Western guilt (concept)

The concept of Western guilt describes a Western culture of remorse within which historic events including Western imperialism, black slavery and the Holocaust produce an emotional response of guilt or sin requiring self-abnegation, penitence, and acts of penance or reparation that can affect political and policy outcomes.

Writing in Foreign Affairs in 1987, Fritz Stern described "the rise of a guilty conscience in Europe" as a "major topic".^[1]

Andrew Anthony describes the way Western guilt influences minds in his 2007 book The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence: "Over the years, I had absorbed a notion of liberalism that was passive, defeatist, guilt-ridden. Feelings of guilt governed my world view: postcolonial guilt, white guilt, middle-class guilt, British guilt. But if I was guilty, 9/11 shattered my innocence …".^[2]

Definitions of Western guilt

Intellectual historian Richard Wolin regards Western guilt as a form of "Western self-hatred" that has "persis(ted) unabated" since the publication of Pascal Bruckner's first book on the subject, The Tears of the White Man (1983). Writing in The New Republic in 2010, in response to the 2010 publication in English of Bruckner's 2006 book The Tyranny of Guilt, Wolin reflected that "In reasonable quantities, of course, self-criticism and repentance are praiseworthy: necessary stages in working through a politically or morally compromised past. Yet when indulged in to excess, they can interfere with the sense of reality, and lead to a kind of psychological immobilism. They turn into an unhealthy preoccupation with the past that shuts down the capacity to live fully and honestly and constructively in the present".^[3]

In The Tyranny of Guilt, Bruckner wrote: "From existentialism to deconstructionism, all of modern thought can be reduced to a mechanical denunciation of the West, emphasizing the latter’s hypocrisy, violence, and abomination.... The whole world hates us, and we deserve it. That is what most Europeans think.... Since 1945 our continent has been obsessed by torments of repentance. Ruminating on its past abominations—wars, religious persecutions, slavery, imperialism, fascism, communism—it views its history as nothing more than a long series of massacres and sackings that led to two world wars, that is, to an enthusiastic suicide".^[3] British author Douglas Murray includes "not only "war guilt and Holocaust guilt" but also a "whole gamut" tat "include" but are "by no mians limited to, the abiding guilt for colonialism and racism".^[4]

Murray describes "Western democracies" of having recently gone through a "suicidal period" during which "An appropriate level of self-criticism long ago morphed into self-distrust, then into a form of self-flagellation. A time emerged when, as the Australian writer Roger Sandall observed, inhabitants of Western democracies were taught that they had been born into guilt whilst everyone else had been born into innocence".^[5] Sandall has accused Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who had written an essay lamenting the fact that "The Crow people survive, but their culture is gone," of being less interested in the historical or cultural realities of the cultural extinction, than in "the masochistic opportunity it provides for self-flagellating exercises in Western guilt and shame".^[6]

American classicist Bruce Thornton describes Western guilt as "the eagerness of our intellectuals, scholars, and artists to don the hair shirt of colonial, imperial, racist, and xenophobic guilt," pointing to Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism as, "the most pernicious example of this cultural pathology," and dismissing Orientalism as, an "incoherent amalgam of dubious postmodern theory, sentimental Third Worldism, glaring historical errors, and Western guilt," "^[7] Philosopher and social anthropologist Ernest Gellner, bemoaned "the prevalent mood of expiation for empire," criticizing Said for "exploiting Western guilt about imperialism".^[8]

Sohrab Ahmari defines Western guilt as a "philosophical quagmire born of a sense of guilt felt by some Westerners for past sins, both real and imagined, committed against the non-Western “other.” Western guilt yields a state of perpetual self-loathing, which in turn leads its victims to celebrate any anti-Western cause as morally worthy. Thus, when Egyptians—rightly—rebel against a pro-American autocracy, their cause is automatically perceived as just."^[9]

Shelby Steele defines Western guilt as an attitude that turns the historical "sins of racism, imperialism and colonialism" into "an automatic prism on the non-Western world, a politeness.^[10]

History of the concept

According to Pascal Bruckner, the idea of the centrality of Western guilt in contemporary politics originated with the Islamo-Leftism of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) goal in the wake of Stalinism of replacing traditional Communism with a worldwide leftist movement that would "spearhead a new insurrection in the name of the oppressed". An idea that reinvigorated Western leftism in the 1960s while imbuing it with the idea that the United States and Israel are the great oppressors, and succeeded in uniting the European Left and the Islamic Republic of Iran in a world view according to which "the Jew has become the Nazi, the Palestinian the Jew and radical Islam is now the victim of Western democracy and not its executioner".^[11]

In relationship to specific countries

Australia

Many Australians understand their history as an unjust instance of settler colonialism.^[12][4]

Germany

Bernhard Schlink 2010 book Guilt About the Past, discusses the legal and cultural impact of guilt over the Holocaust in Germany, focusing on the impact of the fact that all Germans have been regarded as "collectively, and continuously, guilty," even those who where very young, or who were born after World War II.^[13] Schlink argues that German guilt is a form of narcissism that can become dysfunctional, as it did, for example, when Germany initially refused to participate in the NATO campaign to stop the Serbian attacks on Bosnian Muslims.^[13]

United States

According to Michael Walzer, Leo Casey, Michael Kazin and others, writing in Dissent, one of the responses by the American left to the September 11 attacks was to blame American actions including the Gulf War, Sanctions against Iraq, support for Saudi Arabia, and support for Israel, for provoking the September 11 attack.^[14] Walzer later described the left's response to 9/11 as a "radical failure".^[15]

