Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and Enchantment. © by The University of Chicago. Jeff Frank, Megan Laverty Introduction: exploring Cora Diamond’s significances for education and educators, Ethics and Education 16, no.1 1 (Feb ): 1– M Gail Hamner Theorizing Religion and the Public Sphere: Affect, Technology, Valuation, Cited by: 31 Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and Enchantment Akeel Bilgrami It wouldn’t be too lofty to describe the extensive debate in many related disciplines over the last few decades about the inherited ideas and ideologies of the Enlightenment as our intellectual efforts at self-understanding—in particular, our efforts to come to a more or less precise grip on the Estimated Reading Time: 10 mins In Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit's book, Occidentalism: The West in the eyes of the East, they set out to solve the fueling force that drives the "enemies" of America and the Western world. This hatred spans back to the times of industrialization in the east, causing hatred to erupt from the peoples of Asian nationalities, and continues up to present day with Al-Qaeda and the
Essay on occidentalism
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Akeel Bilgrami. Download PDF Download Full PDF Package This paper. A short summary of this paper. These ongoing efforts on our part, however, gain an immediate interest when they surface in the context of a new form of cold war that has religious rather than communist ideals as its target.
Since religion, at least on the surface, essay on occidentalism, in some fairly obvious sense runs afoul of the demands of the En- lightenment, our modernity may seem to be much more essay on occidentalism stake now than it was in the contestations of the original cold war, where the issues seemed to be more about an internal tension within the values of the Enlighten- ment.
In writing this paper, I have been helped essay on occidentalism by discussions and correspondence with Carol Rovane, Stephen White, Noam Chomsky, essay on occidentalism, Eric Foner, Adrienne Rich, David Bromwich, Jerry Cooper, and Ira Katznelson. It essay on occidentalism, I suppose, be an atrocious crudeness and also thoroughly misleading to define the internal tension of the previous cold war as that between the Enlightenment values of liberty and equality.
Certainly anti-Communist cold war warriors would not describe the tension along these lines and would insist on describing it as a tension between the essay on occidentalism of liberty and authoritarianism. One can be wholly critical of the authoritarianism of Communist regimes and still point this out.
On the other hand, essay on occidentalism, there is a parallel mendacity, given how things turned out, in the Communist self-description of being committed to egalitarian values. But if the idea here is one of getting right some balance of rhetoric and motives in that cold war, essay on occidentalism, then, from the point of view of the rhetoric, liberty and equality were certainly the values that were respectively stressed by Critical Inquiry 32 Spring !
All rights reserved. The complaint is misplaced. One sign of this nervousness is essay on occidentalism quickness to find a germ of irrationality in any source of radical criticism of the consensus, essay on occidentalism. From quite early on, the strategy has been to tarnish the opposition as being poised in a perpetual ambiguity between radicalism and irrationalism in- cluding sometimes an irrationalism that encourages a fascist, or incipiently fascist, authoritarianism.
Nietzsche was one of the first to sense the theo- retical tyranny in this and often responded with an edginess of his own by flamboyantly refusing to be made self-conscious and defensive by the strat- egy and by explicitly embracing the ambiguity. More recently Foucault, among others, responded by preempting the strategy and declaring that the irrational was, in any case, the only defence for those who suffered under the comprehensive cognitive grip of the discursive power unleashed by mo- dernity in the name of rationality, essay on occidentalism.
There is a great urgency to get some clarity on these issues. The stakes are high, and they span a wide range of themes on the borderline of politics and culture. In fact, essay on occidentalism, eventually, noth- ing short of the democratic ideal is at stake, though that particular theme is too far afield to be pursued in any detail in this essay.
This paper is one of a pair. A k e e l B i l g r a m i is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and the director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities.
He is the author of Belief and MeaningEssay on occidentalism and Resentmentand Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity forthcoming. His email address is ab41 columbia. But other writing is more sophisticated and has a superior tone, making passing acknowledgements of the faults on the side to whom it gives intellectual support, and such work is often lionized by intellectual elites as fair-minded and objective, and, despite these marginal criticisms of the state in question, it is tolerated by the broad consensus of those in power, essay on occidentalism.
Sure enough since that time, essay on occidentalism, and especially with two or three hot essay on occidentalism thrown in to spur the pundits on, an increasing number of books with the more sophisticated aspiration have emerged to consolidate what Huntington had started.
The focus is worth its while since the conclusions of the book I have primarily chosen, as well as the attitudes it expresses, are representative of a great deal of both lay and academic think- ing on these themes. If one is to be scrupulous, one should register a caveat. The concept of a cold war, though it has had its early versions ever sincereally only came to be conventionally deployed in the way we are now used to after World War II. And in the West, though there were some who took the Soviet side, they were, except in France, rather peripheral in their weight and influence.
