Exploring the Works of Pascal Bruckner

A key French intellectual to be aware of:

Normally I do not sing the praises of most French writers and philosophers – at least more recent ones. Too often their worldviews are greatly at odds with mine. Just think of the atheist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre or the homosexual postmodernist Michel Foucault. Not quite my cup of tea.

Nonetheless, I have written up some French thinkers that I can in good measure support. One that comes to mind is Jean-Francois Revel. See this piece on him for example: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2004/09/26/a-review-of-anti-americanism-by-jean-francois-revel/

Another is Bernard-Henri Lévy, part of the “New Philosophers” school. See this article: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/09/08/intellectuals-going-against-the-flow/

Another important writer in the new philosophers’ camp is Pascal Bruckner (b. 1948). He has penned a number of works on various controversial topics, many defending the West against its host of detractors. One need not agree with all that he says to appreciate his writings, at least as displayed here.

I offer a few brief quotes from the following three books of his:

Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt. Free Press, 1986.
The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism. Princeton University Press, 2012.
An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt. Polity, 2018.

Tears of the White Man

“Third Worldism” is another way in which the woke West beats itself up. Not only does the West’s “compassion” do little to actually help those in the developing world, but it just reinforces Western self-loathing being pushed by the political left.

[E]very Westerner is presumed guilty until proven innocent. We Europeans have been raised to detest ourselves, certain that, within our world, there is a certain essential evil that must be relentlessly atoned for. This evil is known by two terms – colonialism and imperialism….

 

Crushed under the weight of this shameful memory, we have been led to believe that the very Western Civilization our fathers thought was the greatest on earth is, in fact, the worst….

 

How self-hatred became a central dogma of our culture is one of the many enigmas of European history. It is indeed odd that in a century of militant atheism and agnostic thinkers who sharpened their weapons in the cause of fighting against the Church and its teachings have reconciled us all to the idea that is the very basis of Christianity itself – that of original sin. In thought and in morality, there has been a wholesale overthrow of accepted values, disobedience to authority, debunking of taboos and idols, and the simultaneous death of God and the Father so masterfully proclaimed by Jean-Paul Sartre. At the same time, there has been a growing sense of shame, as if the same societies that had gotten rid of the whole idea of sin simultaneously opened the gateway to collective guilt. This is a price that must be paid for being a European, the consequence of our brief triumph over the rest of the world. Modern politics may have given up its Christian motives, but its emotional foundations are still Christian. Our political world is turgid with religiosity, drunk on martyrs, and fascinated by suffering, and even the most secular speeches are usually only inept rehashings of priestly homilies….

 

I aim to uncover the devious chicanery of the virtue professed by self-appointed partisans of the Third World, their self-admiring sophistry, their selfish alibis, and their dishonest bombast…. (pp. 4-6)

The Tyranny of Guilt

Once again, Western guilt-tripping about its past and its perpetual self-condemnation is addressed by Bruckner. Instead of this constant self-demonising, the West should be unafraid of its achievements and its greatness, despite its many mistakes made along the way.

From existentialism to deconstructionism, all of modern thought can be reduced to a mechanical denunciation of the West, emphasizing the latter’s hypocrisy, violence, and abomination. In this enterprise the best minds have lost much of their substance. Few of them have avoided succumbing to this spiritual routine: one applauds a religious revolution, another goes into ecstasies over the beauty of terrorist acts or supports a guerilla movement because it challenges our imperialist project. Indulgence toward foreign dictatorships, intransigence toward our democracies. An eternal movement: critical thought, at first subversive, turns against itself and becomes a new conformism, but one that is sanctified by the memory of its former rebellion. Yesterday’s audacity is transformed into cliches. Remorse has ceased to be connected with precise historical circumstances; it has become a dogma, a spiritual commodity, almost a form of currency. A whole intellectual intercourse is established: clerks are appointed to maintain it like the ancient guardians of the sacred flame and issue permits to think and speak. At the slightest deviation, these athletes of contrition protest, enforce proper order in language, accord their imprimatur or refuse it. In the great factory of the mind, it is they who open doors for you or slam them in your face. This repeated use of the scalpel against ourselves we call the duty of repentance. Like any ideology, this discourse is at first presented in the register of the obvious. There is no need for demonstrations because things seem clear: one has only to repeat and confirm. The duty to repent is a multifunction fighting machine: it censures, reassures and distinguishes. (pp. 2-3)

Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West, that passion for cursing and lacerating ourselves. By issuing their anathemas, the high priests of defamation only signal their membership in the universe they reject. The suspicion that hovers over our most brilliant successes always threatens to degenerate into facile defeatism. The critical spirit rises up against itself and consumes its form. But instead of coming out of this process greater and purified, it devours itself in a kind of self-cannibalism and takes a morose pleasure in annihilating itself. Hyper-criticism eventuates in self-hatred, leaving behind it only ruins. A new dogma of demolition is born out of the rejection of dogmas.

