Guilt Is Good: The Past Isn't Dead Just Yet

The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism
Pascal Bruckner (Princeton University Press, 2010)

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T he seemingly infinite loop of images that document the nightmare—the trains, the camps, the starving and spectral figures—have helped secure the Holocaust’s place in Western life, making it a permanent part of our imagination. This crime of history transfixes us. And so it is with our other great crimes. Imperialism, colonialism, and their abhorrent cousins are lessons in what to avoid, deserving of our eternal condemnation.

Pascal Bruckner’s The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism , a lengthy meditation on this phenomenon, reduces to three words of advice: Get over it. In Bruckner’s mind, the omnipresence of great historical crimes is itself the problem, symptomatic of a West that has turned inwards and sunk to new levels of narcissism. “One part of the world, ours, is thus obsessively preoccupied with drawing up a list of its crimes and creating a lofty statue of itself as a torturer,” he writes. For Germany, there is the Second World War and the Shoah; for France, there is Algeria; and for all of Europe, there are not only the woes of imperialism and colonialism, but the endless wars that ravaged the continent. Although Bruckner says that America is largely exempt from this pathology—save for “certain campuses” and “the left wing of the Democratic Party”—it doesn’t take much to think of slavery as a meaningful American analogue, a symbol of our tragedy, a constant reminder of our inherent brutality.

Our sense of eternal guilt, Bruckner writes, has grave consequences for the West on the world stage. The instinct for self-flagellation deadens our capacity to act—we are so busy critiquing ourselves that we neglect the enemies of liberty in our midst. By arguing as much, Bruckner attempts to revive the debates among the left that swirled around the U.S. invasion of Iraq. There is a pro-war left—aware of the West’s sins but determined to root out tyranny—and there is an antiwar left that considers the West the greatest tyrant. (Bruckner’s caricature, not inaccurate, of the worldview of the latter: “We’re all potential terrorists to one degree or another!”) He attempts to restart this debate in a most indirect manner, never mentioning his own position at the time (he supported the invasion). He is a sharp critic of the antiwar left, which he believes “has never gotten over communism and once again demonstrates that its true passion is not freedom, but slavery in the name of justice.”

Harsh words, certainly, but par for the course for a man who is unafraid to break with basic notions of decency and blame the victim for contributing to our woes. Although he is careful never to excuse the most heinous acts committed against any party, he is unsparing in his criticism of how various groups—the Algerians in particular, and also a good chunk of Africa—have responded to injury. Most egregious are those victims who attempt to “Hitlerize” history, by making every ill a hologram of the Third Reich. “The great ordeal of the oppressed ever since the dawn of time must develop in the shadow of the swastika or be nothing at all,” he says. It is a cosmology in which Auschwitz remains always “the primal scene.”

What Bruckner hopes for instead is that the victimized come to acknowledge the ways in which their suffering helped (yes, helped ). And thus, when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh received an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 2005 and spoke of the British Empire’s “beneficial consequences,” it was, to Bruckner, evidence of India’s success as an independent nation that has mastered its own destiny. No such maturity for Algeria, where “anti-French feeling is still the ferment of the absent national unity.” If only a wise Algerian would come along and give the French credit—for what, exactly, Bruckner never says—then that nation would be as worthy of his praise as India. Bruckner wants victims to cease speaking of their victimhood, and for perpetrators to cease agonizing over their crimes: “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.” He advises we embrace such theories anew—to restore our confidence, so that we may overcome what threatens us.

And what is it that threatens us, exactly? Bruckner’s answer is entirely unsurprising: Muslims. “With a suicidal blindness, our continent kneels down before Allah’s madmen and gags or ignores the free-thinkers,” he asserts. While Bruckner writes with a verve and an affection for language that thrives even in translation, he lacks the lucidity familiar to readers of Paul Berman, and the crystal clarity found in the Euston Manifesto is absent here. The cast of characters here is familiar, and more than a bit tired—Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are valorized, Ken Livingstone is not—but they’re stuffed in between chapters, found in the nooks and crannies of a disjointed book lacking in logical architecture. With The Tyranny of Guilt , Bruckner has constructed a neoconservative’s fever dream, an apologia for nothing and a defense of everything that has wrenched the West apart for the past decade. Yet ultimately, in his aversion to guilt, Bruckner indicts only himself.

L et us first grant that Bruckner is right on the first half of his charge: No one can doubt that, today, the great crimes of history are entirely out of the shadows. Imperialism, colonialism, the slave trade, and genocide, not to mention the ordinary butcheries of war, are well-worn tales. Bruckner tips his cap to that famous saying of Faulkner’s—“The past is not dead; in fact, it’s not even past”—as capturing the essence of our times. These blotches in our history books are memorized and acknowledged the world over, in official proclamation and private conversation.

