literature and politics

Nihilism in the Middle East finds symmetries between the worlds of the 9/11 terrorists and the psychopathology of Lawrence of Arabia, while Colonia and Naipaul surveys V. S. Naipaul's bleak account of the empire of post-colonial resentment, from India, to Africa, to the Caribbean.

The Politics of Oxymoron shows the effects on intellectual life of anthropology's takeover of the word "culture", and suggests that Samuel D. Huntington's use of the word "civilization" will have the same unfortunate result.

The semantic tactic involved was first described twenty-five years ago in "When I Hear the Word Culture" (see elsewhere at this site under Encounter Essays). Surprisingly few people in the humanities ever clearly understood what was happening then. More surprisingly, nothing has changed.

The Chinese Enigma reviews a recent book about the see-sawing approval ratings given China by western thinkers over the last 400 years. This reflects a veering between political realism, and an idealizing of the exotic similar to the 'romantic primitivism' discussed elsewhere at this site.

Oxford University is a long way from Beijing, and its denizens have difficulty understanding any world beyond their own. Is There a Cure for Dons? shows Professor Alan Ryan using the anthropological definition of culture for the usual destructive ends.

The fury of Tamil resistance to Sinhala cultural nationalism had yet to be fully unleashed when Sri Lanka's Sticky Future was written in 1978. The account it provides makes interesting background reading. Since then things have only got worse.

"'Colonia', According to Naipaul", Commentary, December 1983
"Nihilism in The Middle East", Quadrant, December 2001 (Revised in 2003)
"The Politics of Oxymoron", The New Criterion, Summer 2003
"The Chinese Enigma", Quadrant, June 2002
"Is There a Cure for Dons?", Quadrant, December 1999
"Sri Lanka's Sticky Future", The New Lugano Review, 1979-80