THE RIGHT BOOKS

After three years, Pascal Bruckner’s Le Sanglot de I’homme blanc—first published in France in 1983 to praise from, among other critics, Jean-François Revel—makes its appearance in the United States as The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (Free Press, $17.95), to praise from Jeane Kirkpatrick and a laudatory review in the New York Times. The enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic is deserved: Bruckner’s book is indeed what Revel says it is, a very important work. In fact, it is one of the finest and most stylish (in William R. Beer’s English translation) volumes of historical polemicism published in the last 25 years.

The Tears of the White Man is a coruscating critique of Third Worldism, an affliction virulent in left-wing circles since the dismemberment of the great European empires following World War II, but more especially since the Bandung Conference of Colored Peoples in 1955, from which the idea of the Third World as a political bloc took shape. According to Bruckner, Third Worldism is expressed in three fundamental attitudes: solidarity with, pity for, and imitation of the Third World. In the first instance, the underlying assumption is that “their fight is our fight”—that the peoples of the West are also oppressed by the forces of industrial capitalism; so that (as Beer puts it in his introduction) “every time a Communist guerrilla shoots a soldier in El Salvador, I am a little freer; every time lesbians demonstrate for the right to adopt children, the herdsmen of the Sudan are a little freer.” In the second, it is that (to quote Beer again), “because we are rich and they are poor, we are their oppressors. . . . Our wealth is the cause of their poverty . . . [and] our tolerance and democracy are possible only because they are based on our wealth, which in turn is the cause of the suffering of the poor.” In the third, a loss of natural wisdom and innocence by the West is postulated, and primitive peoples are imagined as being closer to nature, to their own selves and to each other, than we are.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

The New York Times

After three years, Pascal Bruckner’s Le Sanglot de I’homme blanc—first published in France in 1983 to praise from, among other critics, Jean-François Revel—makes its appearance in the United States as The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (Free Press, $17.95), to praise from Jeane Kirkpatrick and a laudatory review in the New York Times. The enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic is deserved: Bruckner’s book is indeed what Revel says it is, a very important work. In fact, it is one of the finest and most stylish (in William R. Beer’s English translation) volumes of historical polemicism published in the last 25 years.

The Tears of the White Man is a coruscating critique of Third Worldism, an affliction virulent in left-wing circles since the dismemberment of the great European empires following World War II, but more especially since the Bandung Conference of Colored Peoples in 1955, from which the idea of the Third World as a political bloc took shape. According to Bruckner, Third Worldism is expressed in three fundamental attitudes: solidarity with, pity for, and imitation of the Third World. In the first instance, the underlying assumption is that “their fight is our fight”—that the peoples of the West are also oppressed by the forces of industrial capitalism; so that (as Beer puts it in his introduction) “every time a Communist guerrilla shoots a soldier in El Salvador, I am a little freer; every time lesbians demonstrate for the right to adopt children, the herdsmen of the Sudan are a little freer.” In the second, it is that (to quote Beer again), “because we are rich and they are poor, we are their oppressors. . . . Our wealth is the cause of their poverty . . . [and] our tolerance and democracy are possible only because they are based on our wealth, which in turn is the cause of the suffering of the poor.” In the third, a loss of natural wisdom and innocence by the West is postulated, and primitive peoples are imagined as being closer to nature, to their own selves and to each other, than we are.