ORIENTALISM OR HOW WE TREAT THE OTHER

Dr. Edward Said

I feel very fortunate to have had some really great teachers, and one of them was Edward Said.

Dr. Said was the University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. I studied under Professor Said before he became “famous.” No, he never became a “household name” or as well-known as Taylor Swift or Donald Trump. But within literary, cultural, and even geo-political circles Dr. Said was quite well known when he died, at age 67, in 2003.

Dr. Said was a leading founder of what has become known as “post-colonial studies.”  He was born in Jerusalem, when it was still controlled by the British. He was a Palestinian Arab Christian. After the founding of Israel, Dr. Said moved with his family to Egypt. Eventually he wound up in the United States and became a US citizen.

He did his undergraduate work at Princeton and earned his PhD in English and comparative literature at Harvard. I am truly grateful to have been able to experience such great writers as Oscar Wilde, Girard Manley Hopkins, James's Joyce, TS Elliot, and William Butler Yates with Dr. Said.  He was able to make all of it come alive and breathe.

But I will always remember several one-on-one meetings with Prof. Said when we were reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence. This is the Lawrence who most of us know as Lawrence of Arabia. Many of us first encountered Lawrence of Arabia through the blockbuster movie. Peter O’Toole played Lawrence as if the man was a glamorous Errol Flynn-like character leading the Arab revolt in the desert against the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

We were in his office and Dr. Said said to me, “Here was Lawrence – – this blue eyed, blonde haired, Anglo-Saxon in the middle of the Arabian desert leading an Arab revolt… I often feel like a TE Lawrence character, but only in reverse. Here I am a dark and swarthy Palestinian in a western citadel of European and American learning, teaching you British literature. Really, I am like a Lawrence of Arabia in reverse.”

Dr. Said said this to me well before he wrote the books which he is most noted for. But I can see these ideas were germinating in his mind.

The book he is most famous for, of course, is titled Orientalism. In this path-breaking work, Dr. Said explored how the West has tended to look at the Orient from the era of colonialism right through to the present day. While he does touch on China and the Far East, the central portion of his ground-breaking study focuses on the Middle East.

From Napoleon’s army in Egypt to the American-led war in Iraq, Dr. Said shows how scholars— ranging from philologists to anthropologist— in the West created the foundations for looking at, and classifying, Orientals that would justify the West’s behavior (which was often pretty atrocious) in the Orient.

For example, while it is no longer fashionable to write books or columns about “the Negro mind,” Dr. Said documents how often we read about “the Arab mind” or “the Islamic way of doing things.” Many of these current writings— published in leading western journals— contain old tropes that are even older than Napoleon‘s army in Egypt.

I recently reread Orientalism by Dr. Said, and the reason why I bring it up now is because I think that it really— in so many key ways— deals with what we are right now going through: and I don’t mean just the conflict in Gaza and Israel.

While Dr. Said called his book Orientalism, I think it really does apply to a far larger topic— and I would call this other topic Otherism. It is about how we treat “the other,” people who are different from us (who have different skin colors, ethnic backgrounds, belief systems, cultures, or just come from the different side of the tracks).

I think there is a human tendency to divide up and separate ourselves into a “primary group” (which is “us,” of course). Then we look at all of the non-primary group people as “the others.” Our language, and our way of thinking, often justifies treating “the others” in ways we would never treat “the primary group.”

Let me give an example of what I’m talking about. As many of you know, I was adopted into a Jewish family. So one way of looking at it is Jews and non-Jews. But if we were in a place where there were only Jews the Jewish group would subdivide into looking at it as “Ashkenazi” Jews (Germanic and Eastern European Jews) vs. “Sephardim” Jews (Spanish and North African Jews.)
But suppose you had a place where only Ashkenazi Jews lived. Then there would be further subdivision between German Jews and Russian and Eastern European Jews. This human proclivity to subdivide into a primary group and the “others” is so widespread. Then this can often lead to a consciousness which justifies our treating the other differently from how we would treat “ourselves.”

Jon M. Sweeney

I recently read a column, which puts a humorous touch on all of this. It was written by an interesting spiritual writer, Jon M. Sweeney, who has a cabin on a lake in Wisconsin right near a small Amish community.

Jon wrote that he felt very different from the Amish community since many of their customs and culture were far different from his. However, he liked to go by the community and buy some of the products that were being sold. One day he saw a jar of dandelion jelly for sale. He asked the Amish woman behind the counter, “Dandelion jelly, how do you use it?”

The Amish woman responded that she takes a slice of bread and toasts it. Then, after the bread is toasted, she takes out a knife and spreads the dandelion jelly on top of the bread. After that is completed, the Amish woman said she then either eats the bread herself, or she gives it to one of her family members for their breakfast. Jon realized that the Amish may seem like “others,” but in so many ways they are “us”— and “we” are “them.”

Dr. Said and Jon Sweeney’s comments have reminded me to look at Otherism in my life. Am I tending to divide things between “us” and “the others”? Am I using such divisions to justify different subtle behaviors to different groups? Am I doing to, or thinking things about, “the others” that I would never do to or think about “us”?

If I am sensing Otherism creeping into my life, what am I willing to do to “weed my own garden” or “muck out my own stable”? I believe that the process of prayer and meditation, and journaling/inventorying and action can really help in this process.

I believe that this issue of Otherism is going to be growing in the future. Mass migration will be significantly rising due to global climate changes and political and economic insecurities. Multiculturalism is a fact of life and on the rise – – and it is not going to go away. Spirituality has a very important role to play in how we deal with Otherism.

To paraphrase that great comic character Pogo: “We have met the other, and he/she/it is us!”