Christopher Hitchens described a panel he was on three weeks after the September 11 attacks in front of a "audience of liberal New Yorkers" who "awarded blame more or less evenhandedly between the members of al Qaeda and the directors of U.S. foreign policy". Fellow panel member Oliver Stone "drew applause" when he asserted that there was a close connection between the 9/11 attacks and the Florida ballot recount, which Stone describes as, "a complete vindication of the fact that capitalism has destroyed democracy". Hitchens described Susan Sontag political analysis of 9/11 for The New Yorker as "disdainful," and criticizes Noam Chomsky's response as a dismissal of airplane attacks as "a mere bagatelle when set beside the offenses of the (American) Empire".^[16]

Richard Brookhiser wrote in the National Review that Sontag's essay made it clear that "Sontag felt no grief whatsoever, and was impatient with those who did, describing Sontag's attitude as, part of the "'we deserved it' school of thought".^[16][17]

Types of Western guilt

Postcolonial guilt

Postcolonial guilt derives from the scholarly understanding of Western imperialism and settler colonialism as unique categories of injustice that are not comparable to contemporary or historic forms of settlement, population expansion, or imperialism enacted by non-Western peoples or states. According to Harry Mount, postcolonial guilt dominates contemporary scholarship in British universities.^[18]

Sara Suleri, a Yale University scholar of postcolonial studies, understands her parents own marriage (her Welsh mother married her Pakistani father and she was born in Pakistan,) as having been motivated by her mother's feelings of white postcolonial guilt. She describes her mother as Suleri's mother as having erased the boundaries that separate the political from the personal and of having projected herself as a living symbol of the white race delivering her female sexual acquiescence as a form of penance.^[19]

In his subsection on "Western guilt," anthropologist François Bouchetoux describes the academic filed of anthropology as appropriately burdened by "Western guilt" due to the historic roots of anthropology in colonialism.^[20] Historian William Rubinstein proposes that "Western guilt" over colonialism has been enhanced by the fact that Western scholars have not only underestimated the frequency of warfare and genocidal violence in pre-literate societies, but have "distort(ed) the actual and often appalling facts of life in many pre-literate societies" because colonial administration had "already suppressed" the "most horrifying customs and practices" before the arrival of the early anthropologists on whose work western scholarly opinion relies.^[21]

Environmental guilt

Environmental geographer Martin W. Lewis argues that the environmental movement's "myth of special Western guilt" for degradation of the environment "overlooks the destruction long wrought by human beings in other regions" such as East Asia.^[22]

In relationship to specific issues

Migration policy

According to Colin Kidd, economist Paul Collier in Exodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century, argues that "Postcolonial guilt about historic injustices tends to shape responses to current migration policy, while stifling consideration of wider problems of global poverty".^[23] In a chapter entitled The Tyranny of Guilt in his 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray describes western guilt as a form of self-flagellation, a kind of moral intoxicant that "People imbibe because they like it... It lifts them up and exalts them. Rather than being people responsible for themselves and answerable to those they know, they become the self-appointed representatives of the living and the dead, the bearers of a terrible history as well as the self-appointed redeemers of mankind. From being nobody one becomes somebody".^[4] Murry argues that Western guilt has rendered Europe unable to discus the cultural impact of mass immigration from the culturally distinctive Muslim world.^[4]

Islamic terrorism

Pascal Bruckner's 2006 book The Tyranny of Guilt argues that the West has inadvertently collaborated with Islamists who seek to destroy Western liberal values and political freedom by focusing on western sins such as imperialism, racism and Nazism, and thereby conceding the right of Islamists to impose their standards on the Western countries to which they immigrate. Julia Pascal summarizes part of Bruckner's argument as an argument that "Europe has never recovered from its own barbarity and that now it seeks to cleanse its original sin with a new Eden; even if this Paradise has 70 waiting virgins".^[11] Brendan Simms as, "an eagerness to apologize for the sins of colonialism and genocide and other Western crimes," that defines every Western state as a "penitant... never an innocent victim of terrorist attack but a deserving one: It has, after all, provoked the wrath of the oppressed, either at home or abroad".^[13]

According to Shelby Steele, the burden of "Western guilt" causes Westerners to misunderstand the causes of Islamic extremism, misunderstanding the motivation of Islamist terror attacks by groups including Hamas and Hezbollah as a response to Western imperialist oppression, when, in his view, they are a product of the fact that the "end of oppression and colonialism... forced the Muslim world to compete with the West..." and the Muslim "sense of defeat that turned into extremism."^[10]

In his 2007 book The Suicide of Reason; Radical Islam's Threat to the West, Lee Harris argues that this argument from feelings of guilt has replaced reason and Enlightenment.^[24]

Cambridge historian Brendan Simms, using the term "penitent state", describes Western guilt as an extreme eagerness to apologize for historic sins such as colonialism and genocide, arguing that a penitent or guilty people, by definition, can never be the innocent victim of a terrorist attack, since its past behavior defines it as an oppressor deserving of the just wrath of the oppressed.^[25]

Foreign aid

Economist Karl Brunner argued that the New International Economic Order proposals put forward by developing countries in the 1970s were a kind of ideological warfare drawing on the inclination of Western intellectuals to feel an, in his opinion, unjustified "Western guilt" over Third World poverty.^[26] In his 1977 book, The Inequality of Nations, Robert W. Tucker argued that "Western guilt" over the poverty of nations was unjustified.^[27] British political commentator Melanie Phillips argues that foreign aid has "little to do with relieving the plight of the oppressed. It is instead about alleviating Western guilt and parading consciences on sleeves".^[28]

References