Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit

mentality.
    Comfort is a largely passive experience. There is something dull about comfort. Pleasure tends to be more active, more exciting, and possibly more spiritual. The author Ernst Jünger, who fought in the Battle of Langemark and celebrated military heroism in his books, declared: “All pleasure lives through the mind, and every adventure through the closeness of death that hovers around it.” 5 Death provides the rush, the spiritual edge that separates pleasure from Komfortismus. Jünger, like some other German intellectuals of the early twentieth century, had a profound influence in Muslim circles. His book Über die Linie was translated by Al-e Ahmed, a prominent Iranian intellectual, in the 1960s. Al-e Ahmed coined the term “Westoxification” for the pernicious influence of Western ideas.
    He was a great admirer of Jünger. His friend Mahmud Human, who helped with the translation, said that after working on Jünger he “had seen one issue but with two eyes; had said one thing but with two languages.” 6
    To be comfortable, the traders and shopkeepers of the West need to make money. Indeed, according to Sombart, they are “crazy for money.” They also need security and peace. War is bad for business. In Sombart’s view, Komfortismus and personal gratification infect everything the merchant peoples do. English sports, for example, unlike the German cultivation of martial arts and drill, are typical of people who seek only physical well-being and spurious individual competition without higher aims. But it is the cowardly bourgeois habit of clinging to life, of not wishing to die for great ideals, of shying away from violent conflict and denying the tragic side of life, that seems most contemptible to Sombart, Oswald Spengler, Jünger, and other German thinkers of the period. Indeed, the merchant has no ideals. He is in every sense superficial. Merchants, whether they are petit bourgeois or busy men of the world, are interested in nothing but the satisfaction of individual desires, which “undermines the very basis of a higher moral sense of the world and the belief in ideals.” 7
    Liberal democracy is the political system most suited to merchant peoples. It is a competitive system in which different parties contend, and in which conflicts of interest can be solved only through negotiation and compromise. It is by definition unheroic, and thus, in the eyes of its detractors, despicably wishy-washy, mediocre, and corrupt. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote so admiringly about American democracy, saw the system’s limitations. He wrote:
    If you think it profitable to turn man’s intellectual and moral activity toward the necessities of physical life and use them to produce well-being, if you think that reason is more use to men than genius, if your object is not to create heroic virtues but rather tranquil habits . . . if in your view the main object of government is not to achieve the greatest strength or glory for the nation as a whole but to provide for every individual therein the utmost well-being . . . then it is good to make conditions equal and to establish a democratic government. 8
    Tocqueville did not deplore these limitations. He was indeed a convinced liberal. But he did, nonetheless, miss the grandeur of aristocracy and felt the tug of higher ideals. He noted, on his visit to America in the mid-nineteenth century, “the rarity, in a land where all are actively ambitious, of any lofty ambition.”
    Such lamentations can be heard on both poles of the political spectrum. One reason so many Western intellectuals supported Stalin and Mao, or indeed, to a somewhat lesser degree, Hitler and Mussolini, was their disgust with democratic mediocrity. A prominent supporter of Third World revolutionary causes, Arab terrorists, and other enemies of liberal democracy is the French lawyer Jacques Vergès. He has defended Algerian militants in court, as well as Klaus Barbie, the former SS police chief.