In the current cold war, too, a similar caveat holds, and that is why I will speak only about the writing on one side of the cold war. See Samuel P. See Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies New York, See Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, rev.
New York, Given their various, somewhat essay on occidentalism, claims in the book, the authors are a little obscure, and perhaps even a little arbitrary, when they speak of the West and therefore what they have in mind when they use the term Essay on occidentalism. At times they write as if the West is to be defined by two basic ideals or principles, which had their origins in seventeenth-century Europe and settled into what we have come to call the Enlightenment, the two principles of scientific rationality and the formal aspects of democracy, essay on occidentalism, including the commitment to basic liberal individual rights.
The enemies of the West are said to be opposed to these principles. It is never made clear what exactly the relation is between the defining principles of the West mentioned earlier and these broader cultural phe- nomena. Both are targets of the Occidentalists, essay on occidentalism, but what their relation is to one another as targets is never satisfactorily explained.
They have some sympathy for the opposition to some of the broader phenomena8 as anyone might, essay on occidentalism, however much they are committed to the goodness of the Westbut the final message of the book comes through as a firm defence of scientific ra- tionality and the political principles that the West is said to have ushered in as exemplary aspects of modernity and upon which it has defined itself.
The response leads one to think that the argument of the book is roughly this. The defining essence of the West lies in democracy and scientific ra- 8. Perhaps the conflation occurs via some sort of illicit derivation of these cultural phenomena from those principles. Thus, Occidentalism, in attacking the cultural phenomena, also attacks the West as defined by these principles, essay on occidentalism. Towards the end of the book, they lightly rehearse the by now well- known intellectual antecedents of the contemporary radical Islamist cri- tique of the broader cultural phenomena in Wahabism as well as in the more recent writings of Maulana Maududi and Syed Qutb; but in earlier chapters there are much more intellectually ambitious efforts at finding prior loca- tions for the critique especially the aspect of the critique that stresses loss of romantic and nationalist and indigenist traditions for the pursuit of util- itarian values and a superficial cosmopolitanism in certain intellectual tra- ditions in Germany, Russia, and Japan, essay on occidentalism, which then presumably would also count as being anti-West.
The interests of these more ambitious diagnostic efforts are not pursued with any depth or rigor. By the end, one does not quite know what to make of these claims to antecedent enemies since no convincing case is even attempted for a causal and historical influence of these intellectual and cultural movements on radical Islam though see footnote 10nor—and this is much worse—is there any effort to sort out what is implied by this recurring critique of the West and the principles that define it.
One is, at best, left with the impression of an interesting parallel. I am merely recording that they do not attempt to provide any evidence of causal influences, but, to essay on occidentalism fair to them, causal influences are not required for the parallels they draw to be interesting.
That there is only an interesting parallel and not a causal influence would not matter if the implications of the parallel were pursued in some depth, which they are not. This essay will try and draw a further parallel from an earlier period with a view to pursuing those deeper implications but with no particular claim to causal influence. Traditions of thought in politics and culture essay on occidentalism emerge without causal links as long as the affinities in intellectual and political responses, even among responses in far-flung regions and times, reflect a deep, essay on occidentalism, common understanding of what they are responding to.
Thus, my claims in this essay will be something that Buruma and Margalit could also make for the parallels they cite: that the parallels are interesting, without causal influence, as long as essay on occidentalism can see in them a pattern that speaks to a deeper historically recurring phenomenon that has common underlying sources. Its sophistication lies entirely in the kind of thing I had mentioned earlier, the fact that its cold war voice comes with a veneer of balance.
But no one should go away with the impression that any of this is more than a veneer. The authors are clear that these do not con- stitute the main issue.
The main issue is that the enemies of the West have first of all confused what is the essence of the West—as I said, scientific rationality and liberal democracy—with the broader cultural phenomena discussed in the four main chapters and, second, have again unfairly and illicitly extended their perhaps justified anger against Western conquest and colonization and corporate exploitation to a generalized opposition to the West as defined by those principles.
The West is advised not to be made to feel so guilty by these illicit extensions and derivations that it gives up on its essential commitments to its essay on occidentalism principles. Whether one may con- clude that it is also advised to stop its unending misadventures in foreign lands over the centuries is not so obvious from the text, essay on occidentalism, since its focus is primarily on characterizing a confused and extrapolated state of mind called Occidentalism.
Those that support American interests in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia Chalabi, Karzai, Mubarak, and Musharaff, to name only leaders are the ironically phrased good Muslims. And he is highly critical of this dichot- omy, as being both self-serving and ideological on the part of the West. Much more than Buruma and Margalit, essay on occidentalism, he stresses the systematically Margalit find in contemporary Islamism and in some European and Japanese traditions of thought; and its claim will be that the sources, in order to be properly identified, must go back to a certain metaphysical disputation in the early modern West itself.
