Paradoxically, it is Europe's very readiness to acknowledge its faults that prompts self-hatred, for societies that do not engage in such introspection do not lacerate themselves. These provocative statements undergird Bruckner's brilliant polemic arguing that European remorse for the sins of imperialism, fascism, and racism have gripped the continent to the point of stifling its creativity, destroying its self-confidence, and depleting its optimism.īruckner himself concedes Europe's blemishes but he also praises it for self-criticism: 'There is no doubt that Europe has given birth to monsters, but at the same time it has given birth to theories that make it possible to understand and destroy these monsters.' The continent, he maintains, cannot be just a curse, for its sublime achievements complement its worst atrocities. Europeans feel themselves born with stigmata: 'the white man has sown grief and ruin wherever he has gone.' His pale skin signals his moral defectiveness. When the white man set foot in Asia, Africa, or America, death, chaos, and destruction followed. He shows how Europeans see themselves as 'the sick man of the planet' whose pestilence causes every problem in the non-Western world (what he calls the South).

'All of modern thought,' he adds, 'can be reduced to mechanical denunciations of the West, emphasizing the latter's hypocrisy, violence, and abomination.'Ĭover of Pascal Bruckner's 'The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism.' Another way to sum his message: the imperialism of guilt.

'Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West.' So writes the French novelist and essayist Pascal Bruckner in his book La tyrannie de la pénitence (2006), capably translated into English by Steven Rendall and recently published by Princeton University Press as The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism.

The Tyranny of Guilt by Pascal Bruckner