Occidentalism, The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

Abstract

OCCIDENTALISM The West in 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 United States and rest of west since 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 specific relationship of United States, or west more generally, with Middle East. It is legacy of western imperialism; or of US policies; or it is result of problems particular to region: lack of democracy, of economic opportunity, of 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 Hebrew University of Jerusalem, most recent manifestation of hostility toward west is part of a much broader phenomenon, one that has a history stretching far beyond confines of Middle East, of Islam, or of specific political circumstances or policy choices. It is nothing less than latest variation of a multifaceted, geographically and culturally diverse worldview of resistance to western modernity itself, a worldview that authors call Occidentalism.For authors, occidentalism is a broad phenomenon over time and space, and object of its hatred-the putative occident-is not so much a geographic region as a set of ideals about nature and purposes of human life. The occident is intellectual brainchild of Enlightenment and political successor to American and, especially, French revolutions. It believes that reason and science are guides to what is right and true, and adopts them as paths to progress; its societies practice liberal-democratic politics and economics of capitalist development. To its enemies, occident holds out a model of human existence that values physical comfort and gratification of individual above all. It encourages, even glorifies, mediocrity and ordinariness, and suppresses heroic possibilities and yearnings of human spirit. It gives rise, as Tocqueville observed of 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 extreme, occidentalist sees people of occident-imagined as shallow, materialistic, self-seeking, mediocre, craven-as something less than human, and therefore as undeserving of usual moral considerations.To make their case and trace history of occident and its enemies, 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 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. …