The cosmopolitan ecologist

Recently on a whim I picked up my copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism. For this 25th anniversary edition of the book Said wrote a new Preface, with the events of September 11th and the Iraq war in his mind. The result seems to me today to be one of the best Prefaces I’ve ever read. Two passages in the first paragraph strike me as beautiful. First, he makes a self-mocking comment about “the necessary diminutions in expectations and pedagogic zeal that usually frame the road to seniority.” Second, he writes of the will to go on in the face of adversity not as “a matter of being optimistic, but rather of continuing to have faith in the ongoing and literately unending process of emancipation and enlightenment that… frames and gives direction to the intellectual vocation.”

This is a stirring declaration of the purpose of academia and intellectual life which I can say from experience is absent from many faculty (but not all, by any means). What he essentially does in the rest of the Preface is contrast this search for truth from the stories that sheer ideology would tell. His point is that the US approached its adventure in Iraq in much the same way the French and the British mentally thought about the “Orient, … that semi-mythical construct, which … has been made and remade countless times by power acting through an expedient form of knowledge to assert that this is the Orients nature, and we must deal with it accordingly.”

In the end, Said is making a last stand for the intellectual vocation as humanism, as a search for truth. And in essence he is admitting that in the US today we are losing that battle: “Reflection, debate, rational argument, moral principle based on a secular notion that human beings must create their own history have been replaced by abstract ideas that celebrate American or Western exceptionalism, denigrate the relevance of context, and regard other cultures with derisive contempt.” What I love about the essay is that Said is simultaneously attacking American exceptionalism and postmodernism as both being incompatible with the search for truth.

Posted by ecologist at 09:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This city is, above all else, clean and orderly and beautiful in its well-designed simplicity. I’ve had almost a week in Stockholm, and I’ve fallen in love with the brightly colored medieval homes lined up against the dark Baltic Sea. But what strikes an American about Stockholm is how well-run it seems to be, even down to the way passengers get on and off the metro trains. It’s almost a ritual: at each stop those remaining seated swing their knees towards the aisle to allow those who are departing to get out, and then everyone seated switches seats towards the window seats, to allow new riders who are coming on the train easy access to a seat. Sounds simple, but it is so far from the rudeness of the Boston subway.

As I write that sentence, I know it sounds clichéd, but it’s what really struck me first about Sweden. Some other observations: Sweden has the best bathrooms in the world. The custom is that instead of having little cubicles, each toilet is in a little room covered floor to ceiling with white tile. What’s even better, there’s a real door to the room that really locks, and each little room has its own small sink. Given that the rooms are so private, there’s a tendency for some places to just mark all the rooms as unisex, which makes perfect sense but it stills takes some getting used to for us Americans!

Another thing that is clear it the Swedish people’s love of the environment. Several conservations I had in cafes suggested that the average person here knows a great deal about global warming, for example, and believes the world should do a great deal to fight it. They also clearly love to get out and hike in their woods and gardens, albeit after often driving there in rather large and posh SUVs. I wonder why SUVs have grown so popular in Stockholm, while they are still exceedingly rare in Paris.

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Landing here in winter is like entering an odd no-man’s land, a netherworld of lost souls. White fog obscures the horizon in all directions. Every inch of the ground, save the runway, is covered in wet snow. One can’t glimpse any other buildings, not even a road leaving the compound. It is, in a pleasing, lonely way, like a terminal in purgatory. Inside the terminal is a modern, clean well-lighted place, with the floors occasionally made of wood, a nice touch that adds some warmth to the place. It’s funny that here they have a large, walk-in theatre, showing some truly beautiful pictures of Iceland in the summer. It’s almost as if they want to reassure us travelers that there really is a world out there, beyond the fog.

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