David Landes, Europhobia (Oikophobia), and the Poverty of History

Contribution to a Panel Discussion at ASMEA, November 4, 2023

In the late 1990s, the Fairbanks Center at Harvard held a debate between my father and Ken Pomeranz over why the US developed modernity and China did not. According to Pomeranz, right up to 1800 they were neck and neck, and then things tipped in the West’s favor by chance. It was a kind of therapeutic history designed to make China feel better about itself, and bring West down a peg: “it’s not your fault you lost; and the West ain’t so hot.” Landes, on the other hand, argued that specific Western strengths and Chinese weaknesses explained the outcome.

After the talk, the audience that gathered around the scholars divided neatly: the Western graduate students gathering around Pomeranz, and the Chinese graduate students gathering around Landes to find out more about how to not make the same mistakes their ancestors had committed.

In retrospect, this is more than an anecdote. It gets to the core of the problem: self-criticism. For Pomeranz (and later for Jared Diamond), it was the aleatory shrug of evolutionary forces that accounted for the West’s success, whereas for Landes, it was, among other things, about a culture that had developed a sufficiently accurate information system that it could generate new knowledge and tools, and respond effectively to challenges, vs. a system that had become riddled with misinformation based on what the informers wanted the informed to believe. In the imperial court of Qing China “…a plague of lies and misinformation: officials wrote and told their superiors what they wanted to hear; or what the subordinate thought the superior would want to hear.”

Watching the split in the audience after the talk, I realized that whatever the stated or even believed intention of the Western historian in sparing China’s ego (or the Arab’s ego, or the “third world’s” ego), it was less about “helping” the marginalized, the poor, the losers, and more about virtue-signaling one’s renunciation of western supremacist thinking (hence the crowd around Pomeranz). (At the time, I didn’t know about “luxury beliefs.” From my father’s point of view, the point of having self-confidence was so that you could face unpleasant truths, not getting a false sense of self-confidence from people trying hard not to criticize you.

Were one to start a list of DSL’s “cultural traits that lead to economic productivity” then the ability to self-criticize and hear criticism, goes to the top of the list.

But the “corrective” to Western triumphalism took on a life of its own, a weaponized form that viewed dissent as a measure of bad faith, of racism. This turn against the West as a force for evil (in medieval language the “satanic” West) has been diagnosed as oikophobia by Roger Scruton: a primary revulsion and hostility one feels at one’s own “home” culture, xenophobia inverted against the self. Self-contempt. Not the normal tribal mentality of “my side right or wrong,” but the post-modern masochistic version “my side always wrong.” Oikophobes may dwell endlessly on how Western history is riddled with racist, supremacist thinking, but not, heaven forbid, on how that kind of thinking permeates other cultures.

Retrospectively, this oikophobia represents in my opinion, a great force which my father did not fathom: he was immensely impressed by the Western accomplishment, by the kinds of cultural changes that unleashed the productive powers of the West. The Unbound Prometheus tells the exciting, centuries-long tale of four-way race to modernity.

He did not feel guilty for slavery, neither as a Jew whose family settled America in the early 20^th century, nor as a participant in the Western Promethean epic: on the contrary, the America, the West, that he joined, and that he believed created so much wealth and opportunity for all, was the West that put an end to slavery, and welcomed outsiders according to their merit.

One can criticize his work for not dwelling enough on the collateral damage on the working classes, for a certain teleological belief that the modern prize – a thriving society that offers a good life to its free citizens – was somehow a preordained evolutionary destination. But he shared none of the oikophobes self-loathing. His message to those who lost in the modernity sweepstakes was not sympathetic outrage at their grievance, but – as his profoundly positive-sum spirit dictated – advice on how to escape (self-inflicted) poverty and join the winners.

Choose Life.

But the oikophobes won. Whatever was deemed racist (e.g. the “culture matters” school), became beyond the pale – too insulting, too racist, too supremacist. This therapeutic strain joined together with the zero-sum strain that Jeffrey traced in his presentation, that envious revolutionary claim that anything you have that I don’t is theft. In 2014, Brandeis faculty rose up in horror at the administration’s intention to give Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree. “We cannot accept Ms. Hirsi Ali's triumphalist narrative of western civilization, rooted in a core belief of the cultural backwardness of non-western peoples.” Any narrative of Western modernity as a triumph was, by definition, racist, and, therefore, banished from decent company.

The alignment of “progressive” forces with jihadis, depends heavily on this anti-Eurocentrism. Judith Butler’s blessing to the union of jihad and progressive causes on the basis of a shared “anti-imperialism” embodies the tragic folly of the post-modern academy: in reality, the jihadis are ferocious imperialists with global ambitions. Blinded by their Europhobia, the post-modern critical theorists embrace a merciless foe and turned the very culture that produced them into the Antichrist. With the help of oikophobic Western allies, including many in the press, triumphalist Muslims have been able to wage a grievance jihad for the entire 21^st century, in which their every excess – even October 7 – was a response to the evil of the Israeli occupation. And the Palestinian people – whom the anti-Zionists claim they care about – are left in the merciless talons of a jihadi leadership that benefits exclusively from their suffering.

As a result of this self-loathing, Western intellectuals literally blinded themselves to the forces gathering in a region and in a religion about which they were either uninformed, or misinformed. When a budding Rumi scholar in graduate school when 9-11 happened wanted to work on terrorist ideologies, his advisors at Princeton told him that if he did, there would be no place for him in academia. And they were right.

The hostility to DSL’s Eurocentrism makes perfect sense. The very principles of grievance-culture are what he would consider a recipe for poverty and failure:

·      that meritocracy is only privilege,

·      that inequities are the fault of those who benefit,

·      that only those in power can be racists

Historians cannot even ask the kinds of questions that I would contend are key issues for the future of a prosperous global culture:

·      how did the West overcome (to the degree that it did) the power of “old-boy” networks and open up positions of authority to people from anywhere in that society on the basis of merit?

·      How did the West shift from a political culture in which men scorned labor and shed blood to maintain honor to one of free dispute, effective research and productive labor?

·      How did the West shift from an imperialist culture that prized dominion, to one that wants to renounce its hegemony in the name of peace?  

Therapeutics makes it impossible to do history, because, to paraphrase a famous meme: while our feelings can care about history – that’s why most of us do it – History doesn’t care about our feelings. Or as David Landes put it: “just because something is obvious does not mean that people will see it, or that they will sacrifice belief to reality.” And neither do the velociraptors care about the feelings of the great Western dinosaur which has been utterly disoriented by the work of historians who left the profession without serving notice.

Today, it’s not Chinese officials” telling their “superiors what they wanted to hear; or what the subordinate thought the superior would want to hear.” Today we have a plague of therapeutic lies and revolutionary misinformation: historians telling their colleagues what they think signals their virtue, what they think those they identify as “marginalized and under-represented victims” want to hear, what they think the voting public should know to vote correctly. It’s the same pre-modern shame-honor dynamics, just in the service of a different (and in the case of triumphalist Muslims, a hostile) “peer group.”

There are a thousand good answers to “Why the West?” – some admiring, some deploring, some more sophisticated. But if you can’t ask the question, then you can’t do history. And the only ones who benefit, are the very elites who impoverish their own people. When I first read Wealth and Poverty, I thought the advice, “Choose Life”, was pretty obvious. Today, with so many professors, administrators, and students, embracing a death cult, I realize, it’s not so easy to choose life. It means, among other things, suffering the indignity of occasionally admitting that you were wrong.