by A. Gibson, Daily Sceptic:
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.
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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.
