Confronting the Shadow II
Why the West doesn't want to meet its shadow self
It may be helpful to read my introductory essay “Confronting the Shadow Self” before reading ahead.
The following is a famous exchange between Gandhi and a reporter:
Journalist: What do you think of Western civilisation?
Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.
No one knows whether this exchange truly happened but it is significant that this anecdote has embedded itself into the popular public imagination of East-leaning Westerners, or Buddhist aficionados. It underpins a newer, self-reflective aspect of countercultural Western thought.
I have been wrangling with what “the West” means for some time. When we say “the West” what truths are we erasing? Do we say Global North instead? All of these terms are as inaccurate and geographically incorrect as the other. In Edward Said’s seminal book, Orientalism, he discusses the complications of this terminology:
“Orientalism as a form of thought for dealing with the foreign has typically shown the altogether regrettable tendency of any knowledge based on such hard-and-fast distinctions as ‘East’ and ‘West’: to channel thought into a West or East compartment.”
Said is presenting the problematic nature of “Orientalism” and its rigid compartmentalisation of “East/ “West” polarities. Since 1978, when Orientalism was published, we could argue that the language around these topics has had a necessary awakening, though it hasn’t quite penetrated the public consciousness.
What I understand from Said’s arguments, and the usage of “East” and “West” in contemporary discourse, is that we are challenging reductive concepts of “East” and “West” within its very same binary framework.
Therefore, when I talk about “Western thought”, in reality I am referring to a historical framework of prejudiced ideas, much like referring to a disproven historical concept, such as the earth being flat. Unfortunately, historical prejudices of East and West prevail today, and like the crusades of the past, are used to justify wars and occupations.
Orientalism, as explained by Said, was a burgeoning enthusiasm of scholars and policy-makers in the West for all things “Eastwards” and unknown. Throughout the 18th-century in Europe there was a growing interest in orientalism and Avestan and Sanskrit texts.
Said provides the encyclopaedic description of orientalism as defined by Raymond Schwab in this era, which was:
“An amateur or professional enthusiasm for everything Asiatic, which was wonderfully synonymous with the exotic, the mysterious, the profound, the seminal”.
Orientalism was an admiration of what appeared exotic, alluring, and enriching, fuelling a craze for the collection of Eastern goods, and an enthusiasm for tea (so important in the UK today). Yet within this too, was the profoundly racist, antagonistic idea that alongside the exoticism of these continents lay evil and darkness. One of Said’s interpretations of the orientalists’ “manmade” view of the “mystery” of the East is as follows:
“The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different’; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal’.”
In Lord Cromer’s book, Modern Egypt, he accuses Arabs of being “slipshod”, garrulous, and illogical. According to Cromer, in contrast, the European is “a natural logician”, who is “by nature sceptical”.
Lord Cromer writes,
“The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry.”
What I find most remarkable is Lord Cromer’s hypocrisy. Whilst Cromer would have considered himself a rational European, he does not consider the irrationality of seeing divergence in his concept of “symmetry” as incorrect or illogical. Various orientalists' accounts characterised overheard speech as “babbling”, arrogantly assuming a language that they didn’t understand was nonsensical. It reminds me of the way that Irish Gaelic speakers were portrayed by British occupiers, which I wrote about in my article, The History of the Feminised Voice.
Upon observing the Irish tradition of lamenting the dead, English poet Edmund Spenser interpreted it as, “immoderate wailings” that “savour greatly of Scythian barbarism” (“Contemporary Caoineadh: Talking Straight Through the Dead”, Kathleen O’Brien).
Edward Said expounds upon how the cultural fantasy of “other” is created by occupying and colonising nations:
“It is perfectly possible to argue that some distinctive objects are made by the mind, and that these objects, while appearing to exist objectively, have only a fictional reality. A group of people living on a few acres of land will set up boundaries between their land and its immediate surroundings and the territory beyond, which they call ‘the land of the barbarians’. In other words, this universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is ‘ours’ and an unfamiliar space beyond ‘ours’ which is ‘theirs’ is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary.
I use the word ‘arbitrary’ here because imaginative geography of the ‘our land–barbarian land’ variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for ‘us’ to set up these boundaries in our own minds; ‘they’ become ‘they’ accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from ‘ours’... Yet often the sense in which someone feels himself to be not-foreign is based on a very unrigorous idea of what is ‘out there’, beyond one’s own territory. All kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the unfamiliar space outside one’s own.”
In short, the concept of “barbarianship” is ultimately constructed by the coloniser. It is a concept that is as mysterious as “the East” of the Orientalist. It is as Said says, arbitrary, and nonconsensual, decided upon by “us” without the collaboration of “them”.
