Benedict Beckeld on Western Self-Hatred

What does it mean for a civilisation to turn against itself? In this episode, Quillette‘s Zoe Sankey speaks with philosopher and author Benedict Beckeld — whose 2019 Quillette essay on oikophobia remains one of our site’s most popular pieces — about the recurring historical phenomenon he has spent his career documenting: the tendency of successful Western societies to denigrate their own culture, institutions, and inheritance.

Drawing on his book Oikophobia: Our Western Self-Hatred, published by Cornell University Press, Beckeld traces the pattern from ancient Athens and Imperial Rome to contemporary Europe and the Anglosphere, arguing that cultural self-repudiation is not a modern aberration but a predictable feature of prosperous, secure civilisations. The conversation ranges widely: the assimilability of Islam, the distinction between monoethnicity and monoculturalism, the demographic significance of Israel, the theological differences between the three Abrahamic religions, and the question of whether the West can recover its civilisational confidence before external pressures force the issue.