Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (3 page)

The image of the metropolis as a whore is not just a reflection of female sexuality, so feared and loathed by puritans such as Mohammed Atta, but also a comment on a society that revolves around trade. In the city, conceived as a giant marketplace, everything and everyone is for sale. Hotels, brothels, and department stores sell fantasies of the good life. Money allows people to behave in all manners to which they were not born. City people are seen as liars. In Juvenal’s satire on ancient Rome, a city of flatterers, robbers, and traders from all over the empire, we find the following sentence: “What can I do in Rome? I never learnt how to lie.”
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Rome, to Juvenal, was a city where “of all gods it’s Wealth that compells our deepest reverence,” a city where foreigners mixed freely with natives: “Filthy lucre it was that first brought loose foreign morals amongst us, effeminate wealth that with vile self-indulgence destroyed us over the years.”
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Juvenal reserved his greatest bile for Greeks and Jews, and for women, “high-born or not,” who would do anything to satisfy “their hot wet groins.”
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The most symbolic figure of commodified human relations, relations based on flattery, illusion, immorality, and cash, is the prostitute. The trade in sex is perhaps the most basic form of urban commerce. No wonder, then, that hostile visions of the City of Man always come back to this. One of the clichés of erotic trade is that you can buy a person’s body, but never her soul. The whore, in her (or his) professional capacity, is soulless, and thus not really human. In their journals, the Goncourt brothers describe a famous courtesan in Paris named Païva. She plied her trade in the 1860s, the dawn of the industrial age: “She was coming forward between the chairs like an automaton, as if she was worked by a spiral spring, without a gesture, without expression . . . [a] rolling puppet from a dance macabre . . . a vampire with the blood of the living on her purple mouth while all the rest was livid, glazed and in dissolution.”
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Here we have it, the Occidentalist view of the city, of capitalism, and of Western “machine civilization”: the soulless whore as a greedy automaton.

Soullessness is seen as a consequence of metropolitan hubris. Religious men have been exercised since ancient times by the dissipation of spirituality in the pursuit of wealth. William Blake’s great ode to building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, written in the early 1800s, was not a crude attack on industry (the dark satanic mills), but a cry for spiritual freedom, unfettered by worldly matters. Blake, to judge from his poem, did not hate cities per se; but his ideal city was certainly not a giant marketplace, where men competed for gold and fame.

One century on, T. S. Eliot wrote beautiful poetry lamenting the loss of God’s imprint on the modern metropolis. This, from “Choruses from ‘The Rock’—1934”:

 

The poem exudes pessimism about man’s aspirations to rival God. Secular enterprise, the universalism of the Enlightenment, faith in reason, the City of Man—these are the signs of human transgression, of hubris. From the same poem:

And this:

 

Blowing up the World Trade Center in the name of Allah and a holy war is but a crude, literal, murderous echo of Eliot’s verses. It is not something from a totally different order. The
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had carefully chosen the symbol for their vengeance. New York is the capital of the American Empire. The Twin Towers, filled with people of all races, nationalities, and creeds, working in the service of global capitalism, represented everything that was hateful to the holy warrior about the greatest modern City of Man.

 

 

 

THE QUESTION IS: WHEN DID THE IDEA OF THE CITY as a wicked symbol of greed, godlessness, and rootless cosmopolitanism become almost totally associated with the West? When did the Western metropolis become the prime focus of Occidentalist loathing? After all, the great city, containing many races, was hardly an exclusively European or American phenomenon. Muslims, traditionally, were not haters of big cities. On the contrary, in early Islam, urbanism was promoted as a way to break away from nomadic ignorance. For centuries Baghdad and Constantinople had been centers of trade, learning, and pleasure. Farther east, the wealth and opulence of Beijing dazzled a traveler from thirteenth century Venice. Compared with the refinements of China, seventeenth-century Amsterdam, with all its wealth, had the modest allure of a provincial town. Until the late nineteenth century, Edo, the Japanese capital, was bigger and more densely populated than any European city, including London.

And yet the modern idea of Babylon is now firmly rooted in the West, for the first Occidentalists were Europeans. Richard Wagner once wrote, about his Germanic hero Tannhäuser’s sojourn amid the dangerous seductions of the Venusberg: “I agree with Friedrich Dieckmann’s argument that the Venusberg stands for ‘Paris, Europe, the West’: that frivolous, commercialized, and corrupt world in which ‘freedom and also alienation’ are more advanced than in our ‘provincial Germany with its comfortable backwardness.’ ”

Wagner’s sentiments about Paris reflect more than a distaste for French frivolity. People may dislike cities for all kinds of reasons. But the antiurban bias of Occidentalists goes further. It sees the great city as inhuman, a zoo of depraved animals, consumed by lust. The city dweller, from this perspective, has literally lost his soul.

It was the age of empires, spurred by an extraordinary burst of scientific, industrial, and commercial enterprise, that made Europe into the metropolitan center, dominating the periphery to which much of the rest of the world had been reduced. Wagner’s antipathies against France—and his notion of Germany as the provincial periphery—were a legacy of Napoleon’s domination, but the empires that reached the height of their power in the latter half of the nineteenth century were commercial empires, driven by the pursuit of wealth more than a desire for military conquest or spreading God’s word. The greatest metropole of all, the commercial imperial capital of the nineteenth-century world, was London. And the greatest industrial city, the capital of dark satanic mills, was Manchester. Paris rivaled London as a cosmopolitan center, and Berlin was always desperately trying to catch up. All these cities inspired fear as well as envy and, like New York two centuries later, came to stand for something particularly hateful in the eyes of those who sought to eradicate the impurities of urban civilization with dreams of spiritual or racial purity.