See Mahmoud Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, essay on occidentalism, and the Roots of Terror New York, He gives a historical account, first, of its many covert opera- tions described by him as proxy wars during the cold war period when primarily it invoked the threat of communism as a justification and, then, of its more overt campaigns in the waging of real wars since September 11 when the justification shifted to combating Islamic terror though, of course, as Mamdani realizes, this justification did not have to wait till Sep- tember 11; it was put into place immediately after the cold war ended, and the operations continued in covert form till the atrocities of September 11 gave the United States the excuse for the more overt action in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Everything else is secondary and a distraction from this main issue. To the question I put earlier—Do Buruma and Margalit think that the West should be made to feel guilty over the litany of self- To say that such justifications were put into place soon after the initial cold war ended is also inaccurate, actually.
One heard these justifications as early as when the Reagan administration talked first of a war on terror. Libyans and Palestinians were particularly targeted, essay on occidentalism, and disgraceful stereotyping generalizations and racial attitudes towards Arabs began to be expressed, even among academics and the metropolitan intelligentsia, who had for some years not dared to say similar things about African Americans and Jews.
If I am right in placing Occidentalism as a sophisticated cold war inter- vention, Mamdani would be quite right to have such suspicions of the book.
As I said, it is his view that talk of Occiden- talism and other such notions should be seen as sleight of hand, a sly, though not necessarily always conscious, changing of the subject.
What he fails to see is that the deepest analysis of what goes wrong in this sort of cold war writing essay on occidentalism require not merely seeing the authors as changing the sub- ject from politics to culture but also bringing to bear a critique of the in- tegrated position that links their politics to their cultural and intellectual stances.
This would require linking his own leftist political stances to an absolutely indispensable essay on occidentalism and intellectual surround. The latter understands that the politics of so-called anti-Western thought must be connected with broader cultural phenomena, but its superficial analysis of these connec- tions leaves it as just one more contribution to the new cold war.
In order to reach towards the kind of analysis that both books in their contrasting ways fail to make, one needs to first take a critical rather than dismissive look at the eponymous culturalist idea of Occidentalism and to see what relation it bears to its obvious alter-referent, Orientalism.
To put it in very rudimentary and schematic terms, it has, among other things, five broad points to make about Western writing on the Orient that, as Said puts it, turned non-Western cultures in various parts of the world into the Other. First, and most obviously, the material inequalities generated by colo- nization gave rise to attitudes of civilizational condescension, and the so- cieties and peoples of the Orient were as a result presented as being inferior and undeveloped.
Second, a related but quite different point, colonization stereotyped them and reduced their variety to monolithic caricatures, essay on occidentalism. And, fourth, he argued, all three of these features owed their influence in more and less subtle ways to the proximity of such essay on occidentalism on the Orient to metropolitan sites of political andeconomic power, essay on occidentalism.
This fourth point is absolutely central to the critique and the tre- mendous interest it has generated, essay on occidentalism. The effectiveness of the critique lay pre- cisely in refusing to see literary and scholarly productions about the Orient as self-standing; Said linked seemingly learned and aesthetic efforts at their worst to mandarin-like self-interest and at their best to a blindness re- garding their locational privilege.
A scholar who can write a book on mod- ern Turkey with just a few tentatively and grudgingly formulated sentences about the treatment of Armenians and pass himself off as a man of integrity and learning in metropolitan intellectual circles of the West is a good and well-known example of the worst, and Said is devastating about such shabby work.
The fifth and fourth points are closely connected. It is not surprising that canonical works should have the first three features if those features flowed from the deep links that writing has to power.
The canon, after all, is often constructed by the pow- erful, in some broad sense of that term. The first feature is not to be expected because, as they themselves say, Occidentalist ideas and hostility emerge in Muslim populations out of a sense of material inferiority and humiliation rather than out of a sense of economic superiority. The subtitle of their book, as I said, is The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. That is, the enemies of the West who are presented in this book, far from being close to power, are motivated by their power- lessness and helplessness against Western power and domination.
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Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and Enchantment Akeel Bilgrami It wouldn’t be too lofty to describe the extensive debate in many related disciplines over the last few decades about the inherited ideas and ideologies of the Enlightenment as our intellectual efforts at self-understanding—in particular, our efforts to come to a more or less precise grip on the Estimated Reading Time: 10 mins May 21, · Occidentalism: The West in the eyes of the East Essays Words 3 Pages Occidentalism In Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit's book, Occidentalism: The West in the eyes of the East, they set out to solve the fueling force that drives the "enemies" of America and the Western world The Islamic contribution to Occidentalism is a religious vision of purity in which Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and Enchantment. © by The University of Chicago. Jeff Frank, Megan Laverty Introduction: exploring Cora Diamond’s significances for education and educators, Ethics and Education 16, no.1 1 (Feb ): 1– M Gail Hamner Theorizing Religion and the Public Sphere: Affect, Technology, Valuation, Cited by: 31
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