search
Liza Ashley

Globalizing the Counter-Intifada

Antisemitic incidents in the USA have reached a record-breaking height, according to a recent report from the Anti-Defamation League Center for Extremism. But, like all cancers, this one didn’t spread overnight. 

In fact, much of it dates back decades to the bad ideas of Edward Said. His post-colonial thesis, replete with Marxist Axioms, has formed the intellectual water all of American public life, from academia to foreign policy, has swam in for the last four decades, providing the perfect conditions for rampant antisemitism. 

This ideology involves a rejection of truth—in his view, “knowledge” is just power—universal values, transcendence, and the moral agency of the individual person in favor of a worldview that prioritizes power and group identity as the driving forces in human interaction. 

If you were to speak with a random protestor at a “tentifada,” after a few brief questions, you would likely come to a recapitulation of the Saidian worldview, even if the person in question had never even heard the name. 

In more serious echelons, the Saidian worldview can be seen in the oft-cited assumption that all foreign countries, especially those in the Near East, merely react to actions taken by the West and America in particular. The Houthis do not have any governing goals or eschatological principles of their own that determine their actions. They merely respond to American action. In this paternalistic worldview, the West acts, and the East reacts. 

But, despite the ubiquity of the ideology, few people can articulate its central assumptions and conclusions, let alone point out where it goes wrong and how we ought to correct it.

Enter Charles Malik, the Lebanese Christian diplomat and intellectual heavyweight. Though Malik and Said weren’t exact contemporaries, both grappled with the fundamental relationship between East and West. Beyond this, the two were relatives by marriage and spent summers roaming the hills of Lebanon before promulgating starkly different critiques of the West. 

It isn’t hyperbole to say that this is the family feud that shaped a generation of American intellectualism. 

Many of the differences between the two thinkers come down to a few fundamental disagreements about the nature of reality, morality, and the human person, with profound ramifications for our modern moment.

Malik believed in objective truth, the validity of reason as a means of discovering it, and the necessity of humility before it. In his view, honest inquiry could lead to an understanding of objective reality, which exists regardless of whether one likes it or despises it. Reality and all its sticking edges impose certain limits on the human person, who must reorder himself in accordance with immutable facts or crash against them at his peril.  

In contrast, Said viewed “Truth” and “Knowledge” as mere fig leaves for exploitation and power plays by those with privilege. 

In simple terms, Malik believed that humans must mold their lives in accordance with the truth, whereas Said contended that those in power could mold the “truth” in accordance with their whims, largely falling into four categories of power: power political, power intellectual, power moral, and power cultural. 

As an outgrowth of this, Malik believed in an objective moral law, revealed to all and to which all should be held accountable. He believed in what he called the “Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian Cumulative Tradition” as the greatest repository of universal values and eternal truths. 

Said viewed all claims of “universal values” as outposts of intellectual colonialism. Said often criticized the “orientalists” for imposing their values to dehumanize other cultures. 

Central to Saidian dogma is the Marxist rejection of transcendence: there is no objective morality, objective truth, or objective beauty. Human existence is a zero-sum power game in which material interests predominate. 

While Malik did not contend directly with the modern streams of social Marxism and Critical Theory, he battled their predecessors vigorously on this very basis of nihilistic materialism. 

In one of his many searing rebukes of Communism, he writes: “The whole realm of being is reduced, ultimately, to matter, its one and only principle…The absoluteness and objectivity of the truth and of moral values are rejected. The complex factors that constitute history are oversimplified, for the entire course of history is held to be determined by the forces of economic production and distribution…” 

He continues: “On every count, this amazingly simple and consistent philosophy of Communism seems to be a violent negation of what the American heritage has throughout regarded as sacred and irreducible.”

While this critique was aimed at the USSR, it could just as easily apply to the Saidian thesis or his progeny in the Post-Colonial Studies classrooms of America’s great universities. 

These two initial differences between Malik and Said—the former upholding rational inquiry as a means to objective truth and absolute moral standards, and the latter rejecting both “truth” and “universal values” as covers for exploitation—come to a boiling point regarding the ideas of culpability and repentance. 

Unapologetically steeped in the Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian Cumulative Tradition, ⁠Malik held the individual, complete with will and intellect, in the utmost esteem as a moral agent. 

He could fail, repent, and change. He is responsible for his own moral destiny. 

Said viewed the world not through the lens of individuals but through the lens of group identity, where each group fatalistically plays out its role as “oppressed” or “oppressor” with no opportunity for redemption. 

In this view, the West can never break free from its alleged legacy of exploitation. It has no redeeming qualities. Genuine cooperation between East and West is impossible because there are no objective grounds on which to build bridges aside from the ancestral roles of “colonizer” and “colonized.” 

And, perhaps most insidious of all, there is no hope for redemption or repentance. There is no point in striving for virtue, or excellence, or personal responsibility. 

It doesn’t take long to see how this despairing worldview has metastasized in the West’s greatest halls of learning and power. Our universities apologize endlessly for the intellectual heritage that birthed the very halls of learning they sit in while proclaiming that no apology or course correction could ever atone. Our foreign policy officials often act as if all geopolitics is just a series of non-Western countries reacting to Western aggression in a loop with no exit. 

But there is a way out of the cycle. We could take Malik’s advice—advice from a man who witnessed the greatest calamities and evils of modern history, suffering abuse at the hand of an SS officer and watching the deadly rise of Communist totalitarianism, and still believed in redemption. Despite the West’s many failures, he believed in the great story animating it. 

The answer to the West’s failures is not to give up on its values or cheapen them with relativism but to earnestly try to live up to them. 

Because, in his view, the fate of the world depends on it. In his words, in the war against Western Civilization. “What is at stake is theory, truth, love, freedom, the universal, the highest destiny of the spirit. And if one is not deeply and personally committed to these things, one is really in a state of rebellion–whether or not one realizes it–against some of the dearest things in history: things without which history has no justification and life itself, I dare say, no meaning.”

About the Author
Liza Ashley is the Director of the Charles Malik Institute at the Philos Project. She regularly writes and speaks on topics related to religion, culture, and foreign policy.
Related Topics
Related Posts