The war against the West

When my grandchildren went to school in London, some educational administrators wanted to designate as “black” all children not of Christian Anglo-Saxon origin. This created a great deal of confusion, amusement and sometimes irritation not only among the Irish and Jews but equally among Chinese, Indians and, of course, black people.

As a result, the measure was shelved, and I hope a similar fate will be in store for “occidentalism.” The use of the term goes back, by and large, to the appearance of the late Edward Said’s hugely influential “Orientalism” in 1978. (Anthropologists may have used it before.) Said’s book was written with great passion but much of the time it was not clear what the debate was about. Where was the Orient? Reading Said and his disciples one gained the impression that they were concerned almost exclusively with the Middle East, or, more precisely, the Arab countries of the Middle East. They were not interested, to give but one example, in the Chinese, let alone the Mongols. Chinese scholars were among the most emphatic to reject this new Orientalism concept. It must also be said, in Said’s defense, that he wrote that it was difficult and unlikely “to imagine a field of occidentalism.” He could not have been more mistaken.

In “Occidentalism,” Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit have written an interesting and challenging book about anti-Western stereotypes -- they show a great deal of erudition and good sense. But the parameters of their subject are at least as fuzzy as those of Said’s “Orientalism.” Their subject is not really anti-imperialism: Anti-Westerners do not bother with classical imperialist powers such as Belgium, Holland or Spain, even though the record of those countries was not too good. The term is not even, the authors argue, a synonym for anti-Americanism. Occidentalism, they say, is anti-Westernism. If so, then where and what is the West?

At this stage in considering the subject, the student of the idea of the “clash of civilizations” comes up against serious problems: Mao was no Occidentalist (as the authors define it) but drew much of his inspiration from the West; he was no great admirer of Chinese religion and philosophy and banned (for instance) the practice of traditional Chinese medicine. Hitler, on the other hand, though not born in Saudi Arabia, was an Occidentalist; his followers were at least as averse to the soulless, post-heroic, decadent West as Osama bin Laden and his admirers. In our time, the major bloody conflicts have been not between civilizations but, for example, between Iraq and Iran, between India and Pakistan or inside Africa -- in other words, within certain civilizations.

Occidentalism (to mention the confusing term for the last time) is the war against the West that was invented neither in the East nor in the South but in Europe. The authors quite rightly deal predominantly with the Western sources of anti-Westernism. I recall one saying, in the 1970s and ‘80s, that there were far more Marxists and neo-Marxists on American campuses than in the whole Soviet bloc, and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, with regard to anti-Western ideology (it is less true in Europe). The reaction against the ideas of the French revolution and the Enlightenment occurred for obvious reasons in Europe, not Asia or Africa.

The carriers of anti-Westernism were almost always on the right of the political spectrum. The same is true of European anti-Americanism during the 19th century: British and German conservatives looked down on and ridiculed American plebeian manners, democracy and mass culture. True, this movement gradually died down, though it never entirely disappeared. In Russia, for instance, “Westerners” were confronted by Slavophiles, who talked and wrote a great deal about Western spiritual corruption and the treasures of the Russian soul even though their inspiration came mainly from German philosophy (and quite often they spoke French).

This brand of anti-Westernism had a second coming toward the end of the 19th century when new anti-liberal ideologies were sprouting that juxtaposed the idealistic, anti-bourgeois, deeply nationalist forces of the younger generation with the values of the materialistic, dying West. It was out of this circumstance that fascism grew; communism, though anti-liberal in practice, could never cut itself off entirely from its secular and rationalist ideological sources.

Buruma and Margalit deal with these European sources of contemporary anti-Westernism. They mention, albeit in passing, a seminal work on this topic written many years ago, “The War Against the West” by Aurel Kolnai, a Hungarian psychoanalyst. Kolnai’s book is the most comprehensive study of the subject that ought to be rediscovered. Because the book appeared just before the outbreak of World War II, it never received the attention it deserved. By and large, most of continental Europe had ceased to be “Western” in the 1930s, and under Nazi occupation it was not Western at all.

But how much has all this to do with contemporary anti-Westernism? The connections are tenuous. It is true that some Arab radical thinkers of the 1930s were influenced by pre-fascist and fascist ideologists (this refers for instance to the Syrian and Iraqi Ba’ath), and it is also true that “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was translated into Arabic and other languages early on. But the effect of these thinkers and of the book was limited: There were other native sources of resentment against the West (and Christians and Jews) of much longer standing and more deeply rooted. There was also anti-imperialism, but this was not as rampant as religious fanaticism in the Arab world -- the imperial power in these regions had been, after all, Turkey, a Muslim country. Anti-Jewish literature can be found today in Japanese bookshops as well as in India, but this is more a curiosity than the reflection of a burning issue; the Jewish problem was never a major issue in the East, not even in Persia and Turkey.

In recent decades, there has been a movement afoot to create an anti-Western ideology, and the authors mention all the obvious names of Muslim scholars and radical Koran exegetes, usually self-educated, from Egypt to Pakistan. But this movement has been confined by and large to certain centers in the Islamic world (and the post-colonial departments on American campuses).

There are various reasons, valid and spurious, for the prevalence of anti-Western feelings and resentment -- political, economic, cultural, psychological -- in the Third World. Colonialism prevailed in some parts, and its heritage (to put it cautiously) has been mixed. But the post-colonial hangover was of surprisingly short duration, and I feel a little less apprehensive than the authors of this book about the prospects of the present attempts to resuscitate the hangover. There will be resistance against certain aspects of globalism, economic and cultural, which hurt the non-Western world; Islamist radicals will continue to preach holy war and they will attack ideologically (and also physically) the big Satan as well as the various smaller Satans spreading moral and spiritual corruption. There will be tensions in Western Europe as the number of Muslims in these countries grows and their integration stalls.

But I strongly doubt whether all this amounts to a deep, burning hatred of the rest against the West. It is also a generational problem affecting only some. Nationalist and fanatical religious movements too are subject to what Max Weber called routinization and what is known in the Arab world as the Salafi burnout (Salafi being the Egyptian equivalent of Wahhabism).

With all this, the war against the West is at present a major issue and its underlying motives ought to be studied. I doubt whether much can be done about it; powerful and relatively rich societies have provoked suspicion and envy and attracted enmity throughout history. I do not share the belief of Buruma and Margalit that religion could be a force for good in the Middle East, offering the only hope of a peaceful way out of the mess. The only known way to reduce such hostility is for the West to become less rich and less powerful.

It is the great merit of “Occidentalism” to have given a fresh impetus to the study of this topic and above all to have traced the Western (or, to be precise, European) roots of the new anti-Westernism. The authors cover a great deal of space on their journey, which starts at an anti-Western conference in Kyoto, Japan, during World War II and ends (for reasons not entirely persuasive) in present-day Jerusalem. Having covered so much ground, it is probably inevitable that they come up with some doubtful comparisons; to call the Russian religious thinker Leontiev the Russian Nietzsche is about as correct as calling the German humanist Herder a precursor of Nazism.

But an important book should not be judged by minor aberrations. Buruma and Margalit’s book is a major contribution to our knowledge -- provided that it does not contribute to a spread of the term occidentalism.