The End of the Peace Process, page 18
My own reading of the West places emphasis not on the permanences and essences that give Huntington such evident pleasure, but on the discontinuities and disruptions in it as in all cultures and civilizations, in addition to all the various mixtures and hybrids that in fact compose cultures and civilizations. The authoritarian and dogmatic interpreter will, like Huntington, see Socrates as an important historical figure whose method, metaphysical inquiries into the true and the good, constitute one of the permanent glories of Western civilization. To a genuinely brilliant and imaginative reader like Friedrich Nietzsche, what made Socrates interesting was that by his methods and “his great rolling critical eye” he was a disruptor of values, an overturner of accepted ideas, someone who threatened all authority. This is clearly why Socrates was put on trial, condemned, and left with no recourse but to take his own life. And indeed, it is possible to argue that one of the key elements in modern Western culture was the emergence and dominance of philosophies such as those of Nietzsche, whose great thrust was in fact the overturning of even the ideas of good and evil, and the attempt to eliminate any faith in the concept of a stable identity. For Huntington, civilizations have a fixed and constantly, perpetually recognizable identity, whereas the proper critical question to be asked at the end of the twentieth century is “Which West, or Islam, or Confucianism do you mean? There are dozens, all of them in conflict, irreconcilably opposed, endlessly in flux. Is it really possible to speak of the West, or of one Confucianism, since the evidence of extraordinary diversity within each culture wreaks immediate havoc on any attempt to reduce the culture or civilization to a simple, unitary phenomenon?”
A second mistake running throughout Huntington’s book is that he does not at all take seriously the extent to which all cultures, as well as civilizations, are mixed, hybrid, full of elements taken from other cultures. So much so, in my opinion, that it really is intellectually irresponsible to argue as if there were a pure, unmodified culture that is totally at one, self-identified with itself. Nothing could be more fruitless than seeing the West as somehow standing apart and above from the civilizations of Africa, Islam, India, and Latin America. True, there are specific ideological attempts in all cultures to pretend that some pre-existing essence defines the culture once and for all, but that is ideology, not history or the serious interpretation of culture. I happened the other day to be reading about a new book on the emergence of calculus whose argument was that that indispensable mathematical tool sprang up full-blown in the seventeenth century and emerged simultaneously in Leibniz and Newton; according to the author, this amazing occurrence was a direct consequence of Greek science suddenly reappearing in the seventeenth century. I would call this an ideological, rather than a true historical, interpretation of what happened. To eliminate from this description of “Western” scientific genius any mention of the crucial role played by Arab mathematicians, without whose work neither Leibniz nor Newton could have formulated calculus, is to try to maintain the fiction of a pure, self-enclosed West, whose dominance and power are entirely its own, and whose history in the final analysis has no real connection with any other culture or civilization.
Huntington’s equivalents exist in all cultures today as a consequence, in my view, of nationalism, or at least that aspect of nationalism that is defensive, xenophobic, politically amenable to the kind of manipulation that has produced ethnic and religious conflict as well as partitions of multicultural societies into separate little entities who can snarl at each other across their barbed-wire borders. Huntington himself writes from the point of view of someone who wants to manage such conflicts: he is an intellectual serving the interests of the last superpower (he is actually quite frank about this), whose preeminence as a world power he is set on serving and maintaining. The real subject of his work therefore is not how to reduce the conflict of cultures, but how to turn them to American advantage, as a way of conceding to the United States the right to lead the whole world. Yet none of his grandiose rhetoric can conceal the fact that this style of thought derives from the same polluted source to be found in all cultures, the notion that my way of life, my traditions, my way of thinking, my religion or civilization can neither be shared with anyone nor understood by anyone who does not have the same religion, color of skin, etc. India, Pakistan, Bosnia, Ireland, South Africa, Lebanon, and of course Israel-Palestine bear the ravages of such a logic, which in the end leads to more, not less narrowness, misunderstanding, violence. The point of course is that there is nothing inevitable about these ideas, despite what Huntington and others like him have been preaching. Although he shares very similar ideas with right-wing Zionists who believe that they have a superior right to the land of historical Palestine and are prepared to battle Palestinians until doomsday, he is taken more seriously because the United States has greater power than any other country today, a fact which scarcely validates the soundness of his argument.
No culture today is pure. Huntington writes about the West as if France were still made up of exclusively of Duponds and Bergeracs, England of Smiths and Joneses. This is fundamentalism, not analysis of culture, which, it bears repeating, is made by humankind, not decreed once and for all by an act of divine genesis. Every identity therefore is a construction, a composite of different histories, migrations, conquests, liberations, and so on. We can deal with these either as worlds at war, or as experiences to be reconciled. It is one of the prerogatives of power historically to classify lesser peoples by placing them in eternal categories—the patient Chinese, the servile Black, the devious or violent Muslim, are well-known examples—that condemn them to solitude and apartness, the better and more easily to be ruled or held at bay. This is precisely what the “separation” of Arabs from Israelis is all about, in the past and during the peace process. Is that the only way for civilizations to coexist?
