From Critical Consciousness to Oikophobia Do our enemies think and believe as we do? by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/from-critical-consciousness-to-oikophobia/
The widespread campus protests against Israel that followed the savage attacks by Hamas on our ally and fellow liberal democracy, were unprecedented in their solidarity with terrorist organizations representing a religion fundamentally opposed to modern Western civilization and its Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian roots.
Sadly and shamefully, demonizing Israel is unexceptional and expected from Western progressives and Leftists––purveyors of a “history” that traffics in unhistorical, ideologically mendacious assertions about imperialism and colonialism. These critics have adopted those lies and made them, along with specious charges of “racism” and “genocide,” the original sin of Israel’s creation and continued existence. The UN also has adopted those malign tropes, and made Israel the “Jew of nations,” the global villain par excellence, while also supporting and funding Hamas’ jihadist violence.
A Western civilizational innovation––critical consciousness, the self-examination and criticism of one’s own political community, practice, and values––has now gone rancid and led to a self-loathing oikophobia, the irrational fear, loathing, and hatred of one’s own culture and fellow citizens that encourages our enemies and rivals.
Domestic anti-Americanism, for example, has invaded our culture and schools, and has become a spurious token of intellectual sophistication, “citizen of the world” cosmopolitanism, and the hallmark of critical consciousness. In reality it is slow-motion suicide dressed up as high fashion.
Contemporary Anti-Americanism began with Marxist sympathizers and fellow-travelers, and spread during the Cold War as a weapon for the Left. It flourished in Europe, which had influential communist parties. The European Left, as French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote, “has a grudge against America mainly because the latter has succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity, power, the tendency toward uniformity of economic conditions––these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention, in other words by capitalism, which every well-brought-up intellectual has been taught to despise.”
These days both hatreds––anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism––are dog-bites-man stories, filled with stale clichés, empty rituals like flag-burning, irrational bigotry, knee-jerk censorship and social “cancellation,” and political sermons filled with preposterous lies and toxic ideologies.
The university protests ongoing since last October, however, mark an escalation of oikophobia––irrational fear and loathing of one’s own culture and fellow citizens–– among American students that go far beyond the juvenile identification in the past with murderous tyrants like Uncle Ho, Chairman Mao, and the psychopathic Che Guevara. Now students march in keffiyehs and chant genocidal slogans redolent of Nazi Germany.
Even more incoherent, today’s female student protestors, who used to march women’s rights, unfettered sexual agency, and personal autonomy, are now donning the head-scarves and veils that signify in orthodox Islamic sharia laws that subordinate women to patriarchal control and limitations of their freedom, with honor-killings of those who exercise their own sexual agency and personal freedom. At the same time, these protestors attack the country and civilization that bestows upon them those freedoms. Today, the freest, best-fed, safest women in history are siding with the illiberal ideology of the West’s oldest enemy.
These dangerous novelties are in part the fruit of a shift in Western civilization over the last several centuries. The free West was born in large part in ancient Greece, especially Athens, where we first find the sustained, systemized cultivation of a way of thinking we can call critical consciousness. This innovation was the foundation of philosophy, science, and analytical, sometimes dissenting, examinations of society’s beliefs, mores, values, political structures, laws, and policies, as well as the impulse and willingness to stand back from humanity, nature, and even the gods and make them objects of rational arguments, criticism, and the search for their meaning and significance.
This practice of self-examination and intellectual curiosity over two millennia created the core of Western civilization, and has been its greatest cultural advantage, creating the remarkable progress and power that made it the most dominant civilization in history. The freedom of individuals to analyze and criticize power and orthodoxy has exposed abuses, and discovered more humane alternatives.
Yet critical consciousness unchecked by respect for the limits of human knowledge and creativity, can become toxic. For two millennia these limits were the purview of the gods in antiquity, and later the Judeo-Christian doctrines that provided the moral and ethical foundations of the West, as well as the guardrails against the hubris that stepped over the divine limits on humanity’s destructive passions.
As the esteemed Classicist Gilbert Murray warned, given the tragic, permanent limits of human life and action––time, chance, irrational passions and impulses––the achievements made possible by critical consciousness will eventually lead to our destruction. Then the ancient Greeks will have become the “great wrecker in human history” that “held up false lights which have lured our ship to dangerous places.”
