'Corruption of the Best' - Review

National Review, August 9, 1999 by David Pryce-Jones

Out of Place: A Memoir, by Edward W. Said (Knopf, 352 pp., $26.95)

Edward Said is one of our most celebrated and public intellectuals. His gifts are huge, his reading very wide indeed, and he has a turbulent prose style all his own. A professor of literature at Columbia University, he has long been able to command whatever platform he likes. Of Christian Arab-or, to be secular about it, Levantine-origins, he happens to be the son of a man who had taken out American citizenship as long ago as the First World War. A cosmopolitan at home in East and West alike, he was in an almost unique position to elucidate and bridge both cultures.

In general, he seems to subscribe to the humanist belief that values are universal. Yet in particular, he argues with all the force and passion at his disposal for the divisive "Them" and "Us" approach that calls for different moral standards for different people. "Them" in his view is the United States-and by extension Israel and any other ally- seen as imperialist, war-mongering, triumphalist, even racist. "Us" is the Arab world, Islam, and by extension the Third World, seen as victimized, despised, and to be justified no matter what policies or customs are practiced in those societies. What might have been a brilliant life's work has instead petered out into cause-mongering, which only adds to present violence and hate. Corruptio optimi pessima, as the churchmen used to put it-the worst thing of all is the corruption of the best.

Christian Arabs are a minority community in the Middle East, in the predicament of sharing the majority's ethnic identity but not its religion, Islam. To many, the West offered protection, first from Arab nationalism and later from Islamic fundamentalism, and they opted for emigration. Others, on the contrary, supposed that if they threw themselves into the region's new political movements, for instance Baathism and Communism, they might pass as assimilated in the eyes of the majority. In the old Soviet Union, a comparable illusion led Jews in disproportionate numbers to join the Communist Party.

Said himself was born in Jerusalem in 1935, towards the ignominious end of the British Mandate in Palestine. His parents, he says, disliked that foreboding city. Increasingly successful in spite of a breakdown in health, his father ran a large stationery business in Cairo, and the family moved there in 1947, shortly before the Arab-Israeli fighting to come. The young Said developed his lifelong taste for literature and music. But a huge break occurred as he was growing up, when in the early '50s, and in the name of nationalism, Gamal Abdel Nasser introduced his version of a Soviet police state in Egypt. At one time, the Soviet Union appeared likely to replace the British in the Middle East, and might well have done so had it not been for the determination of the United States to resist any such outcome.

In Out of Place, his memoir, Said skimps on the enthusiasm that he has steadily shown for Nasser and Arab nationalism. Never a Soviet apologist in the classic mode, he nonetheless came to support some of the more fanciful Soviet claims. The Soviet Union and its local clients were promising liberation and democracy and progress, therefore the United States by definition was criminally retrograde in opposing it. "Them" and "Us," writ in capital letters during the Cold War, was a crude mutation of the basic Marxist dogma that class struggle is the engine of history. At this point, Said seems to have been much influenced by fashionable deconstructionists and revolutionaries such as Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon. In such eyes, that same Marxist dogma justified the use of force on the grounds that it brought victory.

For years now, Said has been polemicizing against America and its policies, accusing it in the usual Orwellian inversion of the very exploitation and imperialism that in fact it set itself against. In several books, most notably Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), he indicted the entire West for its dealings over centuries with the Arab world and Islam. All Westerners who ever studied or wrote about Arab society or Islam, according to Said, were "Orientalists," a new coinage for "Them," extending their imperial power over the hapless "Us."

"Orientalist" is only a fictitious categorization of diverse people, another organizing term in the Marxist vocabulary, on the level of "capitalist lackey," say, or "running-dog." To Said, though, explorers and artists, linguists, epigraphists, folklorists, even converts to Islam, from whatever background and country, were all expressing the power of "Them" over "Us." Any Westerner who made a critique of what he found was an imperialist outright. Admirers were condescending from a position of strength. The neutral and scholarly only served the status quo, in which the West already had the advantage. Jane Austen, Verdi, and Dickens were among the many who had no idea that their work was spreading innate assumptions of Western superiority. As always with Marxist theory, the argument is circular, all of it assertion that can neither be proved nor refuted.