Admittedly, there has been progression in challenging Western dogmatism since this hugely influential book was published, along with writers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Franz Fanon. These ideas have caught the public imagination and burst forth in protests and resistance movements over the past century. Yet, orientalist ideas have not been extinguished. CJ Jung wrote, probably around the same time that Said published Orientalism:
“We live in a time where there dawns upon us a realisation that people living on the other side of the mountain are not made exclusively of red-headed devils responsible for all the evil on this side of the mountain.”
To an extent this is true, but it is only recently that white, Western intellectuals have acknowledged how deeply embedded concepts of racism and the “red-headed devils” are in the Western psyche.
The 2023 documentary, The Mission, depicts modern orientalism impactfully, as it tracks the ill-fated expedition of a young, American-Chinese missionary to convert an isolated indigenous tribe on the Bay of Bengal. This hunter-gatherer tribe, living on North Sentinel Island, are protected by the Indian government due to their unwillingness to welcome in visitors. There have been several reported instances that the Sentinelese purposefully shot off bows and arrows towards the shoreline, warning off encroaching explorers.
In 2018, Chau was shot and killed by one of these arrows. Previous to this regretful event, Chau had made various attempts to approach the island under the dark of night on an illegal canoe boat. As Chau approached the Sentinelese, he began to preach the gospel to them whilst holding up a Bible.
Who knows what this language might have sounded like to the Sentinelese, but most likely strange, perhaps even “babbling”. A young member of the tribe sent out a strong–even compassionate–message when he shot an arrow straight into Chau’s bible. As the Sentinelese are highly skilled archers, it was clearly a non-verbal warning rather than a missed assassination attempt. Regrettably, Chau chose to ignore the warning, returning again to preach to the islanders. This time the Sentinelese did not miss. The fisherman later saw Chau being buried at shore.
In popular culture, Chau’s braggadocio has been ridiculed, but watching the documentary was moving, and saddening. It charted the historical extent to which indigenous tribes have been wiped out by colonial missions. It portrayed compassionately the naive delusions of an impressionable young man. Chau had described the island as “Satan’s last stronghold” in his diary. I’m not sure what it was about the sandy shores, turquoise seas, and lush overgrowth of the island that made him think that evil resided there, in comparison to the roaring highways and high-falutin culture of his motherland.
Chau represents the confused message of the West: that by spreading “the word”, which, to a culture like the Sentinelese, is incomprehensible and meaningless, we would shine a light into their darkness. I wonder what the relatively peaceable Sentinelese would have thought about our war-waging, unwell, stressed-out culture if Chau had succeeded in his endeavours to explain it to them. Perhaps I am also biased against the West. I am inclined to paint us in a gloomy shade, but it is impossible to say with certainty if one way of life is better than another; if one deity or supernatural spirit trumps another.
Said makes a similar argument about canonical literature. He uses the example of Sir Walter Scott’s story, “The Talisman”, which appears in the Waverley Novels. Said describes a scene between a crusader and a “Saracen”, which is an antiquated word for a Muslim person. The crusader says to the man:
“I well thought… that your blinded race had their descent from the foul fiend, without whose aid you would never have been able to maintain this blessed land of Palestine against so many valiant soldiers of God. I speak not thus of thee in particular, Saracen, but generally of thy people and thy religion. Strange it is to me, however, not that you should have descent from the Evil One, but that you should boast of it.”
It is an excellent example of the polemic we often find ourselves in. We observe another that is strange to us, and cannot understand why they would worship, or follow “the Evil One”. I was speaking to a friend the other day who was saying that he could not be in a relationship with “a Tory” (a voter of the Conservative party, for my non-UK audience). It is a statement I am sympathetic to. How can one be intimate with someone who actively supports racist, anti-immigrant values? Or when they openly attack the marginalised, and reward the privileged?
Yet, the more I study and look into the arbitrary concepts of “rightness”, “goodness”, versus “badness”, and “wrongness”, the more I am flummoxed by my prejudices. Whilst I wouldn’t pursue intimacy with a person that I believed wished ill unto others, how can I be certain that a label would ensure that? Without clear communication and understanding of differences, and diverging values, how can we be “right” or “good”?
Yet, it is undeniable that one might get a clearer and more rounded view of what is best for humanity if one avoids debating with the 1%. Moreover, we would have a more balanced view of what is truly good, and what is truly evil if less of the conversation about, “what is good for us”, came from a small group of wealthy individuals.
I end this with a few questions to chew on:
What have you been taught to think was bad without questioning it?
When do feelings of judgement arise?
Can you be compassionate to these thoughts? Honest? Can you seek to gently reappraise them?
“The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.
Who are not, but could be.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”
Eduardo Galeano, The Nobodies
P.s. If this caused you to stop and think a little, consider buying me a coffee: