Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit

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