Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

Abstract

OCCIDENTALISM The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit New York: Penguin, 2004. I66pp, $33.00 cloth (ISBN 1-59420-008-4)"Why do they hate us?" This question has resonated widely in the United States and the rest of the west since the events of 11 September 2001, and there is nary a commentator who has not ventured an answer. The explanations have been diverse, but most have revolved around the specific relationship of the United States, or the west more generally, with the Middle East. It is the legacy of western imperialism; or of US policies; or it is the result of problems particular to the region: lack of democracy, of economic opportunity, of the right of political dissent and free speech. The authors of this slim but expansive volume, however, offer a different perspective. For Buruma, a prolific author-journalist with a special interest in things Asian, and Margalit, a philosopher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the most recent manifestation of hostility toward the west is part of a much broader phenomenon, one that has a history stretching far beyond the confines of the Middle East, of Islam, or of specific political circumstances or policy choices. It is nothing less than the latest variation of a multifaceted, geographically and culturally diverse worldview of resistance to western modernity itself, a worldview that the authors call "Occidentalism."For the authors, occidentalism is a broad phenomenon over time and space, and the object of its hatred-the putative occident-is not so much a geographic region as a set of ideals about the nature and purposes of human life. The occident is the intellectual brainchild of the Enlightenment and the political successor to the American and, especially, the French revolutions. It believes that reason and science are guides to what is right and true, and adopts them as the paths to progress; its societies practice liberal-democratic politics and the economics of capitalist development. To its enemies, the occident holds out a model of human existence that values the physical comfort and gratification of the individual above all. It encourages, even glorifies, mediocrity and ordinariness, and suppresses the heroic possibilities and yearnings of the human spirit. It gives rise, as Tocqueville observed of the United States a century and a half ago, to societies marked by "the rarity, in a land where all are actively ambitious, of any lofty ambition" (55). In the extreme, the occidentalist sees the people of the occident-imagined as shallow, materialistic, self-seeking, mediocre, craven-as something less than human, and therefore as undeserving of the usual moral considerations.To make their case and trace the history of the occident and its enemies, the authors venture far and wide in time and space. The book opens with Japanese nationalist intellectuals gathering to discuss how to resist western modernity in the 1940s, but soon moves on to German Romantic thinkers from Herder to Ernst Junger, to Russian Slavophiles and nihilists, and finally to more recent radical Islamists, with numerous detours that take them to Dostoyevsky, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, and Theodor Herzl, and many others besides. …