“Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West.” – Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt (2010)

Pascal Bruckner is the master of the one-liner. That is, he is quotable even when it is difficult to follow his logic. His prose tends towards the poetic and often seems designed to shock, although it ends up trying to please everyone. He will lambaste those who try to “help” the disadvantaged in the “Third World” (a term rarely used nowadays due to its connotations of hopelessness) only to encourage engagement with the impoverished without specifying how.

The view he presents suggests we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. However, given that his book was written thirty-two years ago, it is hard to fault Bruckner’s lack of a clear political approach to the less fortunate. Today the downtrodden are invading Western shores as never before, and we are hard-pressed to know how to react to them for our own sense of “doom” has been markedly sharpened. Still, Bruckner enhances our understanding of ourselves and alerts us to our cultural weaknesses.

What does Bruckner say? In a nutshell, to quote him, “the much touted compassion of most ‘Third-Worlders’ [liberals] is really a form of contempt, because they use the suffering of others for their own ideological purposes.” Bruckner argues that, since the 1960s, the political Left has used the struggling poor of Third World countries as convenient symbols of capitalist oppression since the Left can no longer find potent symbols of class-struggle within Europe itself. The picture of a bourgeoisie that exploits impoverished workers in Europe no longer holds credibility, so propagandists have promoted a post-colonial narrative of the “White Man” shamelessly exploiting the poor in southern countries. He says the Left lumps all of the Third World together as though cultural differences did not exist, treating people as symbols rather than as flesh and bone humans.

The “Other,” he says, has been reduced to a new underling, manipulated by “white” people who are made to feel “guilty” under leftist propaganda. This has produced a need for “repentance” in some, or a total “indifference” to the impoverished South in others. According to Bruckner, this psychological state originates in Christianity with its image of the Garden of Eden as mankind’s primordial “innocence,” destroyed by contact with evil. More recently, he says, Christopher Columbus’s encounter with the natives of the Caribbean established the myth of native “innocence,” corrupted through colonial exploitation. This narrative sees the White Man as inherently evil and corrupt, while native peoples are all vulnerable and virtuous. According to this logic, if there is evil in the Third World, it came with the White Man.

The myth of the Noble Savage, today, translates as European and American exploitation of the Third World, a notion that conveniently ignores oppressive tribal or caste systems that predate the White Man’s influence. Says Bruckner, in the Leftist view of southern countries, we find “a sort of generalization and sweeping reductionism …one that cannot see subtleties at work.” Nor do we see the advantages of modern technology and science that the West has brought to more traditional societies. In Bruckner’s estimation, the West has created the whip with which it flagellates itself for an inherent sense of corruption that is Biblical in origin.

Bruckner especially lambastes intellectuals like J.P. Sartre who had great influence in the 1960s for elevating Chinese Communism and the Iranian Revolution to models of revolutionary virtue. He notes that the impulse behind this position comes from a disenchantment with Western civilization. European idealists looked to “revolutionary” societies for answers to contradictions in industrialized cultures, but ignored the darkest sides of Maoism and radical Islam. He accuses such idealists of “intellectual laziness” and “intellectual gymnastics” used to repress knowledge of atrocities committed in the name of revolutionary zeal. But, he says, a new sense of reality has destroyed our illusions of purity in places like China and Iran. Now we have become disappointed with revolutionary outcomes and look for new penitential alternatives to our “corruption.” Bruckner writes: “As soon as the Third World refused to be oversimplified, we turned away from it, frightened by the complexity we saw there.”

Bruckner says today “indifference” has replaced fascination, and we have only a “negative sympathy” for impoverished nations left. We have been so bombarded by images of global suffering that we have become inured to it. In fact, he claims, Europeans have become “disgusted” with Third World conditions that remind them of their own past. Yet the sense of guilt remains because “Just enjoying relatively better luck puts us in debt to those who are poorer,” at least according to the Leftist perspective. We wallow in guilt as atonement and celebrate the misfortune of others because it gives us “pretexts for humility.”

To be sure, Bruckner offers a complicated interpretation of what goes on in Western mass psychology. Those who promote the myth of Western guilt, says Bruckner, “are like hemophiliacs in love with human suffering, ready to bleed far any cause; they are the professional mourners of modern history.” He calls do-gooders “cowboy humanitarians,” who hold “guilt [as] a convenient substitute for action where action is impossible.”

The persistence of suffering in the Third World “gives us limitless freedom to berate ourselves for it.” In this view, the failure of countries to help themselves becomes our failure to elevate them from the after-effects of colonial rule. It’s all our fault, and we wallow in guilt like a masochist wallows in pain. In this view, former-colonies need assume no responsibility for their atrocities and failures.

Bruckner considers our attitude towards the rest of the world as self-indulgent and self-delusional – attitudes that excuse inaction. He says Westerners fail to see the peoples of the Third World (the “South”) as individuals whose cultures and economies require deeper analyses in order to deliver help effectively. In this he has a point.

However, what Bruckner does not address – I have yet to find anyone who does so – is the impressions that the Third World holds of the West. We recall Edward Said’s bitter denunciation of Western perspectives of the East (Orientalism), a diatribe that completely ignores how they see us. It is doubtful that Eastern perspectives of Europeans or Americans are any more “true” or realistic than ours have been of theirs, so if there is to be a mutually-respectful meeting of minds, there would have to be a radical re-think of who the “Other” really is. But this may not happen. As Bruckner says in a more recent publication, The Tyranny of Guilt (2010), some nations compete with others over who has suffered most at the hands of the West because “suffering confers one rights… [and is] a way of avoiding introspection.” A re-examination of views would require goodwill and intelligence, both of which are sadly lacking, although current clashes between Islam and the West, for instance, certainly underscores such a necessity.

Pascal Bruckner

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