Self-Hatred and Appeasement

 In tribal societies people defended their own through thick and thin. We have reversed that process. Our first instinct under pressure is to dishonour our own society—witness the recent attack on the Anzac tradition. Accustomed to being tolerant, when problems rise we fall over backwards to understand the other side, to acknowledge its legitimacy, even at the cost of our own. But there exist ideological takeover-merchants who are non-compromisers, who manipulate our goodwill for their own non-tolerant ends, and who play for fools people who think along Uniting Church lines—always defer to the complainant.

The grand mal form of this disease is appeasing the present Islamist threat—“the new Vichy syndrome”. The petit mal form is evident in the follies of reverse discrimination. The US Supreme Court will soon be composed of five Catholic and three Jewish judges—WASPs need not apply. The descendants of the English Mayflower pilgrims who fled discrimination to found the country now face a bizarre new form of discrimination. As Brian Coman recently noted, Piss Christ can be displayed publicly, but in some cases a crucifix cannot. Charters of rights compel us to embrace our attackers while demeaning our own beliefs.

A pressing new danger is the co-existence of self-hatred and yearning for the Other. The 1930s and 1940s saw fellow-travelling appeasement of the Other in the form of dictators like Hitler and Stalin. The decades since have been marked by the self-flagellating “adversary culture” of the elites. The worst example is the accusation by some Australians that their own country is guilty of genocide. But self-hatred and admiring the exotic Other are two sides of the same coin. Now with an exotic Other, Islam, producing a new breed of admiring fellow travellers, both problems are on show at the same time.

Three impressive books have recently appeared analysing this problem. The psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple and the French nouvelle philosophe Pascal Bruckner analyse the peculiar mood of despondency and self-satisfaction which characterises Europe today. Both doubt that Europe can create a pan-European patriotism as its social glue. They write with a wide-ranging rhetorical clarity which can dissect the torturous rationalisations of academic theorists. Thomas Sowell documents the intellectual delinquencies of the past century which underlie the present mood of self-repudiation.

It’s a bit scary that Europe, a region we identify with above all others, has elites which have become guilt-ridden, bureaucratic and peacenik. Europe is the sick man of Europe, inclined to neurotic swings between complacency and despondency, between arrogance and self-hatred. Dalrymple calls the dominant mindset a “miserabilist” outlook on life, deeply ashamed of Europe’s war-ravaged past and its colonial ventures, seeing itself in decline, and fearful of a future where Muslim immigrants will replace a lack of indigenous children. Bruckner notes that “a mechanical denunciation of the West” has become a “spiritual routine”, a habit of mind with a life of its own, unhinged from events themselves. Basking in their privileged style of life, Europeans have sunk into a comfort zone on a continental scale: keep problems and foreigners out. Young people seek the security of government positions with guaranteed pensions, one cause of the current Greek meltdown. A majority of the French wanted Saddam Hussein to defeat the US-led forces in the first Gulf War.

Europe once led the world. The current orgy of self-recrimination means it now considers it’s in the lead again by virtue of being the most guilty, the most apologetic. Dalrymple writes of “Western intellectuals who saw the self-denigration of the West in general, and Europe in particular¸ as the path to moral self-aggrandizement. The more thorough the self-denigration, the more generous, open, and liberal-minded the person.” Both writers see the fashionable trajectory of apology, confession for past wrongs, abasement and repentance as a poor secular parody of the Christian virtue of forgiveness. As Dalrymple, not himself a religious believer, points out, religions taught people a mixture of humility and acceptance which today’s public penitents don’t have. They indulge in remorse, a disabling emotion, which Bruckner believes “becomes a second offence that adds to the first without cancelling it”. They always need a new grievance, and someone else to blame.

Over the last few centuries people argued that diverse tribes would benefit, as they did, from being formed into nations. Bruckner shows they are being regressively driven back into being separate tribes again:

[Under] the basic credo of multiculturalism … their good progressive friends set blacks and Arabs, forever prisoners of their history, back into the context of their former domination and subject them to ethnic chauvinism. As during the colonial era, they are put under house arrest in their skins, in their origins. We can no longer see others as equals but must see them as inferiors, victims of perpetual oppression whose past ordeals interest us more than their present merits.

