The Self-Hating Age: How Oikophobia is Dissolving the West

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.