East is East, and West is West

A lengthy essay here Charles Freund following the death of Edward Said, on both the past achievements and present failings of his “Orientalist” accusations toward “the West.”

That is where the Orientalist political critique becomes significant. Its practitioners have spent a quarter-century sifting through the sins committed by the West against the East, a rich and often ugly lode. But the critique’s point has never been to clarify and improve relations and mutual perceptions. For many critics, the point has been to condemn the West, often by dissecting its imagination. As for examining the East’s imagination, to see if it too was cluttered with stereotypes, misconceptions, or other detrimental concepts, that simply was never a sustained part of the critique. Worse, if other scholars did inquire into the dehumanizing trends that may have been present in the East, those scholars were likely to be labeled “Orientalists,” an epithet that eventually became tantamount to “racist,” and which served to marginalize them in the world of respectable scholarship.
This has turned out to be an agenda with consequences. What makes those consequences worth pondering is what made the critique both pressing and valuable to begin with. That is, Orientalist issues were worth addressing not only for their own sake, but because the East-West encounter has been increasingly problematic for the United States and the nations of the East, with explosive political, military, economic, and cultural dimensions for them all.
If the critique could have provided a better conceptual framework for addressing those issues, it would have been the right critique at the right time. But if the critique merely devised a one-sided apologia about Western sins and sinners without addressing similar issues in the East, then it would have proved merely another adventure in failed left-intellectual rationalization. Worse, if the critique ended up marginalizing or even delegitimizing others who did attempt to address the East’s potential problems, it would have left its subject in a poorer state than it found it. It would have helped shape a West debilitated by guilt about its past, yet with no useful framework for understanding those who hate Westerners enough to murder them en masse. Given acts of mass murder by persons whom Reuters News Service refuses to term “terrorists,” given a president who seeks inclusiveness while surrounding himself with various controversial Muslim spokesmen, given an intellectual class here and abroad that has been suggesting empathy with mass murderers, the West’s conceptual approach to this crisis is at least open to question.

To Freund, not only has the critique of Orientalism impacted the West with guilt, it has suppressed any similar critique of its flip side from the East.

Orientalism, the systematic stereotyping and degradation of Easterners that dehumanized them in the eyes of the West, enabled the colonial powers not only to mistreat whole populations, but also, in some of the West’s blackest moments, to slaughter them in horrifying numbers. What makes it possible to commandeer passenger planes filled with innocent travelers, including children, and use them as bombs to murder thousands of people in office buildings? It is a systematic stereotyping and degradation of Westerners that dehumanizes them, and makes their death a pious deed for some and a cause for celebration for others. It is Occidentalism.

Thought-provoking stuff.