The result is that, as Sowell puts it, “a newborn baby enters the world supplied with pre-packaged grievances against other babies born on the same day”. A scramble to acquire official victim status, which confers certain short-term benefits, results. But in the long run this relegates disadvantaged groups to the status of museum pieces. Trapped in a round of grievances foisted upon them by us, they find it harder, as Noel Pearson has pointed out, to resurrect themselves by acquiring their own self-confidence. Our well-meaning compassion hurts them. Civil libertarians who throw around words like racism, homophobia and Islamophobia are simply stopping discussion. The language of freedom ends up in restriction. Bruckner points out that in considering slavery, the Atlantic triangular trade is the only one mentioned—the African and Asian slave trades, equally extensive and largely Muslim, have been airbrushed from history.

The two things the French feel most guilty about are, first, the collapse of 1940—the Vichy regime, and allowing French Jews to be deported for extermination—and second, their own history of colonialism, especially in North Africa. By a perverse logic this explains why Israel and the USA are their great hate objects today. Israel is seen as doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews, the Israelis are the new Nazis, and trying not to let it happen again in the Middle East expiates French guilt for having let it happen in the 1940s. The French have got over their taste for colonial ventures but the brash Americans haven’t. Those New World cowboys interfere everywhere, whereas we tired, quietist Old World cynics have learnt our lesson. So pervasive is anti-Americanism that many public figures—including Jean Baudrillard, John le Carré, Ken Livingstone and Jacques Derrida—supported with “sophisticated” arguments the 9/11 Twin Towers destruction and blamed the West, which, they argued, has “structural terrorism” which is worse than killing people. We are the real terrorists though we have killed no one, just as we committed genocide against the Stolen Generations, who were not killed.

The best evidence that Islamist terrorists are a threat to us is that they say they are, just as Hitler said he was. I think the chances are they won’t succeed—9/11 was a tactical mistake, alerting us to the problem. But with Hamas and Iran having Islamist governments, with Somalia and Yemen providing sanctuary to al Qaeda, with Iraq and Afghanistan in the balance, with Egypt and Algeria fighting off internal Muslim insurgencies, with Hezbollah having a veto power in Lebanon, and with the ultimate strategy of the Turkish government causing suspicions, the situation is not looking promising, and it’s prudent to consider a worst-case scenario.

Since 9/11, Muslims have, strangely, become the flavour of the decade. Television is full of documentaries exaggerating the golden age of tolerant Muslim culture in Andalusia; the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chief Justice of England have suggested sharia law might be considered for Britain; Muslims are depicted as the victims of our racist society, and so on. Islamists globally and extreme environmentalists locally are unsatisfiable—if you reach an agreement, they see it as a sign of weakness and ask for more.

The current mania for apologies plays on guilt and breaks down our self-belief; an apology never satisfies, as we saw with the one Rudd gave. Sowell quotes Churchill in the 1930s saying: “every concession which has been made [to Germany] has been followed by a fresh demand”. But if you take a stand and say No, it changes the psychological momentum, separating the majority of reasonable people from the extremists. Switzerland’s minarets referendum was a symbolic act saying thus far and no further. Before the referendum the Swiss elites opposed the ban, and public opinion was said to be unfavourable, yet the actual vote was decisively in favour. Gordon Brown’s “bigot” comment shows how out of touch the political class is. Dalrymple concludes:

 [Muslims] are unlikely to pose a fundamental threat to European societies unless those societies let them do so. In fact, the Archbishop of Canterbury who—unlike Pope Benedict XVI—mistakes cowardice for bravery, surrender for victory, and platitudes for insights, is far more of a danger to Britain than Islamic fundamentalism on its own could ever be. He is, of course, the finest flower, if I may so put it, of an entire intellectual and social tendency.

That tendency is to surrender one’s own position and to have dialogue with problems rather than facing them.

The world economic crisis and the rise of Islam have re-energised the Old Left, as Bruckner understands:

All intellectuals bow down before it [the Left]: no speech is accepted if it does not begin with a firm condemnation of the market. Thus we see old 68ers, exhausted courtiers who have repented of all their compromises, all their despicable acts, suddenly going back into action and plunging back into the anti-capitalism of their youth. Everywhere in the middle classes “bourgeois bolshevism” is thriving. There is no artist, no journalist, no actor, who does not claim to be subversive, especially if he or she receives a government grant. The rebel used to be a man of the people who wanted to shock the bourgeois; now he is a bourgeois who wants to shock the people.

These people are incongruously called progressives, while liberal thinkers like Bruckner are deemed reactionaries.

