Mushin-Sho

The best reply so far can be found here. My counter argument follows. Since it hasn’t been posted by NYSun yet, I might have to trim it down and resubmit. Anyway, the whole of it follows below.

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There are several important arguments you bring forward and I would like to address them in the order you make them.

First, the Maxim gun. You are absolutely right to state that there is no obvious military advantage to producing a “false” image of one’s enemy. Indeed, as you note, such misunderstandings have created protracted conflicts, including those you mention. However, my use of the phrase “false picture” was provisional and merely took on the terms Mr. Warraq used. That is, the “false” picture is not merely distortion for the sake of making those producing it feel better, i.e. more civilized, about themselves, although that is one entailment. More important for me, and for Said, is that the proliferation of Orientalist discourses helped dehumanize the Arab world so that doing violence to the people is not doing violence to human beings as such. They are flattened to targets, obstacles preventing the spread of rational civilization proper. This is not a direct military advantage, one that helps strategize the battlefield. Dehumanization, rather, is how one gets to the battlefield in the first place and I just described one path to get there. The “false” picture is, rather, something akin to an ‘ethical’ advantage––ethics is not the appropriate word but it is the only one that comes to mind at the moment––one that oddly allows for the eschewing of ethics altogether. That is, if the enemy we are fighting is not human but more like a plague, a virus that produces barbarism, then it is our duty to fight such a force. We, in turn, are allowed to use any means necessary to fulfill this duty.

Although I allude to mass bombings and atomic weapons in my last clause, it is very important to remember this (ill)logic is not the sole property of the ‘West’. Indeed, the Rwandan genocide and its use of machetes to cut down the Tutsi “cockroaches” is a tragic reminder that dehumanization and its consequences are not so easily isolatable.

Second, the rise of Eastern economies:  While I disagree with your overall assessment of both the historical and contemporary economic landscape, you do usefully point to a huge gap in Said’s analysis, namely the lack of attention to economic forces. Said is not blind to their influence, but does subsume them into a larger argument focused on particular discursive strategies and their affects. Scholars, even those sympathetic to Said’s basic project, have often noted this flaw and a lot of important, original work has been done to think through this gap.

My disagreement, however, does not rest there. Rather, your reading of the Meiji Restoration presumes some kind of voluntaristic decision made on the part of the Japanese imperial court. The presence of weapons was less a mark of Western superiority with which to contend than, say, a case of realizing Western belligerence in the sake of promoting economic interests. Indeed, there were already places in the world that served as living lessons for those who would doubt the possibility of economic colonization; Africa and India come readily to mind. My knowledge of American relations with Japan, and Japanese history is bare so that is all I can offer at the moment.

In regards to India specifically, and the rise of “developing world” economies generally, your argument rests on a similar assumption of voluntary action. They see Western superiority and are attempting to catch up with it, having learned from Japan. Of course, choosing not to follow this lead is not really available as a choice. The density and power of the world economic system overdetermines––that is, shapes them with pressure from multiple angles––national decisions. Governments must contend with world trade, find a way compete within it, or see their citizens languish in poverty. Even attempting to compete, however, produces poverty; producing cash crops, for instance, rather than basic nutritional foods for the local population is an all too common world reality. Lastly, economic development within these nations does not necessarily mean a cultural overhaul as well. That is, most nations in the midst of this process, and India specifically, are also battling to indigenize and adapt industrial logics to their cultural situations. They are not, in other words, simply kowtowing to “Western superiority,” but negotiating world economic pressure.

Finally, Iraq. Your assessment of the Neo-Conservative position and its opposition is interesting. There is, indeed, a logic in play that they are or could be “just like Americans;” overthrow the dictator and all will be well. There is, however, another logic behind this one. The presence of the dictator is a clear sign of the Arabic backwardness, which can and must be modernized/ civilized into a democratic sensibility. Of course, this quickly forgets the ways such regimes are and have been supported by the ones who heroically topple them. Arguing that these regimes are necessary to control some inherent Arab cruelty forgets that Iraq’s national boundaries were formed by the United Kingdom after WWI. Forget these histories and, yes, Iraqis are waiting to reveal their true American core.

All of this is, of course, a counter position to the NeoCons that does not rely on the Orientalist tropes you described: Islam is not fit for democracy, it’s “different” etc. But like the gunboat diplomacy you mentioned earlier, democracy isn’t really being offered as a choice. If absolute democracy were offered, my guess is that you would see three separate states, two of which look to Islamic law for guiding principles. No, this is not a possible choice. The only choice, to use your phrasing, is a “western-style democracy.”
 

I have recieved two more replies. Here is the first, and my response follows.

How is thinking about violence, both epistemic and bodily, a utopian project? And what is the teleology of this project, or postcolonial criticism generally? 

My post at the New York Sun prompted a response accusing me of being an apologist for the "inherent" curelty of the Arab world. Here is my response, which was an interesitng way to start my writing for the day.

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 To argue against you, Mr. Kaltenberg, I hope you won’t mind that I quote you quoting me.

"...The argument is reductive insofar as it denies the long and continuing history of Western involvement…."——thus whining is considered to be a valid proof of not whining?

