Civilized Disdain

Civilized Disdain is conceived as a pamphlet in the 19th century tradition: a short treatise of political philosophy with a polemical thesis: The Western Left has since 1945 progressively lost its ability to defend the West’s core values and has outsourced the West’s defense to the political right – with catastrophic consequences. Civilized Disdain diagnoses the source of this malady as the ideology of political correctness and prescribes the attitude of civilized disdain as the cure that will allow the political center-left to take over the West’s defense.

The author argues that the ideology of political correctness that protects non-Western ideologies and forms of life from any form of criticism is a misbegotten perversion of the vital Enlightenment Principle of Tolerance that protected individual liberty and the freedom to criticize any view, creed or form of life. Thus, the central thesis of Civilized Disdain is that the liberal outsourcing of the defense of Western values and culture to the political right is as disastrous as the relativism of political correctness: generations of students in the free world have grown up to think that questions of principle cannot be argued rationally; that all positions are equally valid. The result has been a hollowing of the liberal order. This book offers the concept and the attitude of civilized disdain as a cure for the Free World’s autoimmune disease. It rejects the idea of political correctness as conceptually and psychologically incoherent: no human being can genuinely respect positions he or she considers to be irrational, incoherent, immoral or even inhuman. The adequate response to such positions is disdain.

»What turns disdain into civilized disdain is the ability to respect the humanity of those who hold such positions.«

»This passion is inspiring, this fight against the inertia of taking everything for granted, against the trepidation of the politically correct. With Civilized Disdain, Israeli philosopher Carlo Strenger offers an intelligent ›manual for defending our freedom‹, a call to take a stance. And once you read the 94 pages, you close the book and think: this is exactly how that had to be said.« Berliner Zeitung

»The book is fantastically angry and sensational in a polemic manner.« Politiken

»Out of the recently published books examining the lifestyles and values of different cultures (especially those shaped by Judaeo-Christianity and Islam), this essay by a philosopher who was born in Switzerland and who teaches in Tel Aviv seems to me especially recommendable – specifically because of its clear and completely non-polemical reasoning.« Hartmut Handt, unterwegs