Western Civilization Is Drowning in Guilt

It’s not just the artifacts. It’s not just about whether Once-Great Britain will return the Elgin Marbles to Greece.

The guilt is real enough. The self-flagellation is more than sufficiently real. Guilt for imperialism. Guilt for colonialism. Guilt for capitalism. Guilt for the patriarchy. The liberal West is drowning in guilt for its past. Thus, it systematically diminishes the achievements of the West and embraces other more barbaric cultures. As for the liberal world order, whose decline is much bemoaned, the multiculturalists have it in their sights. As long as they fail to defend what is valuable in Western civilization, it will continue its decline.

As I say, it’s not just about the artifacts. More importantly—I emphasize the point because Giulio Meotti doesn’t—its Western success and achievement. Wealth and power, riches and might… for which Western elites feel waves of guilt. (via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit)

They cannot praise the accomplishments of capitalism because they believe them to have been won by exploiting the less developed and less civilized world. Yes, indeed. Elizabeth Warren expressed it well: You didn’t build that. You did not build what you built. You did not earn what you earned. The grand dame of American socialism tells you that what you earned is not yours. It belongs to everyone. The reduction ab absurdum of the mania about rights is quite simple: others have the right to whatever you have earned. It might be illegal migrants. It might be the oppressed peoples of the third world.

It does not suffice that you pay taxes from what you earned. It does not suffice that those taxes support a government whose reason for being is to constrain your business activities. The important part, for socialists like Warren, is that you do not own what you own, did not build what you built, did not earn what you earn. Your success was built on exploitation and even criminal enterprise. If the state comes along to take it away from you, well, you didn’t build that and you do not own the profits of your enterprise.

The mania for equality masks a narrative in which one person’s success can only have been purchased at someone else’s expense. You did not build it. You cheated. You lied. You oppressed and exploited. Thus, the logic of socialism has it that what is yours is mine. But especially what you worked to earn must be redistributed to those less fortunate or less industrious. Until, as Margaret Thatcher pointed out, you run out of other people’s money.

Meotti examines the question from the perspective of cultural artifacts. And he notes that our civilization is no longer proud of its achievements:

The cultural elite in the West now seem so haunted by feelings of imperialist guilt that they are no longer confident that our civilization is something to be proud of.

Being as I have discussed the perils of guilt culture in two books already, I am happy to agree to Meotti’s point: guilt has become a substitute religion in a post-Christian age:

A sense of guilt now seems a kind of post-Christian substitute religion that seduces many Westerners. The French scholar Shmuel Trigano suggested that this ideology is turning the Westerners into "post-colonial subjects" who no longer believe in their own civilization, but instead what will destroy it: multiculturalism. In France, for example, a manifesto was launched for "a multicultural and post racial republic". The result would be, in the words of the anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle, a "war of identities" and a clash between communities. Last month, the UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said that, if elected Prime Minister, he would order the British Museum to return to Greece the Elgin Marbles, the frieze that had surrounded the Parthenon of Athens and one of the major attractions of the British Museum. "This whole campaign is sheer lunacy," wrote Richard Dorment. But it is a lunacy spreading all over Europe.

Those who are appalled by parliamentary democracy happily embrace the most brutal and uncivilized totalitarian movements:

Thirty years ago, in a book, The Tears of the White Man, the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner wrote that, "the remorseless and self-righteous critic who endlessly denounces the deceptions of parliamentary democracy is suddenly rapt with admiration before the atrocities committed in the name of the Koran, the Vedas, the Great Helmsman..." Since then, Western elites have excused many crimes committed in the name of political Islam, as if these were the consequences of our own colonial crimes.

Thus, when ISIS took over large swaths of Iraq and Syria, when they persecuted Christians, the West, and especially Barack Obama stood silent. Gang rapes, sex trafficking, murdering homosexuals… not a problem for the enlightened liberal West:

When Christians in Iraq were exiled, murdered or persecuted en masse by the so-called Islamic State, the West stood silent -- as if these Christians were the agents of the Western colonialism and not the legitimate and oldest inhabitants of the Middle East long before the Arabs converted to Islam. When a mob destroyed the French Institute in Cairo, burning books and collections, those who now want to return the "colonial artifacts" stood silent. When Iran's President Rouhani visited Rome, the Italian authorities covered the naked statues in the Capitoline Museums. Are we covering our own culture to please the Islamic world?

How many of the enlightened few who are willing to take up arms against ICE were equally willing to take up arms against ISIS?