Moreover, the habit of critical consciousness can be dangerous in another way––the discarding of common sense and practical wisdom, and the attempt to use science to replace both that comprise the collective wisdom of humanity’s millennia of experience. That impulse to privilege science over God-given morality leads to the most pernicious fallacy of modernity––the “category error” that applies the tools and protocols of material science to human beings with minds and free will––that is, transcendent souls.
Next, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet shows, “thinking too precisely on the event,” especially in foreign policy and military strategies, can be paralyzing and dangerous when immediate action is necessary to prevent evil from triumphing. As Secretary of State George Shultz warned, “We cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of Nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how we respond” to aggressions.
We’ve had the evidence supporting Shultz’s wisdom in the West’s history since World War II, which has been dominated by the idealistic conceit of a “rules based international order,” that privileges diplomatic engagement, multinational institutions, and negotiated “agreements,” over force.
In other words, verbal processes comprising “words, words, words” that enable us to “lose the name of action,” as Hamlet says, either through a failure of nerve, the fear of political risks, or the preference for spending money not on materiel and military preparedness, but on distribution via government entitlements to political clients.
Moreover, this foreign policy idealism enables utopian fantasies that we can create the juvenile utopia of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” where there’s “nothing to live or die for.” We’d be better off heeding the wisdom of Plato: “Every nation is in a natural state of war with every other.”
Endemic among Western intellectuals for most of the 20th century, the “Hamlet disease” now has become a fashionable reflex among the Leftist media and academic elites, one whose display asserts intellectual and moral superiority and “nuance” over the blood-thirsty, unreflective, realists who scorn analytic timidity and itch to settle conflicts with violence.
Also, like the “rules-based international order,” the Hamlet disease promotes a quasi-pacifism that weakens patriotism, since in the Leftist gospel, patriotism and love of one’s nation is a precursor to fascism. These attitudes contribute to the serious difficulty our services now face in recruiting military personnel.
Finally, it’s clear that a considerable number of today’s Americans lack the beliefs, character, and common sense of those who won World War II, and thereby created the freest and richest human beings in history. Back then, whatever doubts, misgivings, or fears Americans may have had, they still had core beliefs that protected them from the Hamlet disease or unreal idealism. They knew what they believed, and they knew that what they believed was superior to what their enemies believed.
Americans also knew that the freedom and autonomy of individuals can be enjoyed only by those willing to defend them whatever the cost—and that means knowing not only what to die for, but what to kill for. They accepted what Lincoln called the “awful arithmetic”: sometimes you have to kill a thousand today so that ten thousand don’t die tomorrow.
Finally, they knew too that all human actions carry unforeseen and sometimes horrific consequences, but that inaction frequently entails consequences a thousand times more horrific. And most important, they clearly understood that appeasing aggression never worked, but only invited more frequent and virulent attacks. In short, from their experience and faith they had the tragic vision of human life: since irrational evil is an eternal constant, sometimes you have to choose between the bad and the worse, and sometimes you have to get blood on your hands.
Apparently, some in our postwar generations are very different sorts of people. They are utopians: unless actions are guaranteed success, entail no unpleasant consequences, and come with a very small cost, they’d rather pass and hope for the best. They are therapeutic: if action will make even our enemies, let alone ourselves, suffer physically or even emotionally, then action is better avoided. They are self-loathing: because we Americans are not angels, we cannot go and kill devils. They are cultural relativists: who are we to say our culture of democracy and freedom is better than another, they ask––but always from Berkeley or Manhattan, never from Damascus or Tehran.
Worst of all, they no longer seem to believe in the unique values of our civilization, the goods of freedom and equality and material prosperity that these postmodern critics “deconstruct,” even as they enjoy and abuse them. They have forgotten Thucydides’ simple wisdom: “Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on courage.”
President Trump so far has undone much of the damage to America’s prestige and interests that the Obama and Biden administrations wrought. Part of their failures reflect assumptions that our enemies think and believe as we do. As historian of Soviet brutal tyranny Robert Conquest wrote, “This trap is precisely the error that must be avoided in foreign affairs.” Let’s hope that Donald Trump stays the realist course, and doesn’t fall into that trap.
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