Why do they hate us? The rise of anti-westernism concerns us all - yet most attempts to understand it display exactly the sort of chauvinism that explains why people despise the west. The real challenge is to try to understand other cultures on their own terms
Published 04 October 2004
Occidentalism: a short history of anti-westernism
Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit Atlantic Books, 165pp, £14.99
ISBN 1843542870
Pity the Orientals! The poor sods aren't even allowed to hate the west without being told how to conjure up their hatred, what its most important elements are, and against what it should be directed. Without western guidance, people with little history and even less intellectual capacity would have no idea why they hate - and should hate - the west, let alone understand the complex, pluralistic nature of western societies and culture. Such guidance, argue Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, has been provided by a long line of western luminaries: Wagner, Voltaire, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, the Romantics and the socialists, Hitler, the Russian Orthodox Church. And so occidentalism - "the dehumanising picture of the west painted by its enemies" - has its origins in the west itself. Radical jihadis, as well as anti-globalisation protesters, are really acting out a perverted western fantasy.
Buruma and Margalit acquired this insight after a visit to the grave of Karl Marx. At Highgate Cemetery, the intrepid professors learned that the rather well-off and secular German Jews were disliked by their poor, narrow-minded eastern counterparts. Eastern Jews saw German Jews as cold, arrogant, materialist and mechanical. In a blinding flash of light, Buruma and Margalit realised that all the countless people out there who hate the west see it in similar terms, as "a machine-like society without a soul". Eureka! Occidentalism was born.
It is easy to dismiss Occidentalism as a rather feeble attempt to develop a counterpart to orientalism, but that would be a mistake. We should all be concerned at the spread of anti-western feeling in the non-west. Anti-American and anti-western sentiments are not going to evaporate. Occidentalism seems poised to become the dominant discourse of the future. This means that attempts to theorise, understand and do something about it will become more common - and more necessary.
Herein lies the importance of Occidentalism. Yet Buruma and Margalit demand serious engagement not for what they actually say - which is slight, superficial and seriously flawed - but for what they do not say, and for what they imply. They do not, for example, tell us anything about the nature of the "west" that they want to defend. Where is it? What does it consist of? How does it differ from the "Europe" of the Enlightenment? And why should we actually want to defend it? Because it is intrinsically superior? Because its values are universal? Or because it is the dominant power and its definitions must be accepted by all peoples and cultures? It is implied that occidentalism is the antithesis of orientalism. But can we really equate the two things? The history of orientalism dates back a thousand years. How old is occidentalism? What is the relationship between these two structures of perceiving the Other?
These are essential questions; thus, Buruma and Margalit's failure to address them suggests there is a serious problem with their project. And it is simply this: most western thinking about non-western societies is totally bankrupt. The west has almost no ability to relate to and understand the non-west on its own terms. The best it can do is to engage in a form of navel-gazing: western man looks at himself, sees a superior being and, on this basis, tries to rationalise why others despise him.
Occidentalism is an excellent example of this. Subtitled "a short history of anti-westernism", it actually provides a history of dissenting and fascist thought within the west. Non-western villains such as Islamist ideologues, Japanese nationalists and the Khmer Rouge are allowed no more than a walk-on role. And so, in the best orientalist tradition, the non-west is depicted as having no history and nothing to say. The authors even borrow their justification for writing the book from orientalism. Their aim is to defend the west from its enemies by seeking to understand them. Wasn't this the purpose of orientalism, and the reason why classical anthropology emerged as a discipline? For Buruma and Margalit, occidentalism performs much the same function as orientalism: it is a means to control, contain and manage.
Buruma and Margalit tell us that the "venomous brew" of occidentalism consists of four main elements: hostility to the city; revulsion for the material life; abhorrence of the western mind; and hatred of the infidel. Occidentalists, we learn, do not actually hate the city per se, only "cities given to commerce and pleasure instead of religious worship". As cities are ambiguous places that people - including fanatics - love and hate in equal measure, however, this is about as banal a rationale as it is possible to produce. Fanatics may be fanatics, but they are not stupid enough to think that it is possible for cities to be devoid of commerce and entertainment. Saint Augustine - and there is no non-western counterpart of this arch-western fanatic - permitted commerce and righteous enjoyment in his "City of God". Even Mecca is not without its pleasures.
