Occidentalism

I know I don't rock out on the political on here very often, but here I go again. On my own.

I was down at the discount bookstore the other day and found a book I'd never read nor even seen before - it is called Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (authored by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit) and frankly, it rocks. Just as works on Orientalism explain why the West felt (and continues to feel) justified in oppressing non-Western cultures, polities, and societies, this piece explains why non-Westerners (and traditional, anti-Modern social conservatives) hate the Modern West. Not only that, it does so without talking over the average human being's head. For instance, dig this review in Foreign Affairs:


In this grandly illuminating study of two centuries of anti-Western ideas, Buruma and Margalit contend that the hostility of Islamic jihadists toward the United States is but the most recent manifestation of a long-running, worldwide reaction to the rise of Western modernity. They call the cluster of prejudices and unflattering images of the West conjured by its enemies "Occidentalism," a phenomenon that originated within the West itself in the late eighteenth century and only later spread to the Middle East, Asia, and beyond. German romantics, reacting to the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalism, expressed it in their rejection of a coldly rational Europe -- a "machine civilization," manifest in imperialism, urbanism, and cosmopolitanism. From there, similar themes appear in Occidentalism's other variants: the sinfulness and rootlessness of urban life; the corruption of the human spirit in a materialistic, market-driven society; the loss of organic community; the glory of heroic self-sacrifice in overcoming the timidity of bourgeois life. Western liberalism is a threat -- to religious fundamentalists, priest-kings, and radical collectivists alike -- because it deflates the pretensions of their own brand of heroic utopianism. Ultimately, the picture that emerges is not of a clash of civilizations but of deeply rooted tensions that ebb and flow within and across civilizations, religions, and cultures. What the West can do about Occidentalism, however, is less clear. The anti-Western impulses in nineteenth-century Europe and interwar Japan were only transitional, overwhelmed by the forces of socioeconomic advancement. Whether the Occidentalism of present-day Islamic radicals will also come to accommodate modernity is the great question of our time. Buruma and Margalit do not venture an answer, but their evocative study shows that, whatever happens in the end, it will play out as a long and violent historical drama.

Hellz yes.

Things not to miss:

1. The explanation of modernity as the separation of religious and political/economic spheres (6)
2. The explanation of the Third Reich as an anti-Western movement (8)
3. The contrast of Orientalism and Occidentalism (10)
4. The metaphor of the Urban as the prostitute (18)
5. Occidentalism as a manifestation of threatened traditional elites (30)
6. Anti-Semitism as anti-urbanism/anti-modernism (33)
7. The explanation of anti-modernism as an expression for a desire for meaning through heroic acts (52)
8. Alexis de Tocqueville's explanations of the limits of democracy (55)
9. Militarism as anti-democratic/capitalist (57)
10. The Japanese emperor cult as a flawed interpertation of Western institutions (63)
11. The comparison of Osama bin Laden's beliefs with Nazi fanaticism (68)
12. Anti-Modernism as Utopianism (72)
13. The West as soulless (75)
14. Romanticism as reveling in emotion and failure (79)
15. The discussion of anti-rationalism (94)
16. The rise of the concept of Protestant "individual conscience" (127)
17. The veil as a sign of wealth (131)

Oh snap. . . get on Amazon and rock out kids.

Basically, this work is brilliant not only because of its ability to explain the subject, but because it demonstrates that social conservatives in all states, including the United States, are children of the same monster - reactionism and anti-individualism. To hell.