Saturday, July 02, 2022

First Paragraph

 We in the West continually come across oikophobia. We see it when a schoolteacher tells the students that Western civilization has been uniquely evil in its pursuit of colonization and slavery, with the implication that other civilizations have not engaged in such things; when a school named after Thomas Jefferson seeks to change its name because of concerns about racism; when a commercial for a Scandinavian airline insists that nothing is truly Scandinavian; when Western universities "decolonize" their departments to make them less Eurocentric than they have already become; when the waving of one's own national flag is decried as xenophobic while other nations are encouraged to display pride in their cultures; when wild crowds tear down statues of their country's founders. These instances reveal a civilization that has stopped believing in itself, that hates itself, and that is therefore unwilling to defend the values of freedom, democracy, and scientific and scholarly skepticism that have been handed down to us since antiquity.

- From Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations by Benedict Beckeld


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