{"id":335,"date":"2004-02-08T02:38:23","date_gmt":"2004-02-08T02:38:23","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:30","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:30","slug":"occidentalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=335","title":{"rendered":"Occidentalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

There have been a flurry of blog posts triggered by the article<\/a> in Chronicle of Higher Education on ‘Occidentalism’ (a clever play on Said’s ‘Orientalism<\/a>‘) – we were tipped by MaroonBlog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’ll try and catalog some of them here and then wrap up with some of my own views (which are, unsurprisingly almost completely in agreement).<\/p>\n

First off, the article itself:<\/p>\n

However, the kind of violence currently directed at targets associated with the West, from the World Trade Center to a discoth\u00e8que in Bali, is not just about the United States. Nor can it be reduced to global economics. Even those who have good reason to blame their poverty on harsh forms of U.S.-backed capitalism do not normally blow themselves up in public places to kill the maximum number of unarmed civilians. We do not hear of suicide bombers from the slums of Rio or Bangkok.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Something else is going on, which my co-author, Avishai Margalit, and I call Occidentalism (the title of our new book): a war against a particular idea of the West, which is neither new nor unique to Islamist extremism. The current jihadis see the West as something less than human, to be destroyed, as though it were a cancer. This idea has historical roots that long precede any form of “U.S. imperialism.”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s been blogged several places that I’ve found; here’s the full Technorati<\/a> list.<\/p>\n

This is a subject right at the beating center of my interests, given my early posts on Romanticism and Terrorism<\/a> and The War on Bad Philosophy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, I think that we’ll win this war with philosophy, not with violence (but in the short and intermediate term, we’ll certainly need violent men and women to protect the philosophers while they philosophize).<\/p>\n

Here’s the ‘money quote’ I pulled from Isiah Berlin’s ‘Roots of Romanticism’:<\/p>\n

Suppose you went…and spoke with [long list of European Romatic intellectual figures, including Hugo, de Sta\u00ebl, Schlegel, Goethe, Coleridge, Byron] Suppose you had spoken to these persons. You would have found that their ideal of life was approximately of the following kind. The values to which they attached the highest importance were such values as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one\u2019s life to some inner light, dedication to an ideal for which it is worth sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and dying. You would have found that they were not primarily interested in knowledge, or in the advancement of science, not interested in political power, not interested in happiness, not interested, above all, in adjustment to life, in finding your place in society, in living at peace with your government, even loyalty to your king, or your republic. You would have found common sense, moderation, was very far from their thoughts. You would have found that they believed in the necessity of fighting for your beliefs to the last breath in your body, and you would have found that they believed in the value of martyrdom as such, no matter what the martyrdom was for. You would have found that they believed that minorities were more holy than majorities, that failure was nobler than success, which had something shoddy and vulgar about it. The very notion of idealism, not in its philosophical sense, but in the ordinary sense in which we use it, that is to say the state of mind of a man who is willing to sacrifice a great deal for principles or some conviction, who is not prepared to sell out, who is prepared to go to the stake for something which he believes, because he believes in it…this attitude was relatively new. What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Map that against the Occidentalist article:<\/p>\n

Calculation — the accounting of money, interests, scientific evidence, and so on — is regarded as soulless. Authenticity lies in poetry, intuition, and blind faith. The Occidentalist view of the West is of a bourgeois society, addicted to creature comforts, animal lusts, self-interest, and security. It is by definition a society of cowards, who prize life above death. As a Taliban fighter once put it during the war in Afghanistan, the Americans would never win, because they love Pepsi-Cola, whereas the holy warriors love death. This was also the language of Spanish fascists during the civil war, and of Nazi ideologues, and Japanese kamikaze pilots.<\/p>\n

The hero is one who acts without calculating his interests. He jumps into action without regard for his own safety, ever ready to sacrifice himself for the cause. And the Occidentalist hero, whether he is a Nazi or an Islamist, is just as ready to destroy those who sully the purity of his race or creed. It is indeed his duty to do so. When the West is seen as the threat to authenticity, then it is the duty of all holy warriors to destroy anything to do with the “Zionist Crusaders,” whether it is a U.S. battleship, a British embassy, a Jewish cemetery, a chunk of lower Manhattan, or a disco in Bali. The symbolic value of these attacks is at least as important as the damage inflicted.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and against my own comments on terrorism and Bad Philosophy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Finally, that the roots of terrorism, or rather the roots of the political decision to assume terrorism as a tactic, have to do as much with the desire to have an impact on people\u2019s awareness as on their behavior. When I accuse the Palestinians of adopting tactics aimed at dramatic TV coverage as much as at damaging the Israelis, I\u2019m pointing out that in terrorism the desire to psychologically defeat the opponent may outweigh the desire to defeat them in practical terms.<\/p>\n

Now what is unique about terrorism is that it stands alone as a kind of “media war” in which the rhetoric and media images matter more than the actual balance of power “on the ground”. Terrorists almost never attack targets that would have substantive impact; they attack airport waiting areas, and not the radar or air-traffic control facilities that would shut down the airport. Even when they do attempt attacks against infrastructure (the Pi Glilot refinery), one wonders if it was for the effect on fuel supplies of the size of the explosion that mattered.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think we’re on to something; a picture of a Western philosophical movement that ultimately connected to a Middle Eastern religious one. In fact the connections are explicit. NewsRack blog has a great piece<\/a> on the connections between Qutb and Alexis Carrel:<\/p>\n

It turns out that Qutb had a more direct connection to a variety of European mysticism and nascent totalitarianism in the writings and philosophy of one Alexis Carrel<\/a> — Nobel Prize in Medicine winner for his work on circulatory surgery and transplants, arch-conservative Catholic, Vichy regime supporter, and, in the end, apologist for Nazi euthanasia and eugenics programs.<\/p>\n

Rudolph Walther, a historian living in Frankfurt, recently wrote a piece for the German newsweekly Die Zeit that discusses the Qutb-Carrel connection, “The strange teachings of Doctor Carrel: how a French Catholic doctor became a spiritual forefather of the radical Islamists<\/a>.”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is gonna be fun.<\/p>\n

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the great discussions on Qutb at Demosophia<\/a>, Ideofact<\/a>, and Regnum Crucis<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There have been a flurry of blog posts triggered by the article in Chronicle of Higher Education on ‘Occidentalism’ (a clever play on Said’s ‘Orientalism‘) – we were tipped by MaroonBlog. I’ll try and catalog some of them here and then wrap up with some of my own views (which are, unsurprisingly almost completely in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}