Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (8 page)

And yet, bin Laden’s language does have historical roots, which go back to rebellious sectarian cults in the Muslim world. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a millenarian Shi’ite sect known as the Assassins took it upon themselves to kill unrighteous rulers and their followers. They claimed that salvation was at hand for a chosen few, through secret knowledge known by the holy leader, or Imam. Ensconced in fortresses in Syria and Persia, the Assassins showed absolute obedience to their leaders by elaborate displays of ritual suicide. If ordered to do so, they would hurl themselves off a cliff without hesitation. They also treated their murders as a sacred duty. The dagger was the only permissible weapon, and an honorable Assassin expected to die after his deed was done.

Various theories have been put forward to explain the motives of this murderous sect: it stemmed from a Persian rebellion against Arab domination, or a war between rural landowners and their serfs against the rulers in the growing cities. But whatever the reasons for this peculiar way of violence, it ended in failure. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the Assassins were finished, crushed by the might of the invading Mongol armies. A pattern was set, however, for religious rebels appealing to the poor, the oppressed, and the discontented to fight to the death to restore God’s kingdom on earth. Leaders of Islamic death cults almost invariably ended up in the prisons of the rulers they tried to overthrow.

From the nineteenth century onward, when ruling elites in Egypt and other parts of the Islamic world began to adopt European ideas of secular law and constitutional government, the West became directly associated with the worship of money. Muslim radicals in India, Egypt, and elsewhere called for a holy war against Westernization and its Jewish agents, a war against the Muslim leaders who had been “corrupted” by Western ways. The Muslim Brotherhood, a radical movement founded in Egypt in 1928, stated its goals precisely: “God is our objective; the Qur’an is our constitution; the Prophet is our leader; Struggle is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.”

Japanese kamikaze tactics were reinvented by the Hezbollah in Lebanon, after the Israeli invasion of 1982. In October 1983, 241 U.S. servicemen were killed by a suicide bomber driving a truck filled with explosives. Ten years later suicide bombing was adopted by Palestinians as well. Those who strap themselves with bombs are often motivated by revenge. But those who dispatch them see this as a battle between holy warriors who are ready to die and people addicted to
Komfortismus.
The latter are regarded with contempt. As the Hezbollah leader Sheik Hasan Nasrallah explained days after Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000: “Israel may own nuclear weapons and heavy weaponry but, by God, it is weaker than a spiderweb.”

 

 

 

NEITHER CAPITALISM NOR LIBERAL DEMOCRACY EVER pretended to be a heroic creed. Enemies of the liberal society even think that liberalism celebrates mediocrity. Liberal societies, according to the prewar German nationalist Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, give “everyone the freedom to be a mediocre man.”
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Importance is given “to everyday life rather than to exceptional life.” This is not wholly wrong. Tocqueville made a similar observation. Of course liberal societies also give people the opportunity to have exceptional lives, marked by exceptional achievements. But these are individual achievements. Individuals are rewarded for their exceptional talents with money and fame. Liberal capitalism is by definition inegalitarian, for not everyone is equally gifted or equally lucky. Sometimes these talents, singled out by success in the marketplace, are meretricious, and more profound gifts fail to be recognized. This is a reason not to see the market economy as a panacea. But most people, in any case, are indeed destined to lead unexceptional lives. Liberals, in line with a Puritan tradition, have learned to accept this. More than that, as witnessed by seventeenth-century Dutch painting and English novels, they recognize that the unexceptional, everyday life has dignity too and should be nurtured, not scorned.

This cannot satisfy those who wish to see heroism and glory as parts of a collective, and thus often vicarious, enterprise. Fascism appealed precisely to mediocre men, because it gave them a glimpse of glory by association, by feeling part of a supernation, and in Nazism to a superrace, supposedly endowed with superior virtues and spiritual qualities. Politicized religious movements often attract people for the same reason. Self-sacrifice for a higher cause, for an ideal world, cleansed of human greed and injustice, is the one way for the average man to feel heroic. Better to die gloriously for an ideal than to live in
Komfortismus.
Choosing to die a violent death becomes a heroic act of human will. In totalitarian systems it might be the only act an individual is free to choose.

