Occidentalism: The false west
National
Review Online ^ | May 10, 2002 | Victor Davis Hanson
Posted on ٢٧/٠٢/١٤٢٣ ٠٤:٢٥:٢١ م by xsysmgr
American professors have
long lectured to our students about purported Western biases and cruel
misconceptions toward the "Other." According to Edward Said and other
postcolonial critics, much of our dim view of Arabs is a product of an
"Orientalism" that was constructed by European intellectuals of the
19th century West — blinkered folk actively engaged as colonialists overseas,
and conditioned by an earlier pedigree of prejudice toward the East dating from
Herodotus and Aeschylus. According to such supposedly biased and
unsophisticated views, Asians and Arabs were considered tribal, emotional,
less-sophisticated peoples, prone to violence, fundamentalism, and irrational
thinking, simply because they did not understand, or chose not to follow,
Europe's rather brutal notions of capitalism, nationalism, rationalism, and
Christianity.
Few any longer accept
such a simplistic, black-and-white portrait — especially when a number of
erudite Europeans made great efforts not only to live among and understand the
Islamic world, but also to criticize their own culture's interactions with it.
Indeed, "Orientalism" is a superficial charge that does no justice to
a wide range of liberal 19th-century thinking and the present array of modern
Middle East Studies programs throughout America and Europe.
What really is
startling, however, is not how the West in an earlier age — without easy
communications and cheap travel — misunderstood the Arab and Islamic worlds,
but rather how today — Internet, jets, student visas, television, and all — the
East continues to stereotype the West, with not a clue about its
intrinsic nature.
We should call this bias
"Westernism" — or, perhaps, "Occidentalism." In general we
can describe it as the mentality of desperately wanting something that one
either cannot understand or that one, in fact, blindly and in ignorance
loathes. Millions of Arabs have now come in contact with the dividends of
Western capitalism and industrial production, most clearly in their easy
acceptance of everything from cell phones and televisions to antibiotics and
chemotherapy — everything that makes life a little easier materially, and occasionally
somewhat longer. Sheiks from Saudi Arabia go to London or New York for bypass
surgery — not to Cairo or Amman; they buy their Viagra from the States, not
from apothecaries in Yemen. The Arab street purchases appliances that are made
in China or Japan on Western blueprints, rather than producing them en masse in
Damascus or improving on their designs at Baghdad University.
The Israelis produce the
best tank in the world, and export everything from drip-irrigation technology
to computer software; their enemies whine that America does not give them more
and better weapons. Not even Saddam Hussein could establish a modern aircraft
factory, nor could the formidable Assad dynasty produce a single destroyer. All
the arms in all the Arab countries are either imported from Europe, Japan, or
America — or licensed and built from Western designs in China and Korea.
We see such a very thin
facing of material prosperity in almost every picture that is broadcast from
the Middle East — thousands of consumer goods, movies, videos, and processed
food that would be impossible without the West. Bin Laden himself, after
calling for a medieval caliphate, bought a cell phone, a video camera, and
sophisticated weapons — products that his own anti-rationalist madrassas and mosques
could not produce. The Taliban liked SUVs, but the government and school system
they established ensured that not a single Afghan would ever acquire the
knowledge to produce such pricey appurtenances. The killers in Palestine must
bring in everything, from their rifles to their bombs — and the expertise to
use them. Those few who do possess indigenous knowledge of sophisticated
destruction either are foreign-educated or got the requisite information off
the Internet.
The lust for the West is
not only a matter of material addiction; there is a yearning for its freedom,
modernity, and liberality as well. On American university campuses, Arab
students often are the most vociferous questioners at lectures, and bask in the
Western idea of completely unrestricted free speech. At rallies and on call-in
radio stations, Islamic visitors on visas keenly exercise their rights of sharp
critique — by openly condemning our own Mideast policy, our president, and
indeed our country itself. Non-Westerners metamorphose into hyper-Westerners
when they come here to study.
Diplomats from the
Middle East are a funny sort. They are at home in Western ties and suits, and
with cocktails and limos — and adept at the free-for-all of commercial
television — adroit, too, in the subtle nuances of our politics, and aware of
the possible nexus between the cause of the Palestinians and a vast labyrinth
of American victimology. They grow silent only when caught in an obvious lie,
abject anti-Semitism, or incontrovertible evidence of state-sponsored terrorism
— occasions when their newly found Western candor would earn them a bullet or
prison billet upon landing on the tarmac at home. Likewise, al-Jazeera
has the entire fluff of the Western news media down pat — the jazzed-up
background music, the computer-simulated graphics, the photogenic airhead
newsreaders — everything except true free speech, criticism of government, and
doubts about religious orthodoxy.
So this entire
familiarity with Western goods and practices ultimately is superficial. The
Arab world is suffering from a deep-seated schizophrenia as it slowly sorts out
its ambiguous feelings toward the hated West. Do you despise a country that
gives you oil-drilling equipment, Ford SUVs, and contact lenses, along with
Spider-Man and McDonald's, as being crass, godless, and decadent? And if so, do
you express such loathing between Big Macs, as you park your air-conditioned
Wagoneer, board a 767, or put in eye drops for your glaucoma? Are America's
unveiled, auto-driving, and sometimes belly-baring women sluts and worse? — or
do they accomplish far more than exciting the baser passions, such as doubling
the work force and bringing critical brain power to the very pinnacles of
society? Should you even shake hands with a Western woman, pay her to join your
harem, lecture her about chastity — or hire her to economize your bureaucracy,
control your aircraft traffic, design your power grid, sort our your legal
codes?
And what exactly is this
mysterious Western paradigm — the right to speak freely when visiting America,
but not when you return to Egypt? If you are a envoy from the Sudan, Palestine,
or Saudi Arabia, do you condemn America on Crossfire and Fox News,
but then curb such criticism when it concerns Arafat and the royal princes at
home? Quite simply, very few in the Arab world realize that the reason we
produce CAT scanners and F-16s and Apaches, and they do not — or the reason
they come here to be schooled and we, as a rule, do not go there — is that our
universities are free, our governments elected and tolerant, our people welcome
to chose any religion or none, and our schools secular and meritocratic rather
than fundamentalist and tribal.
Occidentalism — this
counterfeit affinity with, and superficial knowledge of, the West — is most apparent
in politics, where America's support for Israel is wrongly attributed to
Zionist conspiracies and Jewish influence, rather than a tolerance and liberal
values shared with the Middle East's only true democracy. When we see Israeli
women in uniform, we think of our own — not those veiled in Pakistan. When we
see the fiery debates in the Knesset, we recall our own Congress — not Syria's
faux parliament. When we witness in the last few years Rabin, Netanyahu, Barak,
and Sharon, we think of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II — not of the
uninterrupted tenure of an Arafat, Mubarak, or Hussein.
In short, Orientalism is
a simulacrum of the West, and it is an insidious and often tragic phenomenon.
One uses the Internet — a handy device that one's own society could not create
or repair — to spread fundamentalism. One has a parliament and a president —
even a staged election or two, on occasion — but no free press, real
opposition, or unbridled speech. A writer likes Western acclaim, the genre of
the novel, and literary prizes based on merit not obsequiousness — but finds
stone-throwers in the courtyard when one's narrative dares to question the hold
of Islam. One travels abroad to become a vociferous Western student, but upon
graduation goes from a vocal lion on an American campus to a timid mouse in the
Gulf.
At day's end, the Arab
world will have to sort out these paradoxes and contradictions — and decide how
traditional, how fundamentalist, or how autocratic and closed its societies
should be in rejecting some, all, or none of the West's material and
ideological dynamism. But we here in America have our own choices to make — and
it is high time that we confront Occidentalism squarely and without pretense.
Politically, our
officials must at last realize that Israelis tell the truth more often than
Palestinians do — not because of genes or superior morality, but because their
system of a free press, informed citizenry, and vocal opposition requires them
to. We must not take seriously too much Arab hatred that is predicated on real
grievance, but realize that most antipathy is the result of this unhealthy stew
of envy, anger, and desire for the West, a concoction that can so often be as
humiliating to them as it is dangerous to us — as we saw with the Westernized
murderers on September 11.
As a people and a
government, we must realize that our West is not Westernism; that all the
suits, jet planes, and televisions in the Gulf do not add up to gender equity,
free speech, or religious tolerance — and that the latter are precisely what
ensures the life that is good, and humane, and uniquely our own. We must accept
that the most parochial and ridiculed American — selling real estate in Des
Moines or hammering nails in Provo — in fact knows far better who and what he
is; what his own culture is, and is not, about; and what the Arab world stands,
and does not stand, for, than does the wealthiest, most sophisticated, and most
glib Westernized intellectuals and professors of the Middle East.
We wish all this was not
so, but it is — and we should get used to it, fast.
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