Occidentalism

by Ian Buruma

  One way of describing Occidentalism would be to trace the history of all its links and overlaps, from the Counter-Reformation to the Counter-Enlightenment in Europe, to the many varieties of fascism and national socialism in East and West, to anticapitalism and antiglobalization, and finally to the religious extremism that rages in so many places today.3 But we decided, for the sake of clarity as well as concision, to take a different route. Instead of a strictly chronological or regional account, we have identified particular strands of Occidentalism that can be seen in all periods and all places where the phenomenon has occurred. These strands are linked, of course, to form a chain of hostility—hostility to the City, with its image of rootless, arrogant, greedy, decadent, frivolous cosmopolitanism; to the mind of the West, manifested in science and reason; to the settled bourgeois, whose existence is the antithesis of the self-sacrificing hero; and to the infidel, who must be crushed to make way for a world of pure faith.

  The point of this book is neither to gather ammunition in a global “war against terrorism” nor to demonize the current enemies of the West. Our aim is rather to understand what drives Occidentalism, and to show that today’s suicide bombers and holy warriors don’t suffer from some unique pathology but are fired by ideas that have a history. This history does not have clearly defined geographical boundaries. Occidentalism can flourish anywhere. Japan, which was once a hotbed of murderous Occidentalism, is now in the camp of its targets. To understand is not to excuse, just as to forgive is not to forget, but without understanding those who hate the West, we cannot hope to stop them from destroying humanity.

  [THE OCCIDENTAL CITY]

  The values of this Western civilization under the leadership of America have been destroyed. Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights, and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke.

  OSAMA BIN LADEN1

  SOON AFTER THE TWO JUMBO JETS SMASHED INTO lower Manhattan, bringing the World Trade Center down in a blaze, videotapes went on sale in China showing the horrific highlights, spliced together with scenes from Hollywood disaster movies. It was as though the real thing—two flaming skyscrapers collapsing on thousands of people—were not dramatic enough, and only fantasy could capture the true flavor of such catastrophes, which most of us know only from the movies.

  The deliberate conflation of reality and fantasy left an impression that the victims were not real human beings, but actors. And most were kept invisible anyway by the uncharacteristic modesty of the television networks, which refused to show suffering in close-up. For at least a few seconds, unreality was the impression many people got when they switched on their television sets. To pretend it wasn’t real was a convenient way of distancing oneself from the horror. For a distressingly large number of people, not only in China, the idea that this was a kind of movie, a purely imaginary event, an act of theater, also made it easier to feel something more sinister. The destruction of the towers—symbols of U.S. power and wealth; symbols of imperial, global, capitalist dominance; symbols of New York City, our contemporary Babylon; symbols of everything American that people both hate and long for—the destruction of all that, in less than two hours, gave some people, not only in China, a feeling of deep satisfaction.

  In this peculiar sense, the annihilation of the Twin Towers and the people inside them was a huge success. For it was part of Osama bin Laden’s war on the West, both physical and metaphysical; it was at once a real and a symbolic attack, on New York, on America, and on an idea of America, and the West it represents. A deliberate act of mass murder played into an ancient myth—the myth about the destruction of the sinful city. That purification was foremost in the minds of the attackers is clear from the last testimony of one of their leaders, a young Egyptian named Mohammed Atta. He expressed a horror of women and sexuality: “The one who will wash my body should wear gloves so that my genital parts should not be touched. . . . I don’t want pregnant women or a person who is not clean to come and say goodbye to me because I don’t approve of it.”

  Consumers of the Chinese tapes were not, however, so far as one can gather, poor villagers with a hatred of Americans, or even of city slickers, but young men in Shanghai, Beijing, and other large cities whose skyscrapers reach ever higher to rival those of New York. The West in general, and America in particular, provokes envy and resentment more among those who consume its images, and its goods, than among those who can barely imagine what the West is like. The killers who brought the towers down were well-educated young men who had spent considerable time living in the West, training for their mission. Mohammed Atta received a university degree in architecture in Cairo before writing a thesis on modernism and tradition in city planning at the Technical University in Hamburg. Bin Laden himself was once a civil engineer. If nothing else, the Twin Towers exemplified the technological hubris of modern engineers. Its destruction was plotted by one of their own.

  The reaction in many places to the American disaster was, in any case, more than schadenfreude over the misfortunes of a great and sometimes overbearing power, and went deeper than mere dissatisfaction with U.S. foreign policy. There were echoes of more ancient hatreds and anxieties, which recur through history in different guises. Whenever men have built great cities, the fear of vengeance, wreaked by God, or King Kong, or Godzilla, or the barbarians at the city gates, has haunted them. Since ancient times, humans have lived in terror of being punished for their effrontery in challenging the gods, by stealing fire, or gaining too much knowledge, or creating too much wealth, or building towers that reach for the skies. The problem is not with the city per se, but with cities given to commerce and pleasure instead of religious worship. In the case of Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta this religious impulse curdled into a dangerous madness.

  Hubris, empire building, secularism, individualism, and the power and attraction of money—all these are connected to the idea of the sinful City of Man. Myths of their destruction have existed as long as men built cities in which to trade, accumulate wealth, gain knowledge, and live in comfort.

