Occidentalism the Title of Ian

¶ … Occidentalism

The title of Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit's essay "Occidentalism" reflects the commonly-expressed notion that the world is polarized between two civilizations, that of 'the East' and 'the West.' Recently, the negative connotations of Orientalism, or the exotiziation of the East in a demeaning fashion, have been subjected to greater scrutiny by scholars. Buruma and Margalit attempt to examine how the ideals of the West have been viewed in a pejorative fashion by people who define themselves against Western values. By defining Western values as liberal democracy and pluralism the authors classify Japan, and even Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as representative of anti-Occidental ideas during World War II. Thus, for Buruma and Margalit, the West is more of an intellectual rather than a geographic construct.

The most obvious present-day example of anti-Occidental views can be found in fundamentalist Islam. The West -- decadent, overly sexualized, and urban -- is also a frequent target of scrutiny in movies from poor countries, the authors point out. But this not a new phenomenon or only particular to Islam: even before the Industrial Revolution the city was loved by intellectuals like Voltaire but hated by authors who disliked liberal democracy and diversity. Of course, the construction of the West as 'the other' and has harboring the fleshpots of Sodom and Gomorrah bear little relation to what the West is in reality. In fact, hatred of the West often carries contradictory impulses -- the sexuality of the West, its religious tolerance, its Jewishness, its Christian nature, its power, its money, its persecution of Islam, its aid to poorer nations are all conflated in anti-Occident ideology.

The one uniting factor of most anti-Western movements is a hatred of intellectualism and a celebration of the non-rational, unscientific 'soul.' In discussing this type of anti-Western prejudice, the authors ironically echo some of the criticisms leveled at liberals by conservatives even within America -- the idea that liberals are sexual, godless, overly tolerant, go against the natural order of male-female relations, and prioritize the scientific over the spiritual is expressed today in debates over teaching evolution in school, stem cell research, and abortion. Oppression of women is seen as a manifestation of the obvious evils of the Taliban in Afghanistan, but the idea that women should be relegated to traditional roles in America is embraced by many American, Christian conservatives. These conservatives are, in the authors' estimation, anti-Western, even though they perceive themselves to be upholding Western values.

But is this really a useful or complete understanding of the complexities of the religious and cultural debates that exist within the Middle East, America, or the larger world? Although the use of the term Occidentalism helpful to some extent in examining why 'they' hate 'us' in the Islamic vs. Western world's culture wars, ultimately the term is so broad its value is somewhat limited, especially if their construct is applied to Nazi Germany vs. The West. Further confusing the issue is that the authors note that many Western critics come from within the system itself, from the ultimate critic of Western bourgeois values Karl Marx to Western-educated fundamentalist terrorists. This makes the definition of 'the Occident' even slipperier, especially as Marx was pro-urban, pro-science, in contrast to religious fundamentalists.