Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (2 page)

Other participants in the Kyoto meeting did not go so far back as the Reformation or the Enlightenment, but pointed to the rise of industrialization, capitalism, and economic liberalism in the nineteenth century as the root of modern evil. They spoke in dire terms of “machine civilization” and “Americanism.” Some of them argued that Europe and Japan, with their ancient cultures, should make common cause against the noxious blight of Americanism. Such talk fell on fertile ground in some parts of Europe. Hitler, in his table talk, was of the opinion that “American civilization is of a purely mechanized nature. Without mechanization, America would disintegrate more swiftly than India.” Not that an alliance with Japan came easily, for he also believed that the Japanese were “too foreign to us, by their way of living, by their culture. But my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance.”
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Since our contemporary forms of Occidentalism are often equally focused on America, it should be pointed out that anti-Americanism is sometimes the result of specific American policies—support of anti-Communist dictatorships, say, or of Israel, or of multinational corporations, or the IMF, or whatever goes under the rubric of “globalization,” which is normally used as shorthand for U.S. imperialism. Some people are antagonistic to the United States simply because it is so powerful. Others resent the U.S. government for helping them, or feeding them, or protecting them, in the way one resents an overbearing father. And some hate America for turning away when help is expected. But whatever the U.S. government does or does not do is often beside the point. The Kyoto professors were referring not to American policies, but to the idea of America itself, as a rootless, cosmopolitan, superficial, trivial, materialistic, racially mixed, fashion-addicted civilization. Here, too, they followed European, often German models. Heidegger was a sworn enemy of what he called
Amerikanismus,
which in his view sapped the European soul. And a lesser thinker of the prewar years, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, the man who coined the phrase “Third Reich,” opined that “
Amerikanertum
” (Americanness) was to be “not geographically but spiritually understood.” It marked “the decisive step by which we make our way from a dependence on the earth to the use of the earth, the step that mechanizes and electrifies inanimate material.”

This is not about policies, but about an idea, almost a vision, of a machinelike society without a human soul. So anti-Americanism plays a large role in hostile views of the West. Sometimes it even represents the West. But it is only part of the story. Occidentalism is not the same as anti-Americanism. In fact, the idea of writing about Occidentalism came to us from a very different perspective. One blustery winter’s morning, we visited Highgate Cemetery, the funeral park in north London, where the very famous and the unknown lie together under a higgledy-piggledy assortment of monuments. We paused in front of the rather grandiose tomb of Karl Marx, erected long after his death by a group of admirers. His large stone head looks out sternly over the graves strewn around him, some of which contain the remains of Third World socialists and other spent warriors against American imperialism. We talked about Marx, and what others had said about him. Isaiah Berlin’s description of Marx came up, as a typical German Jew, whose humor was as heavy as his food. German Jews—who, before the Nazi catastrophe destroyed them, were often better off, more secular, and more assimilated than their eastern brethren, and perhaps a little overproud of their high German culture—were not always liked. They may have regarded themselves as cultivated children of the Enlightenment, but to the poor eastern Jews, especially those whose lives were narrowly circumscribed by the hoary traditions of shtetl life, the Germans lacked a spiritual dimension. They were cold, arrogant, materialistic, mechanical people, efficient, no doubt, but godless. In short, they had no soul. This, too, was a form of Occidentalism.

There are, of course, perfectly valid reasons to be critical of many elements that go into the venomous brew we call Occidentalism. Not all the critiques of the Enlightenment lead to intolerance or dangerous irrationalism. The belief in universal progress, driven by business and industry, is certainly open to criticism. Blind faith in the market is a self-serving and often damaging dogma. American society is far from ideal, and U.S. policies are often disastrous. Western colonialism has much to answer for. And the revolt of the local against claims of the global can be legitimate, even necessary. But criticism of the West, harsh as it might be, is not the issue here. The view of the West in Occidentalism is like the worst aspects of its counterpart, Orientalism, which strips its human targets of their humanity. Some Orientalist prejudices made non-Western people seem less than fully adult human beings; they had the minds of children, and could thus be treated as lesser breeds. Occidentalism is at least as reductive; its bigotry simply turns the Orientalist view upside down. To diminish an entire society or a civilization to a mass of soulless, decadent, money-grubbing, rootless, faithless, unfeeling parasites is a form of intellectual destruction. Once again, if this were merely a matter of distaste or prejudice, it would not be of great interest. Prejudices are part of the human condition. But when the idea of others as less than human gathers revolutionary force, it leads to the destruction of human beings.

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.
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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.

OSAMA BIN LADEN
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S
OON 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.