the tyranny of guilt an essay on western masochism

Islamic terrorism? Caused by Western imperialism. Our litanies of shame differ from Woodrow Wilsons naive Americanism only in the conclusions they draw. We are still the great exception, but now we’re exceptionally bad. The vanity remained intact, transforming itself into a belief that America is the exceptional source of evil in the world. But it did not lead to a more nuanced view of America’s place in the world. The traumas of the 1960s undermined this complacent belief in American exceptionalism. 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.įor a long time the liberal establishment in America believed that our society was the source of good in the world. Why? To begin, the notion that the West is the Great Satan feeds our egoism. We seem to relish denunciation for its own sake.

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.

As he knew, the pressure of criticism pushes us toward a fuller and more self-aware grasp of the truth. Thomas began his analysis of the truths of Christianity by surveying the objections. 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. To a certain extent, our present self-laceration reflects one of the virtues of Western culture. Capitalism depends upon the exploitation of the worlds poor. The colonization of the New World amounted to genocide. We are imperialists, racists, and purveyors of unsustainable consumption that threatens to engulf the world in an environmental disaster. 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. I wouldnt say that John Rawls or Jürgen Habermas or Benedict XVI fit that description. ∿rom 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 latters hypocrisy, violence, and abomination.

The tyranny of guilt an essay on western masochism