by Ian Buruma
Infatuation with sheer will was of course a major theme of fascism and Nazism too. The liberal West was always being accused of being paralyzed by timid reasoning. The ability to make the big decision was worshiped for its own sake, regardless of its content. This was the basis for the Nazi Führerprinzip. One leader with absolute power gains his authority by his ability to decide the fate of the nation. Decisionism in the political theology of two leading pro-Nazi thinkers, Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, is the idea of playing God in politics. The leader is like the God of Genesis: “And God said: ‘let there be light.’ And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.” The calculating West, on the other hand, is caught in a paralyzing game of endlessly weighing the pros and cons of any action. For fear of missing some evidence, liberals end up dithering. Believing only in what is proportional to evidence is the enemy of acting decisively on faith.
The “Russian Nietzsche” was Konstantin Leontiev (1831- 1891). If we look for an archetypal Russian Occidentalist, he would be the one. Born into the gentry, Leontiev served as a military surgeon in the Crimean War of 1853-1856, went through a spiritual crisis, and shortly before his death became a monk. His monkish predilections notwithstanding, Leontiev adopted a heroic posture in his “poetry of the war” against the bourgeois philistines. He also vehemently rejected modern technology. In his book Russia and Europe, which made a big impression at the time, Leontiev advanced an organic model for historical development, couched in terms of cultural growth and decay: first embryonic simplicity, then blossoming complexity, and finally decay and death.
In Leontiev’s view, the West, with its liberal egalitarianism, was in the last stages of decay. Russia, as a younger culture, could, however, still retain its blossoming state by freezing its institutions, and keep its vitality through the sheer force of the czar’s will. Leontiev’s Occidentalism goes in many directions, but what is clear is that the contest between Russia and the West is about character. Victory belongs to the side with the stronger will. Russia has a better chance than the West, but is already being crippled by Western liberal egalitarianism. After all, even the Slavophiles lacked the will to resist the political reforms of the 1860s, which brought more freedom to the serfs.
However, the main charge against the Western mind, by Ivan Kireyevsky and others, remained its excessive rationalism. Kireyevsky pictured the human mind as a university, divided into many faculties, of which reason is only one. The faculties of emotion, memory, perception, language, and so on are at least as important. The mind of the West, to him, is like a university with only one faculty, the faculty of reason.
Rationalism is a belief that reason and only reason can figure out the world. This is tied to the idea that science is the sole source of understanding natural phenomena. Other sources of knowledge, especially religion, are dismissed by rationalists as superstitions. Then there is political rationalism, which pretends that society can be run—and all human problems solved—by a rational blueprint, guided by general and universal principles. The arrogant West, in Occidentalist eyes, is guilty of the sin of rationalism, of being arrogant enough to think that reason is the faculty that enables humans to know everything there is to know.
Occidentalism can be seen as the expression of bitter resentment toward an offensive display of superiority by the West, based on the alleged superiority of reason. More corrosive even than military imperialism is the imperialism of the mind imposed by spreading the Western belief in scientism, the faith in science as the only way to gain knowledge.
The fact that scientism was eagerly adopted by radical reformers in the non-Western world only sharpened the hostility of nativists. For the direct enemy of Occidentalists, as we saw in the example of revolutionary Islamists, is not always the West itself so much as the Westernizers in their own societies. Chinese modernizers in the early twentieth century demanded reforms in the names of Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy. Many were extreme iconoclasts who saw total Westernization as the only solution for China. Their intellectual opponents often invoked the Chinese spirit as an antidote to this doctrine.
In Russia, the scientistic believers included the nihilists, whom Occidentalists saw as carriers of a noxious ideology imported from the West. The mood of the nihilist movement was best conveyed by Dmitri Pisarev, who said, before drowning at the age of twenty-eight, that “what can be struck down, must be struck down unceasingly; whatever resists the onslaught, is fit for existence; whatever flies to pieces is fit for the rubbish heap. Hew your way vigorously, for you can do no harm.”3 Nihilism is in fact as much a mood as a doctrine, but the main aim is to undermine everything that cannot be based on science and rational thinking, be it aesthetics, conventional morality, religion, or authority in all its forms—church, family, or state.