Bruckner is even correct that our sense of guilt sometimes corrupts our judgment. His discussion on Israel is most penetrating on this count. The casual equation of Zionism with Nazism, so often bandied about in certain precincts of the Arab world—and, yes, on the American and European left—proves as offensive as it is idiotic. The refusal to grant the Jews a belief system that ought to be viewed as indistinguishable from common nationalism is more than troubling, but telling: Why are the Jews not permitted the same group adhesiveness, the same longing for a homeland, that we grant every other people? Yet like many a great French intellectual before him, Bruckner takes a reasonable case and drowns it in excess: “We also find an incredible tolerance among our intellectual, political, and media elites for Palestinian terrorism,” Bruckner writes. This is a bridge too far; while latent anti-Semitism is still around, the elite classes of the West, who are particularly vulnerable to terrorism, have zero tolerance for it. The evidence he presents to indicate otherwise is wildly unconvincing. And he claims that “people who support the Palestinians are not hoping to aid flesh-and-blood human beings but pure ideas.” Surely, for some supporters of the Palestinians, this is an accurate description, but obviously not for all. Unless, that is, Bruckner means to accuse himself of such treachery. For in the very same book, he decries the “illegitimacy” of the Israeli occupation and says the “Palestinian tragedy” cannot be minimized. Bruckner can care about other people as deeply as he does ideas; the rest of us are permitted only one or the other.

Bruckner conceives of himself as standing atop the barricades, exhorting his followers in the most urgent of moral terms. If we do not follow his path, and embrace the West, and stand up against our enemies, we run the risk of “being one of the vanquished, writing history from below.” But soapbox preaching is a hasty way to avoid the mess of complexities that has bedeviled many an absolutist. Recall the book’s thesis: Bruckner believes that guilt’s abundance is reason enough to get rid of it altogether. This strident perspective precludes one very real possibility: that although guilt gushes from our every pore today, it is, more often than not, a superficial kind of guilt. It seems to me that action is inhibited precisely because of such superficiality.

Consider, for instance, the attitude of so many contemporary Germans to the Holocaust. Last November, John Demjanjuk, an 88-year-old former Detroit resident, was on trial in Germany for crimes he had committed more than sixty years earlier. The authorities alleged that, before becoming an autoworker in America, Demjanjuk had helped facilitate the deaths of nearly twenty-eight thousand Jews. As the trial represented, in all likelihood, one of the last times that a living person would be tried in connection with the Shoah, audiences across the globe were captivated by it, especially in America. Yet the Germans themselves were mostly unmoved. One American reporter, who had been in Germany for more than twenty years, confessed the strange disparity to me: her American editors had an insatiable appetite for coverage, whereas her fellow Berliners seemed to yawn with boredom.

In their ubiquity, the crimes of the West have become furniture with which we’re too familiar—frequently used, but on the whole taken for granted. It is said in Germany that even the worst student finishes school with knowledge of the Holocaust’s particulars. It is safe to assume that few Americans escape school without a similar lesson on slavery. Yet what we have gained from this universal awareness is questionable. Did anything come of Bill Clinton’s shallow apology for slavery? Of course not. It was guilt by press release; a transient political gesture rather than a moral reckoning that gains resonance precisely by sustained engagement. Bruckner rightly bemoans the lack of a meaningful movement against human trafficking. But whence will such a movement come if not from an outpouring of knowledge that draws together the slave trade of yesterday with its modern-day descendant?

B ruckner is careful to avoid describing the crimes he says are overblown in any sort of detail, and with good reason—an accurate recitation of, say, colonialism’s horrors would probably enhance the reader’s willingness to indulge in exactly those guilty feelings he so despises. He prefers to speak of these crimes as “-isms,” as generic manifestations of evil rather than specific instances of criminality. In doing so, he is only adding to a problem usually perpetuated by those who loudly bang the drum about the West’s guilt: the lazy preference for the general over the specific.

Yet specificity—burrowing down into the details—is probably the more effective avenue to democratic action. The West urgently needs not less guilt, but a deeper sense of it—not merely for the sake of its indulgence, but to pursue redress. After all, despite the inescapability of the Holocaust, multiple genocides have occurred in the decades since; although we rail against the memory of the slave trade, human trafficking endures; and violent expansionism is never on the wane. Or contemplate Iran, a country deprived of democracy in large part because of the West. Perhaps if our sense of guilt regarding Iran were deeper, we might take more steps to support
democracy there.

Although it may be unclear to Bruckner, guilt has a purpose. It is both an expression of judgment and a spur to action. In fact, Bruckner’s aversion to guilt illuminates a broader aversion—one to judgment itself. On that most vexing of foreign policy conundrums, the Iraq War, he is unable to offer judgment. “Iraq was an exemplary case of the double bind: whether one approved of the intervention or not, one was wrong,” he proclaims parenthetically. Well, no: a decision with as far-reaching costs, both human and moral, as the Iraq War must be either right or wrong. Those who got it wrong—those who overestimated the competence of the Bush administration and the desire of the Iraqis for democracy—are not deserving of damnation. Those who got it right, conversely, will surely get things wrong in the future. But even if one still believes that the war was right, one has cast judgment.

Bruckner, meanwhile, would prefer to remain on the sidelines, comforted by heady abstractions that gradually reveal their sanctimony. He pushes for some vaguely defined action, some sort of inscrutable “confrontation” with the West’s enemies. Does he mean war? He does not say. But if not that, then what? What matters to him is that we rid ourselves of paralyzing guilt. Yet his vision of paralysis is but the ordinary contortions of democracy. And his vision of guilt is so perverted that, ultimately, no one is guilty but the victim. Whatever it is, this is not justice. Guilt is a fundamental predicate of Western civilization. Although (as Bruckner says) it may surround us, we need more of it.

Ethan Porter is a contributing editor for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.