  The fear of punishment for challenging the power of God, for the hubris of thinking we can go it alone, is common to most religions. The story of Babylon and its great tower is one of the oldest known to man. After the great Flood, Nimrod built the city of Babylon. In another account, by the historian Diodorus Siculus, a powerful queen named Semiramis was its builder. She was later associated with a mother goddess cult. Perhaps it was the relative sexual freedom of Babylonian women that prompted pious Jews and Christians to describe their city as “the mother of prostitutes and of the abominations of the earth” (Rev. 17:5). The people of Babylon, rather like the citizens of fourteenth-century Florence, or twenty-first-century New York, lusted after worldly fame. “Come,” they said, “let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves” (Gen. 11:4).

  The Tower of Babel was probably a ziggurat, a building with a circular staircase that followed signs of the zodiac. The Babylonians were keen astrologers. Astrology was their way of exploring the workings of nature, of gaining knowledge. God decided to punish these uppity infidels. “Behold,” God said, “they are one people, and they all have one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will be impossible for them” (Gen. 11:6). Then God had his revenge: one language became many languages, the people were scattered all over the world, and the tower was abandoned.

  Nebuchadnezzar, a later ruler of Babylon who conquered Jerusalem (very much the City of God), enslaved the Jews, and had visions of a kingdom of gold, was punished for his hubris as well and driven away to “eat grass like cattle.” It is not the least of history’s ironies that the Jews, who wrote this tale of vengeance against the City of Man, would in later centuries themselves be scattered around the world, speak many languages, and be described by their enemies as rootless cosmopolitans addicted to visions of wealth.

  That
many people in Muslim countries believe that the destruction of the Twin Towers was in fact the work of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency thought to be at the heart of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, is as unhinged as the religious extremism of Al Qaeda activists. But it is not entirely unexpected. Jews have often been blamed for their own persecution, and anti-Semitism can wrap itself around strange paradoxes. Capitalist conspiracies were associated with the Elders of Zion, but so was communism. There is a possible link. Both capitalism and Bolshevism, opposites in almost every respect, might still be described as attempts to replace the world of God with the world of Man.

  The image of the metropolis as a whore is not just a reflection of female sexuality, so feared and loathed by puritans such as Mohammed Atta, but also a comment on a society that revolves around trade. In the city, conceived as a giant marketplace, everything and everyone is for sale. Hotels, brothels, and department stores sell fantasies of the good life. Money allows people to behave in all manners to which they were not born. City people are seen as liars. In Juvenal’s satire on ancient Rome, a city of flatterers, robbers, and traders from all over the empire, we find the following sentence: “What can I do in Rome? I never learnt how to lie.”2 Rome, to Juvenal, was a city where “of all gods it’s Wealth that compells our deepest reverence,” a city where foreigners mixed freely with natives: “Filthy lucre it was that first brought loose foreign morals amongst us, effeminate wealth that with vile self-indulgence destroyed us over the years.”3 Juvenal reserved his greatest bile for Greeks and Jews, and for women, “high-born or not,” who would do anything to satisfy “their hot wet groins.”4

  The most symbolic figure of commodified human relations, relations based on flattery, illusion, immorality, and cash, is the prostitute. The trade in sex is perhaps the most basic form of urban commerce. No wonder, then, that hostile visions of the City of Man always come back to this. One of the clichés of erotic trade is that you can buy a person’s body, but never her soul. The whore, in her (or his) professional capacity, is soulless, and thus not really human. In their journals, the Goncourt brothers describe a famous courtesan in Paris named Païva. She plied her trade in the 1860s, the dawn of the industrial age: “She was coming forward between the chairs like an automaton, as if she was worked by a spiral spring, without a gesture, without expression . . . [a] rolling puppet from a dance macabre . . . a vampire with the blood of the living on her purple mouth while all the rest was livid, glazed and in dissolution.”5 Here we have it, the Occidentalist view of the city, of capitalism, and of Western “machine civilization”: the soulless whore as a greedy automaton.

  Soullessness is seen as a consequence of metropolitan hubris. Religious men have been exercised since ancient times by the dissipation of spirituality in the pursuit of wealth. William Blake’s great ode to building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, written in the early 1800s, was not a crude attack on industry (the dark satanic mills), but a cry for spiritual freedom, unfettered by worldly matters. Blake, to judge from his poem, did not hate cities per se; but his ideal city was certainly not a giant marketplace, where men competed for gold and fame.

  One century on, T. S. Eliot wrote beautiful poetry lamenting the loss of God’s imprint on the modern metropolis. This, from “Choruses from ‘The Rock’—1934”:We build in vain unless the LORD build with us.

  Can you keep the City that the LORD keeps not with you?

  A thousand policemen directing the traffic

  Cannot tell you why you come or where you go.

  A colony of cavies or a horde of marmots

  Build better than they that build without the LORD.

  Shall we lift up our feet among perpetual ruins?

