Out of Our Minds
Page 40
Anti-Americanism is the converse of US exceptionalism. People who see themselves as uniquely good invite characterization as uniquely bad. As US power grew to eclipse that of other powers, resentment grew with it. After the Second World War, US strength was felt as far as the frontiers of communism; Uncle Sam interfered in other people’s empires, treated much of the world as his backyard, and legitimized illiberal regimes in US interests. The magnetism of the trashy culture of hot dog and hard rock was as resented as it was irresistible. GIs, irksome reminders of European impotence, were ‘overpaid, oversexed, and over here’. Benign policies, such as support for war-weak European economies, elicited little gratitude.69
From 1958, the hero and spokesman of anti-Americanism was the French president Charles de Gaulle: a Samson in Dagon’s temple, pushing at the pillars and striving to expel the philistines. Because he was an unruly client of the United States, his critique was more effective than the propaganda of self-interested enemies who issued their denunciations from behind the Iron Curtain. More convincing still – and more disturbing from an American point of view – was the growing clamour from morally committed, politically neutral quarters. Challenges came first from the liberal West, and especially from America itself, becoming strident during the Vietnam War; protests from the ‘Third World’ followed. In the 1970s, as America began to get over the trauma of Vietnam, an exiled Iranian mullah, Ayatollah Khomeini, became the loudest critic. While hating other forms of modernization, he was a master of mass communication. His conviction of self-righteousness was almost insane. His simple message was that the world was divided between oppressors and dispossessed. America was the Great Satan, corrupting humankind with materialist temptations, suborning the species with crude force.
As the self-proclaimed champion of capitalism in successful global confrontations with rival ideologies, the United States invited this caricature. Moreover, US society had undeniable defects, as its critics from within well knew. ‘Trash capitalism’ defied the canons of taste with ugly urban sprawl and cheap, tawdry products that made money in mass markets. US values elevated vulgar celebrities above sages and saints and has elected one of them as president. The country exhibited, without shame, excessive privileges of wealth, selective illiberalism, dumbed-down popular culture, stagnant politics, and conflictive insistence on individual rights, with the tetchiness and ignorance that veil the United States. The world seemed to forget that these are vices other communities also have in abundance, and America’s virtues greatly outweigh them: the people’s genuine emotional investment in freedom; the amazing restraint and relative disinterest with which the state discharges its superpower role. It is hard to imagine any of the other contenders for domination of the twentieth-century world – Stalinists, Maoists, militarists, Nazis – behaving in victory with similar magnanimity. Yet every American foreign-policy error and injudicious operation of global policing makes anti-Americanism worse. ‘The “rogue state” has … effectively declared war on the world’, announced Harold Pinter, the world’s most admired playwright in the late twentieth century. ‘It knows only one language – bombs and death.’70 The adverse image of the United States has nourished resentment and recruited terrorists.
Effects beyond the West: China, Japan, India, and the Islamic World
For people at the receiving end of Western influence anti-Americanism is a device to cope with and appropriate aggressive, ethnocentric thinking. In the nineteenth century, thinkers in China, Japan, India, and the Dar al-Islam – cultures with assertive traditions of their own – struggled to adjust by projecting quasi-nationalisms of their own.
China was psychologically unprepared for the experience of European superiority, first in war, then in wealth. When the nineteenth century began, the confidence of the ‘central country’ with a divine mandate was still intact. The world’s biggest population was booming; the world’s biggest economy enjoyed a favourable balance of trade with the rest of the world; the world’s oldest empire was undefeated. Western ‘barbarians’ had demonstrated exploitable technical cleverness and had won wars elsewhere in the world; but in China they were still cowed, co-operative, and confined to a single waterfront in Canton by gracious permission of the emperor. The menace of Western industrialization was not yet apparent. The only danger to the invulnerability of the Chinese economy was the one product for which foreign traders had found a market big enough to affect the overall balance of trade: opium. When China tried to ban imports of the drug, British fleets and armies crushed resistance. China seemed stunned into backwardness, from which it is only beginning to re-emerge today.
In November 1861, Wei Mu-ting, an imperial censor with a taste for history, wrote a memorandum that laid out the principles of what came to be called self-strengthening. He stressed the need to learn from and catch up with the latest ‘barbarian’ weaponry, but pointed out that Western firepower derived from gunpowder – a technology the foreigners borrowed from the Mongols, who had picked it up in China. His view became a commonplace of Chinese literature on the subject for the rest of the century. Domestically unexploited Chinese prototypes, Wei continued, were the source of most of the military and maritime technology of which China was the victim. His argument is curiously reminiscent of the terms in which Western apologists nowadays denounce Japanese ‘imitations’ of Western technology. It is also probably true: Western historians of the diffusion of Chinese technology are now saying something similar themselves. Once China had recovered its lost sciences, Wei Mu-ting believed, it would again resume its customary supremacy.
