Societal critique is a central pillar of the Western inheritance. Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics assess the most fundamental aspects of civilisation and seek to describe the ideal society. Moreover, the Old Testament contains a commentary on the historical development of the Israelites, and its prophets admonish the rich for neglecting the poor. Honest, often harsh self-criticism is embedded in the Western tradition. Indeed, it is a core means by which our civilisation has flourished over the centuries, from the Medieval era, through the Enlightenment and into Modernity.
Yet, over the preceding decades, this tradition of thoughtful, constructive critique has been transmogrified into a poisonous campaign against the heart of Western civilisation. The very organisation of our societies – from the class structure and the family to the economic model – has been under sustained assault. The attack manifests in various modes of pseudo-intellectual ‘deconstruction’, which seek to present the Western status quo, and the history from which it was forged, as innately wicked and repressive.
Although this is now familiar to us in the form of the prevailing woke ideology, the true origins of this attack can be traced to the early part of the 20th century (and, indeed, earlier); but the campaign of grievance and civilisational self-hatred has in recent decades usurped our intellectual traditions to become the dominant mode of Western thought.
In his 2004 book England and the Need for Nations, the British philosopher Roger Scruton termed the rising liberal ideology of self-contempt as oikophobia. The Ancient Greek word for home is oikos; and thus oikophobia, Scruton wrote, is “(stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home”. It manifests as a consolidated, wide-spanning offensive against the historical, theological, literary, legal and social inheritance that formed the modern West.
The intellectual engine driving oikophobia is a set of ‘critical theories’ that seek to deconstruct (simply: attack) our history, our justice system, our political traditions, and so forth. The essential pillars of our civilisation are smeared by the Left’s creedal oppressor-victim narrative – a simplistic, catch-all lens through which some powerful group is claimed to have exploited and repressed some weaker group. By the lights of this Manichean and warped rubric, the very essence of Western society is castigated as irredeemably wicked.
As Scruton observed: “Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people — the intellectuals especially — tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left are especially prone to it, and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers.” Hence, the tedious political activism that was formerly confined to the university campus has now been propagated across Western institutions and corporations. Indeed, the touted ‘grown-ups’ in the West are now largely liberal oikophobes, educated at elite universities that serve, as the conservative historian Niall Ferguson has argued, to transmit civilisational self-contempt in place of the classical Western inheritance.
Scruton observed that the Left’s oikophobic movement was cultivated in Western universities over decades. It was propelled especially by the Frankfurt School, a Left-wing academic circle that originated in the Weimar Republic of the interwar period. Critically, its founding thinkers moved to American universities during the 1930s, within which they exerted a profound and lasting influence.
Writers such as Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas and Herbert Marcuse decried the institutions and the very structure of Western civilisation as inherently oppressive. Although now obscure, these thinkers guided the thought of important – and vastly overrated – Left-wing giants of the late 20th century such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who in turn formed the modern Left-wing intellectual paradigm. The Frankfurt School thus began a surreptitious and longstanding war against the foundations of Western civilisation from inside its finest academic institutions.
In his excellent book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, Scruton dismantles the intellectual “nonsense machine” created by the modern Left. He observes that, according to the Left-wing rubric, “The condition of society is essentially one of domination, in which people are bound to each other by their attachments, and distinguished by rivalries and competition.” Formerly, it was social class and economic relations that defined the Left’s interpretation of the Western power-struggle. But following the end of the Cold War and the blatant collapse of the socialist economic model, the Left forged new cultural fault-lines out of race, sex and sexuality. This politics of personal identity eventually evolved into the woke dialectic which now dominates our universities with its crude caricatures and biases. Indeed, it has been through the Left’s longstanding capture of these prominent institutions that the oikophobic ideology has been imparted to the Western elite – and hence to society at large.
Importantly, this is not the first time that the intelligentsia has led Western societies dangerously astray. In a recent essay, Niall Ferguson illustrates the parallels between the Left’s ideological capture of the modern university and the leading role played by German academics in the Nazi movement. He writes:
Non-Jewish German academia did not just follow Hitler down the path to hell. It led the way… Anyone who has a naïve belief in the power of higher education to instil ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich. A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it.