The Occident, as defined by its enemies, is seen as a threat not because it offers an alternative system of values, let alone a different route to Utopia. It is a threat because its promises of material comfort, individual freedom, and the dignity of unexceptional lives deflate all utopian pretensions. The anti-heroic, antiutopian nature of Western liberalism is the greatest enemy of religious radicals, priest-kings, and collective seekers after purity and heroic salvation.

The bourgeois, often philistine, unheroic, antiutopian nature of liberal civilization can make it difficult to defend. Where the free market dominates, as in the United States, intellectuals feel marginal and unappreciated, and are inclined to be drawn to politics with grander pretensions. Taking their freedoms for granted, they become easy prey for enemies of the West. The Weimar republic did not fall only because of Nazi brutality, reactionary stupidity, military ambition, or the arguments formulated by the likes of Moeller van den Bruck. It also fell because too few people were prepared to defend it.

T
HE ATTACK ON THE WEST IS AMONG OTHER THINGS an attack on the mind of the West. The mind of the West is often portrayed by Occidentalists as a kind of higher idiocy. To be equipped with the mind of the West is like being an idiot savant, mentally defective but with a special gift for making arithmetic calculations. It is a mind without a soul, efficient, like a calculator, but hopeless at doing what is humanly important. The mind of the West is capable of great economic success, to be sure, and of developing and promoting advanced technology, but cannot grasp the higher things in life, for it lacks spirituality and understanding of human suffering.

The germ of this distinction goes back a long way. Plotinus (A.D. 204 -270), the revered founder of Neoplatonism in the Greco-Roman world, made a distinction between discursive and nondiscursive thought. Plotinus used the term “discursive thinking” to refer to the thinking of the soul, and “nondiscursive thinking” to refer to the intellect. Belief in God, for example, can mean that one accepts the proposition that God exists. Or one can simply venerate God without saying anything about Him. These types of thinking come from separate mental organs, as it were: the intellect and the soul. (We tend now to reverse these terms—the soul for nondiscursive and the intellect for discursive thinking.) Too much stress on the intellect diminishes the role of intuitive and nondiscursive thought. It is a Romantic idea that intuitive thought is superior to deliberative and discursive thinking. Occidentalism often takes its cue from these categories. The mind of the West is accused not only of being incapable of nondiscursive thinking but, worse, of having the arrogance and impudence to deny its existence.

The mind of the West in the eyes of the Occidentalists is a truncated mind, good for finding the best way to achieve a given goal, but utterly useless in finding the
right
way. Its claim to rationality is only half true anyway—the lesser half. If by rationality we mean instrumental rationality, fitting means to ends, in distinction to value rationality, choosing the right ends, then the West has plenty of the former and very little of the latter. Western man, in this view, is a hyperactive busy-body, forever finding the right means to the wrong ends.

Antithetical to the Western mind is the Russian soul, a mythical entity constructed by intellectuals in the course of the nineteenth century. This love affair of Russians with their own soul is a perfect illustration of the Occidentalists’ sordid picture of the Western mind. But there is another reason for focusing our attention on it. Nineteenth-century Russian nativist thinkers, loosely termed Slavophiles, have provided a model for national or ethnic spiritual attacks on Western rationalism that was followed by generations of intellectuals in other countries, such as India, China, and the Islamic nations. However, even though Slavophiles stressed the unique spiritual qualities of the Russian soul, they too had a model. Russian Slavophilia was rooted in German Romanticism, just as Russian liberalism took its cues from German liberal ideas.

For Peter the Great, the Western quarter in Moscow meant the German quarter. But in Germany, and especially Prussia, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, France was seen as the quintessential West, powerful, inspiring, and threatening. There is a great deal of truth in Isaiah Berlin’s view that the German Romantic movement and its Romantic nationalism were “a product of wounded national sensibility, of dreadful national humiliation.”