Dalrymple and Bruckner believe European pessimism is overdone. Both notice the current vogue of intellectuals predicting catastrophes—the whole world is going to be jeopardised by global freezing, or global warming, or AIDS, or mad cow disease, or the millennium bug, or—the latest scare—Muslims dominating Europe by immigration, fecundity and terrorism. Dalrymple is more sanguine: scary projections of present trends are predictions that may not eventuate. The Muslim birth-rate in Europe is declining back to normal levels, and most Muslims are attracted to European life, though Dalrymple admits some may regress under fundamentalist pressures. They have a love-hate relationship with Europe, and obsessive debauchery can suddenly swing over to excessive puritanism: “For these people, life is either total self-indulgence or total self-denial: the concept of l’homme moyen sensual is utterly alien to them.” Bruckner concludes that Europe has the great advantage of being able to reflect on itself, an ability Islam doesn’t have.

Thomas Sowell, a well-known US Afro-American economist, social commentator and columnist, documents the major mistakes of thinkers over the last century. Since the Second World War, especially with the rise of the media, intellectuals have never been more influential, but commentators like Bertrand Russell, Paul Ehrlich and Noam Chomsky have caused a lot of trouble with wild predictions in areas outside their expertise. Maddened by ideas and by their own inflated egos, intellectuals are prone to make exaggerated claims, believing they have all the answers and can save the world from catastrophes that benighted ordinary folk don’t even know exist. Intellectuals find it hard to operate at room temperature. They rarely account for the unintended consequences of their ideas, or apologise for them, though they are experts at demanding apologies from others. Unlike such fields as medicine or engineering, there are no external tests in the humanities and no penalty for failure—they are cut off from feedback. Sowell believes the dispersed, multi-faceted wisdom of ordinary people or the market is usually more reliable than the constricted group-think of academics: “The intelligentsia have treated the conclusions of their visions as axioms to be followed, rather than hypotheses to be tested.”

Sowell points to two conflicting visions of society. Many intellectuals from Rousseau on have seen themselves as anointed beings who believe that “social contrivances are the root cause of human happiness”. A minority, including Edmund Burke and Isaiah Berlin, share the more tragic view that “inherent flaws of human beings are the fundamental problem and social contrivances are simple imperfect means of trying to cope with that problem”. Our knowledge and human aspirations are limited. We live in a constrained world: “Civilization itself [is] something that requires great and constant efforts merely to be preserved—with those efforts to be based on actual experience, not on ‘exciting’ new theories.” We have to work with Berlin’s “crooked timber of humanity”. There are no short cuts.

In addition, Sowell argues, intellectuals tend to use arguments that loosen the bonds that hold society together. They have sought to replace the groups into which people have sorted themselves, with groupings created and imposed by the intelligentsia. Ties of family, religion and patriotism, for example, have long been treated as suspect or detrimental by the intelligentsia, and new ties that intellectuals have created, such as class—and more recently “gender”—have been projected as either more real or more important.

A recent trend is for some academics to deem themselves “public intellectuals”—super intellectuals with celebrity status. Richard Posner has said that “many public intellectuals are academics of modest distinction fortuitously thrust into the limelight”. Sowell comments that “the demand for public intellectuals is largely manufactured by themselves”.

Intellectuals tend to be deficient in economic understanding; they don’t understand wealth creation and fall back on income distribution. Business is often their target. Misleading statistical profiles are advanced rather than the lives of flesh-and-blood people. Professor Ronald Henderson reported that a million Australians lived below the poverty line. He did not find a million people but deduced their existence from taxation returns. But many such people have other supports like family and neighbourhood help, they may get rental and other assistance, and Henderson was measuring relative not absolute poverty, so as wages rose the poverty line rose. Sowell shows that most families deemed poor in the USA have a colour television, a DVD player, a microwave oven and a car.

The high tide of intellectual influence was in the 1970s and 1980s. The turning point was Reagan and Thatcher, who said No to the opinion-forming elites. James Q. Wilson stood up against the dominant harm-minimisation school, showing how crime could be reduced by a zero tolerance strategy. Mayor Giuliani applied it to New York and achieved a dramatic decrease in murder and violence figures. Other unfashionable strategies have reduced teenage pregnancies, and so on. Sowell points out that things are better now with countervailing pressures coming from non-Left think-tanks, free market ideas, and some media outlets like Fox TV. The adversary has captured schools, universities, the media, welfare bodies, law (partly) and government bureaucracies during the long march through the institutions, but fortunately these sectors don’t matter as much as business, medicine, science, technology, and the higher realms of politics, which are relatively immune. Crucial in all this was Rupert Murdoch, who had two crucial insights: first, that the majority views of ordinary people were being locked out by the Left-liberal media, and second, that there was a commercial windfall to be made by filling the gap. Where would we be without the Australian, an outstanding newspaper by any standard. No wonder Murdoch is so reviled on the campuses.

Patrick Morgan, who lives in Gippsland, wrote on bushranging history in the June issue.