Thus, Nazism was not a movement of working-class troglodytes against the learned elite: it was in fact the bien-pensant ideology of the elite. Ferguson continues:
Later, after it was all over, the historian Friedrich Meinecke tried to explain “the German catastrophe” by arguing that excessive technical specialisation had caused some educated Germans (not him, needless to say) to lose sight of the humanistic values of Goethe and Schiller. As a result, they had been unable to resist Hitler’s “mass Machiavellianism”.
This same rot of excessive specialisation has corrupted modern Western universities. As the American classicist Victor Davis Hanson observes, “special studies courses” have diluted curricula, distracting students – and their professors – from the difficult, traditional subjects of law, history, philosophy and so forth. Hence, the academic elite is exponentially distancing itself from the Western moral and intellectual inheritance, leaving a vacuum that is being steadily filled by oikophobic ‘grievance studies’ that attack the core of our civilisation.
So, what forms does the modern oikophobic assault against the West take? The campaign is waged on four principal battlefronts. First, Western history is condemned in an ahistorical, gratuitously unfair, even smirking, manner. European colonialism is presented as a purely racist endeavour, dismissing and denying all of its moral and material complexity.
Similarly, the greatest figures of the modern West – including Winston Churchill, the American Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln – are besmirched as incorrigible oppressors and racists who fail the modern, specifically Left-wing morality-tests. It is obvious that the aim is not to revise history in the spirit of curiosity and truth, but rather to disparage and poison the heroes and events that anchor us to a nation and to a collective past. In short, it is designed to sever us from the very roots of our civilisation, thereby creating an historical tabula rasa onto which a new Utopian society can be inscribed.
Second, the theological basis of the modern West – Christianity – has been assailed ferociously by the secular Left. The attack gained momentum through the 20th century and was given a strong boost by the popular New Atheist movement of the early 2000s, which targeted Christianity and the Bible in particular.
Moreover, the modern Left shows consistent bias towards Islam and other non-Western religions, whilst agitating fervently against Christianity and the cultural influence it has traditionally wielded. Indeed, this theological attack is a foundational pillar of the oikophobic campaign: for it was through our Christian heritage that the moral and social cosmos of the West was formed. And it is therefore only by breaking our allegiance to that cosmos that the new ‘progressive’ morality of the Left can be imposed.
Third, contempt for traditional customs and simple patriotism has become a familiar and undisguised trait of the oikophobic Left. Indeed, George Orwell recognised the roots of this adolescent sentiment in his great 1941 essay, England Your England. He wrote:
In Left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.
Such absurd antipathy has only worsened: increasingly in the West, the metropolitan, monied upper-classes are dissociating themselves from the largely provincial, poorer working-classes. This manifests in an enduring attack on tradition and patriotism. In Britain, for example, the English flag and St. George’s Day are increasingly treated as symbols of pseudo-fascism by smug, university-educated liberals. In America, too, the sentiments and loyalties of ordinary people – particularly those of the Rust Belt and the Deep South – are sneered at by the bicoastal, metropolitan Left.
Fourth, as Orwell further noted in England Your England, a chief symptom of the Left’s worldview is its servility to anti-Western foreign regimes. In Orwell’s day, members of the Left were beguiled by Stalin’s Soviet Union, denying or excusing its appalling crimes. Today, we see the Left’s chronic apologism for Iran’s dangerous aggressions in the Middle-East. China – a repressive, imperialist, post-communist dystopia – is treated with absurd sympathy, too.
These strange allegiances are motivated by the familiar Left-wing dogma which states that foreign cultures must not be criticised; but it is also part of a juvenile and spiteful compulsion on the Left to side with whatever is not Western against the West. Perhaps the most outrageously hateful personification of this oikophobic preference for foreign agents is the overt support for Hamas among many pampered young activists at American and European universities. Much of this shocking outburst is certainly antisemitic. But it is, above all, specifically anti-Western and oikophobic in its origin and intent. Israel is monstered by Left-wing radicals precisely because it is a Western, democratic, free, prosperous enclave surrounded by hostile and repressive non-Western neighbours. Such radicals are indeed the pro-Stalinists of our time.
