Occidentalism

by Ian Buruma

  In Voltaire’s admiring account, then, English commerce is tied to both freedom and imperialism. This is a connection that is still very much alive in Occidentalism, even though the enemy is no longer England alone, but Anglo-America, or America, or the West, or, in Osama bin Laden’s favorite phrase, Crusader-Zionism.

  What impressed Voltaire about London did not always find such favor among other European observers. One German traveler in 1826 saw only “self-interest and greed gleam in every eye.”7 Twenty years later, the great Prussian writer Theodor Fontane remarked that “the cult of the Golden Calf is the disease of the English people.” There was no spirituality, no poetry, in the great metropolis, for everyone was too busy “running around in a restless hunt for gold.” Indeed, he was convinced that English society would be destroyed by “this yellow fever of gold, this sell-out of all souls to the devil of Mammon. . . .”8

  Friedrich Engels saw something “repulsive” in the city crowds of Manchester and London, “something against which human nature rebels.” The city is where people of “all classes and all ranks crowded past each other,” indiscriminately, promiscuously, and, above all, indifferently. What repelled Engels was the lack of solidarity in this society of “atomized” individuals, each going after his own “selfish” interests. 9

  But this could be an advantage too. For crowds give room to individual eccentricity. You can hide in a crowd. Its indifference sets you free. In every industrializing country, including nineteenth-century England, women and country people flock to the cities, to find work, make money, and be free. What awaits them is often industrial blight, the criminal gang, or the brothel. This has never stopped people from coming, of course. But once left behind, the old certainties of village life, the tightly knit clan relations, and the subservience to feudal or religious traditions are usually lost forever, and this can result in violent resentments.

  The story of the lonely outsider, ignored or abused in the big city, is common everywhere. It is often told in the darker tales of Hollywood, where the big city is New York, Chicago, or L.A. It became a cliché in films made in India, Thailand, and Japan in the 1950s. Many of them are gangster pictures. The young man leaves his village, driven by hunger or ambition, his head filled with stories of vast riches and easy women. What he finds instead are the uncaring crowds, and the tricksters and cheats who rob him of his tiny savings. Finally he loses his dignity too, when he learns how to become a robber himself. Sometimes he joins a criminal gang, where some of his traditional village codes of conduct are reenacted in perverse ways, and sometimes he tries to survive alone. But almost always he loses in the end, exploited by a gang boss or some other person he thought he could trust. The climax is an explosion of suicidal violence, when the long-suffering outsider, like Samson among the Philistines, brings down the city pillars in a final act of catastrophic vengeance.

  A common feature of the bad, cold, calculating, rich villains in these morality tales is not just their sexual depravity, their greed, or their dishonesty, but their flashy Western ways. In European gangster films, the bad guys dress and behave like Americans; in non-Western movies, they behave like phony white men. The wicked gangsters in 1950s Japanese movies use guns, drink whisky, and wear suits, while the kimonoed heroes fight only with traditional samurai swords. In most countries, the typical gangster movie is hostile to the modern world. So of course is the typical American western, where the villains are city slickers from “out east,” who come to build cities in the western plains, connected by the new railroads. Old relations of trust between the honest rural folks are replaced by dodgy contracts drawn up by men in suits. It is a universal story, this clash between old and new, authentic culture and metropolitan chicanery and artifice, country and city.

  IN EUROPE, THE METROPOLITAN BEHEMOTHS THAT swallowed entire rural populations in their glittering maws were often identified with Jews and other rootless moneygrubbers. Again T. S. Eliot finds the finest phrases for this prejudice:. . . My house is a decayed house,

  and the Jew squats in the window-sill, the owner,

  Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

  Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London . . .

  Juvenal’s image of the lying citizens of ancient Rome resurfaces in prejudices about Jewish merchants and bankers in nineteenth-century cities. Karl Marx, himself the grandson of a rabbi, likened Jewish capitalists to lice, feeding off the poor like filthy parasites. Another nineteenth-century socialist thinker, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, believed that the Jew was “by temperament an anti-producer. . . . He is an intermediary, always fraudulent and parasitic, who operates, in trade as in philosophy, by means of falsification, counterfeiting, and horse-trading.”10 Nazi thinkers took up the same themes, of course, and linked the parasitic Jews to New York, London, Paris, and also Berlin.