The word “nihilism” was used in Russia as early as the 1830s, but it became a household term only after Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, whose main character, Bazarov, is the emblematic nihilist. Bazarov is not only an extreme utilitarian, who believes only in maximizing what is useful, but a fanatical believer in scientism. He is a good-hearted man, but his manners are as crude as his materialism. Aesthetics is rejected as worthless, yet he has supreme confidence in the mind of the individual. Bazarov is the kind of Russian whom Turgenev liked to call a “superfluous hero,” not existentially redundant so much as socially useless, an intellectual incapable of affecting life around him. But Bazarov is precisely what Occidentalists—of whom Turgenev was an articulate opponent—would have seen as a typical product of the Western mind. He is everything they loathed.
Bazarov is a fictional character. Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), the nihilist martyr, was not. The son of a highly educated priest, Chernyshevsky was seen from very early on as a threat by the czarist regime. By intercepting a letter sent to him from London by Aleksandr Herzen, government agents found the “evidence” of a conspiracy they were looking for. Chernyshevsky was banished to Siberia and condemned to fourteen years of hard labor. His famous and influential What Is to Be Done? was written in prison while awaiting trial. This novel depicts the protagonists, Lopukhov and Vera Pavlovna, as a new breed of rational egoists who will breathe life into ailing Russia.
In his main philosophical work, The Anthropological Principle of Philosophy (1860), Chernyshevsky promoted what is by now a familiar theme, that science is the only key to human knowledge, and that in principle there is nothing that science cannot figure out. “The union of the exact sciences under the government of mathematics—that is, counting, weighing, and measuring—is year after year spreading into new spheres of knowledge, is growing by the inclusion of newcomers.”4
Among the new fields to come under the aegis of science, Chernyshevsky includes the moral sciences—that is, social sciences and psychology. Science, for him, is the only way of discovering human nature, just as science reveals the nature of acidity. Once we figure out what natural laws are applicable to humans, social sciences open the door for the rational organization of society with the aim of achieving happiness. “A careful examination,” he writes, “of the motives that prompt men’s actions shows that all deeds, good and bad, noble and base, heroic and craven, are prompted by one cause: a man acts in the way that gives him most pleasure.”5
One of the greatest celebrations of nineteenth-century science and progress was the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in London in 1851. The extraordinary Crystal Palace, a huge iron and glass conservatory especially designed for the exhibition by Joseph Paxton, a former gardener, was immediately recognized as an emblem of the practical and progressive mind.
It is against this Crystal Palace that Dostoyevsky’s man of the underground protests. He is convinced that the West is committed to scientism, the belief that society can be engineered like the Crystal Palace. For him, imported scientism and utilitarianism constitute a dangerously deluded ideology. When it comes to human nature, he claims, there are no natural laws. If there were laws
, men would still assert their freedom by living not according to any notion of organized happiness, but according to their mischievous whims.
“What is to be done,” Dostoyevsky wonders, “with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously that is, fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong onto another path to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but as it were simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in darkness?”6
We might share Dostoyevsky’s view of human behavior, but his view of the West as a huge Crystal Palace, driven by nothing but arid rationalism, is a dehumanizing Occidentalist distortion. He might have counted among the “millions of facts” the example of today’s suicide bombers, who defy the utilitarian calculus of human behavior. His point is, however, that those who live in the bourgeois Crystal Palace cannot possibly understand the willingness to make such a sacrifice. And that is something with which the fanatical Occidentalists of our own time would be in complete agreement.
