Customer Reviews

The Tears of the White Man: Compassion As Contempt

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Pascal Bruckner's The Tears of the White Man is an old school classic concerning the guilt westerners feel towards citizens of the third world. It also describes the guilt whites feel towards people of color in general, but is only vicariously applicable to the United States. An introduction by William Beer ties its narrative to the American experience but Bruckner himself, a Frenchmen, doesn't directly address it. Over the years I've noticed that some of the most brilliant rightists come from countries in which you would not expect to find them, such as France and Israel. Bruckner himself is a reformed guiltist and we should all be grateful that he made the transition from emotion to logic in the seventies and eighties. As a writer Bruckner is clever and precise. The idea that compassion is actually a form of contempt is blatantly evident and one recognizes its truth shortly after hearing it. I read that the work had an influence on the career of Michel Houellebecq which is a testament to its importance. Despite being penned in 1983 it stood the test of time and is still applicable to the present day. Additionally, it is a potent analysis of leftist thought and leftist psychology. I definitely profited from reading it.

This book will anger some people, but others will see it as saying some long-overdue things. It deserves careful attention from all. Bruckner focuses on "third worldism" in France as of 1983, but this outlook persists throughout the West today. By "third worldism," Bruckner and others mean a general sympathy for the Third World, especially its liberation movements and leftist revolutions, but more broadly, the term also refers to an outlook of western guilt for everything from colonialism and capitalism to being wealthy while others are poor. Bruckner, a psychologist, writes in a way that may strike some (especially scholars) as rambling, and at times his point could be clearer; also he is not an economist or economic historian, and he seems unsure whether he believes accusations that western wealth caused/causes Third World poverty. If he is not the writer to resolve that issue, his analysis of the mentality in question can be insightful, and he presents a great deal of very interesting evidence in the form of statements by French writers and public figures, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the quotations he presents (lavish praise for Mao and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, for example) look foolish indeed today, but Third Worldism certainly endures. This book by no means says the last word on the subject (indeed he has returned to it in later books) but this is a vital book nonetheless.