The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

Again, there is nothing so terrible about this. All descriptions must by necessity include some generalization. Not every sentence can be the length of a dissertation. Concepts that sum up large swaths of peoples—including “the West”—are useful even if they cannot sum up everything contained therein. But an interesting aspect of Said’s judgment in this is that while he loathes essentializing in others, he indulges in it frequently himself. For instance, at one point in his most famous work he says, “It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”28 Every European? Every single one? Where is the evidence to support that fact? If you replaced the word “European” in that sentence with “African,” “Arab,” or even “Palestinian Christian,” what might you be called? Elsewhere Said refers in passing, perfectly blithely, to an “average nineteenth-century European.”29 What is that, you wonder? It essentializes an awfully large array of people.