Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (10 page)

Kireyevsky targeted both rationalism and reasonableness as pernicious elements in the Western mind. The two are easily conflated, but not in fact the same. Aristotle, in Kireyevsky’s view, was responsible for molding the mind of the West in the iron cast of reasonableness. It was a good thing, however, that he failed to transmit this idea to his most illustrious pupil, Alexander the Great, who was great precisely because he was after glory, and not after the petty ideal of being reasonable. Reasonableness, says Kireyevsky, is nothing but the “striving for the better within the circle of the commonplace.” Reasonableness is timid prudence, an appeal for intense mediocrity, based on trite conventional wisdom, the opposite of true wisdom. It is the fear of being original, lest one is perceived as an extremist, the worst thing one can be in the cowardly West. Reasonableness is the epitome of the non-heroic mind, excoriated by not just Russian Slavophiles such as Kireyevsky but a host of antiliberal thinkers, many of them German, who, as we have already noted, despised the merchant and worshiped the hero.

Many of us might think that being reasonable suggests prudence, stability, and having a modicum of foresight. It also suggests willingness to listen to reason and to act for clear reasons. In this sense it means the same as being rational. But Kireyevsky, as well as other Occidentalists after him, viewed prudence as timidity, stability as dullness, and foresight as seeking an uninspiring, sheltered life. Kireyevsky found all that in Aristotle, since Aristotle took common beliefs and common sense seriously, and Kireyevsky interpreted Aristotle’s golden rule as a rule for avoiding extremes and seeking the average, which is another name for mediocrity. Thus Kireyevsky turned Aristotle into the first philosopher of the bourgeois mind, which is nothing but the mind of the West.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas on the human will had a huge impact on Russian thinkers too. The bourgeois mind of the West is often seen by Occidentalists as an impediment to action, or at least any action that matters. Hamlet is the symbol of this. Russian translators rendered Hamlet’s question “to be or not to be” as “to live or not to live.” Brooding Hamlet, paralyzed by too much intellectual agonizing, lacks the vitality that comes from the spontaneous life. To the Slavophile, the rootless Westernizer in Russia is of this type. The view that human action should be guided by reason is wrong, in this scheme of things, and should be supplanted by voluntarism, the idea that action should be spurred by sheer will. The will is superior to reason. Reason, to the voluntarists, gives us not genuine reasons for action but only phony rationalizations for doing nothing.

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.

W
ARS 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.