I think not. Another way of using difference in culture is to welcome the “other” as equal but not precisely the same. Most of the great humanistic scholars of our time, from Erich Auerbach to Joseph Needham, Louis Massignon to Taha Hussein, saw in the past and in different cultures an opportunity to overcome the alienation of time and distance. Reading Dante, Auerbach caught that poet’s relationship to the fourteenth century, as well as to our own. The idea therefore is to study culture not nationalistically, but in order to understand how it is made, and how it can be remade for others. In this it is the critical humanist or intellectual, not the Huntingtonian crisis manager, who has something to offer, as well as a more authentic vision of the possibilities for human community.
I have spent thirty-five years of my life teaching young people the arts of interpretation, that is, how one reads, understands and connects the products of human culture with other human activities. This has enabled me, I think, to understand politics better, since interpretation teaches one that all human activity takes place in history, is of history. The goal of interpretation, in my opinion, is to learn how to connect things with each other—different cultures, different peoples, different historical periods. That is an act of choice, the very opposite of the choice made by Huntington and others in the West and in the Islamic world, to see cultures in terms of opposition and clash. The clash of civilizations thesis is presented as if it is inevitable, whereas of course it is imposed upon a world filled with uncertainty and potential as well as actual discord. But we always have a choice to work for conflict, or against it. We must not be fooled by Huntington’s martial accents into believing that we are condemned to ceaseless strife, because in fact we are not.
Al-Ahram Weekly, February 13, 1997
The Gulf Today, February 14, 1997
Al-Khaleej, February 13, 1997
Al-Hayat, February 13, 1997
Chapter Twenty
Loss of Precision
FOR THE PAST seven or eight weeks I have been plagued by a series of infections that inflicted more or less persistent pain on me, in addition to the necessity of remaining at home all the time, unable to teach my classes (which had to be cancelled for the semester), and enduring the kind of despondency and discouragement that a patient feels when he believes that he has suffered too long and too much. Despite that, I was able to experience something of the effect of what it must be like for an American to watch television for long periods of time. In too much discomfort to read anything for very long, unable to listen to or play music, I found myself all too frequently resorting to the handy television remote which so easily and seductively seems to bring the world to life on a small screen with the mere pressing of a button. People who live in New York must subscribe to a cable service (there is only one, a monopoly owned by Time-Warner), since without the cable the presence of so many high buildings makes even minimum reception totally impossible. So as you lie on your bed of pain you have flitting before you no fewer than about seventy-five channels, with films, news, sports, documentaries, talk shows, and many more varieties than I can enumerate here, available twenty-four hours a day. At first, I derived pleasure from looking at old movies—a few weeks ago one channel offered twenty-four hours of 1940s Universal films about the Middle East, most of them starring Jon Hall, Maria Montez, Sabu, Yvonne de Carlo, and Turhan Bey, movies like Sudan, The Arabian Nights, Scheherezade, in which Hollywood’s conception of what the Orient was supposed to be like is given amusing, if grotesque, realization (to simulate the Middle East in these now long-forgotten films one always had to have lots of sand, galloping horses, cruel sultans, and dancing girls)—but after watching three or four of them I couldn’t bear to watch another for even a second.
In what turned out to be a relatively short time I had exhausted my patience with television. One had to wait hours, perhaps days, for a decent, usually imported, film or documentary to appear; the chat shows were tiresome, unbelievably stupid, gossip; the news as delivered by CNN, the national networks, or the local channels, was almost entirely about the United States, and usually copied from one network by another; CNN I found unwatchable since there are too many commercial breaks, too many shows about cooking and fashion to be worth the time spent waiting for an item of real news; endless sports programs proliferate, usually basketball and football, but punctuated with all kinds of bizarre new attractions like women’s boxing and barefoot water-skiing.
Most of the airwaves, however, are polluted with three types of program. One is a general category that purports to be entertainment: this runs the gamut from cartoons to soap operas to weekly hourlong dramas and films. Intended to appeal to audiences of twenty million and more, these are usually sensationalist, extremely simple to follow, sentimental, vacuous. Most Americans tend to watch these shows round the clock, even as they work, and certainly after coming home from work one imagines these silent gatherings around the TV set replicated all over the country, with lots of popcorn-eating, beer-drinking and the like, as entire families sit around the main TV set (every house, except for the very poor, has more than one set) transfixed by what is being watched. Second, is the vast category of talk show, in which an interview takes place between a “host” and various invited guests, usually celebrities, but often people with peculiar problems (women who go out with their sons’ girlfriends, men who always fall in love with extremely fat women, etc.), or “news-makers,” that is politicians, or important visiting dignitaries like Princess Diana, but also Benjamin Netanyahu. So self-referential has television become and so powerful are its personalities that very frequently the top journalists interview each other, with the result that “the news” is what these characters say it is. Lastly there are the religious programs, which probably outnumber the other two categories. The enormous proliferation of these religious programs is one small index of how the United States is by far the most religion-obsessed country in the world. According to a recent poll, 88 percent of the American public believes that it is loved by God. Television religion includes all the standard denominations enacting their services, but that is minuscule compared to the weird cults and sects that proclaim their secret pathway to God on the air the rest of the time, from Christians who believe that a true understanding of God is available through a decoding of the structure of the Great Pyramid at Giza (I have actually seen these people on television, so you must believe me) to the various faith healers who purport to make the blind see and the lame walk in full view of millions of witnesses.
Even this quick summary is enough to suggest that American television, now exported all over the world, is from the point of view of a moderately well educated individual a deeply unsatisfying source of information or, in the real sense of the word, of entertainment. For one, because of its extraordinary prodigality of programming and availability, it imposes on the mind a sense of dependency and passivity. Most people feel that they can avoid, or perhaps even solve, their problems by simply flipping on the television, and getting lost in the daydreams and fantasies that very soon acquire both a familiarity and reality that is more attractive than their own world. As for growing children, there is nothing easier for parents than to plant their three- or four-year olds in front of the TV set as a way of pacifying them for hours. In all sorts of obvious ways, then, television can become a kind of drug to be used with greater dependency once the habit gets started. Above all, from the perspective of someone who is interested in why so few people in this society—or for that matter, in the Arab world—refuse to accept the various abuses and lies of their governments, and why we seem now to be led by mediocre leaders who are simply not doing their jobs correctly, television provides an answer. It disarms critical or moral thought by its totality, by its all-enveloping, easy accessibility, and by its underlying ideological message, which is that this is America, the greatest society on earth, where all problems are as easy to deal with as opening a bottle of Coca-Cola.
I do not at all want to suggest that television does not present anything except silly farces: on the contrary, local news channels, for instance, are mainly full of murders, rapes, fires, and natural disasters. The medium has an amazing way of distorting reality so that where news programs are concerned you get the feeling that because it is on TV, a story is therefore real; conversely if it is not, then it does not exist. I would say that the percentage of news reported contains at most 3 or 4 percent about international issues, most of them, however, usually reported because of a crisis which as soon as it passes erases the issue from memory. Rwanda and former Yugoslavia make extremely rare appearances these days; in most minds, they are now only associated with the idea of “trouble” and little else. But by comparison, the amount of time devoted by television (and in effect by all the media) to the various O.J. Simpson trials has distended and bloated the story into something beyond all reason or even emotion. It has become virtually impossible to see the world as not principally about Simpson, his lawyers, victims, and legal predicaments. And the problem is that the story itself is fed not only by TV itself, but by a public that cannot get enough of what in reality is a sordid case of wife-beating and murder. In other words, the mind has lost its power to resist an onslaught of irrelevance and gross distortion of reality.
I am convinced therefore that television dependency has played not only a great role in inducing an absence of critical thought but an even more crucial role in reducing the capacity of the mind for precise and exact uses of language, language being what it is we think with and in when we think about our world. Television images are a form of magic that work by quick shifts from one place, image, time, and subject to others; they depict the world as subject to sudden magnifications and equally unlikely arrests, that give us a reassuring sense that what we have before us, whether as soap operas, news broadcasts, sports spectacles, or journalists chatting authoritatively to each other, is the world, and its life is being lived, explained, and transmuted for us, without any effort on our part. Individual consumers of TV have no choice in what is before them, although of course they can switch from one program or channel to another. Gradually, then, the repertoire of images and verbal discourse derived from television becomes a substitute for the processes of one’s own mind, whose laboriously built-up capacities through education begin to atrophy and then finally give up. Instead of thinking concretely and self-consciously then, you rely instead on what you heard or saw on television, which simply floods in as you are looking for a word or thought. It articulates your thoughts, provides much of the vocabulary, constructs sequences, and reduces complexity to simple images.
In this way, over the years the image of the Arab or Muslim has been essentialized down to the one simple meaning, terrorist. For the time being, I am sorry to say that we are stuck with that identity in the American consciousness, regardless of how moderate and concessive our leaders appear, and irrespective of how many times they appear for photo opportunities at the White House. It should also be kept in mind that there is virtually nothing—and I mean this literally—in what one sees on television that can provide a viewer with even the possibility of doubting that the United States is God’s country, has never done anything wrong, and is basically a force for good in the world. The phrase “our country” or the pronoun “we” has acquired an unassailable positive force, so that even the word “America” in common discourse is an ideological term, not just a simple national designation, and is used as such on television. Most individual vocabularies today therefore tend to be assaulted constantly by prepackaged terms like “we are going forward,” “the great opportunities that God has given us,” and so forth, most of them safeguarding unrestrained capitalism even though the majority’s interests are being harmed. A perfect instance of this is the chorus of attacks on “government,” which now means “big government,” i.e., socialism. During the abortive debate three years ago about health care—one must remember that over forty-five million people have no health coverage, since the government doesn’t provide any; one must either be wealthy or be enrolled in a corporate health plan—the one alternative never seriously discussed was national health insurance. Here even the thought was never analyzed, because that kind of national medical care had been polluted and transformed into the idea of socialism, a concept which still has a very potent negative resonance for the average American.
