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