 

Thus we Euro-Americans are supposed to have only one obligation: endlessly atoning for what we have inflicted on other parts of humanity. How can we fail to see that this leads us to live off self-denunciation while taking a strange pride in being the worst? Self-denigration is all too clearly a form of indirect self-glorification…. (pp. 33-34)

Europe must cherish freedom as its most precious possession and teach it to schoolchildren. It must also celebrate the beauty of discord and divest itself of its sick allergy to confrontation, not be afraid to point out the enemy, and combine firmness with regard to governments and generosity with regard to peoples. In short, it must simply reconnect with the subversive richness of its ideas and the vitality of its founding principles. (p. 220)

An Imaginary Racism

While Judaism and Christianity are open to self-reflection and self-criticism, dare to critique Islam and you might find your head being lopped off. Muslims and their woke Western supporters have invented a bogus term to ensure Islam cannot be naysaid, no matter how much it deserves to be.

Islamophobia: the term probably already existed in the nineteenth century, which explains its spontaneous use by imperial officials. As for its antonym, Islamophilia, whether erudite or popular, since the seventeenth century it has been a constant in European history, which is still massively fascinated by Islamic civilization. But after the Iranian Revolution of 1980 the expression ‘Islamophobia’ underwent a mutation that weaponized it. Between the expulsion of the American feminist Kate Millet from Teheran in 1979 for having protested against the regime’s requirement that Iranian women wear a veil, and the Rushdie affair in 1988, which exploded under the influence of British Muslims, this dormant word suddenly awoke and became active in another form. A word does not belong to the person who created it but to the one who reinvented it to make its use widespread. This lexical rejuvenation makes it possible to kill two birds with one stone: stigmatizing traitors to the Muslim faith, on the one hand, and shutting up godless Westerners, on the other. (pp. 2-3)

Let’s face it: the undertaking conducted here may be doomed in advance. The expression ‘Islamophobia’ has entered the global lexicon. It has become a juridical, political shield that makes it possible to ward off all criticisms, but that is not a reason for giving up. Languages sometimes fall ill, as we have seen in the history of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. To borrow an expression from Camus, which is repeated ad nauseam: ‘calling things by the wrong name adds to the affliction of the world’. The battle is first of all philosophical: anyone who expropriates words, expropriates brains and places mendacity at the heart of language. For the time being, the fundamentalists have won the vocabulary battle, but there is still time to stop this excessively well-oiled machine. Delegitimizing the term ‘Islamophobia’, instilling doubt about it, putting it permanently between quotation marks – that is the goal of this essay. To win the war against fundamentalism, we have to fight it first on the terrain of ideas. Here I offer a small toolbox for deconstructing the witch-hunt and rejecting the blackmail. (p. 5)

What should an anti-racism, rightly understood, consist in? The wisdom to live together, the attraction of diversity when individuals of all origins encounter one another in the same space, but also a discerning intelligence capable of distinguishing what is a matter of humiliation from what is a matter of freedom of expression. Let us recall that the goal of a wise politics is to prevent discord and avoid war. But anti-racism, which has become the civil religion of modern times, has been transformed into a permanent war of all against all, a rhetoric of recrimination. (p. 11)

What is political correctness? An allergy to naming things, a sweeping-away of difficulties, the impossibility of saying anything without using metaphor, displacement, gibberish. Words are blurred the way genitals are blurred on some statues, and as piano legs, according to popular legend, were skirted in the Victorian period to avoid offending polite society. Saying what is the case, saying what one sees, would be shocking. Now ‘to stigmatize’ is to mention that which must not be mentioned. We ‘stigmatize’ as soon as we point to a problem. Let us recall that during their respective terms as president, both Barack Obama and Francois Hollande seemed incapable of speaking of ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘radical Islam’, instead always using indirect or neutral expressions to describe our enemies. The contemporary taboo seeks to shelter not only beliefs or ideas, but whole areas of reality. In certain American universities, for example, students have protested the mere use of the term ‘Islamism’ or ‘radical Islam’, regarding it as inappropriate. (p. 14)

It is hoped that exposure to these brief quotes might induce you to get hold of some of Bruckner’s important works.

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