. . AND ORIENTAL OSTRICHES

Ian Buruma also warns of

dangers in trusting the sages of Orientalism

SOMEWHERE — I honestly forget where — I read the following criticism of Presi- dent George Bush. Before starting the war with Iraq, so the critic said, Bush had not had much time to listen to the advice of Middle-East experts. The tone of the criticism was peevish, so I suppose the critic might have been an expert himself. Presumably the comment was meant to show yet again what an irresponsible light- weight 'Poppy' is. But yet again Bush may have been under-estimated. In fact, I think he was on to something. Experts cannot be trusted.

All through the war, 'experts' warned that every Arab, indeed every Muslim, if not indeed every denizen of what people persist in calling the Third World, would rise as one against the pale-faced infidel. Yet nothing of the sort ever happened. On the contrary, Iraqis were demonstrating in London a few weeks ago, asking the Americans to march to Baghdad to sort things out. Admittedly, these demonstra- tors were Saddam Hussein's political ene- mies. But still, except among the disposses- sed and desperate Palestinians, there was little evidence during the war of a united Muslim, or Arab, or Third World anti- American rage.

Why were the wise old hands wrong on such a fundamental issue? If anyone could have read the mood in the Arab streets, it should have been they. In fact, experts very often get it wrong, far more wrong than many relatively ignorant people who use their common sense. Let me give a personal example. A few years ago I visited Burma. All the Burmese I spoke to in Rangoon and Mandalay complained about the disastrous conditions in their country; the oppression, the poverty, the waste of educated talent, the cruelty of Ne Win's military regime. When I reported what I had heard, in a literary magazine, I was harshly attacked by two academic experts for being an arrogant ignoramus, seeing Burma through a Western prism. One of the old hands, a well-known professor in Burmese studies, said that the world could actually learn a thing or two from what was still called 'the Burmese Road to Socialism' in those days. A year later, Burmese came out into the streets en masse to protest against the dictatorship that had ruined their country. Hundreds, maybe thousands were shot dead in the streets, or tortured to death.

The point of the story is not to show how right I was to sense something rotten about Burma. Such pride would be misplaced, since anyone with eyes and ears could have reached the same conclusion. The question is what had blinded the old hands to a reality that was so plain to see? Was it purely a misguided faith in anything that called itself 'socialist'? Partly perhaps, but that is not all. Take the People's Republic of China. The Australian expert Ross Terrill visited China in 1971, when the Cultural Revolution was still raging. He had been deeply moved, he re- ported, by the social achievements of the Chinese revolution. Not only had hunger been relieved (forgetting for a moment the millions who died of famine in the 1950s, because of horrendous economic experi- ments), but the ordinary people of China felt secure. This, when the streets were in turmoil, class enemies beaten to death, families torn apart, universities wrecked, and millions of ordinary people bullied and molested. I studied Chinese at university and I remember well the many experts, including some of my teachers, who spoke of the miraculous achievements in the field of women's rights, medicine, education, agri- culture, and whatnot. And then there was the fact, proudly and insistently reported by many an expert visitor, that China had licked the problem of industrial pollution.

Were Terrill, Han Suyin et al. all con- vinced Maoists? No. Were they stupid? That depends on how you define stupidity. Were they cynical? Some, perhaps. Han Suyin, almost certainly. But again, that does not explain all. The answer, I think, has to do with the nature of Western expertise on the East (including the Middle-East). Edward Said, the leftist (Christian) Palestinian--American profes- sor at Columbia University, a television pundit, and one-man-spokesman for the Palestinian cause in America, has made a famous study of this, entitled 'Oriental- ism'.

He writes: 'Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident". Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, econom- ists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, "mind", destiny, and so on.'

The key word here is distinction: the East is different, basically different. How the East is different is for the experts to explain. If the fundamental distinction between East and West were to go, there would be much less for the old hands to do, so it is in the expert's interest to keep the flags of distinction flying, so to speak. Thus we are told that we might find living under Mao, or Kim Il Sung, or Ne Win intoler- able, but the East is different, the Oriental `How many times do I have to tell you — I don't want a hot water bottle.' mind is geared to collectivism, despotism is part of the Eastern tradition, and so on and so forth. You don't have to be left-wing to believe this sort of thing. Not at all. After the Chinese demonstrators were crushed in Peking, there were plenty of right-wingers, some of them prominent in the Conserva- tive Party, who said that democracy was incompatible with the Chinese tradition, and so the Chinese regime was absolutely right to stamp on the subversiye crowds. The same argument is used against demo- crats in Hong Kong. And these people those who cheered the stampers, that is, not the democrats — are not even old hands. They just use old-hand arguments.

The purpose of Edward Said's polemics about Orientalism is a political one. To put his sophisticated arguments simply, he is saying that Orientalism and Orientalists are part of the colonialist, or neo- imperialist enterprise. Not only were many early Orientalists, especially British and French, colonial administrators, but even the novelists, poets and university profes- sors reflected in their different ways the Western imperialist mind. And in Said's view they still do.

