glory of the Cote d'azur testifies to their successes.
But wherever they explored, the crowning achievement of their work was to empower the peoples of the world to develop too. Now we want to know if we were too beastly to their forebears. For the most part, the new, native rulers of the world don't really care. They have bigger fish to fry, like deciding how to use their new-found powers.
So, now why the self-absorption in guilt? My best guess is that it is the hangover of the oligarchs. The rank and file of the west didn't oppress anyone, so they have no guilt. The elevation of the whole world however has made the oligarchs rather unnecessary, and in retirement they have seemingly too much idle time on their hands. They spend it reading their old propaganda rags. To read a nations public press is to learn what the people think. Or rather, it is to learn what the people who read the public press think.
When they bring up slavery, the indians, etc., it's not hard to turn it around by saying the ability to conquer and enslave large numbers of people and dominate the world in so many ways are part of what made our ancestors such Great Men, and the unwillingness to do so today is what makes us small and decadent by comparison.
All you have to do is not make obeisance to their morality, and their argument degenerates pretty quickly into ad hominems.
When people around the world are asked about their degree of nationalism and patriotism, the U.S. almost always comes out near the top -- closer to countries like Turkey, India and Nigeria than to the Netherlands or Sweden.
Moreover, it seems to me this self-flagellation is a bi-partisan affair. People on the extreme left slam the U.S. for all of the above while people on the extreme right complain about the country becoming a den of sodomy, perversion and effeteness -- a once-great civilization that is headed for the dust-bin any day now.
Most normal people don't believe any of this nonsense, though.
I agree that there is a disjunct between the folk and the self-flagellents (for which I thank God), but that minority is very influential. It includes much of the entertainment industry, the media, the professoriate, government bureaucrats, and the professoriate educates the elite. Americans think much more of the United States than Europeans do of their own countries--American exceptionalism again, but though students do keep their own counsel when attending the courses of professors on the apologetic and apoplectic left, the campus atmosphere and publicly permissible speech and behavior of students has changed markedly since I came to my college in the early eighties, and this change has largely been leftward. If you read the writings of some of the people who were movers and shakers in the early modern movement, people like H.G. Wells, Margaret Sanger, Kraft-Ebbing, Freud and others, you will find repeatedly the statment that in order to progress the Judaeo-Christian morality had to be destroyed. Philip Rieff discusses the phenomenon at length in his works, particularly Triumph of the Theraputic and Sacred Order/Social Order. The key thinker in the subversion of the Western elite, including that of America, is the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who advocated not a frontal assault on capitalism, but taking it over from within in the form of the famous "March through the Institutions." Well, I have been a witness to that process, and if you think it is an hallucination than you and I live on different planets.
I do not consider the West doomed and I think that a major reason is the obduracy of common sense in America. We admit our screwups, try to fix them, and then move on. But dismissing all this as nonsense is going too far. Read the Times, the Post, Salon, Slate, Rolling Stone, the daily Kos, etc. Something is going on, all right. But I think you may be right in the end.
Best,
Richard
Keep in mind too that the defining political moments for younger thinkers aren't going to be the Viet Nam War or May 1968 but rather things like the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and 9/11.
Reno writes: "It’s titillating to flaunt authority..."
The word is flout, sir. Flout.
Yes, exaggeration is possible but so is the pretense that the elephant is not in the parlor. I can without too much trouble add a few radical names to your list of reformists: Susan Rosenberg, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Tom Hayden, Edward Said, Ramsay Clark, Ed Asner, Juan Coles, Ward Churchill, Bill Ayers, Peter Singer, and Cornell West (whom I have heard publicly described as the most important public intellectua in America--God preserve us all). What worries me more than this is how the educational rank and file among the professoriate has been radicalized. I am very hard pressed to name conservative members of our faculty. There are some (very quiet) moderates, but the most vocal and numerous are those who run from left of center to starkly radical. They dominate debates and set institutional policy. This has unbalanced the interchange of ideas at our school to a pathological degree, and utterly ruined some of our departments, as even some of the radical professors and administrators will privately admit. This, needless to say, is extremely unhealthy. Our college charges an arm and a leg a year for a young person. In a perfect world, we would charge nothing and pay parents a hefty indemnity for the damage done to the minds of their offspring.
As for our students being influenced by the fall of Communism and 9/11, would that their attention span were that long. They are stunningly ignorant of history, and I am afraid that that is by design (yes, the high schools are sometimes part of the problem). Those who don't know the past will be defenseless in the face of tendentious presentations of the past, whether left or right.
Please don't misunderstand what I'm claiming. We are not about to drown in a sea of red (or green or anything else). But the college life as a toughminded exchange of ideas between well informed and honed young minds is simply not in evidence. I want our students better informed about the world past and present, and better informed about the various viewpoints from which contemporary thinkers view that world. I want balance. A takeover by the far right would horrify me every bit as much as a takeover by the far left. American history has been driven by public debate between real alternatives. To keep to our simple minded division of left and right, sometimes the right is correct; sometimes the left is correct. Sometimes compromise between the two is the most prudent policy. I think we need them both. McCarthy lost. Good! Alger Hiss lost. Good! Let's keep it that way.
Here's to a pluralistic and prosperous future, grounded in a community undergirded by common principles like democracy, pluralism, liberty, equality, human dignity, and the free flow of ideas.
Best,
Richard
The problem is not gorging ourselves on self-criticism that is legitimate. The problem is that after whipping ourselves with words, we continue the behavior we have deplored with legitimate Christian guilt (as in Viet Nam, Iraq and now Afghanistan), much like the Mafia hit man who leaves the confessional just in time for another hit that he has fully justified in his own mind.
