Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations
By Benedict Beckeld.
Northern Illinois University Press, 2022
Hardcover, 264 pages, $32.95.
Reviewed by Daniel Fischer.Â
Americans’ relationship with their country resembles a fraying marriage. According to Gallup, between 2001 and 2024 the proportion who felt “very” or “extremely” proud of being American peaked at 91 percent in 2002 and 2004 then declined to a low of 63 percent in 2020 before mildly rebounding to 67 percent this year. Considering just the proportion who felt “extremely proud” reveals that the decline included both the left and right. The proportion of Democrats who felt this way reached 65 percent in 2003, bottomed out at 22 percent in 2019, and recovered slightly to 34 percent this year. Although the proportion of “extremely proud” Republicans was higher, it, too, dwindled from 86 percent in 2003 to 58 percent in 2022 and has come back only a point or two since.
These figures portend trouble for the United States, argues philosopher Benedict Beckeld’s Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations. Beckeld provides a helpful perspective on the early-twenty-first-century United States by touring the history of Western Civilization in search of moods like the one revealed by Gallup. He calls such moods “oikophobia,” a term introduced by philosopher Roger Scruton and derived from “oikos,” the Greek word for “home.” Beckeld finds oikophobia not only in the present-day United States but also across the West and in ancient Greece and Rome, eighteenth-century France, and twentieth-century Great Britain. Oikophobia’s onset is significant because it has weakened the places in which it appeared.
Beckeld captures the state of the West in his depiction of oikophobia, which he defines as “the opposite extreme of xenophobia. As xenophobia means the fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners, so oikophobia means the fear or hatred of home or one’s own society.” An oikophobic culture is relativistic, meaning that it believes no people group can be said to have achieved more than any other—but it applies this rule only one way, denigrating itself while celebrating foreign cultures. If oikophobic cultures were embodied, they would “prostrate themselves to all the world.” Nevertheless, oikophobes are not personally modest. “By disparaging his own kind,” writes Beckeld, the oikophobe “places himself among those who are putatively greater than that kind.” Vegetarians often display oikophobia’s combination of pride and humiliation. “To find a way to rise above his culture,” writes Beckeld, “that individual will reject meat-eating as immoral and backward.”Â
Dominant influences shift in times of oikophobia. Men become less physically strong, and women’s power begins to eclipse theirs. Christianity’s influence is in decline—except for mounting commitment to its principles of “nonviolence, empathy for the weak, and elevation of victims.”Â
Perhaps Beckeld’s keenest observation is that while oikophobia is most common on the left it is not exclusive to it. “Oikophobic excesses will cause a conservative backlash,” he writes, “and this reactionary force will sometimes become so strong that it lapses into another kind of oikophobic hatred against what one’s own civilization is perceived to have become.” This attitude is apparent in many American conservatives’ disgust with a “Woke Military.” Â
Beckeld identifies a process that has led to oikophobia throughout Western history. Oikophobia has historically been concentrated in the West because it draws nourishment from intellectual and political freedom, which have been most prevalent in the West. Rising civilizations are xenophobic. Repeated victories feed their pride.Â
Civilizations eventually become highly accomplished. Once they do, they develop characteristics that feed oikophobia. Military security allows the armed forces to do without the service of intellectuals. Free from patriotic responsibility, they become fertile soil for oikophobia. Widespread affluence, freedom, and equality reduce dependence on one’s country, feeding self-interest demonstrated by “unwillingness to die for one’s civilization.” Another side effect of wealth is that it allows the educated to divert time from survival to writings that include criticism of their culture. Peace and prosperity become so dependable that people take it for granted rather than seeing it as a blessing of their great nation. Governments of peak civilizations provide their populations with more rights, such as citizenship, leading to conflict over who gets what. As a result, foreign enemies begin to seem less threatening than competitors at home. The power and attractiveness of powerful civilizations allows increasing contact with foreign people groups. Contact leads to self-doubt and conflict, which leads to relativism. Cities are the most oikophobic areas because they have the easiest access to new ideas. Religion promotes far more love for “home and hearth” than material interests, but once civilizations get strong they no longer see the need for divine aid and discard faith.Â
One of the weaknesses of Beckeld’s work is a pompous style that lards the text with tangents. A more significant problem is a theory of history that allows too little room for chance and human decision. Beckeld claims to be “discussing tendencies, not absolute laws,” but he usually presents oikophobia as inevitable. The only way people can influence it is to slow it down. For example, certain that mounting divisions in eighteenth-century France could have only one outcome, he says, “Oikophobia will not be far away.” Part of the problem is that he equates “cycles and tendencies.” But these terms really mean different things. The former is natural, while the latter is repeatedly observed. A more detailed look at each of these civilizations would no doubt reveal that the onset of oikophobia was the result of many incidents. Such studies would be a far larger project than Beckeld could have undertaken for this volume, but at least he could have allowed more room for contingency.
Beckeld is less successful at treating oikophobia than at diagnosing it. He believes Western oikophobia can be given palliative care. His regimen is simple but reasonable: Imitate the Classical Greeks, authors of “the highest cultural achievement so far” by being “neither xenophobic nor oikophobic.” That means recognizing both the achievements and the flaws of one’s country. Refuse both arrogance and “self-hatred.” Be “aware and proud of one’s worth” and able “to learn from other cultures.” Simultaneously gaining the benefits of civilizational self-confidence and cosmopolitanism while avoiding the extreme versions of these outlooks is appealing. So is the correspondence between Beckeld’s approach and a sophisticated view of history, which resists exclusive exaltation or condemnation of a people group.
But Beckeld’s response to oikophobia rests on shaky ground. He believes that Judaism and Christianity help to hold up Western Civilization, defends religion from critics, and sees the decline in religious fervor as a major contributor to oikophobia. Yet he himself is an atheist. He calls free will “a Judeo-Christian illusion” designed to get God off the hook from being blamed for calamity. People lack free will because they are a “body only,” meaning that their decisions are determined by experience and genetics. Beckeld’s treatment for oikophobia depends on atheism. If people would see others as only physical, they would recognize that they have something in common with all. They would also realize that others have no control over their actions and therefore suspend judgmental attitudes. But, if religion helps to ward off oikophobia, it is hard to believe that Westerners can fight oikophobia by treating religion as, at best, a helpful set of rituals that derive no power from the divine design of the human heart or real contact with divinity.
A quite different response to the civilizational significance of religion came from author Ayaan Hirsi Ali in late 2023. Like Beckeld, Ali was an atheist who believed that religion could sustain a people group, but her respect for religion took her in a dramatically different direction. Ali came to see Christianity as the only bulwark stout enough to allow Western civilization to withstand the onslaughts of Russian and Chinese authoritarianism, radical Islam, and wokeness. “Atheism,” she wrote, “is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes.” Ali then put skin in the game, concluding that if she wanted the benefits of Christianity she had to practice it herself.Â
Ali’s conversion raises the question of whether a faith largely motivated by Christianity’s usefulness can sustain civilization as effectively as a faith chosen for more transcendent reasons, but it is even more unlikely that today’s Westerners can continue to enjoy the benefits of a civilization that built itself on Christianity if they stand outside the church admiring it but regarding its occupants as delusional.
Daniel Fischer is a writer and freelance copy editor. He has a PhD. in history from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is working on a book manuscript titled “The War on Winter: Settling the Northern West at the Dawn of Modernity,” and he keeps a Substack called The A La Carte Scholar.
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