This, even in its sophisticated form, is too crude. Many Asian hands are in fact strongly anti-colonialist in their sym- pathies. Like Cyril Fielding, in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, they are often intelligent, open-minded people, fascin- ated by the cultures of Asia and intensely irritated by the bigotry of the memsahibs and clubmen who pretend 'to know the native mind'. They are sometimes great scholars, without whose work much of Asian culture would have remained obscure, even to the people of Asia them- selves.

But there is the constant temptation, lying in wait for every old hand, expert and scholar, which is to change from explainer to apologist. And what is worse, the apologist of the 'native mind' is very often an apologist for the official spokesmen of that mind, that is to say, for the indigenous rulers, especially when such rulers claim to speak for the People, and are opposed to the West. To become the unofficial ambas- sador for the native rulers is to have one's revenge on the narrow little clubmen and mem-sahibs whom one so despises.

Native rulers need not be bloody dictators to attract foreign experts to their courts. One of the most famous post-war Amer- ican ambassadors in Tokyo was Edwin 0.

Reischauer, who could serve as the archetype of the apologising expert. A missionary's son, born in Tokyo, he went on to become a Harvard professor in Japanese studies. In 1961 President Ken- nedy appointed him as ambassador to Japan. The task of an ambassador is of course to represent the interests of his country. There is no reason to doubt that Ambassador Reischauer fully intended to do just that. He was a very vain man who adored honours and gongs. But he also had another, more curious interpretation of his task: `. . . I saw my job as being essentially educational, as it had been at Harvard.' He became the official American interpreter of the 'Japanese mind', which was really the mind of official Japan. When Washing- ton pushed Tokyo too hard to open up its borders to trade, the US ambassador would be on hand to plead understanding for Japan's special circumstances, or its unique culture, or whatever. By doing so he unwittingly helped to sow the seeds of the increasingly acerbic trade conflicts today. Some people in Tokyo still speak wistfully of 'the best Japanese ambassador' they ever had.

In a way, however, Reischauer fits Said's description. He did have a proprietorial attitude to Japan, which is hard to disting- uish from a colonial one. He, Edwin 0. Reischauer, would help to teach the Japanese to be model free-market demo- crats, and model American allies. Anyone who doubted the success of the remaking of post-war Japan, which shared with its American mentor 'common basic ideals of democracy, human rights and egalitarian- ism', was either an ignoramus, or a bigot, or both. In essence, the expert- ambassador-educator so wanted America and Japan to be friends that he constructed a false model, and distorted reality to fit his ideal.

Anti-colonial experts like Reischauer, or Kim Philby's father, St John Philby, the man who went native in Arabia, often want it both ways: to be Orientalised, and to be honoured at home. Some of this ambiva- lence was caught beautifully by Forster, who had a much subtler appreciation of the Orientalist than Said. Cyril Fielding spoke up for his friend Aziz, was ostracised by the clubmen and lived among the natives. Yet he ended up marrying Miss Quested: `He had thrown in his lot with Anglo-India by marrying a country-woman, and he was acquiring some of its limitations, and already felt surprise at his own past hero- ism.'

St John Philby, in-between his sojourns in the East, stood twice for Parliament. went to every Test match, was a member of the Athenaeum, and contributed to the Times. There need not be anything surpris- ing or contradictory about this. Why shouldn't a man who takes a keen interest in the East also be a consummate English- man? No reason at all why not. What is interesting and relevant, however, is to see how the the expert's perception of his own country affects his brand of Orientalism. In his book about Kim Philby, Phillip Knight- ley describes how Philby Major had a lifelong obsession with the moral decline, the perfidy and deceit of Great Britain. Was disappointed patriotism not perhaps one reason for his admiration for Arabia? (The same might be said about Philby Minor's faith in Marxism.) This, apart from vanity, is perhaps the greatest pitfall for the expert — the projec- tion of idealised values onto an alien culture, because of dissatisfaction or dis- illusionment with home. Thus one finds the great traveller Wilfred Thesiger lament in his autobiography the decline of the Eng- land he knew in his youth, and discover the very things he missed — honour, loyalty, stoicism, valour, etc. — amongst the peo- ple of Africa and the Arab countries. In his books, Ethiopian tribesmen came across almost as idealised Old Etonians with spears.

This is also why China, so far away, so unknown, so apparently strange, has been such a convenient screen for dissatisfied Europeans to project their fantasies on. This was true of the French philosophes of the 18th century, who saw in China the ideal Mandarin society, governed by wise men and scholars — men much like the philosophes themselves. It was also true of the worshippers of Mao and his miraculous achievements. China was the perfect anti- model to the messy, vulgar, liberal West, where intellectuals felt insufficiently appreciated. If there is a moral to be drawn from this story, it is this: whenever an expert extols the Other, it might be good to examine his attitude to his Own.