The urban civilization of nineteenth-century London, which delighted some and disgusted others, was characterized by great disparities of wealth, as well as a large degree of civic and individual freedom, whose origins might be traced back to the Magna Carta, but which also owed a great deal to the ideals of the Enlightenment. When Voltaire arrived in England one sunny day in 1726, he set out to attack French absolutism by praising English freedoms. His polemical goal naturally lent itself to exaggeration, but Voltaire was a sharp observer whose claims contained some important truths. One of the things he admired about London, apart from the freedom of scientific inquiry and the high status of thinkers, was the Royal Exchange, which he described as “a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind.”
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Far from despising the merchant class, as most French aristocrats and literati would have done, Voltaire saw commerce as a vital condition for liberty. For there, at the Royal Exchange, he wrote, “the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess’d the same religion, and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts.”

Money, as Voltaire saw it, dissolved differences in creed or race. In the marketplace, men are bound by common rules, contracts, and laws, which were not revealed by ancestral gods, but written by human beings to safeguard their properties and limit the chance of being cheated. Birth doesn’t count for much in the marketplace. Old rules of trust, which might still work in clan relations or village communities, can no longer be relied on. Since the laws that governed trade were secular, Voltaire, being a supreme rationalist, obviously approved of such arrangements, but to the religious or feudal mind they can seem cold, mechanical, even inhuman. Voltaire’s admiration of the English went further, however. He believed that “as trade enrich’d the Citizens in England, so it contributed to their Freedom, and this Freedom on the other Side extended their Commerce, whence arose the Grandeur of the State. Trade rais’d by insensible Degrees the naval Power, which gives the English a Superiority over the Seas. . . .”

In Voltaire’s admiring account, then, English commerce is tied to both freedom and imperialism. This is a connection that is still very much alive in Occidentalism, even though the enemy is no longer England alone, but Anglo-America, or America, or the West, or, in Osama bin Laden’s favorite phrase, Crusader-Zionism.

What impressed Voltaire about London did not always find such favor among other European observers. One German traveler in 1826 saw only “self-interest and greed gleam in every eye.”
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Twenty years later, the great Prussian writer Theodor Fontane remarked that “the cult of the Golden Calf is the disease of the English people.” There was no spirituality, no poetry, in the great metropolis, for everyone was too busy “running around in a restless hunt for gold.” Indeed, he was convinced that English society would be destroyed by “this yellow fever of gold, this sell-out of all souls to the devil of Mammon. . . .”
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Friedrich Engels saw something “repulsive” in the city crowds of Manchester and London, “something against which human nature rebels.” The city is where people of “all classes and all ranks crowded past each other,” indiscriminately, promiscuously, and, above all, indifferently. What repelled Engels was the lack of solidarity in this society of “atomized” individuals, each going after his own “selfish” interests.
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But this could be an advantage too. For crowds give room to individual eccentricity. You can hide in a crowd. Its indifference sets you free. In every industrializing country, including nineteenth-century England, women and country people flock to the cities, to find work, make money, and be free. What awaits them is often industrial blight, the criminal gang, or the brothel. This has never stopped people from coming, of course. But once left behind, the old certainties of village life, the tightly knit clan relations, and the subservience to feudal or religious traditions are usually lost forever, and this can result in violent resentments.

The story of the lonely outsider, ignored or abused in the big city, is common everywhere. It is often told in the darker tales of Hollywood, where the big city is New York, Chicago, or L.A. It became a cliché in films made in India, Thailand, and Japan in the 1950s. Many of them are gangster pictures. The young man leaves his village, driven by hunger or ambition, his head filled with stories of vast riches and easy women. What he finds instead are the uncaring crowds, and the tricksters and cheats who rob him of his tiny savings. Finally he loses his dignity too, when he learns how to become a robber himself. Sometimes he joins a criminal gang, where some of his traditional village codes of conduct are reenacted in perverse ways, and sometimes he tries to survive alone. But almost always he loses in the end, exploited by a gang boss or some other person he thought he could trust. The climax is an explosion of suicidal violence, when the long-suffering outsider, like Samson among the Philistines, brings down the city pillars in a final act of catastrophic vengeance.

A common feature of the bad, cold, calculating, rich villains in these morality tales is not just their sexual depravity, their greed, or their dishonesty, but their flashy Western ways. In European gangster films, the bad guys dress and behave like Americans; in non-Western movies, they behave like phony white men. The wicked gangsters in 1950s Japanese movies use guns, drink whisky, and wear suits, while the kimonoed heroes fight only with traditional samurai swords. In most countries, the typical gangster movie is hostile to the modern world. So of course is the typical American western, where the villains are city slickers from “out east,” who come to build cities in the western plains, connected by the new railroads. Old relations of trust between the honest rural folks are replaced by dodgy contracts drawn up by men in suits. It is a universal story, this clash between old and new, authentic culture and metropolitan chicanery and artifice, country and city.

 

 

 

IN EUROPE, THE METROPOLITAN BEHEMOTHS THAT swallowed entire rural populations in their glittering maws were often identified with Jews and other rootless moneygrubbers. Again T. S. Eliot finds the finest phrases for this prejudice: