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De-Addiction From Westoxication
And The Recovery Of The Self

By Shajahan Madampat

02 February, 2002
Countercurrents.org

The West is an interesting subject. It is interesting because, among other things, it is the ultimate yardstick by which everything is judged. Everyone is judged, I must add. Everyone is in a mad rush to look western, talk western, dress western, and even gesticulate western.

True, the Occident is an accident, as Roger Garaudy eloquently summed up. The history of the modern West, whose high point was the separation of wisdom from knowledge, has become the yardstick by which the past and present of the rest of humanity is judged. Even the perpetual victims of Western savagery and hypocrisy, like the Arabs, seem so awestruck by the dazzling quality of their tormentors. Even the bitterest West-baiters hate the West only so much as they love it!

Look at the job vacancies advertised in the newspapers. Many employers want ‘Western educated’ candidates, as if they are sure these worthies would bring miraculous benefits. Several companies pay phenomenally higher salaries to employees with Western passports, than their colleagues of ‘less fortunate’ nationalities. Of course, one is tempted to attribute all this to a streak of racism, which it is not in the ultimate analysis. That said; we must still look askance at the bizarre situation in which your nationality determines your salary.

If you analyze this in some depth, the truth stares you in the face. Underneath our all-pervasive obsequious reverence for the West is a profoundly disturbing sense of self-hatred, self-doubt, and collective diffidence. This is precisely what centuries of colonialism has done to the oriental man, and woman: The core-essence of his or her being is contaminated with self-hatred. Since you are skeptical about everything that you inherited, manifestations of your own identity make you feel enormously nervous in the public sphere and you get into a process of othering your own self.

The end result is that you are constantly in a limbo, neither here nor there. You are a floating piece of wood, unable to determine the course of your journey and yet blissfully pompous in the prestige of your enslavement. In this crisis of belonging; you imbibe the worst of both the sources of your civilizational nourishment: the West and the East. You either become an individual who blindly apes the West in all its externalities or turn into a diehard fundamentalist who misses the soul of his own culture.

For instance, the practice of deciding salaries on the basis of nationality: it is pronouncedly anti-Western. One of the fundamentals of Western social life is the notion that the worth of an individual springs from what he did, rather than what he is. One of the major contributions of Western modernity has been the removal of birth as a significant differentiator of individual worth. In a curious reversal of this quintessentially Western value, our self-hating oriental expresses his infatuation with the west by honoring a Westerner in violation of one of the key principles of Western social life!

This dichotomy results from a collective inability to come to terms with history. The long history of the modern West - beginning from the simultaneous birth of capitalism and colonialism that we euphemistically call the renaissance, through countless instances of ‘civilizing and democratizing savagery’ that continue to this day – makes sense to its victims only as a prescription for glory or as an excuse for phantasmagoric delusions about their own past. Either way, it is only a fragmented engagement with the West and hence, deeply flawed and fraught with dangers.

The aping of the West is often disguised as Westernization. Westernization would imply internalizing many values and concepts that enriched humanity: democracy, social egalitarianism, rational and critical ways of thinking, a questioning mindset and so on. Westernization is not the nauseating imitation of the externalities of Western culture with an uncritical intellectual barrenness and debilitating self-hatred.

The aping that we see all around us in infinitely ridiculous shapes and patterns is what the late Iranian Heideggerian philosopher Ahmed Fardid called “Westoxication.” Although coined by Fardid, it was Jalal Ahmed who made the term popular through his book ‘Gharbzadagi’ (Westoxication). The state of being intoxicated with the West is neither healthy nor desirable; it is a pathological condition that calls for urgent remedies. It is an affliction, even addiction, which profoundly distorts the personality of the individual. For societies that collectively suffer from westoxication, attempts at de-addiction and rehabilitation are never too late because survival after the loss of the self is a poignant travesty of dignified existence.

Westoxication is a kind of obsessive-compulsive neurosis, exacerbated by smug self-righteousness and pretensions to refinement and sophistication. Worse; it is a malady that the elite of all developing societies wear on their sleeves with pride. Ask yourself: are you an exception? The answer can hardly be in the affirmative!!

(Shajahan Madampat is a cultural critic and commentator. He could be contacted at [email protected])



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