[THE WRATH OF GOD]
WARS AGAINST THE WEST HAVE BEEN DECLARED in the name of the Russian soul, the German race, State Shinto, communism, and Islam. But there is a difference between those who fight for a specific nation or race and those who go to battle for religious or political creeds: The former exclude outsiders; they believe they are the chosen ones. The latter often make claims for universal salvation. In practice, of course, the lines are never so clear: Islam sometimes becomes a form of Arab chauvinism; State Shinto propaganda extolled the Japanese as a divine race; communism excluded social classes. Nevertheless, the distinction between religious Occidentalism and secular Occidentalism is a valuable one. Religious Occidentalism tends to be cast, more than its secular variations, in Manichaean terms, as a holy war fought against an idea of absolute evil.
We have seen how the Occidentalist picture of the West has been colored by religious sources. We have also seen how the Russian Orthodox view of Roman Catholicism as the epitome of all that is soulless and corrupt influenced Russian ideas of the West in the nineteenth century. And most forms of Occidentalism contrast empty Western rationalism with the deep spirit of whatever race or creed the Occidentalists extol. But even the most fervent Slavophiles never regarded the West as barbarous, or Westerners as savages. This attitude is peculiar to certain strains of Islamism, the main religious source of Occidentalism in our own time.
Islamism, as an ideology, was only partly influenced by Western ideas. Its depiction of Western civilization as a form of idolatrous barbarism is an original contribution to the rich history of Occidentalism. This goes much further than the old prejudice that the West is addicted to money and greed. Idolatry is the most heinous religious sin and must therefore be countered with all the force and sanctions at the true believers’ disposal.
The metaphorical use of idolatry to depict the capitalist West is not in fact new; nor is the view that Jews are its archetypical idolaters. Karl Marx, that bitter grandson of a rabbi, once remarked: “Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of mankind and converts them into commodities.” He also believed that the “bill of exchange is the Jew’s actual god. His god is only an illusionary bill of exchange.”1 This kind of rhetoric was later adopted by radical Islamists, some of whom probably read Marx before they read Islamic texts. But the literal use of idolatry, which emerged among political Islamists, is a lethal innovation.
Lest we blame Islam for everything, it should be pointed out that the idea of idolatry as the ultimate religious sin comes originally from Judaism. In terms of scale, Judaism is not a world religion. It has barely the size of a sect. Yet Judaism has had a huge influence in shaping the idea of idolatry as a key religious concept. Idolatry in the Bible is couched in terms of personal relations. God is the husband and Israel the wife, who betrays her husband with a lover, a false god. Idolatry is adultery. The jealous God of the Bible is modeled on the jealous husband. This is particularly striking in Hosea. Israel, the wife, prefers other lovers to God, thinking they are better equipped to satisfy her material needs. She says, “I will go after my lovers, who supply my bread and my water, my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink” (Hosea 2:5).
These lovers are in fact the big powers of that time, ruled by alien gods: “You played the whore with your neighbors, the lustful Egyptians—you multiplied your harlotries to anger Me. . . . In your insatiable lust you also played the whore with the Assyrians; you played the whore with them, but were still unsated. You multiplied your harlotries with Chaldea, that land of traders; yet even with this you were not satisfied. . . .
Yet you were not like a prostitute, for you spurned fees. [You were like] the adulterous wife, who welcomes strangers instead of her husband” (Ezekiel 16:26-32).
This shows that the nightmare vision of big powers as potential seducers, who compete with the reign of God, is as old as the Hebrew Bible. The relationship between husband and wife is not the only formative metaphor for idolatry in religious texts. Religious language is full of metaphors for political sovereignty, describing the rule of God. God, after all, is the only legitimate king of the universe. God the King rules exclusively in relation to His creatures. That is why people should worship only Him. Violating His exclusivity is idolatrous.
Heads of great powers are constantly accused of hubris for trespassing on the domain of God. This is what God told Ezekiel to say to the Prince of Tyre: “Because you have been so haughty and have said ‘I am a god; I sit enthroned like a god in the heart of the seas,’ whereas you are not a god but a man, though you deemed your mind equal to a god’s . . . I swear I will bring against you strangers, the most ruthless of nations” (Ezekiel 28:2-7).