If I understand your counterargument correctly, I am contradicting myself by reproducing the very critique I am attempting to debunk. Taken out of context, this would seem to be true. However, that sentence particularly, and a major part of my argument generally, was about locating the blame on Said alone. Hundreds of years of history cannot be laid aside for the sake of one scholar’s book that is a mere 40 years old. Said did not invent imperialism, or it’s bloody fallouts; rather, he describes one self-reproducing mechanism that allows for conquest without guilt. I am not sure how remembering, and articulating, the various histories that bring us to our present moment is “whining”?  

On the subject of vocabulary and sentence shaping, I happily admit my own inadequacies, but also ask you not to use infantilizing words like “whining” to describe a heated political situation.

But returning to the argument proper: Historical amnesia is clearly not something you are in favor of either, if your invocation of “the western apologists of Stalinist purges and the American & Brit supporters of the nazi regime” is any evidence. Aside from its polemical force, a comparison between “the inherent and inexcusable cruelty” of the Arab world and systematic slaughter by Stalin or the Nazi regime is hyperbolic and inaccurate to say the least. Strangely, the use of these examples gives us an insight into a counterargument used by various Islamists, militant or not. Their argument, or my approximation of it, goes like this: “You say we are backward and you are modern, that we are lacking and need to catch up. If, however, being modern allows for the rise of concentration camps, atomic weapons, and other forms of mass violence, then perhaps we don’t want to be modern.” The argument is pertinent and one that greatly troubled the greatest “Western” minds of the early 20th century. What does it mean to be “modern”? Is there really such a thing as historical “progress,” if forward movement in time has just created more elaborate means of destruction? These are key questions “the West” must ask itself to understand why “backward” peoples continue in their “inherent and inexcusable” ways.

The opposite side, one where I sympathize with you and Mr. Warraq, recognizes in liberal democratic societies a greater distribution of civil liberties (never inherent, always battled for), and greater access to advanced medicine. I use “greater” as a qualifier because I don’t believe that these traits are inherent products of Western societies; claiming so would forget the battles fought to gain such rights.

My own position is still in the process of being formulated. I have no desire to see human rights abused, in the Arab world or otherwise, but I cannot claim to sit on an impossibly clean throne from which I can decide the innocence or guilt of others. If I apologize for anything, it is simply for not being able wholly to laud or condemn “East” or “West."

I am writing final papers right now and in the rhythm of writing. The New York Sun, unfortunately, felt a part of these drum beats as I posted the following respone to this article reagarding one of my intellectual heros, Edward Said. The one available there, unfortunately, is not formatted properly.

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Let me respond first by noting that Said’s influential book is indeed deeply flawed, and in Terry Eagleton’s apt phrasing, is a "flawed classic." The fact that it is a classic and spawned, as noted in the article, the vast field known as Postcolonial criticism is, for Mr. Warraq, a major problem. Many scholars sympathetic to Said’s project have noted most of the basic problems that Mr. Warraq points to, those of historical accuracy etc. Moreover, Postcolonial theory and criticism has moved well beyond Said’s text; the newer iterations of these projects would provide more fertile ground for thinking the contemporary situation. That is my first point.

My second point is that there is, at least in this article, a deeply flawed understanding of what Said’s argument is. "If Orientalists have produced a false picture of the Orient, Orientals, Islam, Arabs, and Arabic society… then how could this false or pseudo-knowledge have helped European imperialists to dominate three-quarters of the globe?" 

Producing a false picture is precisely how the imperial project was accomplished. That is, Said is concerned with the ways conquest is justified, or even more perversely, thought to be helpful. A part of his argument, then, is ‘Orientalizing’ the Arab world meant dehumanizing its population, casting them into particular types such as the lascivious harem female or the equally perverse despot. Such debased creatures obviously need the help of Enlightened European empires whose universal rationalism will clearly see beyond their opium-induced irrationality. This is merely a gloss of the argument, but one that I hope illustrates the ways imperialism comes to be justified as, what Said calls, "the civilizing mission." One does not need much imagination to see how such dehumanizing logics–––based on sound epistemological practices no doubt–––duplicate themselves in the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africas, et al.  Such logics, moreover, are not merely the scars of history but the present’s still bleeding wounds; the justification offered after invading Iraq, for instance, is a contemporary iteration of the ‘civilizing mission,’ namely the ‘democratizing mission.’

My final point, however, is less firm and more sympathetic to Mr. Warraq’s concerns. The question of how one avoids ethnocentrism without also collapsing into a toothless cultural relativism that remains mute to the persecution of women, homosexuals, and others, is a very serious one. Claiming, as Mr. Warraq does, that it is Said who paved the way for the Arab world to cry victim and hide cruel persecutions behind those tears is both reductive and historically inaccurate. The argument is reductive insofar as it denies the long and continuing history of Western involvement, often of the military kind, in the Arab world. More significantly, at least for Said’s case, is that a better part of the 30 year career following Orientalism was spent as an intellectual and cultural liaison. One article in particular, published in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, entitled "The Other America," admonished his readers to shatter their crude one dimensional images of America, or the West generally. In that same article, Said also describes his lifelong efforts with Arab premiers to think more complexly about the West, lest they replicate the same dehumanizing gestures he spent his lifetime critiquing.