The perils of comfort

Sometimes associated with the “New Philosophers,” a group of thinkers who broke with Marxism after the summer of 1968, Pascal Bruckner is one of France’s most eloquent critics of the anti-Western biases of today’s progressive intellectuals.

In his 1983 book The Tears of the White Man, he eviscerated the approach to the Third World that blames Western colonialism for every problem in former colonies. His 2006 book The Tyranny of Guilt critiqued what he called the West’s “self-hatred” and the inability of many on the left to admit to anything good in the Western intellectual tradition and anything bad in non-Western ones.

His latest book, The Triumph of the Slippers (Polity), translated by Cory Stockwell, can be read as a companion to both The Tears of the White Man and The Tyranny of Guilt. Rather than focusing on the European elite, Bruckner looks at the common man in The Triumph of the Slippers. What he finds is a disturbing willingness to give up personal freedom for the promise of safety. The COVID-19 pandemic, of course, made this willingness clear, but it was just the “midwife to the actual virus: a pre-existing allergy to the Outside” and to risk.

Bruckner sees this allergy in increasingly alarmist climate policies, approaches to dating following #MeToo, the preference of living in the virtual world rather than the real one, our preoccupation with domestic comfort, and our love of leisurewear.

The West today is dominated by “declinism,” he claims. “We now define ourselves by subtraction,” Bruckner writes, “or by opposition.” Modern technologies “encourage incarceration under the guise of openness.” The “man of the future is a reduced being” who prefers the so-called “augmented reality of the virtual” to reality itself. This results in a kind of voluntary imprisonment in which we are “free” to live in “authorized sloppiness” and “splendid regression.”

Despite his secular worldview, Bruckner provides an eloquent summary of what ails the West, but he has less to say about what has caused this devotion to safety and comfort.

He mentions in passing the new emphasis the Protestant Reformation placed on everyday life, but he stops short of blaming it for our current situation and even notes that “by cutting itself off from transcendence,” modern life has become repetitive and meaningless.

In light of these critiques, it’s notable Bruckner ignores the precipitous decline in church attendance in Europe over the last 50 years that partly explains this diminished view of life. He complains that the “need for complete safety can stifle our very desire to be with others.”

But if this life is all there is, why risk it by helping others? He laments the “proliferation of rights” that “is accompanied by an equal decrease in duties” but neglects to see that it is the Church that taught us to love God and others and understand our rights rightly.

—Micah Mattix is the poetry editor of First Things magazine and a professor of English at Regent University