Why has oikophobia emerged in our civilisation – and why is it accelerating? Crucially, the oikophobic attack has recurred throughout Western history. In his 2022 book Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilisations, the philosopher Dr. Benedict Beckeld observes that the elites of Ancient Athens and Rome became openly contemptuous of their own civilisations during the latter stages of their respective declines. In both societies, it was a phenomenon of the elites and the intellectual class. It was not shared by the people at large, who continued, broadly, to uphold the conservative, patriotic traditions by which the state and society had been served and respected.
Beckeld argues that, in a civilisation’s early days, its confidence rides high; yet, once external enemies have been defeated, and as decadence, leisure, egalitarianism and individual empowerment set in, new internal enemies and regressive political machinations are crafted. Thus, writes Beckeld, “success is, ironically, a prerequisite for a society’s self-hatred”.
The modern oikophobic attack on the West should thus be interpreted as both a symptom and a cause of our own steady decline. The sense of self-contempt, downturn and moral guilt was exacerbated by the great catastrophes of the last century: the world wars; financial and imperial decline; the Holocaust; the 1960s social revolutions; and the calamity in Vietnam. These all undermined Western moral and civilisational confidence, lending credence to the budding preachers of self-hatred. However, as the oikophobic intellectual attack has taken ever-bolder shape, it has itself served to profoundly accelerate and deepen our decline by fragmenting Western peoples along cultural lines and corrupting the hearts of our most valuable institutions.
The only remedy is to recover the true roots of the Western intellectual heritage. Criticism must once again, in the spirit of Plato and Aristotle, serve to advance our civilisation, not smear and dismantle it. Reconstruction begins in our universities, where the traditions of free inquiry and the rigorous pursuit of truth must be retrieved. Our other institutions will follow the academics’ lead – just as they have done historically.
So, as Roger Scruton advised shortly before his death, we must simply stop listening to the Left’s high priests that currently sit enthroned in the Western Academy, and recover our higher inheritance.
A. Gibson graduated in Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh in 2012. He writes the Fathom Five Substack newsletter. Subscribe here.
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Excellent article. Thanks.
If only….
Well it’s the globalists, isn’t it? People like Ivor Cummins have looked extensively at this and went right back in time to trace the origins of what we’re all experiencing now in our societies, with the various agendas being pushed by our puppet leaders and those shady, all-powerful entities behind the scenes. Kissinger’s totalitarian protege, Klaus Schwab, is one of the main orchestrators. Short clip here;
”Perfect short clip explaining all the madness currently being foisted on our world, and exactly who is responsible for it:
https://x.com/FatEmperor/status/1826254623847633405
I recommend watching the full documentary; Stakeholder Communism, when you have time. It really does a thorough job of showing us exactly who our enemies are. **Spoiler** It doesn’t conveniently boil down to one particular gender;
”In 2020, G20 governments, in collusion with the World Economic Forum’s Stakeholders, discretely and undemocratically enacted a global ten-year transition to an authoritarian political system, called Stakeholder Capitalism.
After propagating a Marxist idea that black and trans people are oppressed and indoctrinating us to fear climate change, the Stakeholders are mandating their pre-planned political system, which its criminal mastermind, Klaus Schwab, alleges is better for ‘people and planet’.
Will we push back before A.I. takes our jobs, our wealth shifts to the Stakeholders and we become vulnerable to tyranny?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1m4zZvyCxg&t=1s&ab_channel=YellowForum
He also mentions the Rockefellers, Rothschilds etc.
From the book 180 degrees….”There were clearly financial incentives for Rothschild, Schiff and others on Wall Street to see the Tsarist regime fall into the hands of the Revolutionaries. By offering financial support they could expect lucrative contracts in the future. But arguably the greatest prise, just as it had been with the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, was gaining total control of the monetary system.
“The establishment of a central bank is 90% of communizing a nation”….Vladimir Lenin.
Thanks for the link, Mogwai.
