"Occidentalism," by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit. Penguin, 2004, 160 pages.

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Occidents Happen

by Eric Kenning

In 1948, Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Islamic fundamentalist who became a major influence on Osama bin Laden, visited America and was horrified. All the conversation in New York was about "money, movie stars or car models" (this is no longer the case — car models have been replaced by real estate). He recoiled from the racy clothing, banter, and manners of city women. And a church dance in Greeley, Colo., sent him into shock, as young women abandoned themselves to the seductive rhythms of "Baby, It's Cold Outside." Back in Egypt, instead of simply joining the Brotherhood of People with Unpronounceable Names, he joined the shadowy Muslim Brotherhood, which aimed to establish an Islamic theocracy, becoming its chief theorist and martyr (he did most of his writing in jail before Nasser finally executed him).

Qutb's reaction to New York and its saucy women doesn't seem substantially different from the patented Whore of Babylon reaction of home-grown fundamentalists like Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, or Jerry Falwell. But according to Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit in this short, ambitious, interesting, and somewhat misdirected book, Qutb and bin Laden don't primarily represent religious fundamentalism, not even a particularly rabid and brutal Islamic jihadist division of it. What they really are is the latest incarnation of "Occidentalism," an anti-liberal, anti-Western ideology that, like a horror-movie vampire, apparently keeps being killed off by the forces of reason and democracy only to rise from its grave and sink its fangs into us again.

Even if Buruma and Margalit are right in thinking that it's Occidentalism that we're up against, which I doubt, we might stand a better chance of zeroing in on it and defeating it once and for all if it had a catchier name. Since occident is Latin for west, Occidentalism sounds like it should be a pretentious Westernizing movement in non-Western countries. But the authors are academics (Buruma at Bard College in upstate New York, Margalit at Hebrew University in Jerusalem) who feel obliged to turn the tables on "Orientalism," the academically in-fluential 1976 book by Edward Said, which upbraided Western scholars and writers for perpetuating prejudices and stereotypes about the exotic, sensual, puritanical, despotic, languid, warlike, honor-bound, and devious inhabitants of the East.

So Occidentalism would be a set of hostile prejudices and stereotypes about the modern liberal West, where life is mechanical, materialist, calculating, and soulless, reducing everything to standardized mediocrity and numbers, counting heads in democracy, dollars in capitalism. The West is inauthentic and shallow and unheroic, marked by caution and comfort, the ideals of merchants and soft, possession-crazed consumers. Its entertainment is trivial and degrading, its art decadent. But the culture of (fill in the blank with your own authentic country or ethnic or religious group) is organic and profound, rooted in the soil and peasant simplicity and warrior heroism, in religion and honor and ancient custom. It puts spiritual values and art and poetry over money and material comfort, and it is austere and self-sacrificing, despising greed, luxury, and self-indulgence.

The authors demonstrate that this set of contrasting stereotypes was passed on for 200 years more or less intact, like a treasured heirloom or explosive device, from one culture to another, thus refuting (though they don't point this out) its own premise, which is that everything in authentic cultures is deeply rooted in the soil and native tradition. The "Occidentalist" contrast first surfaced in Germany, where most writers and intellectuals had initially welcomed the universalist ideals of the French Enlightenment, just as Frederick the Great welcomed Voltaire to Potsdam. But they began having second thoughts when revolutionary armies and Napoleon's legions seemed to be merely shoving French cultural preferences down German throats, turning what had been an ideal of anti-fanaticism and tolerance into a kind of rationalist jihad.

The most intriguing response came from philosophical historian Johann Gottfried von Herder, whom Buruma and Margalit discuss as if he fit their Occidentalist profile, though he doesn't. Herder wasn't a nationalist who believed in the superiority of German or any other culture. He was a kind of libertarian traditionalist with, in Isaiah Berlin's words, "his acute dislike for political coercion, empires, political authority, and all forms of imposed organization." He believed that cultures had a specific individuality, and that to understand other cultures (or periods of history) you needed sympathetic imagination, not just facts and analyses. Once you understand them, you see that they're not just defective versions of yourselves. Different cultures should be valued and preserved as great works of art are valued and preserved, for their unique creativity and individuality. If Herder were around today, he'd be a familiar figure, making documentary films about South American rain forest tribal cultures and displaying STOP GLOBALIZATION and FREE TIBET and U.S. OUT OF IRAQ bumper stickers on his Volkswagen.

But other German writers reacted to the French intrusions with self-congratulatory notions of German metaphysical depth and folkish purity, and the authors' basic Occidentalist template was born. By the mid-19th century it was translated into Russian and taken up by the Slavophiles, who used it against everything to the west of Russia (including Germany) on behalf of the mystical Russian nation and the Russian Orthodox Church. In the 1930sÐ40s, it was picked up by Japanese nationalists, who used it against everything to the west of Japan (including Russia) on behalf of the sacred imperial mission to purify Asia of imperialism. It can be detected among Maoist Chinese and Cambo-dian Communists, who used it against everything foreign and capitalist and bourgeois (including Japan) on behalf of communal peasant purity. Finally, the authors think it turned up again among Islamic fundamentalists, who have used it against all infidels (including Communists, but especially Americans and Israelis) on behalf of an ideally purified, back-to-the-7th-century Islamic community.

Because "Occidentalism" is arranged by touchstone themes ("The Occidental City," "Heroes and Merchants"), not chronologically and historically, Buruma and Margalit dart back and forth between cloudy Germans and gloomy Russians and fervent Japanese and robotic Maoists and rancorous Arabs, leaping whole continents and centuries in a single bound. It's a method good for turning up similarities, not so good for respecting differences. They don't spend enough time with anyone to register differences. They interrogate their suspects just long enough to get the Occidentalist confessions they're looking for.

So they're happy to find an Arab here and a Persian there who picked up the Occidentalist script during a Western education or while browsing in translated European novels. They don't ask if Qutb or bin Laden ever heard of these European ideas, let alone whether they were more influenced by them than by their interpretations, warped or not, of the Koran and its doctrine of jihad. They don't concern themselves with the differences between militant Islam, which even at its narrowest and nastiest has no theory of racial or ethnic superiority, and German National Socialism and Japanese militarism, which did, or the differences between apostles of cultural diversity like Herder and frothing xenophobic nationalists. And apart from a brief mention of Tocqueville, they don't acknowledge how many of the Occidentalist criticisms of the alleged soulless commercialism and artless mechanical monotony of modern life, the loss of heroism or individuality or spiritual depth, were echoed by eminent writers and artists who were living in liberal Western societies.

By not assessing what might be called the (more or less) loyal imaginative opposition in Western societies, the authors risk making their schematic division, "the West" versus "Occidentalism," a George W. Bush-caliber "You're either with us, or you're with them" Manichaean proposition (which they say they want to avoid). William Blake saw "marks of weakness, marks of woe" on every face in every London street, and Frank Lloyd Wright hated congested modern cities and sought a spaced-out organic architecture that would do away with them. So were Blake and Wright (or the agrarian idealist Thomas Jefferson) Occidentalists trying to stamp out "The Occidental City"? Wordsworth lamented the "getting and spending" treadmill of modern life, Thoreau and Whitman and William James denounced their fellow Americans for their cult of money and possessions and success, English writers like John Ruskin, William Morris, G.K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc sought some version or other of the organic, craft-guild society of the Middle Ages, and the southern American writers known as the Fugitives, like Richard Weaver, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate, were nostalgic for traditional poetry and agrarian virtue. None of them had the hellbent fanaticism of what Buruma and Margalit call Occidentalism, the willingness to use total state control and total war to dismantle liberal modernity, but they sounded some of the same notes (as did, more vehemently, D.H. Lawrence, or Continental writers like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy). The authors are trying to define Occidentalism by theme, and it doesn't quite work.

They might have had better luck by writing a book not about a recurrent polemical contagion among incompatible fanatics called Occidentalism but about the pathological political-religious quest for purity in modern life. It's something that religious fundamentalists and xenophobic nationalists have in common: the pursuit of a mythic purity of origins. Extreme nationalists, Nazis, fascists, Maoists and other devout Marxists, fundamentalists, and the more deranged sort of environmentalists are all obsessed with purity (the original purity of race, nation, peasant life, primitive communism, undefiled nature, etc.). Democracy and market capitalism are very human, which is to say very messy, muddled, competitive, compromising, inconsistent, and impure. Religious fundamentalists have deluded notions about the pure divine origins of their religions, which actually always begin as amalgams of previous religions, myths, and superstitions. The "Occidentalist" subjects of this book had a deluded notion of the organic purity of culture. Cultures are always eclectic, platypus-like creatures, patched together out of trade and religious conversion and curiosity and envy and aesthetic imitation. Cultures throughout history have tended to leak like sieves and absorb like sponges. Even Tibet, isolated by the highest mountains in the world, got its Buddhist religion from India, some of its customs and costumes from China, and its lama system from its 17th-century political and religious Mongolian connections. When threatened by the scientific skepticism and pluralism and market-driven innovations of liberal modernity, traditional societies, institutions, and religions, along with assorted idealists and crackpots, seem to retreat into myths of purity. There's a book to be written about it, and it might have been this book, if it had been a little longer and deeper.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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