Of Matters Modern: The Experience of Modernity in Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia Book

As a rather stolid and matter of fact description of the relationship between Western intellectuals and the so-called 'wisdom religions' of the East, this book stands up to scrutiny. It is also a sound and respectful critique of Edward Said's polemical views on 'orientalism'.

So far, so good if a little dull. However, published at the high point of post-modernism in 1997, it is also a slightly tormented justification of a post-Gadamerian hermeneutic approach to East-West dialogue that is on less sure ground.

I would regard this as a work of ideology masquerading (mostly legitimately) as a work of scholarship. Towards the end, the heart sinks as the tolerant liberal critiques his own ideology and ends up promoting the cuddly fluff that is at the root of the 'decline of the West'.

I honestly do not have time to critique the critique of the critique in any depth. Life is short. It is of its period and it represents a variant of the standard position, more or less, of the very nice and comfortable people who inhabit our minor universities. It depresses but is not dangerous.

The book will appeal to those who desperately demand the return of some kind of religion to deal with 'nihilism', who are pained by the thought crimes of the West and who think science and religion may have to be shoehorned into a common universal position of mutual understanding.

It will also appeal to people who care about the planet, worry about the patriarchy and are not too sure about identity politics when it goes ethnic on them. It is, in short, a text for our times - or rather for the beginning of our times when wokery was still innocent instead of damaging.

But it is still worth reading by those of us who do not belong to this universalist and tormented ideological turn precisely because it contains the raw material to feed a suspicion that the West began to destroy itself when it brought back mythic versions of the 'other' from the East.

Imperialism, in a sense, both created and destroyed the West and not because imperialism in itself was some inherent moral evil (it was more complicated than that) but because it created a pool of ideas that could be used to eat the West from within.

Clarke makes a very good point that the East is not really well understood at any time by Western intellectuals but is rather a tool for various forms of dissent. I would say a tool used by dissenters with often subversive intent.

The 'philosophes' used Confucianism (as they had invented it) to critique the Ancien Regime, Eastern 'wisdom' was part of the progressive assault on Christianity and Buddhism has been part of the counter-cultural movements that reach deep into ecology and New Age thought alike.

One can see, even as a Western atheist, Pope John Paul II's well-known critique of Buddhism as holding some validity while there seems to have been a 'evil wisdom' in Stalin's total purge of Stcherbatsky's attempt to fuse Buddhism and Marxism (which is not to justify his crimes at all).

And there is delusion as to the actuality here. The people of the East are just as complex, decent, bad and evil as we are and the over-privileging of texts and ideas to explain and define them really was a form of disrespectful imperialism, a view Clarke himself explores.

It is neatly forgotten that D T Suzuki and the interwar Zen intellectuals of Japan were perfectly happy to justify the murderous worst of Japanese imperialism while Gandhi was a bit of a fraud who owed more to the West than the East in the contruction of his own mythos.

The truth is that ideas are just tools - like spades and language itself - and the history of the appropriation of ideas should not concern itself only with the idea but who is using the idea and for what purpose: is it to dig a foundation trench, a grave or a hole for some tree roots?

The book starts off as a description of the tools and their uses but becomes, by the end, a tool itself so that we have to ask what idea is the author actually trying to make use of and for what purpose. And, indeed, just how conscious is he of what he is doing?

He rightly challenges post-modernism and he rightly challenges the presumption of Western intellectuals throughout history in claiming to 'know' what Easterners thought and meant but he seems all-too-eager to save some of the bath water for his own ideological purposes.

My own take on all this is simple enough. The East is different but not special. It has things to teach us - or rather it has ideas we can steal as tools or weapons for our own purposes. There is no reason why we should not steal from them as they have the right to steal from us.

But we should deal with this mutual theft with open eyes and get back to the question of who is stealing and why. My nervousness arises from the fact that the Western intellectual's thieving of ideas seems consistently designed to promote his class interests at the expense of his own culture.

While Chinese neo-Confucianism or Modi's revival of Hinduism are equally fraudulent, they are empowering their nations and their cultures while ours seems to be going into a self-reflexive terminal decline. The role of the Western intellectual can be creative but it can also be destructive.

We seem to have gone over a line where Western 'creative destruction' becomes a narcissistic class-based destructive creativity. A lot of this has to be put down to the explosion in size of an intellectual class that has no purpose but to think and criticise, paid for by its own targets.

Instead of single radical critics as creative leavening, providing radical ideas that improve our ability to grow and survive, we have whole classes of intellectual who are sizeable enough to behave (to use an Eastern example) as disruptive 'Buddhist monks' did in medieval imperial China.

The use of the East - especially Buddhism - has a sinister component, especially as Western Buddhism is a hybrid of Western liberalism and Eastern Buddhist faith. It is, in effect, the return of obscurantism by the back door, a filling of the gap left by Nietzsche's gutting of Christianity.

Instead of having the courage to accept lack of meaning and make choices that take account of our true nature as individuals and as a culture, the desperate search for meaning imports new nonsense from overseas because our own old nonsense no longer stands up.

The triumph of Western civilisation lies in our coming to terms with the death of meaning and the invention of procedures to ensure we can still live together and with ourselves. This is all being thrown away by weaklings and cowards who want new religions and new faiths.

And so, as our parasitical intelligensia engages in a 'trahison des clercs', making use of 'philosophy' (as in post-modernism), a revived universalism based on 'faith' yet claiming to respect 'science' (less so reason) and a denial of the 'self', we slide into decadence.

The destruction of the 'Self' (though easily justified by philosophy) misses the point that we construct the Self not as truth but as tool. The construction of the tool creates our values. To unravel the Self (as Buddhists and post-modernists do) is to unravel democratic society.

The fact that the unravelling is an unravelling of Western values is regarded as a good thing by the neo-religious and post-moderns who consider only the negative side of those values and none of their dynamic and energising power.

While we are being taught either to despise power or to have power be siphoned off into the small-minded, abstract and resentful, the East itself is accumulating power without any of the flummery ascribed to its 'ancient wisdom' in the West.

The Self may or may not be 'true' absolutely but it is true enough to hold the West together. The insidious destruction of the Self by a large minority of educated people who are parasitical on state funding is, indeed, 'trahison', a Fifth Column for abstraction and, ultimately, fragmentation.

And when we are fragmented, as in the East, we are ready to be ruled from above. The fact that our rulers may be eco-friendly, liberal, non-patriarchal rulers engaged in tolerant dialogue with other cultures and faiths does not make them any the less our rulers. This is insidious power.

So, on balance, this is a frustrating but valuable book because it not only tells us about the alleged 'oriental enlightenment' in honest, fair and factual terms but it exposes an ideology that arises out of it, a component in Western decline to be noted and guarded against.