No worries.
Let me know what you think.
The oikophobes want to demonstrate what they believe is their rectitude. They are amazed at what they believe themselves to be.
Patriotism is still to be lauded when it is Ukrainian. In the UK, the media describes the activities of Russian military aircraft flying near the country as if it were the Battle of Britain. Some residue of pride in national achievements is resurrected in a carefully managed way when convenient.
Perhaps it was inevitable that self-criticism should become pathological in a society that has abandoned the Christian idea of forgiveness.
Scruton observed that the USSR lasted long enough for its political software to ossify into hardware. Its educated elites were never oikophobes. But eventually everyone else became tired of the pretentions that it was a Utopia.
Is there some sense in the meaningless concatenation of phrases and metaphors that Starmer delivers without passion in the language of his speeches that some ossification or, even more revealingly, some lignification has set in among the UK’s elites?
I’m not that bright so I might have missed the point of it but the conclusion of Plato’s examination of the ideal society seemed to be that people like him should be in charge. Plus ca change!
I’ve always relished the irony of Michel Foucault’s analysis of the hidden power structures in Western society and the marked contrast to the open power he exercised over the children he so enthusiastically sexually assaulted on his frequent ‘holidays’ to North Africa. For some reason, this pervert’s disgusting behaviour is never questioned or criticised by his idiot followers in Western academia.
Their thinking is “well, yeah, he was a peado but he was one of us, a good guy, a nice progressive academic, like us”.
Just like Stalin. Yeah, sure, they were some excessive measures, but he was a nice progressive guy.
The woke elite and their ideological forefathers suffer from self-loathing and they project this self-loathing onto the masses and Western society in general.
The underlying reason for their self loathing is that at the spiritual world they serve evil forces. They may not be conscious of this but at the subconscious level this keeps troubling them. Ultimately, in the Biblical sense, you might say they are possessed by demons that project certain images into their heads which they then mistake for reality.
Despite our modern “enlightened” age, we are still exposed to the spiritual world; woke is not that different from worshiping the bad old gods of the Old Testament like Baal and Moloch.
I think that’s simply the so-called West tearing itself apart because of the many contradictions it’s built on. Eg, catastrophes of the 20th century of course get the Holocaust as mandatory mention. But the mountains of skulls Communist adherents of Pol Pot created in Cambodia never are. You won’t hear to the Tianamen massacre, the Boznian genocide, the genocide in Rwanda or Stalin’s murderous persecutions of people living in Soviet Russia he happened to distrust, say, the Wolga Germans, the Kossacks, the Krim Tartars, Ukrainiains etc.
But that’s only level 1 because while this stuff is rarely explicitly mentioned and probably never without an “But Hitler and the Holocaust!” reference being thrown in for good measure because politically motiviated mass murder is simply not like politically motivated muss murder. When it’s said that the German did it, this makes it a category of its own above anything else and regardless of the actual body count.
The millions of people we’d nowadays called civilians who starved to death because of the (technically illegal) English trade blockade during world war one never figure. It’s conjectured that these were 700,000 in Germany alone from the cessation of hostilities in November 1918 to the signing of the Versailles diktat, the blockade being kept in place to ‘motivate’ the Germans to actually sign it.
The moral highground you like claiming isn’t really yours and the so-called “left intellectuals” happen to know this as good as anybody else who has at least a passing knowledge of history of the 20th century. They obviously also don’t mind millions of Germans dying of starvation or being driven from the their ancestral homes as part of Stalinist pogroms. But they know that there are plently of other skeletons in the nicely polished closet.
Some honesty is urgently called-for on this area, say, admitting that history doesn’t tell us anything about bad guys being conquered by good guys but only of more powerful people prevailing over less powerful ones. People living in 1914 would have regarded this as self-evidently true and their consciences wouldn’t have troubled them about being in the first and not in the second group.
‘Dr. Benedict Beckeld observes that the elites of Ancient Athens and Rome became openly contemptuous of their own civilisations during the latter stages of their respective declines. In both societies, it was a phenomenon of the elites and the intellectual class. It was not shared by the people at large,’
Er, I wonder about this as an interpretation of the Antique decline and fall.
