Having finished Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia, which we were talking about recently, I found an early response from Jay Spencer Green in the now defunct Irish Left Review (visible through the WayBack Machine, and reposted on the author’s blog in 2019). The response includes complaints about James’s selection (“no architects, no painters, no sculptors”), which – you know, is almost inevitable with this sort of book. Cultural Amnesia is a collection of a hundred essays on various historical figures, dictated largely by James’s personal interests and curiosities. It’s going to be lopsided. Jay’s more pointed critique touches on how James talks up humanism and civilization, but then most of his essays are about men. “Where, in your book, are the liberated feminine voices of Western civilization, Clive? Where’s Aphra Behn, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, your own Germaine?” That’s really the starting point for this critique: it’s not gaps or blind spots in themselves, it’s how those blind spots intersect with the book’s purported vision. This book about civilisation skips over Africa. It ignores Asia beyond complaints about communism (Mao Zedong), justifications for the bombing of Hiroshima (Isoroku Yamamoto), and the conclusion that “Britain made India possible” (Nirad C. Chaudhuri). James talks about civilisation and humanism, but really his interests are Europe and its colonies. He only seems to make it as far as South America because they speak Spanish and Portuguese.

James’s views on the Middle East, then, are roughly what you’d expect. Writing on Edward Said, James describes the thesis of Orientalism as that “every Orientalist racist imperialist scholar since the Enlightenment was furthering the territorial ambitions of his home country”. James’s counter-argument is that they can’t be imperialists, because the best Orientalist scholars were German, and Germany didn’t have any colonies. He skates entirely past Said’s actual point – that the Orient, so-called, is an imaginative site in European thought, that it is the Other against which the Western Self is constructed. As Said writes in the introduction to his book, “Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” James restricts his point to imperialism – the literal land-grabs, the claiming of territory and administrative or political rule – but Said’s talking about something bigger. He’s talking about the way in which we discuss and conceptualise the Orient in relation to ourselves, partly in academic study, sure, but also through a shared cultural imaginary. Said cites the efforts of “poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators” who have “accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind’, destiny, and so on.” It’s a discourse. It’s a perspective or lens shared across Western nations, textured, no doubt, in various different ways, fitting itself to different through-lines, but with an identifiable DNA that marks it out as part of an Orientalist mode of thought. People can adopt Orientalism without trying to start a colony. That’s a category error. You might as well ask: if there’s antisemitism in England, why is there no English Holocaust? It’s a category error – assuming that every expression of antisemitism has to match this one specific manifestation. There are other ways antisemitism can express itself. James argues that scholars of the Orient can’t be imperialists, because Germany had Orientalists and no colonies. That’s just not how Orientalism works.

Although Said is the only Arabic writer to receive a full essay, James makes little comments about Islam and the Middle East in other places. In his essay on Flaubert, for instance, he demonstrates a familiar pattern of poorly considered argument gussied up with rhetorical flourish. James subscribes to a classic liberal-atheist view of the world (almost in the same vein as The Talos Principle). There is the darkness (religion, fascism, communism), and the light (atheistic democracy). The world moves inexorably towards enlightenment, towards democracy, and it would go a great deal faster if people would stop being silly about religion. He has, of course, nothing to say about the corrupting influence of money in politics, or the corrosive, anti-democratic practices of voter suppression or gerrymandering in the US – ah, but I’m picking at his selection again. As part of his liberal myth of progress, in his essay on Flaubert, James waxes on about how the West moved past religion. “Eventually, in the West, we emerged from the age in which people paid with their lives for a religious allegiance. We emerged into another age in which they were murdered by the million for other reasons, but not for that one.” He writes that we’re now waiting for Islam or the Middle East to make the same development that we did. You can see the rhetorical structuring here: there’s an arc towards enlightenment, a set path of progress, with a terminus in liberal democracy. The West is further along this path than the Muslims, and James looks back at the laggards, hoping they’ll catch up with the rest of the world. The West, he says, “graduated” from religion. The word connotes a process of maturing, coming of age, completing your education and becoming an adult – as opposed to the believers, who are childish and immature. And I just have to ask – if the West is still murdering people by the millions, have we really progressed at all? James preaches to the Muslim world about the importance of tolerance and civilisation, but his soapbox is the pile of seventy million dead from the Second World War. Another seventeen million died in WWI, and while the numbers in the Soviet Union are contested or unclear, it’s comfortably in the millions. Less than three thousand people died on 9/11. In the subsequent invasion of Iraq, and in the years since, the Iraq Body Count project records somewhere in the region of two hundred thousand dead Iraqi civilians, which does not include the thirty to seventy thousand dead Iraqi combatants. James would dodge responsibility for the dead in the Second World War – Nazis and Communists, in his view, are part of the darkness that we’re trying to emerge from. But it’s not clear that religion is the issue. In the grand scheme of things, Islam really doesn’t seem to be the problem.

Where is this progress, then? What have we graduated into? James writes that the West stopped killing over religion because religion stopped mattering. That’s not to say we stopped killing people, though. If anything, we’re killing more. James lashes out at Islam for its supposed backwardness – the Orient again a foil for Western ideals, constructed in opposition to Western self-image. We are advanced, they are not. We have moved past religion, and they have not. It’s the same thing Edward Said was talking about in 1978. It’s the same behaviours, the same boring racism. There’s no progress here. We’re not going anywhere positive. We continue our tradition of hatred, cruelty, and death.