Edward Said back in 1978 wrote a book that has completely turned the left inside out. It has gotten leftists to support people who are about as anti-leftist as can be, yet leftists today cannot see this. Called Orientalism, this book has had as much effect on leftist attitudes toward Muslims as anything else has, and maybe even more than anything else has. In fact, if the left is destroyed as a result of its having supported reactionary Muslims, then Said bears most of the responsibility.
I claim that the followers of Edward Said, which includes practically every liberal and leftist in the West these days, are sadists.
Before getting into that, let me say that the basic thesis of Said is that the people who are called the Orientalists – that is, Westerners in earlier eras who as artists, authors, and scholars were interested in what we now call the Middle East (and also the Far East, although Said is focused on the Muslim world) – are guilty of having helped with Western imperialism. People who are Saidists believe that even we today can fall into Orientalist attitudes and that it is not just a relic of the past.
This is the basic thesis of Said, but this thesis also comes with post-modern intellectual tendencies that make him hard to pin down, but which I am going to ignore. (See here for a good wrap-up.)
Now every critic has pointed out that Said cherry-picked his evidence so that it looked as though the Orientalists began their project at the time when Western imperialism began. He ignored German and Russian (later Soviet) Orientalists, he ignored the fact that some Orientalists were in fact against imperialism, he ignored the fact that some were working in the Ottoman Empire, which was never colonized by the West, and so on. But when confronted with these inaccuracies, he and his followers have never been persuaded. The facts are irrelevant, apparently. As one critic, Robert Irwin, has pointed out, “One finds oneself having to discuss not what actually happened in the past, but what Said and his partisans think ought to have happened” [For Lust of Knowing, p. 4].
Let me also point out that the acceptance of this book by the left has much to do with what I have been calling Rich People’s Leftism. Given that the rich run the left and that they feel guilty about imperialism, they were bound to accept a book that fed into their guilt. After all, as rich people they are far more likely than those of us who come from the bottom half are to have had ancestors who actually took part in and directed imperialism. A point I made in my most recent book is that those of us who come from the bottom half needn’t partake of this guilt, that we can leave that to wealthy leftists.
Another thing to note is that the Orientalists were basically the first wave of multiculturalists, the ones who were the first in modern Western culture to become interested in non-Western cultures. So, why pick on them rather than their fellow citizens who were far more racist? Why pick on a group of people who were the progressives of their era? If they hadn’t done what they did, today’s multiculturalists would be starting where the Orientalists started in terms of knowledge of other cultures. But to criticize an earlier phase of multiculturalism and progressivism brings up a dilemma. Either that phase was necessary to get to today’s phase, in which case the Orientalists made honest mistakes and so it would be ridiculous to criticize them as harshly as the Saidists have, or that phase wasn't necessary and instead must be seen as a wrong turn made by leftists. It almost goes without saying that leftists don’t like admitting that they have made mistakes.
Anyway, here are the reasons why Saidists are sadists.
1. They harass people over something harmless or trivial. For example, this essay from the NY Times is about a sale of objects from the non-Western world, and the essayist is in a snit over it because some of the objects have been categorized incorrectly. He writes:
Political bias often leads to absurd categorization. Even so, few among the arbitrary constructs adopted by the West as a result of 19th-century colonial attitudes can beat the meaningless concept of “Islamic art.”
Is incorrect or misleading categorization really a problem? Naturally, one can imagine some big problems, such as categorizing some people as sub-human, but that is not what is happening here. Some people at an auction house simply lumped together a bunch of items from the Muslim world and called them Islamic art. Why is this such a terrible thing? The author ends the essay by pointing out that Orientalism is still around. Really? This is the equivalent of imperialism? Yet, that is the typical stance of the Saidist.
Another example concerns a recent exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (hat tip: Mark Spahn). According to this post, there was a traveling exhibit that began in Japan involving a work of art by Manet in which he depicted his wife wearing a kimono. Visitors can put on an actual kimono if they are interested. This was protested by the Saidists, who thought it was a terrible thing to do. As was noted at the link, one of the protesters was Asian, but not Japanese (and was in fact Chinese). Another said that if one put on the kimono, one could feel what it was like to be a racist imperialist. This is almost the height of absurdity. Why would wearing the clothing of another culture make one an imperialist? Because one is appropriating something from their culture? How about eating sushi, then? Does that count, too? If so, good luck in eradicating it, but if not, why not? Why would appropriating a type of clothing count as imperialistic, but not a type of food?