  Before 1933, the city of Berlin was the symbol of everything vile, not only to Nazis, but to quite a number of romantic German nativists. In the 1890s, an assortment of nature lovers, folklore enthusiasts, nudists, and promoters of a purer, more organic, more Germanic homeland wanted, in popular slogans of the day, to “get away from Berlin,” to “escape from the brick of Berlin,” with its factories, slums, nightclubs, leftists, democrats, Jews, and other foreigners. The great Prussian capital was seen as a hybrid, artificial copy of French, English, Austrian, and American cities. Berlin’s modernity was “un-German.”

  In Nazi propaganda, Berlin department stores, corrupting German womanhood with decadent, “cosmopolitan” products, such as cosmetics and cigarettes, were vilified as symbols of “Jewish materialism” and depicted in Nazi publications as slimy octopuses strangling small German enterprises and honest German craftsmen.11 Artistic modernism and natural science were seen as a Jewish fraud. Jazz, or “nigger music,” was denounced as depraved Americanism.

  Outside Europe, it is the West or Americanism that is blamed for the metropolitan condition and the vanished rural idyll—Americanism and some local variation of the big-city Jews, such as the Chinese in Southeast Asia or the Indian merchants in Africa, who are believed to conspire, together with venal “Westernized” native elites, to poison and undermine authentic, spiritual, or racial communities. But these ideas of Americanism, or, to cite the term of an Iranian Islamist, “Westoxification,” were influenced by prejudices that originated in the West.

  When the Japanese intellectuals at the Kyoto conference in 1942 railed against Americanism, they were thinking less about modernity in America or Europe than about the style of their own big cities, Tokyo and Osaka: Hollywood movies, cafés, dance halls, satirical reviews, radios, newspapers, movie stars, short skirts, and automobiles. They hated this new metropolitan civilization because they regarded it as shallow, materialistic, mediocre, rootless, and un-Japanese—that is, unlike the kind of profound, spiritual culture they wished to uphold. In this, the Japanese deep thinkers were no different from many European intellectuals in the 1930s, even if their idea of spiritual culture may have been different in form. Indeed, like many Arab intellectuals, who were directly inspired by pan-German ideals, the Japanese were deeply influenced by German nationalists of the 1920s and 1930s, and applied their anti-Western, antiurban views to Japan.

  There was some historical amnesia here too, for Japanese cities had been commercial centers long before Harold Lloyd and Deanna Durbin set the styles. There is little evidence that the world of Kabuki theaters, fairground entertainments, markets, and brothels of old Edo was any more spiritual than the pleasure districts of 1930s Tokyo. But intellectuals also detested Americanism for a more personal reason. They knew that in an Americanized society, dominated by commercial culture, the place of philosophers and literati was marginal at best. Far from being the dogma favored by downtrodden peasants, Occidentalism more often reflects the fears and prejudices of urban intellectuals, who feel displaced in a world of mass commerce.

  The other thing the urban intellectuals feared about “rootless” metropolitan culture and mass co
nsumption was mass participation in politics. Newspapers and radio gave everyone access to information that had been limited to the elites before. This was dangerous, for masses were thought to be irresponsible, uneducated, and swayed by mass emotions. Hollywood movies, as the film critic at the Kyoto conference warned, promoted individualism and democracy, and a multiracial society. The commercial metropolis was where singular cultures, rooted in blood and soil, broke down, and an urban civilization was forged out of cosmopolitan diversity.

