RALEIGH – You must read David Brooks’ excellent cover essay in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard. Entitled “Among the Bourgeoisophobes,” it explains thoroughly why certain elements of European and Middle Eastern society have such virulent hatreds of both Americans and Israelis. Here’s the link.
What Brooks argues is that the U.S. and Israel are actually hated by these cultural throwbacks for perfectly understandable reasons: our success is based on liberal (in the old, libertarian sense of the term), democratic, commercial, and pluralistic values that they find abhorrent. He locates this old animus, for which he uses – indeed, resurrects – the descriptive term “bourgeoisophobia,” in 19th century France. Writers, artists, and intellectuals with lots of pretension and aristocratic bearing and little actual life experience or marketable skills saw others succeeding in a nascent capitalist society and reacted with revulsion.
As Brooks writes, these same impulses guide the hatred of Americans and Jews we see today in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere:
“This is because today, in much of the world’s eyes, two peoples – the Americans and the Jews – have emerged as the great exemplars of undeserved success. Americans and Israelis, in this view, are the money-mad molochs of the earth, the vulgarizers of morals, corrupters of culture, and proselytizers of idolatrous values. These two nations, it is said, practice conquest capitalism, overrunning poorer nations and exploiting weaker neighbors in their endless desire for more and more. These two peoples, the Americans and the Jews, in the view of the bourgeoisophobes, thrive precisely because they are spiritually stunted. It is their obliviousness to the holy things in life, their feverish energy, their injustice, their shallow pursuit of power and gain, that allow them to build fortunes, construct weapons, and play the role of hyperpower.”
You will not satiate the voracious appetites for hate that this stunted nincompoops display by accommodating them, by giving them territorial or economic concessions, by surrendering what makes free, Westernized societies the most successful in the history of the world (the most successful for non-Westerners and Westerners alike, by the way). You will only overcome the bourgeoisophobes by proudly defending and spreading the universal principles of freedom. As Brooks concludes:
“Maybe in their hatred we can better discern our strengths. Because if the tide of conflict is rising, then we had better be able to articulate, not least to ourselves, who we are, why we arouse such passions, and why we are absolutely right to defend ourselves.”