The worst example is the idea that it was wrong to have composed an Encyclopedia of Islam without having actual Muslims involved. As described by Robert Irwin:
[Muhsin] Mahdi notes the resentment widely felt by Muslims at the arrogance of the West in producing a vast reference work, the Encyclopedia of Islam, that was neither by nor for Muslims and the notion that it should be written by Westerners or those who conformed to Western standards of scholarship. [p. 329]
Why would Muslims feel that this is wrong? What moral principle is involved? No moral principle whatsoever. It is nothing but feelings. Any principle one can think of, such as never describe another culture without involving someone from that culture as a reviewer, has been regularly violated by Muslims throughout history, and by every culture in the world. A principle that says it is wrong to do this if Muslim culture is being described but is permissible for other cultures is racist against those other cultures. Saidists will argue that this Encyclopedia contains harmful stereotypes, but the harm comes not from the description itself, but from when those descriptions are acted upon. Anyway, even bigots can be right about things; why assume the encyclopedia is inaccurate? Denying us Westerners the right to construct encyclopedias about other cultures is unreasonable and sadistic.
2. Then there are the constant exhortations for us Westerners to be tolerant and to co-exist, exhortations that are never given to Muslims, even though they need it as much, if not more, than we need it. It is more harassment.
3. The Saidists also insist that the Orientalists misrepresented the “Other.” That is, they used stereotypes. Never mind that Said misrepresented the Orientalists. Moreover, the misrepresentations mentioned in the link above about the exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts aren’t exactly terrible. We think of Asians as “quintessentially exotic,” but is that a real problem? Things could be a lot worse.
But more to the point is that this can be an everlasting complaint. No one ever represents another exactly as they should be represented, so you can always claim that someone is misrepresenting someone else. Since it is thus impossible to represent someone else completely accurately, to condemn them for “misrepresentation” is sadistic. Said never said what Orientalists ought to be doing, unless it was abasing oneself completely before the non-Westerner, which sadly our leftists seem intent upon doing.
4. This business about misrepresentation has so wholly taken over the minds of the Saidists that they ignore much greater sins. As Robert Irwin writes:
Since Orientalism is by its nature a Western sickness, the same must be true of imperialism. The Persians, who under Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes built up a mighty empire and sought to add Greece to that empire, were not denounced by Said for imperialism. On the contrary, they were presented as the tragic and innocent victims of misrepresentation by Greek playwrights. [p. 286]
Why think of misrepresentation as worse than or equal to imperialism? The Saidists are being sadistic toward the West by judging in this way.
5. More broadly, they are against any criticisms of the non-Western world, especially the Muslim world, which means that any suffering that people experience at the hands of Muslims is totally ignored by the Saidists.
6. This entails that the plight of their own ideological kin in the Muslim world will be ignored. In fact, the worst example of outrageous name-calling by a Saidist was reached when a Western woman called an Algerian feminist an Orientalist because she complained about the activities of Muslims in her country. This was recounted in Karima Bennoune’s book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here [p. 249; see here], and anyone who reads her book can see perfectly well that feminists are under siege in most of the Muslim world, but that doesn’t bother the Saidists.
7. Finally, the Saidists have ended up implicitly supporting Islamist groups like ISIS. They weaken the West with their criticisms, but cannot bring themselves to say that the West is morally superior to the Taliban and to ISIS. They do nothing to obstruct the most sadistic of Muslims. If the Orientalists supported Western imperialism, the anti-Orientalists, the Saidists, are supporting Islamic imperialism. Nor should anyone suppose a moral equivalence between these two groups. Western imperialism promoted the end of slavery, for example, while Islamic imperialism will do the exact opposite. There are still slaves today in the Muslim world, though the Saidists never want to talk about them, of course. The Saidists may think they are remedying past sins of the West, but by ignoring current sins committed by the rest of the world, they guarantee that they will be perpetuated and will even be extended to the West.
What is pathetic about this whole business is that the Saidists are not only sadistic, but also stupid because despite being dutiful followers of Edward Said’s views, it helps them not at all as far as the Islamists are concerned. See here for an account in the Chronicle of Higher Education by an Iranian progressive who was imprisoned in Iran and who learned to his dismay that the authorities were completely unimpressed by his being a fan of Said (and of Noam Chomsky). They regarded Said as in effect a Zionist. There is probably more to it than that; they probably didn’t like him because he was not a Muslim. But the point is that nothing other than converting to their brand of Islam will satisfy these people.
The Saidists cannot escape the charge that they are sadists. Their intentions may be honorable, or may have started out as honorable, but it has been pointed out to them again and again that they are overlooking important fact about the sufferings of people who are the victims of Muslims, and yet they do not change their views. They simply have no sympathy for anyone outside of their circle of victims, and that is enough to declare them sadists.