  Teeming slums, where most people, including the police, feared to tread, grew with the industrial revolution and were associated in Continental Europe with England, and especially with the laissez-faire economic system known as Manchester liberalism. The popular districts of Tokyo were never as squalid as those of London or Berlin, but the effects of industrialization, such as mass culture, mass media, and masses of rural folk streaming into the cities, were associated with the West. They were part of Japan’s Westernization and thus part of what the Occidentalists wanted to “overcome.” Japan was the first. But the same process occurred in other parts of the non-Western world, such as China. Industrialization, which transforms thousands of peasants into factory workers, mass-producing commodities to feed an expanding network of markets, planted the idea of the West as a “machine civilization,” coldly rationalist, mechanical, without soul.a

  When Sayyid Qutb, one of the most influential Islamist thinkers of the last century, arrived in New York from his native Egypt in 1948, he felt miserable in the city, which appearedto him as a “huge workshop,” “noisy” and “clamoring.” Even the pigeons looked unhappy in the urban chaos. He longed for a conversation that was not about “money, movie stars or car models.” In his letters home, Qutb was particularly distressed by the “seductive atmosphere,” the shocking sensuality of daily life, and the immodest behavior of American women. A church dance in remote Greeley, Colorado, hardly a metropolitan place, struck him as wickedly lascivious. Qutb was a defender of the ideal of a pure Islamic community, against what he saw as the empty, idolatrous materialism of the Occident, a battle to which we will return later. Life in America simply confirmed his prejudices. But like all dreams of purity, his ideal of the spiritual community was a fantasy, which contained the seeds of violence and destruction.

  TRADE IS OF COURSE NOT A WESTERN INVENTION, BUT modern capitalism is. Trade as a universal system—stemming from the great cities of the West, sweeping across old and new empires, with claims of forging a global civilization—appears to those who set themselves up as guardians of tradition, culture, and faith as a conspiracy to destroy what is profound, authentic, and spiritual. This conspiracy can be called Roman imperialism, Anglo-American capitalism, Americanism, Crusader-Zionism, American imperialism, or simply the West. It is not a conspiracy, of course, but the tensions between local and universal are real enough. Trade, certainly in its modern, global capitalist form, does change the way people arrange their political and social affairs, even though the results are not as straightforward as its boosters or enemies believe.

  Jews have been associated for so long, in Christian as well as Islamic societies, with trade and finance that they are almost invariably included in hostile views of capitalism. But being seen as parasitic enemies of cultural authenticity, Jews are also associated with Western claims to universal ideas, such as French republicanism, communism, or even secular law. Nazis in the 1920s blamed Germany’s ills not only on Jewish capitalists, fraudsters, and stab-in-the-back traitors but on Jewish lawyers who drew up the Weimar constitution in order to emasculate the German Volk. A theorist named Hans Blueher argued in the 1920s that the Jews, excluded from the warm embrace of völkisch communities, had to believe in laws and rational institutions, which promised human progress. Leaving aside, for a moment, the many Jews who continued to live according to ancient religious laws, Blueher had a point. Secular laws and political rationalism were the most promising tools of emancipation. But for that very reason they were seen by anti-Semites as cold, mechanical threats to the purity of faith and race.

  The belief in progress, law, and reason was not just “Jewish,” but also French, rooted in the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Modern anti-Semitism in Europe—the idea, that is, of a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world—began as a reaction against the French Revolution. French opponents of republicanism saw Jews and Freemasons as secret plotters to undermine the Catholic church and other traditional institutions. Napoleon’s emancipation of the Jews and his aim to impose universal standards and laws all over Europe provoked paranoid beliefs that he was a puppet of the Jews, and even that he was a secret Jew himself.

  These French delusions infected other Europeans, especially Germans. In Mein Kampf, Hitler argued that France, enslaved to the Jewish stock exchange, and “cunningly directed by the Jew,” was taking its revenge on Germany.12 He also believed that America was thoroughly “Jewified” and that the British Empire was “becoming more and more a colony of American Jews.”13 It is always risky to apply rational analysis to the Führer’s dinner table rants, but one thing Hitler, and the writers whose ideas he borrowed, had in mind was a very different notion of community. Membership in a Volk was “organic” and by definition exclusive, while citizenship in the French republic, the United States, or Britain was, like their cities, theoretically open to all. In the words of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, one of Hitler’s beloved pundits, British citizenship could be had “by every Basuto nigger” for two shillings and sixpence.

