Orientalism for Me, But Not for Thee

Lee Harris, whose essays on terrorism were recently collected in his book Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History, argues that Orientalism, made famous by the late Edward Said's book of the same name, amounts to little more than racism. But the victims in this case -- namely Arabs -- achieve that status not so much because Westerners argue that they can't live up to our standards, but because their own intellectual class does so. Key paragraph:

"Does it need to be pointed out that such an ideology dehumanizes the very people whose interests it is supposed to be defending? If we exempt a group of people, like the Palestinians and the Arabs, from normal ethical demands we make on Europeans, Americans, and the Asians, are we respecting their culture, or pitying them for having such a rotten one? To say that we must apply a whole new set of ethical rules to the Arabs implies that they are not fit to be judged by ours. Furthermore, to fail even to bring our ethical standards to their attention, is to imply very strongly that they could not appreciate these standards if we did."

Harris's observations go to the heart of efforts to bring (first) the rule of law and (later) democracy to the Middle East. If Arabs are assumed to be incapable of living under any type of polity other than tyranny, then all efforts to modernize the region and reduce the threat of terrorism and war are futile. The work of Edward Said and his acolytes is a core element of the multicultural left here and abroad, which preaches a destructive cultural relativism that precludes condemning barbaric behavior as such, lest we forget that it's not worse, only different. Yet it also supports the contentions of the racialist far right, which argues that democracy is beyond the grasp of other ethnic or racial groups.

I'm reminded of the intellectual class's reaction to the Iranian Revolution. As an undergraduate history major I heard professors with national reputations state blithely that the mass executions that were still going on (c. 1981) were simply part of that nation's "indigenous culture" and that, although we wouldn't condone it, we couldn't condemn it, either. Nearly 25 years later let's hope we've learned that such a romantic, limp-wristed approach is not only ahistorical, but born of old fashioned nineteenth century racialism -- whether it's spread by those of European descent or Arabs themselves.