  The poem exudes pessimism about man’s aspirations to rival God. Secular enterprise, the universalism of the Enlightenment, faith in reason, the City of Man—these are the signs of human transgression, of hubris. From the same poem:

  The Word of the Lord came unto me, saying:

  O miserable cities of designing men,

  O wretched generation of enlightened men,

  Betrayed in the mazes of your ingenuities,

  Sold by the proceeds of your proper inventions. . . .

  And this:

  O weariness of men who turn from GOD

  To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action,

  To arts and inventions and daring enterprises . . .

  Blowing up the World Trade Center in the name of Allah and a holy war is but a crude, literal, murderous echo of Eliot’s verses. It is not something from a totally different order. The jihadis had carefully chosen the symbol for their vengeance. New York is the capital of the American Empire. The Twin Towers, filled with people of all races, nationalities, and creeds, working in the service of global capitalism, represented everything that was hateful to the holy warrior about the greatest modern City of Man.

  THE QUESTION IS: WHEN DID THE IDEA OF THE CITY as a wicked symbol of greed, godlessness, and rootless cosmopolitanism become almost totally associated with the West? When did the Western metropolis become the prime focus of Occidentalist loathing? After all, the great city, containing many races, was hardly an exclusively European or American phenomenon. Muslims, traditionally, were not haters of big cities. On the contrary, in early Islam, urbanism was promoted as a way to break away from nomadic ignorance. For centuries Baghdad and Constantinople had been centers of trade, learning, and pleasure. Farther east, the wealth and opulence of Beijing dazzled a traveler from thirteenth century Venice. Compared with the refinements of China, seventeenth-century Amsterdam, with all its wealth, had the modest allure of a provincial town. Until the late nineteenth century, Edo, the Japanese capital, was bigger and more densely populated than any European city, including London.

  And yet the modern idea of Babylon is now firmly rooted in the West, for the first Occidentalists were Europeans. Richard Wagner once wrote, about his Germanic hero Tannhäuser’s sojourn amid the dangerous seductions of the Venusberg: “I agree with Friedrich Dieckmann’s argument that the Venusberg stands for ‘Paris, Europe, the West’: that frivolous, commercialized, and corrupt world in which ‘freedom and also alienation’ are more advanced than in our ‘provincial Germany with its comfortable backwardness.’ ”

  Wagner’s sentiments about Paris reflect more than a distaste for French frivolity. People may dislike cities for all kinds of reasons. But the antiurban bias of Occidentalists goes further. It sees the great city as inhuman, a zoo of depraved animals, consumed by lust. The city dweller, from this perspective, has literally lost his soul.

  It was the age of empires, spurred by an extraordinary burst of scientific, industrial, and commercial enterprise, that made Europe into the metropolitan center, dominating the periphery to which much of the rest of the world had been reduced. Wagner’s antipathies against France—and his notion of Germany as the provincial periphery—were a legacy of Napoleon’s domination, but the empires that reached the height of their power in the latter half of the nineteenth century were commercial empires, driven by the pursuit of wealth more than a desire for military conquest or spreading God’s word. The greatest metropole of all, the commercial imperial capital of the nineteenth-century world, was London. And the greatest industrial city, the capital of dark satanic mills, was Manchester. Paris rivaled London as a cosmopolitan center, and Berlin was always desperately trying to catch up. All these cities inspired fear as well as envy and, like New York two centuries later, came to stand for something particularly hateful in the eyes of those who sought to eradicate the impurities of urban civilization with dreams of spiritual or racial purity.

  The urban civilization of nineteenth-century London, which delighted some and disgusted others, was characterized by great disparities of wealth, as well as a large degree of civic and individual freedom, whose origins might be traced back to the Magna Carta, but which also owed a great deal to the ideals of the Enlightenment. When Voltaire arrived in Englan
d one sunny day in 1726, he set out to attack French absolutism by praising English freedoms. His polemical goal naturally lent itself to exaggeration, but Voltaire was a sharp observer whose claims contained some important truths. One of the things he admired about London, apart from the freedom of scientific inquiry and the high status of thinkers, was the Royal Exchange, which he described as “a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind.”6 Far from despising the merchant class, as most French aristocrats and literati would have done, Voltaire saw commerce as a vital condition for liberty. For there, at the Royal Exchange, he wrote, “the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess’d the same religion, and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts.”

  Money, as Voltaire saw it, dissolved differences in creed or race. In the marketplace, men are bound by common rules, contracts, and laws, which were not revealed by ancestral gods, but written by human beings to safeguard their properties and limit the chance of being cheated. Birth doesn’t count for much in the marketplace. Old rules of trust, which might still work in clan relations or village communities, can no longer be relied on. Since the laws that governed trade were secular, Voltaire, being a supreme rationalist, obviously approved of such arrangements, but to the religious or feudal mind they can seem cold, mechanical, even inhuman. Voltaire’s admiration of the English went further, however. He believed that “as trade enrich’d the Citizens in England, so it contributed to their Freedom, and this Freedom on the other Side extended their Commerce, whence arose the Grandeur of the State. Trade rais’d by insensible Degrees the naval Power, which gives the English a Superiority over the Seas. . . .”