Classical civilization was raised on the sweat of slaves. When the tyrannical bureaucratic rule of Rome was threatened by Barbarians, the response of the Roman state was to increase its centralization of power and redouble police cruelty. Many civilized Romans preferred to live in barbarian controlled regions because there humanity and tolerance existed.
Intolerance worsened when Christianity became the official state religion of Rome in the 4th Century. The privilege the early Christians won for themselves they forbade to others. All religions but Christianity were banned. Burning alive was the standard punishment for refusing any submission to Christian domination. The aspects of security, lenity and tolerance that had been the benefits of life within the Roman empire disappeared. In becoming totalitarian and tyrannical the empire lost both its appeal and its purpose.
Many people who were not strictly speaking slaves were yet not allowed to leave the area of their birth or to change occupation. And these restrictions were passed to their descendants. How was their condition much different from that of slaves?
Roman society was partitioned into Honestiores and Humiliiores, serfs and lords. Here is where the modern parallels are really found. The Antique urban middle class disappeared. Recently we have seen a major persecution of our modern urban middle classes by modern Honestiores, resulting in a $40 trillion wealth transfer.
That the Roman empire was enveloped, toppled and destroyed by invading barbarians is true only in a highly qualified sense. Barbarians had been within the empire for centuries. They supplied most of the Roman army. The invading barbarians had only a fraction of the numbers of the standing Roman forces. Yet everywhere as they advanced the barbarians found people who welcomed them, cheered them on and swelled their numbers.
Many people who were not strictly speaking slaves were yet not allowed to leave the area of their birth or to change occupation. And these restrictions were passed to their descendants. How was their condition much different from that of slaves?
The change to an absolutist state and hereditary occupation for all of its subjects was enacted by the emperor Diocletian (reigned from 284 – 305). Christianity didn’t become state religion until 380.
Who is pulling the Left’s strings?
The Left seem to avoid protesting about today’s problems and national issues like homeless veterans and the 80,000 homeless young people and the housing crisis and crime and the steady collapse of law and order and corruption in government and the civil service and at all levels in governmental agencies and institutions and the indoctrination of schoolchildren or the decline of the UK tacitly acquiesced to by the Uni-party with none campaigning to reverse it.
They instead campaign to make problems like homelessness and the housing crisis worse by campaigning for ‘migrants welcome’ whilst ignoring the plight of their own indigenous peoples.
They instead want to impoverish the already impoverished by demanding reparations for the acts of long dead people who are unrelated to today’s living in more ways than one.
They are determined to destabilise established UK communities and attack established values.
They have no concern for the stupidity of the rush to ‘Net Zero’ nor question the supposed ‘scientific consensus’ which all academics must subscribe to if they don’t want to be cancelled.
They take sides in the impossible political wars like in Israel/Gaza/Palestine calling for racist genocide of Israel and Jewish people failing to recognise fault and true grievances on both sides.
One thing is certain – the Left are easily led down these paths and seem unable to think for themselves.
Very good. I hadn’t heard the term ‘oikophobia’ before, but will now be putting it to good use.
I thought it was an irrational fear of oiks like islamophobia.
However fear of Islam history has taught us is not irrational – at least for some versions of it.
Apologies to those muslims no one needs fear. The problem is it is impossible to tell which ones are OK.
Or at least not be looking that is.
How I miss Roger Scruton. A life gone too soon. (I had sent James Brokenshire an angry message about his sacking of RS back in 2019). RS had the decency and common courtesy to reply to one of my emails to him concerning his sacking. Me! A mere mortal! A decent man and a great mind.
Something that puzzles me about Foucault (whom I have never read but have always heard of as someone who advances the cause of left-wing ‘deconstruction’ and wokeism) is that David McGrogan regularly cites him (see today’s News from Uncibal for example) as someone who doesn’t so much advance that cause as retard it by explaining it. Perhaps Mr Gibson and Professor McGrogan ought to find a forum for debating the question.
I heard Foucault’s pendulum is a bit of a swinger.