Western Self-Contempt

Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations

Benedict Beckeld

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501763199
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

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.

Chapter 1 OIKOPHOBIA IN ANCIENT GREECE

Western civilization rests on two pillars: the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian. Judaism may already have been in existence in some very primitive form when the first word of Greek was recorded in the hieroglyphic syllabary of Linear B on a clay tablet in the murky confines of a Mycenaean fortress. But Judaism became a part of the West only later, and entered it sideways, as it were, through Christianity, in the waning days of the Roman Empire. And so the West begins with Greece, and it is there that we find the first clear case of oikophobia.

With Greece we can move straight into the period of the city-states, because apart from archaeological remains, the culture of the so-called Mycenaean Greeks survives only in the tales told by Homer several centuries later, in the Iliad and Odyssey, and these are only weak reflections of that culture. Around the turn of the millennium the Greeks, along with much of the eastern Mediterranean world, descend into a Dark Age which to this day is not very clearly understood. And so Greek civilization proper—the West—begins as the Greeks emerge from this ancient Dark Age into what is known as the Archaic Greek era (ca. 800–480 BC). A people awakens (the primordial opening bars of Bach’s violin chaconne glitter all around) and, like a child, is roused by the sudden understanding of its own influence on the surrounding environment. Non-Greeks—the Other—do not yet feature very strongly, and there is a general Greek mentality that is at this stage under the influence of the mythical age as represented by Homer, where life is brief, difficult, and heroic. There are glimmers of glory and joy only for those quick enough to seize it. Such a mentality has no time for cultural considerations one way or the other, and simply lives in the moment. There is little space for metaphysics in this world, only for the exploits of the individual and his tribelet.¹ Strictly speaking, of course, there is really no such thing as the “original” state of a people: things are always in flux, and what seems to be a beginning in fact merely follows upon something else more obscure, where various traditions mix and wander from one culture to another. Nonetheless, there comes a time when something approaching a civilizational awareness—of one’s own society as a cohesive, separate entity—begins to take shape.

The Archaic Greeks develop rather organically and independently, moving slowly from myth to science and rationalism through the work of the pre-Socratic philosophers in the sixth and early fifth centuries BC. They adopt what is useful from Egyptian, Babylonian, and subsequently Persian sources, and leave the rest without much concern for whether those neighboring and older civilizations are superior or not. The position of most philosophers on the peripheries of what is then the Greek world, in Ionia (western Turkey) and Magna Graecia (southern Italy), is certainly helpful in this regard, and it is why, through borrowings from other cultures, the periphery develops faster at this time than the Greek mainland, which remains more primitive for some time.²

But then the late Archaic Greeks, after their Ionian cities have come under foreign domination, clash with the Persians and, with Athens at the helm, finally emerge victorious from the absolutely crucial civilizational encounters at Marathon (490 BC); Thermopylae, Artemisium, and Salamis (all three 480 BC); and Plataea and Mycale (both 479 BC). The battle of Marathon offers a glimpse of two cultures at different stages of development. Herodotus, the West’s first historian, records the Persians’ incredulity (Histories 6.112) that the Greek hoplites simply charge at them without the support of either cavalry or missile troops. The Athenians and other mainland Greeks are at a relatively early stage in their culture, where each man fights with admirable naïveté against an in many ways much more sophisticated foe; the Persians, with an older civilization, have had time to develop a much more intricate force of different departments and are not prepared to face an enemy that simply launches itself headfirst at them, with the bravado of men fighting for their families and homes. The Ionian Greeks, on the other hand, having developed culture and wealth, are less hardy and stubborn than their mainland brethren in the face of Persian aggression. The Ionians’ proximity to the Babylonian, Lydian, and then Persian civilizations has had both a positive—cultural—as well as a negative—wealth and sloth—effect. For example, at a time when the Athenians are still composed mainly of yeoman farmers—people willing to die for their homesteads, for their children, and for their aging parents—the pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes in Ionia is already criticizing his contemporaries for having been ruined by Lydian luxury. He says of them (Fragment 3, slightly abbreviated): “Learning useless luxury from the Lydians, they went to the market wearing purple-dyed cloaks, strutting with their pretty hair and drenched and pungent with sophisticated oils.”

Already here we begin to see what will be a repetitive pattern, namely that with wealth comes an unwillingness to die for one’s civilization, and with that unwillingness oikophobia goes hand in hand. The fact that some pre-Socratics, such as Anaxagoras and Protagoras, are chased out of backwards, village-like Athens for their scientific or freethinking teachings, as reported by the biographer Diogenes Laertius in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (2.12 and 9.52), indicates how the Greek mainland for a long time is less advanced than the periphery. We can thus recognize little signs of proto-oikophobia or perhaps allophilia among the Ionian Greeks early on, without this meaning that Athens is anywhere close to oikophobia at that time. But I shall confine my remarks here mainly to the development of Athenian culture.

Subsequent Greek conquests, particularly that of Byzantium (478 BC), which wrests control of the Black Sea trade from the Persians and almost completely cuts off the latter from Europe, ensure the creation of a large and burgeoning Athenian empire, while the traditionalist and parochial Spartans withdraw to their own borders. At this point, xenophobia and self-love among the Greeks in general and the Athenians in particular have developed to their fullest.

Entering upon the Classical age, which by scholarly consent runs from after the Persian Wars in the 470s BC to the death of Alexander the so-called Great in 323 BC, the mainland Greeks begin to become aware of themselves. It is because self-awareness is one of the prerequisites of oikophobia that the Greeks offer us the first clear example of this phenomenon. Once they have left their mythical past behind and scored successes against neighboring peoples, they become aware of their own power, knowledge, and uniqueness, and begin to analyze these. And self-analysis requires a distancing of the self from itself, in order to view the object of study in its entirety, so that the people becomes more objective toward itself. One of the earliest hints of this in literature is Aeschylus’s play The Persians (472 BC), the only extant Greek tragedy based not on myth but on a historical event—and a recent one at that—namely the naval battle of Salamis eight years earlier, in which the playwright himself presumably took part. In the play, we see events from the point of view of the Other, namely the vanquished Persians, who react with shock and humanity at their lost cause. They are portrayed not as some faceless, evil horde, but as human beings with a sense of hope and tragedy. This is a remarkable achievement for a work of literature of such antiquity, especially considering the fact that it was to be presented at a dramatic competition before a judgmental audience of Athenian men, many of whom had personally fought against the Persians and had friends who had fallen in battle. The Athenians, though their cause had been just, since they had fought for their very homes against an imperialist aggressor, understand from their benches in the theater that war victimizes also those who fight unjustly, and that the suffering of losing loved ones does not distinguish between cultures. If we are pleasantly surprised that the Athenians were this open-minded, we must be astonished at the fact that they voted to award the first prize to Aeschylus. They have internalized, already at this early stage, the subsequent Jewish lesson that one should not rejoice at the demise of one’s enemies. In Jewish tradition, God rebukes the angels for wanting to sing his praise as the Egyptian charioteers pursuing the Israelites are drowning in the Red Sea. To paraphrase somewhat: The enemy soldiers, too, are human beings, and my work—why should you sing in joy, when my children are drowning in the sea? (Talmud, Megillah 10b and Sanhedrin 39b).

Euripides, the third great Attic tragedian after Aeschylus and Sophocles, almost routinely questions conventional ways of thinking in his plays. For example, his in some ways sympathetic portrayal of the title character in his Medea (431 BC) raises the question of what a woman is supposed to do when suffering injustice in a patriarchal world where there is no higher authority to which she may turn for succor. He also shatters traditional myth. In Heracles (416 BC), for instance, Euripides destroys the Greek gods, with the exception of Athena, by having them prove so evil, incapable, and spiteful, so unworthy of being worshipped, that it is only through human love and friendship, here between the kindly Theseus and the broken hero Heracles, that salvation can be found. He eventually reconstitutes the gods in a new image, through Artemis’s intervention in Iphigenia in Aulis (staged posthumously in 405 BC). In several versions of the myth, the goddess Artemis commands that Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia in order to get wind in the sails of his fleet. But Euripides does not accept that a god should require an innocent human sacrifice; he instead portrays her as a benevolent force that substitutes a deer for Iphigenia on the altar in the last moment, even though the girl had heroically taken it upon herself to die for the sake of the Greek navy sailing on to Troy. So instead of making his play about the struggle between religious or political duty and personal desire, Euripides steps out of the myth and asks his audience why on earth they should believe such a thing in the first place.³

Mention should also be made of the fragment from the otherwise lost play Sisyphus, by Euripides or perhaps Critias. In this surviving textual snippet, someone seemingly atheist is arguing that the gods were merely invented in order to frighten people into behaving morally. This is probably the first expression in history of this nowadays popular viewpoint. So in the development of Attic tragedy is found an increasing tendency to question traditional Greek attitudes, even to some extent Greek religion itself.

Drama aside, it is above all in the more or less historical and scientific treatises that we see what is properly a Greek self-study: Herodotus’s historical, anthropological, and sociological comparisons between the Greeks and other peoples he visited (Histories, ca. 440 BC); Thucydides’s perceptive observations not only of the Greek and Athenian character but also of human nature in general (History of the Peloponnesian War, last decade of the fifth century BC); Plato’s conservative mocking of Athenian society and democracy in the Republic (ca. 380 BC); and Aristotle’s establishment of countless scientific disciplines, perhaps most importantly, in the present context, of literary theory in his Poetics (ca. 335 BC), where he examines the literature of his own culture. The degree of self-examination in these works, and many others, has no parallel in any other civilization before the Greeks; it is the Greeks who invent theory.

Once external foes have been overcome and a measure of wealth and leisure established, intelligent men begin to focus on internal matters and to write about them. This is indeed similar to how Aristotle explains the rise of the pre-Socratics, in Metaphysics 982b: “This kind of science began to be pursued, for the purpose of leisure and pastime, when almost all necessities of life had been taken care of.” Nonetheless, this heightened self-awareness, though often facilitating self-critique, is only a prerequisite for, and not identical with, oikophobia. Aeschylus wishes to be remembered more for his participation in the military defense of Greece than for his dramas: he is neither xenophobic nor oikophobic, and he does not set the Persians on any sort of pedestal or ascribe to their culture more than its due. Euripides’s work is full of Athenian patriotism—it is not for naught that, in the play Heracles already referred to, it is Theseus, primordial king of Athens, who rescues the son of Zeus from suicide, and only Athena herself who puts an end to the carnage—even though, in the end, Euripides abandons his native city and heads north upon the invitation of the Macedonian king Archelaus I. Although Euripides is often coupled in intellectual matters with Socrates (on whom see below), he thus remains pro-Athenian, even if his patriotism knows certain bounds. Herodotus, for his part, is happy to travel but thinks the Greek world best, especially Athens, which he seems to prefer (Histories 5.78) to his native Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, which is under tyrannical Persian sway. Thucydides has Pericles utter some of the most patriotically beautiful words imaginable on the greatness of Athens and the indomitable Athenian spirit (History of the Peloponnesian War 2.35–46). Aristotle considers it quite clear, in many different passages of his works, that his Greek compatriots are culturally superior to other peoples. So these men, and others, are able to analyze and even question their own traditions without thereby slipping into oikophobia. This self-awareness, however, which eventually becomes the natural outcropping of a cultured people, will over time have both positive and negative effects.