The connection between idolatry and hubris in the big powers surrounding Israel is made explicit by the words of Isaiah (2:7-8): “Their land is full of silver and gold, there is no limit to their treasures; their land is full of horses, there is no limit to their chariots. And their land is full of idols; they bow down to the work of their hands, to what their own fingers have wrought.” Chariots and horses were the heavy weaponry of that time and the main symbols of big powers. All we need to do to bring this up to date is to change the names of the big powers and the weapons in their arsenal. The rage against them remains the same.
Idolatry becomes an issue as soon as worldly authority demands a political loyalty that rivals what we owe to God. Islamists see the political reality of our time not only in political but in theological terms. Muslim countries with secular governments are accused by radical Islamists of idolatry, or tajhil. Such accusations begin as religious sermons but are quickly translated into political activism against the agents of idolatry in the Muslim world, usually the people in power, and the main operator behind those agents, the idolatrous West.
The term for idolatry, or religious ignorance, is jahiliyya. It describes the state of ignorance among the Arabs before the revelations of the Prophet. But the great scholar of Islam Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921) disagreed with the conventional translation of jahiliyya as ignorance, and preferred the term “barbarism.” In his view, Muslims believed that Muhammad was sent to uproot the idolatry of the barbarians and thus to wipe out barbarism. This is an important correction, which helps us understand the force of the current use of the “new jahiliyya” as a more noxious form of barbarism.
The word jahili is analogous to the way the ancient Greeks understood “barbarism.” The distinction between “us,” the Greeks, and “them,” the barbarians, is a distinction between two types of human beings. The Romans used it to refer to those beyond the pale of Roman civilization, rude savages. The barbarians are not quite human. It is this connotation that conveys the full force of the idea of a new jahiliyya, as the barbarism of our time emerging from the West. The new jahiliyya is a dehumanizing idea, one that fuels a new holy war against
evil, fought in the absolute terms of Manichaeism.
MANICHAEISM, FOUNDED IN PERSIA BY MANI IN THE third century A.D., was once a serious rival to Christianity as the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. There were still Manichaeic communities in China in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Manichaeism no longer exists as a religion today, but remnants of its worldview are still with us. It is used as a cliché for any doctrine that sees the world in black and white, dividing “us,” the children of light, from “them,” the evil children of darkness. When Ronald Reagan spoke of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” and George W. Bush lumped North Korea, Iran, and Iraq together as the “axis of evil,” they were speaking in Manichaean terms.
There is, however, a more profound way in which Manichaeism is still at work. The West, in the Occidentalist view, worships matter; its religion is materialism, and matter in the Manichaean view is evil. By worshiping the false god of matter, the West becomes the realm of evil, which spreads its poison by colonizing the realm of the good. That is why, in 1998, Osama bin Laden called upon all Muslims to fight a holy war against “Satan’s U.S. troops and the devil’s supporters allied with them.” In terms of religious Occidentalism, the struggle with the West is not just a political struggle but a cosmic drama, much like the drama of Manichaeism.
Like many religions, Manichaeism was formed around a creation myth. In the beginning, there were two realms, the realm of the good, symbolized by light, and the dark realm of evil. They were separate, but there was an inherent instability in the realm of darkness, since there could be no harmony and equilibrium in evil. One day, the devil, while traveling along the border of the two realms, caught a glimpse of the realm of light and desired the territory for himself. And so the realm of darkness became the evil empire, invading the realm of the good. This led to a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil, and the world, as we know it, was created as the result of that war. One detail of this titanic struggle is worth mentioning. The matter of the world is made from the bodies of the princes of darkness, and earth is made from their defecation; earth stands for matter, and the negative attitude to earth is a negative attitude to matter in general.
