Free Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit Page A

scorned.
    This cannot satisfy those who wish to see heroism and glory as parts of a collective, and thus often vicarious, enterprise. Fascism appealed precisely to mediocre men, because it gave them a glimpse of glory by association, by feeling part of a supernation, and in Nazism to a superrace, supposedly endowed with superior virtues and spiritual qualities. Politicized religious movements often attract people for the same reason. Self-sacrifice for a higher cause, for an ideal world, cleansed of human greed and injustice, is the one way for the average man to feel heroic. Better to die gloriously for an ideal than to live in Komfortismus. Choosing to die a violent death becomes a heroic act of human will. In totalitarian systems it might be the only act an individual is free to choose.
    The Occident, as defined by its enemies, is seen as a threat not because it offers an alternative system of values, let alone a different route to Utopia. It is a threat because its promises of material comfort, individual freedom, and the dignity of unexceptional lives deflate all utopian pretensions. The anti-heroic, antiutopian nature of Western liberalism is the greatest enemy of religious radicals, priest-kings, and collective seekers after purity and heroic salvation.
    The bourgeois, often philistine, unheroic, antiutopian nature of liberal civilization can make it difficult to defend. Where the free market dominates, as in the United States, intellectuals feel marginal and unappreciated, and are inclined to be drawn to politics with grander pretensions. Taking their freedoms for granted, they become easy prey for enemies of the West. The Weimar republic did not fall only because of Nazi brutality, reactionary stupidity, military ambition, or the arguments formulated by the likes of Moeller van den Bruck. It also fell because too few people were prepared to defend it.

[MIND OF THE WEST]
    T HE ATTACK ON THE WEST IS AMONG OTHER THINGS an attack on the mind of the West. The mind of the West is often portrayed by Occidentalists as a kind of higher idiocy. To be equipped with the mind of the West is like being an idiot savant, mentally defective but with a special gift for making arithmetic calculations. It is a mind without a soul, efficient, like a calculator, but hopeless at doing what is humanly important. The mind of the West is capable of great economic success, to be sure, and of developing and promoting advanced technology, but cannot grasp the higher things in life, for it lacks spirituality and understanding of human suffering.
    The germ of this distinction goes back a long way. Plotinus (A.D. 204 -270), the revered founder of Neoplatonism in the Greco-Roman world, made a distinction between discursive and nondiscursive thought. Plotinus used the term “discursive thinking” to refer to the thinking of the soul, and “nondiscursive thinking” to refer to the intellect. Belief in God, for example, can mean that one accepts the proposition that God exists. Or one can simply venerate God without saying anything about Him. These types of thinking come from separate mental organs, as it were: the intellect and the soul. (We tend now to reverse these terms—the soul for nondiscursive and the intellect for discursive thinking.) Too much stress on the intellect diminishes the role of intuitive and nondiscursive thought. It is a Romantic idea that intuitive thought is superior to deliberative and discursive thinking. Occidentalism often takes its cue from these categories. The mind of the West is accused not only of being incapable of nondiscursive thinking but, worse, of having the arrogance and impudence to deny its existence.
    The mind of the West in the eyes of the Occidentalists is a truncated mind, good for finding the best way to achieve a given goal, but utterly useless in finding the right way. Its claim to rationality is only half true anyway—the lesser half. If by rationality we mean instrumental rationality, fitting