Hand in hand with this cultural, literary-scientific development goes the legal and political development. These two will of course in some way reflect each other in every civilization. A gradual rejection of one’s own traditions is accompanied by a fragmentation of the populace into smaller interest groups that will view the closer threat—other interest groups of the same people—as more urgent than the more distant Other. A conservative stubbornness holds a very protective and exclusive view of citizenship and political participation in the early Greek city-state (and this will be repeated among the Romans), but things gradually begin to change. The crushing naval victory at Salamis, won by poor and simple oarsmen rather than by comparatively wealthy, landed hoplites, leads the poor to demand more rights. This is why the conservative Plato views that battle in a negative light (Laws 707a–c), even though it was a Greek victory. He feels that it caused a more assertive citizenry of individuals who believe more in themselves than in the community, and he is echoed by Aristotle at Politics 1274a and 1304a. (Similarly, young Americans during the Vietnam War will successfully argue that if they can be asked to die for their country, they should be allowed to vote as well; this is a common phenomenon in history, another example being the enlistment of Russian serfs to fight in the Crimean War, contributing to the end of serfdom.) Increasingly, the rich and the poor, the democrats and the oligarchists, come to hate each other more than either group hates the Persians. Since the common civilizational enemy has been successfully repulsed, it can no longer serve as an effective target for and outlet of the people’s wrath. Human psychology generally requires an adversary for the purpose of self-identification, and so a new adversary is crafted: other Greeks, and other Athenians.

An empowerment of the lower classes through this postwar democratization in Athens also leads to an increasing culture of dependence on the government. As the voices of regular people start to count more and more, the democratic leader Pericles and his aristocratic opponent Cimon begin to compete with each other by essentially bribing Athenian citizens voting in the Ecclesia, the Athenian Assembly. After the ostracism of his rival, Pericles’s dominance in Athens (ca. 461–429) involves ever more largesse for the purpose of maintaining support from the politically strengthened populace. As governmental largesse often does, Pericles’s generosity makes men ask what more they can get from the government, and makes them less willing to sacrifice themselves for the state. Late in the fifth century BC, payment to the participants in the Ecclesia is introduced, so that even the poorest citizens can afford to take off from work and partake in government there. One can look upon such a policy as equitable and fair—just as one may entirely agree with the brave trireme oarsmen at Salamis—while at the same time recognizing that it furthers the mentality of avarice, as well as the attitude that the state is simply there for one’s own direct personal benefit and gain. For it should be considered an axiom of human nature that dependence leads not to gratitude but to resentment—already Thucydides knows this—and when the state provides goods at no charge, or even cash handouts, the people come to consider themselves entitled to it and develop the mentality that asks not what service one can provide to others, but how much one can get from others, primarily the state. Dependence makes people resentful and miserly, and the more they receive from the state, the less they will respect it. This is why there is often a dynamic of mutual strengthening between oikophobia and government largesse, and oikophobia and the entitlement mentality go hand in hand.

Elements of this can be seen in Thucydides (1.77), where some Athenian diplomats explain to their Spartan hosts that subjects of the Athenian empire are more resentful precisely because of Athenian generosity than they would have been if the Athenians had treated them with brutal force from the start. Another example (3.37–39) is where Cleon of Athens, in the famous debate on the fate of the rebellious Mytilenians, argues that showing kindness and mercy will not make the Athenians more liked, and that it is a general rule of human nature that people all too often despise those who treat them well and admire those who are firm. This will be echoed by the Roman commander Vocula in Tacitus’s Histories (4.57). Once this sense of entitlement becomes the predominant outlook, the citizens of a state begin to compete more with each other, while the external enemy recedes into the background. Over time it is forgotten why the enemy, soundly defeated, was ever an enemy, and he seems harmless, even benevolent, in comparison to the ruffi...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation
• Introduction
• 1. Oikophobia in Ancient Greece
• 2. Oikophobia as Relativism
• 3. Oikophobia in Rome
• 4. The Role of Religion
• 5. Oikophobia in France
• 6. Oikophobia in Britain
• 7. Oikophobia as Positivism
• 8. Oikophobia in the United States
• 9. Cyclical and Progressive Theory
• 10. Oikophobia in the United States
• 11. The Confluence of the West
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index