In non-western civilisations, cities have always been a focus for ritual and symbolism; part of their purpose was to provide connections to communal and national history. Perhaps the reason many non-western people dislike cities is that these connections have been severed. Their cities, along with their history and cultural property, their traditional architecture and environmentally sound lifestyles, have been destroyed by the imposition of western urban planning. Fifty years of "development planning policies" have uprooted and destroyed communities, turned self-sufficient neighbourhoods into slums, and concentrated wealth into ever fewer hands.
Buruma and Margalit tell us that it was Voltaire who taught occidentalists that "commerce is tied to both freedom and imperialism", but west-hating fanatics hardly need Voltaire to inform them of this. Having lived through colonialism, the non-west has experienced the connections between commerce and imperialism for itself. And it knows at first hand that most "free markets" are free only for a select few.
In any case, perhaps it is not hatred of material life that is the problem, but the kind of material life the west is imposing on the non-west. For decades, the west has engaged in "cultural terrorism" - described in the 1960s and 1970s as "Cocacolonisation" and, more recently, as "McDonaldisation". In 1962, the Iranian philosopher Jalal Al-e Ahmad described the onslaught of western culture - films, television, fashion, pop music, architecture, consumer goods - as Occidentosis: a plague from the west. Everything we cherish, he suggested, is being made irrelevant; soon, our culture will be found only in cemeteries and we will be reduced to "gatekeepers of graveyards".
Occidentalists, Buruma and Margalit suggest, "believe that the west is guilty of the sin of rationalism, of being arrogant enough to think that reason is the faculty that enables humans to know everything there is to know". But why would non-westerners need to learn about rationality from someone called Ivan Kireyevsky, of whom few people have even heard, when Muslims can learn about it from the Mutazalites, the classical rationalist philosophers who believed that reason itself was enough to know and develop everything, including morality and knowledge of God? The truth is almost exactly the opposite of what Buruma and Margalit claim: occidentalists do not despise "instrumental reason"; rather, they use it to justify their actions. Instrumental reason is their last resort. Moreover, their dislike of "democratic mediocrity" comes not from western supporters of Stalin, Mao and Hitler, but from Socrates and Plato. Occidentalists may not read Voltaire, but they certainly know their Greek philosophy from original sources.
It turns out that what these city-hating, anti-materialist, anti-rational occidentalists dislike most is "the selfish greed of capitalism, the moral emptiness of liberalism, the shallowness of American culture". Well, if these are their only gripes, they have my support - along with that of millions within the west. Does that make us occidentalists? And does "the idea of the west" really come down to this?
Occidentalism, as constructed by Buruma and Margalit, cannot be equated with orientalism. Orientalism is a discourse - a coherent structure of knowledge through which the west has understood and represented the "Orient", and through which the west produces self-confirming accounts of the non-west. Occidentalism is nothing more than a collection of a few pet hates, most of which, as the authors themselves admit, are entirely justified, given the excesses of the west.
Moreover, orientalism is a discourse of power, with the strength of a dominant, globalised civilisation behind it. Occidentalism is the recourse of the powerless. Orientalism can be seen in films and television shows, read in novels and travel literature, heard on the radio and perused in newspapers and magazines throughout the western world. Occidentalism is limited to the fringe. Orientalism has a long history, dating back to the inception of Islam itself. Occidentalism, if Buruma and Margalit are to be believed, is a relatively recent phenomenon in the non-west, emerging only after the Second World War. Above all, orientalism is deeply embodied in western knowledge and disciplinary structure; it shaped disciplines such as anthropology and development studies, international relations and area studies, history and geography. There is not a single discipline in the world in which occidentalism plays an integral part.
The problem with Occidentalism is not just the limitation of Buruma and Margalit's scholarship: it is the problem of the west itself. The very tools the west uses to study the non-west - concepts, ideas, disciplines, methodologies - are deeply implicated in the exploitation of non-western cultures. They act as smokescreens that make the obvious invisible. That is why Buruma and Margalit can claim that occidentalists "favour crowds rather than the individual", or that they have "organic minds", without appearing to realise that these are classic orientalist assertions. They can state that "the direct enemy of the occidentalist, particularly revolutionary Islamists, is not always the west itself but Mr Science" - without acknowledging that by far the majority of prominent Islamists are scientists and technologists, as were the 9/11 bombers.
There is occidentalism out there. To understand its true nature, however, we need to understand non-western societies on their own terms, within their own histories and with their own concerns and concepts. Is this really too much to ask?
Ziauddin Sardar's American Dream, Global Nightmare, co-written with Merryl Wyn Davies, is published by Icon Books
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