In Berlin’s account the French dominated the Western world—politically, culturally, militarily. This was deeply humiliating to the defeated Germans, particularly the traditional, religious, economically backward East Prussians. Frederick the Great’s enthusiasm for French ideas and his penchant for importing high-handed French officials made things worse. The Germans, responded “like the bent twig of the poet Schiller’s theory, by lashing back and refusing to accept their alleged inferiority.” They contrasted their own deep inner life of the spirit, the poetry of their national soul, the simplicity and nobility of their character, to the empty, heartless sophistication of the French. This mood rose to fever pitch during the national resistance to Napoleon and was, as Berlin puts it, “the original exemplar of the reaction of many a backward, exploited, or at any rate patronised society, which, resentful of the apparent inferiority of its status, reacted by turning to real or imaginary triumphs and glories in its past, or enviable attributes of its own national or cultural character.”
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When people are not only humiliated by foreign forces but oppressed by their own government, they often retreat to the “inner life” of the spirit, pure and simple, where they can feel free from the corruption of power and sophistication. Philosophy and literature become political substitutes when political debate is no longer possible. This was true of nineteenth-century Germany, and also of Russia, where German texts were grafted onto a Russian trunk, like false limbs. Severe censorship enhanced the importance of ideas and created the impression that ideas, even of the most esoteric kind, mattered greatly. The inability, under the rule of the czars, to translate ideas into action and thus to test them against reality drove many Russian thinkers toward purism. Extreme views were held with such fanatical conviction that thinkers and writers were turned into prophets. Many of these views came out of German Romanticism, especially the early high Romanticism, between 1797 and 1815. In Russia they were transmuted, or rather truncated, into Occidentalism.

Isaiah Berlin regarded the Romantic movement as part of the Counter-Enlightenment. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers took the optimistic view that human history is a linear progression toward a happier, more rational world, the Romantic scheme uses old religious notions of innocence, fall, and redemption. The Romantic always feels that he is at the nadir of the fall, from which he looks up in the hope of redemption. The fall is marked by total fragmentation, estrangement from one’s own true self, alienation from one’s fellow human beings, and estrangement from nature (or God).

The main causes of fragmentation, in this line of thinking, are the division of labor and competitive markets. The redemptive scheme is destined to fulfill the yearning for unity and harmony. The Romantic is not an optimist. There is no guarantee that he will ever be able to overcome alienation, so the nonbourgeois Romantic is forever haunted by the constant longing for lost unity. But this is bearable, since for the Romantic the quest is all-important, whether or not the goal is ever reached. Because innocence, in the Romantic scheme, comes before the fall, Romantic politics tends to be steeped in nostalgia. Be it medieval Europe, early Christianity, the heyday of Russian monasticism, or indeed ancient Japan, the past serves as a model for the work of restoring the harmony of the past—the “unity.” This longing, as well as the attitudes it spawned, has been enormously influential. The Occidentalist vocabulary of good and bad words is essentially the same as the Romantic one. When it comes to the mind, “organic” is a good word and “mechanical” is a bad one. The organic mind enables the individual to be one with himself, one with others, and one with nature or God.

The Divine manifests itself in various different arenas: nature, history, and the human soul. Pagan gods operate in nature. Judaism made history, as recorded in the Old Testament, the main stage for God’s presence. St. Paul and St. Augustine located God’s presence in the human soul. Of course, these things overlap, and the major religions show elements of all of them. Romanticism, in its religious manifestation, revitalized nature as a focus for the Godhead, but it also heightened the role of the soul. It is this element of Romanticism that was picked up by Russian thinkers and, more important, by Russian “prophetic novelists.” The Slavophiles and their spiritual heirs, such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Solovyov, not only made the human soul into God’s temple, but turned the Russian soul into its inner sanctuary.

It was a common Romantic belief that excessive rationalism caused the terminal decay of what was once the vital organism of the West. Rationalistic cleverness was held to be a Western disease: cleverness without wisdom. The Russian contribution was an intense moral seriousness, of the kind we find in Dostoyevsky’s novels. But Dostoyevsky added an important twist: even the most boorish peasant, in his account, is better than the most sophisticated intellectual. For at least the God-fearing peasant knows whom to ask for forgiveness.