Words ending in “ism” are resilient. Often crafted from spurious meanings, they are frequently used to highlight misunderstandings, mask preconceived ideas, and indulge in excessive generalizations. Materialism, fundamentalism, and globalism cloud the clarity of thought, leading to what American political scientist Robert Dahl described in his elite theory as an “infinite regression of explanations”—in other words, an admission of impotence in comprehending a phenomenon.
It took two renowned authors from culturally distant backgrounds, along with the collaboration of Flammarion’s “Climats” series, to embark on the adventure and create a new term: “Occidentalism.” Without solely referencing the Orientalism of the late Palestinian writer Edward Said, the two authors thankfully went beyond the point where all their potential critics expected to catch them: Occidentalism is not built solely in opposition to Islamism. And while today certain regions of the Near and Middle East concentrate the hatred of Western modernity, the “dehumanized representation given by its enemies,” as defined by the authors, existed well beyond this part of the world. It is even in Europe that one should look for its roots. The “Western city” is the cradle from which grows the rejection of a civilization that remains its showcase. Did the poet Juvenal not explain in his satires dedicated to ancient Rome: “What can I do in Rome? I never learned to lie.” Money, political corruption, and dissolute morals remain today the favorite targets of those who consign the West to utter disgrace.
Long before Osama Bin Laden’s diatribes “justifying” the destruction of the New York World Trade Center towers, European capitals were often perceived as genuine places of perdition. Did not the Pied-Noirs of Algeria commonly say of a promiscuous woman that she “acts like the metropolis”? Did a vast Japanese cultural movement not call in 1942 to rid itself of Western modernity, which had “broken the unity of Eastern spirituality”? The anti-Americanism associated with this movement of rejecting the “machine civilization” appears to have inspired the inventor of the expression “the Third Reich” of the Nazis. It is within these megacities that the ideas undermining traditional values are born. The concept of “Konfortismus” by a German author in 1942, who criticized the mentality of a bourgeoisie solely attached to their material comfort, was later adopted in the 1960s by an Iranian intellectual who coined the term “intoxident,” the pernicious influence of Western ideas. The authors could easily have borrowed other examples from contemporary history: does Russia’s ancestral complex vis-à-vis the West not find a surprising continuation in Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric towards the West? Does the alter-globalization movement not draw on the denunciation of certain forms of economic modernity? Yet it is the pure spirit of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, who held in 1726 that commerce— an ancient form of liberalism—was a condition for freedom and the fulfillment of democracy. Admiring the London Stock Exchange, he humorously explained that “Jews, Muslims, and Christians trade as if they belonged to the same faith and the term ‘infidel’ is only given to those who go bankrupt.”
Ian Buruma & Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: A Brief History of the War Against the West, Editions Climats (Flammarion), 2006, 161 p., 16 Euros.