The essence of self-strengthening as it was understood in China was that superficial technical lessons could be learned from the West, without prejudice to the essential verities on which Chinese tradition was based. New arsenals, shipyards, and technical schools teetered precariously on the edges of traditional society. Zeng Guofan, the model administrator widely credited with the key role in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion in the 1860s, uttered the language of Western conservatism. ‘The mistakes inherited from the past we can correct. What the past ignored, we can inaugurate.’71 He insisted, however, that imperial rule and rites were perfect; political decline was a product of moral degeneracy. ‘Propriety and righteousness’ came above ‘expediency and ingenuity’.72
In the 1850s, Japan, too, was forced into opening its markets and exposing its culture to Western intruders. But the Japanese response was positive: the rhetoric was resentful, but the reception was enthusiastic. In 1868 successful revolutionaries promised to ‘expel the barbarians, enrich the country, and strengthen the army’, while restoring a supposedly ancient order of imperial government.73 In practice, however, Okubo Toshimichi, the main author of the new policies, turned to Western models. The new ruling classes confirmed foreign treaties, unknotted their hair, rode in carriages, flourished umbrellas, and invested in railways and heavy industries. Military reform on Western lines mobilized conscript masses to subvert the samurai – the hereditary warrior class – to the advantage of central government bureaucrats. Japan became the Britain or Prussia of the East.74
‘Asia’, according to Rudyard Kipling, ‘is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much of Asia and she is too old.’75 Even in his day, his prediction seemed insecure. Today’s Asian Renaissance – the hectic development of Pacific-side China; the prominence of Japan; the rise of ‘tiger economies’ in South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong; the new profile of India as a potential major power; and the pace of economic activity in many parts of South-East Asia – is the latest phase of self-strengthening. The watchwords are unchanged: selective Westernization, defence of ‘Asian values’, and a determination to rival or eclipse Westerners at their own games of economic power.
Adjustment to Western hegemony has always been selective. In early-nineteenth-century India, for instance, Raja Ram Mohan Roy was the reputed paragon of Westernization. His West was Enlightenment Europe. He idealized human nature, prescribed Voltaire
for his pupils, and replied, when the Bishop of Calcutta mistakenly congratulated him on converting to Christianity, that he had not ‘laid down one superstition to take up another’.76 Yet he was no mere mimic of Western ways. The roots of his rationalism and liberalism in Islamic and Persian traditions predated his introduction to Western literature. He knew about Aristotle from Arabic translations before he encountered the original works. The movement he founded in 1829, which became known as Brahmo Samaj, was a model of modernization for societies stranded by the headlong progress of the industrializing West, but eager to catch up without forfeiting traditions or identities.
Cultural cross-fertilization was normal in nineteenth-century India, where babus quoted Shakespeare to one another under the Athenian stoa of Hindu College, Calcutta, while British officials ‘went native’ and scoured Sanskrit scriptures for wisdom unavailable in the West. The next great figure in Roy’s tradition, Isvar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820–91), did not learn English until he was on the verge of middle age. He did not hold up the West as a model to be imitated, but marshalled ancient Indian texts in support of his arguments for widow remarriage or against polygamy, or when he advocated relaxing caste discrimination in the allocation of school places. On the other hand, he dismissed the claims of some pious Brahmins who insisted that every Western idea had an Indian origin. He resigned the secretaryship of the Sanskrit College of Calcutta in 1846 because pundits opposed his projected new curriculum, which would include ‘the science and civilization of the West’. His commitment to reform, however, was, in his mind, part of a drive to revitalize native Bengali tradition. ‘If the students be made familiar with English literature’, he claimed, ‘they will prove the best and ablest contributors to an enlightened Bengali renaissance.’77 This sounded like capitulation to the imperial project Macaulay had espoused when he was Britain’s minister responsible for the government of India: to make English the learned language of India, as Latin had been for earlier generations of Englishmen. But Vidyasagar was right. In the next generation, the Bengali renaissance, like its earlier European counterpart, generated a vernacular revival.