Our constitution is, in my view, a gift from God. We can take Tocqueville's description of our political culture as valid. Historically we have been the leader in representing best what democracy means. But we have failed miserably in exporting democracy simply because of greed and rivalry.
Rene Girard's has revealed how the Cross dismantles the rivalry that leads to violence universally inherent in the mimetic desire of individuals and nations. It is time to take this information and begin supporting democratic movements instead of tyrants in promoting our rivalrous self-interest, which fosters scapegoating while fueling the escalating violence. That others behave this way is no reason for us to. At some point a nation has to step forward from the Cross and show another way, and we are still the best equipped spiritually to do so, but not for long with the secular humanists on the rise, which will only lead us into another expression of violent paganism. Can’t we see how Americans are now lining up with Europeans to once again scapegoat Jews to gain peace in the Middle East?
We still have the best chance at promoting democracy in the world if we heed the Cross and not give in to idolatrous crusaders or secular humanists who whip themselves with a politically correct faulty logic, a logic that affirms as righteous the sins of others that we condemn in ourselves, a masochism that is far from the truth, and thus far from a good confession.
"We are imperialists, racists, and purveyors of unsustainable consumption that threatens to engulf the world in an environmental disaster. The colonization of the New World amounted to genocide. Our greed supports brutal tyrants. Capitalism depends upon the exploitation of the world’s poor."
It's hard to argue with that list. At the same time we should recognize the positive role the West (and America in particular) have played in promoting free government, religious tolerance, prosperity, technological innovation, modern medicine... and on and on.
Can we hold both these sets of truths about our cultural heritage in our heads at the same time? If we are able to, then we can be prophetic without being self-loathing, and we can be grateful without being triumphalistic.
Re: Don Roberto's suggestion about the Pledge of Allegiance >
The more I read and reread the New Testament, the more I become convinced that it is a mistake for Christians to pledge allegiance to any nation, principality or power other than the Kingdom of God. As St. Paul says, our citizenship is in heaven. I am deeply aware of how fortunate I am to live in the United States and am grateful for the many blessings this affords me. Even still, my allegiance belongs not to America or its flag, but only to Jesus and His Kingdom. How can I credibly claim to have allegiance to the Prince of Peace if I am simultaneously pledging my allegiance to a nation-state whose military spending outstrips the rest of the world combined?
I didn't quite hear your answer to this key question: how exactly do you refute JESUS HIMSELF, telling us to be self-critical?
That is specifically: how do you get around Jesus himself, telling us to look for the “log” in our own eye, before criticizing the “speck” in others? As follows:
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in the your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye. Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.... Watch out for for prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves” (Mat. 7.4-6, 15; Luke 6.41). “Why do you call me, 'Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I say?” (Luke 7.46).
That Jesus! Always telling us to be self-critical, before “judging” others! What an awful, self-doubting Liberal, that Jesus!
But in any case: just EXACTLY how, and with what argument SPECIFICALLY, did you and First Things, prove that Jesus was wrong?
So it is that a masochistically driven charity/tolerance among many Christians moves them to excuse or be silent about the sins of those who are not Christian, even when those sins constitute violations of the Ten Commandments, including "Thou shall not kill". Burying one's head in the sand when Islamic and other non-Christian groups spout anti-Semitism violates holiness as much as Christian triumphalism. Turning a blind eye towards African American children and adults who discriminate against or intimidate, or threaten or even commit acts of violence against whites is as serious as turning a blind eye towards whites who do the same to African Americans (witness the behavior of Black Panthers at voting stations recently and the government’s response). Remaining silent about racial hatred towards Jews throughout the Middle East, and how it is now being propagated here in America, is just as serious a sin as remaining silent about how our politicians manipulate and support tyrants in the Middle East for our own selfish ends.
He also expresses his opinion that the US can behave impulsively, but is able to assess its actions in a thoughtful way and move on. He believes that a feeling of pervasiveness forces Europeans towards passivity, eg. in refusing to stop the war in the Balkans without US help. He sees a renewed commitment to trans-Atlantic cooperation as a way of neutralising the worst aspects, and emphasising the best, of each culture.
For myself, I believe that we should be clear-eyed about our past, but not enslaved to it. That my father grew up in the slums in Sydney in the 1940s is interesting to me, and is an important part of my family’s story, but it in no way conditions my behaviour – or his, for that matter. This is basic stuff, but it seems to be forgotten by many social commentators.
The displacement of perhaps 1.5 million Jews and Arabs from their ancestral homes in the late 1940s happened at the same time as the displacement of 11 million ethnic Germans from eastern Europe (2 million dead) and the partition of India (12 million displaced, perhaps 1 million dead). Only the first, and smallest by an order of magnitude, still convulses the world, and this is largely because it has become totemic for all kinds of people; there is a profound unwillingness to move beyond the sins of the grandfathers. No one that I have heard of seriously suggests that East Prussia should be re-settled by Germans and annexed back on to Germany. We are told to feel guilty about certain historical incidents, and not others. (Bruckner points out that The Black Book of Colonialism, which he considers generally praiseworthy, only points out the injustices of European colonialism, and never the injustices of Arab colonialism.)
I believe that fretting over historical injustices is a way of emphasising our own moral worth, in a way that does not demand self-correction. Shortly after taking office in 2007, Australia’s last Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, publically apologised to the “Stolen Generation”, those aboriginals who were removed from their mothers and raised in state care in the past, for the suffering which many of them experienced – no mention was made of non-indigenous state wards, by the way. One contrarian newspaper insisted on reporting that more aboriginal children are being placed in state care now than happened at the height of the period in question, but this was largely ignored.
(I know that the “Stolen Generations” issue is contentious – I’ve no wish to debate the details, suffice to say that the issue illustrates my point.)