  Jews, America, France, and Britain were, as objects of hate, often interchangeable, and Nazi Germany, like our contemporary Islamists, was at war with them all. There were those in Germany, the “nation in the middle,” who felt surrounded by enemies, Bolsheviks to the east and the “Jewified” democracies of Europe and America to the west. The Weimar republic was seen by its enemies as “a hostile power in Western pay.” Before taking on Stalin’s Asiatic hordes, Germany went to war with the West. This assault on the liberal democratic states, seen as artificial, rationalistic, racially hybrid, materialist, and lousy with greedy Jews, was a pure example of murderous Occidentalism in the heart of the European continent.

  LEON TROTSKY ONCE DESCRIBED THE HISTORY OF CAPITALISM as the victory of town over country. This was not a criticism so much as an observation. To Marx and Engels, as well as Trotsky, the country was an uncivilized place populated with idiots. And so, incidentally, were Asia and other parts of the non-Western world. In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels note that “the bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns . . . has created enormous cities . . . has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones.”14 And this, they predicted hopefully, prepared the ground for global revolution.

  Things didn’t quite turn out that way, but the idea that the homelands of the Western colonial powers represented, as it were, the City, and the colonies the Country, is persuasive, even though some of the world’s most sprawling cities have since emerged in the old colonial periphery. These huge conurbations, often little more than suburban slums spreading out from decayed historic city centers, are consumers at the lowest rungs of the new global economy: pirated DVDs showing Hollywood action films, cheap U.S.-style leisure wear, and a twenty-four-hour din of American pop music or its local spin-offs. To idle youths living in these cultural wastelands, globalization, as the closest manifestation of the Western metropole, can be a source of endless seduction and constant humiliation. To the more highly educated ones, globalization has become a new word for imperialism.

  When Europe still had formal empires, the City provided ideas, technical know-how, scientific innovations, administrators, businessmen, engineers, and military officers, while the Country yielded raw materials, cheap labor, and an endless supply of foot soldiers. Each colonial power had a somewhat different idea of its “civilizing mission.” British and Dutch interests were largely commercial, while the French were convinced that the whole world would benefit fr
om French civilization, which they held to be universal. Perhaps because America, like France, was born from a revolution, Americans have been rather more like the French in their missionary zeal than like the Dutch or the British. But these differences aside, all empire builders saw themselves as agents of civilization, as opposed to the backward, superstitious, “semi-barbarian” priests of local culture.

  Opposition to this view came early on. Romantic thinkers in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Germany resisted the imperial designs of France in the cultural sphere, even as Prussian troops fought Napoleon’s army. France, to German Romantics, represented the aggressive, expanding City, driven by its false, rationalist, metropolitan ways. Germany was the countryside of poets, artisans, and peasants. The work of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744 -1803), for example, shows this juxtaposition clearly. Herder was a keen folklorist who believed that nations were organic communities, which had evolved like trees, rooted in native soil. Languages and cultures contained a spirit, unique to each community. Embedded in these communities, their languages, and the Volksgeist that gave them life were ancient wisdoms and warm human virtues. Unfortunately, however, “the cold European world” was frozen by “philosophy,” meaning French philosophy with its claims to universal reason.

  Coupled to this cold philosophy, like a malignant twin, was the ruthless European trading system, which brought death and destruction to warm cultures on three continents. Herder was a typical “Orientalist,” as defined by modern anticolonial critics, in that he projected an exclusive, unchanging view onto the world outside Europe. Not for him the virtues of “hybridity” or “multiculturalism.” He saw most people in the tropical zones as “nature’s children,” who were still blessed with simple, childlike reverence for god-kings and despotic wise men. But he did not say these things to promote the white man’s duty to educate the benighted natives. On the contrary, he was violently opposed to imperialism or indeed any claim to universal wisdom. Compared with cold rational Europe, nature’s children were better off, purer, more authentic. It was an arrogant mistake to think all men should be free, since our supposed freedoms led only to inhumanity and sterile materialism.