Like many foreign, barbarian conquerors before them, the British in India added a layer of culture to the long-accumulated sediments of the subcontinent’s past. In India, more than in China and Japan, Western traditions could be absorbed without a sense of submission, because the myth of the ‘Aryan race’ – the supposed original speakers of Indo-European languages, who spread across Eurasia thousands of years ago – created the possibility of thinking of Indian and European cultures as kindred, sprung from the same origin. The great advocate of the equipollence of Indian and European thought, Swami Vivekananda, called Plato and Aristotle gurus. In consequence, India could accept selective Westernization without sacrifice of identity or dignity.78
Western influence was harder to accept in the Islamic world. From the 1830s to the 1870s Egypt tried to imitate industrialization and imperialism, coveting an empire of its own in the African interior, but, owing in part to protective counter-strategies by Western industrialists, ended bankrupt and in virtual pawn to French and English business. One of the great founding figures of Islam’s intellectual ‘awakening’ in the late nineteenth century, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, faced, with typical uncertainty, the problems of assimilating Western thought. His life moved to the rhythm of exile and expulsion, as he fell out with his hosts in each asylum in turn. The fabric of his thought and behaviour was a tissue of contradictions. In Egypt he was a government pensioner who demanded subversion of the constitution. To his British patrons in India, he was both a foe and a consultant. His exile in Persia in the service of his shah ended when he was accused of plotting with assassins against his master. He founded the Egyptian Freemasons, but upheld religion as the only sound basis of society. He wanted Muslims to be abreast of modern science, but denounced Darwin for godlessness and materialism. His talk entertained the brilliant café society of Cairo from his spacious corner table in the Café de la Poste, and his sermons aroused worshippers in Hyderabad and Calcutta. He advocated parliamentary democracy but insisted on the sufficiency of the political lessons of the Qur’an. Muslim leaders have faced similar dilemmas ever since. It is probably true that traditional Islamic law and society can coexist with technical progress and scientific advance. Rational Muslims are always saying so. Yet the demon of modernization is always twisting the ‘path of the Prophet’ into a detour pointing west.79
Struggle and Survival: Evolutionary Thinking and Its Aftermath
So far, the political thinkers we have identified started from history or philosophy in formulating their prescriptions for society. The scientific basis Auguste Comte had sought remained elusive. In 1859 the publication of a biologist’s study on the origin of species seemed to enhance the prospects of genuinely scientific sociology.
Charles Darwin had no such ambitious outcome in mind. Organic life absorbed his attention. By the mid-nineteenth century, most scientists already believed that life had evolved from, at most, a few primitive forms. But what Darwin called ‘the mystery of mysteries’ remained: how new species arose. Comprehensive schemes for classifying the world were legion. George Eliot satirized them in the obsessions of characters in Middlemarch, her novel of 1871–2: Mr Casaubon’s ‘key to all mythologies’, Dr Lydgate’s search for ‘the common basis of all living tissues’. Darwin seems to have taken his first unmistakable step toward his similarly comprehensive linkage of all organic life when he was in Tierra del Fuego in 1832. There he encountered ‘man in his lowest and most savage state’. The natives taught him, first, that a human is an animal like other animals – for the Fuegians seemed bereft of human reason, foul, naked, and snuffling with no inkling of the divine. ‘The difference’, Darwin found, ‘between savage and civilized man is greater than between a wild and a domesticated animal.’80 The Fuegians’ second lesson was that the environment moulds us. The islanders adapted to their icy climate so perfectly that they could endure it naked. A little later, in the Galapagos Islands, Darwin observed how small environmental differences cause marked biological mutations. Back home in England, among game birds, racing pigeons, and farm stock, he realized that nature selects strains, as breeders do. The specimens best adapted to their environments survive to pass on their characteristics. The struggle of nature seemed awesome to Darwin partly because his own sickly offspring were the victims of it. He wrote, in effect, an epitaph for Annie, his favourite daughter, who died when she was ten years old: survivors would be more healthy and most able to enjoy life. ‘From the war of nature’, according to On the Origin of Species, ‘from famine and from death, the production of higher animals directly follows.’81 Natural selection does not account for every fact of evolution. Random mutations happen – they are the raw material natural selection works with, but they occur beyond its reach. Functionless adaptations survive, unsieved by struggle. Mating habits can be capricious and unsubmissive to natural selection’s supposed laws. The theory of evolution has been abused by exploiters and idolized by admirers. But, with all these qualifications and grounds of caution, it is true. Species originate naturally, and divine intervention does not have to be evoked to explain the differences between them.82
As Darwin’s theories became accepted, other thinkers proposed refinements that later came to be known as ‘social Darwinism’: the idea that societies, like species, evolve or vanish according to whether they adapt successfully in mutual competition in a given environment. Three probably misleading assumptions underpinned sociologists’ appropriation of evolution: first, that society is subject to the same laws of inheritance as living creatures, because it has a life like an organism’s, growing from infancy through maturity and senescence to death, passing characteristics to successor-societies as if by descent; second, that, like some plants and animals, some societies get more complex over time (which, though broadly true, is not necessarily the result of any natural law or inevitable dynamic); and finally, that what Darwin
called ‘the struggle for survival’ favours what one of his most influential readers called ‘the survival of fittest’. Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase, explained it like this:
The forces which are working out the great scheme of human happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and useless ruminants. Be he human being or be he brute, the hindrance must be got rid of.83