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

means to ends, in distinction to value rationality, choosing the right ends, then the West has plenty of the former and very little of the latter. Western man, in this view, is a hyperactive busy-body, forever finding the right means to the wrong ends.
    Antithetical to the Western mind is the Russian soul, a mythical entity constructed by intellectuals in the course of the nineteenth century. This love affair of Russians with their own soul is a perfect illustration of the Occidentalists’ sordid picture of the Western mind. But there is another reason for focusing our attention on it. Nineteenth-century Russian nativist thinkers, loosely termed Slavophiles, have provided a model for national or ethnic spiritual attacks on Western rationalism that was followed by generations of intellectuals in other countries, such as India, China, and the Islamic nations. However, even though Slavophiles stressed the unique spiritual qualities of the Russian soul, they too had a model. Russian Slavophilia was rooted in German Romanticism, just as Russian liberalism took its cues from German liberal ideas.
    For Peter the Great, the Western quarter in Moscow meant the German quarter. But in Germany, and especially Prussia, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, France was seen as the quintessential West, powerful, inspiring, and threatening. There is a great deal of truth in Isaiah Berlin’s view that the German Romantic movement and its Romantic nationalism were “a product of wounded national sensibility, of dreadful national humiliation.”
    In Berlin’s account the French dominated the Western world—politically, culturally, militarily. This was deeply humiliating to the defeated Germans, particularly the traditional, religious, economically backward East Prussians. Frederick the Great’s enthusiasm for French ideas and his penchant for importing high-handed French officials made things worse. The Germans, responded “like the bent twig of the poet Schiller’s theory, by lashing back and refusing to accept their alleged inferiority.” They contrasted their own deep inner life of the spirit, the poetry of their national soul, the simplicity and nobility of their character, to the empty, heartless sophistication of the French. This mood rose to fever pitch during the national resistance to Napoleon and was, as Berlin puts it, “the original exemplar of the reaction of many a backward, exploited, or at any rate patronised society, which, resentful of the apparent inferiority of its status, reacted by turning to real or imaginary triumphs and glories in its past, or enviable attributes of its own national or cultural character.” 1
    When people are not only humiliated by foreign forces but oppressed by their own government, they often retreat to the “inner life” of the spirit, pure and simple, where they can feel free from the corruption of power and sophistication. Philosophy and literature become political substitutes when political debate is no longer possible. This was true of nineteenth-century Germany, and also of Russia, where German texts were grafted onto a Russian trunk, like false limbs. Severe censorship enhanced the importance of ideas and created the impression that ideas, even of the most esoteric kind, mattered greatly. The inability, under the rule of the czars, to translate ideas into action and thus to test them against reality drove many Russian thinkers toward purism. Extreme views were held with such fanatical conviction that thinkers and writers were turned into prophets. Many of these views came out of German Romanticism, especially the early high Romanticism, between 1797 and 1815. In Russia they were transmuted, or rather truncated, into Occidentalism.
    Isaiah Berlin regarded the Romantic movement as part of the Counter-Enlightenment. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers took the optimistic view that human history is a linear progression toward a happier, more rational world, the Romantic scheme uses old