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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