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Title: Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit ISBN: 1-59420-008-4 Publisher: The Penguin Press HC Pub. Date: 25 March, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.54 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Terse but Illuminating
Comment: A terse but brilliant book tracing the various strands of anti-Western ideology, many of which originated in the West itself. These ideas eventually penetrated Asia and the Middle East, where they were incorporated into supposedly authentic Eastern thought. How ironic that the fiercest anti-Westerners in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, China, Japan, etc., owe such a huge intellectual debt to the very thing they hate so passionately.
Mind you, the authors are NOT claiming that all (or even most) criticisms of the West are illegitimate or the product of irrational hatred. Contrary to what some reviewers have said, Buruma and Margalit define Occidentalism fairly clearly. It is an ideology that condemns Western civilization in toto, as inherently diseased, and advocates its complete destruction. It is characterized by an implacable hatred for a whole spectrum of modern developments that (rightly or wrongly) are associated with Western civilization: democracy, technology, individualism. The fact that this ideology is muddleheaded and borrows much from what it most hates does not make Buruma and Margalit's thesis muddled: It is simply a paradoxical fact about this ideology. (By the way, it is NOT "simply conflating enemies of the past and present" to point out Islamism's heavy borrowings from European fascism. The authors are, among other things, trying to dispell certain popular misconceptions and clarify the nature of a movement that has long been mistaken, particularly by many scholars [cough, cough, John L. Esposito] in our Middle Eastern Studies departments, as a misguided but proto-democratic grassroots phenomenon; or by many Christian and Jewish bigots as an inherent, ineradicable part of authentic Islam.)
Rating: 2
Summary: A mishmash of irrelevant ideas in search of a thesis
Comment: This is a book that meanders and flops about looking for cohesion and a thesis. The authors, who are historians and philosophers and heady intellectuals of the sort that grace the pages of The New York Review of [Each Other's] Books with their speculations, think they have found something in their notion of "occidentalism." Occidentalism, they have decided is the way the East, or to be more accurate, primarily the Islamic Middle East, views the West. They are writing in partial reaction to Edward Said's book, Orientalism from 1978 and in more immediate reaction to Islamic terrorism.
Their idea is first to imagine that such a world view as occidentalism exists, and then to trace its roots and weigh what influence various religious, social and political ideas have had in its formation, including Marxism, German militarism and German romanticism, "State Shinto" and other aspects of Japanese nationalism, Russian nativism, and especially Islamic radicalism. The problem with this of course is that no such animal exists. Occidentalism is just a fancy term for a confusion of views opposed to Western culture.
There is no occidentalism anymore than there is an occident that can be defined. There is widespread hatred of Western culture, but it has less to do with all the ism's that the authors come up with (or their city versus country polarity), and more to do with religious animosity, remnants of colonial exploitation, poverty, jealousy, and plain ignorance. It has little to do with the intellectual notions that fascinate the authors.
Additionally, just as there is no occident anymore (people living in China, Japan, Korea, etc., when they look toward the east to see the rising sun look, as they must, across a vast ocean toward the Americas) there is also no orient as such. Indeed today is it considered politically incorrect to refer to Asians as orientals, and it has been a long time since people in the Middle East were lumped together as orientals. Such artificial distinctions reflect a categorical way of thinking that no longer has much meaning other than as history. The authors, however, like the man searching under a lighted post for his keys (which he dropped elsewhere) are shining the light of their particular learning upon something that isn't there.
Supporting such intellectual vacuousness is the style employed by the authors. Consider this statement from page 12: "Occidentalism is not the same as anti-Americanism." One would expect an explanation to follow, a distinction to be made. Instead the authors go off on a tangent about visiting Karl Marx's grave and how eastern European Jews found that Germans lacked "a spiritual dimension." They never return to support their statement. The whole book has this quality of expressing an idea and never actually demonstrating that it has anything other than rhetorical value.
There are many other better books to read on why the West is hated. For a focus on how the Islamic peoples of the Middle East came to hate the West, I recommend Bernard Lewis's succinct, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (2002) or the more detailed War without End: The Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response (2002) by Dilip Hiro.
Rating: 3
Summary: incomplete?
Comment: With Edward Said's Orientalism in mind, this book, obviously, is an answer to Mr. Said's thesis. However, Mr. Said was a lebanon-born scholar studying, in most of his life, in U.S. while in my humble opinion, the two authors don't have the same depth of counterpart trans-cultural experience. The book is extermely short to treat this huge subject, which, inescapability, fails to answer these two questions:
1. The book put a lot of effort on describing how the "Orient" hate the "Occident" on its corrupt social values, self-centerism, bourgeois, etc. But, does the rural conservative part of a "West" country has the same feeling against their own megapolis?
2. Beside the "hatred" towards the west, there is also a lot of admiration, which this book doesn't cover at all. E.g., Ian Buruma's own book "Anglophile" document and study how UK is "loved" by a lot of people. How can an "East" person love the "West" if there is only "hatred"? How is the struggle between the two class of people? E.g., in Japan, during the Meiji period, there was a proposal to drop Asia identity and jump into the Europe identity. In China, a similar proposal for a total Westernization around 100 years ago too. How can Arab/Chinese/Japanese/Indian send their kids to study in Europe/America if they hate the Europe/US?
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Title: Civilization and Its Enemies : The Next Stage of History by Lee Harris ISBN: 0743257499 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 11 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Colossus: The Price of America's Empire by Niall Ferguson ISBN: 1594200130 Publisher: The Penguin Press HC Pub. Date: 22 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Surprise, Security, and the American Experience by John Lewis Gaddis ISBN: 0674011740 Publisher: Harvard University Press Pub. Date: 23 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Anatomy of Fascism by ROBERT O. PAXTON ISBN: 1400040949 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 23 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Who Are We : The Challenges to America's National Identity by Samuel P. Huntington ISBN: 0684870533 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: May, 2004 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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