DIFFERENCE Dan Cohn-Sherbok 10.00am-4.30pm Diversity and Don Cupitt Friends House Division within Merryl Wyn Davies Euston Road Religious Responders London NW1 2BJ Traditions David Hart www.sofn.org.uk/london David Patterson sofn_london @ yahoo.co.uk Hotline: 020 8422 1591 —— Sof 58 Patti Whaley reviews Why do people hate America? by Merry! Wyn Davies and Ziauddin Sardar Icon Books, 2002, pp.231, £7.99, ISBN 1-84046-383-X In small-town America, the discount chainstore WalMart is the subject of universal loathing. Whenever WalMart proposes to move into town, the locals campaign against it; they know that Wal-Mart will undercut local business and pull local shoppers away from traditional town centres towards bland, generic strip-malls selling cheap, generic products. The local campaign always fails; Wal-Mart always wins. It moves in, and the locals despise it.
Why do people hate America?, by Merryl Wyn Davies and Ziauddin Sardar, portrays, with considerable detail and painful bluntness, how people around the world feel about the international Wal-Mart that is America. America is too big, too powerful, too cheap, and too omnipresent for local cultures to compete against it. Without, in many cases, doing anything illegal or coercive, simply by seeking out and exploiting new outlets for its own inexhaustible energy, it mows down everything in its path. Because America views itself as playing by a set of economic and political rules that are equally available to any other players, it has trouble seeing exactly where its fault lies. Hence, when it is attacked, it assumes that what its attackers resent is its success, not its methods.
Spelling out why this assumption is incorrect is the task undertaken by Ziauddin Sardar, writer and cultural critic, and Merryl Wyn Davies, a Welsh anthropologist and convert to Islam. They characterise their book as not "about" the events of September 11 but prompted by those events; it is an attempt to explain why America’s responses to September 11 — the immediate lapse into unthinking patriot-speak, the refusal to concede the possibility of legitimate complaint against America, and the blatant preference for a military solution — only act to confirm the worst suspicions and prejudices of America’s opponents.
Their analysis ranges from American military and economic policy, to American cultural imperialism, to the offensiveness of the underlying prejudices that America expresses, more or less consciously, towards other cultures.
They are particularly strong in discussions of American popular culture; whether in highlighting the stereotyping of foreigners latent in TV shows such as "The West Wing" and "Alias" and films such as "Rules of Engagement"; or in dissecting the more insidious and interwoven effects of the violence, cultural alienation and consumerism that characterise high-style American brands.
They are on rather shakier ground when they discuss the roots of American attitudes; their discussion of how European attitudes to Muslims, dating back to the Crusades, or towards American Indians, during the colonial period, are reflected in current American behaviour seems to suggest that past centuries of European guilt have now been transferred or projected on to America. This may well be a valid reflection of how non-Americans actually feel; the authors cite a poll, reported in the International Herald Tribune, in which the majority of non-Americans believe WHY DO PEOPLE HATE AMERICA? ¢ aWyn Davies that the US is responsible for the current gap between the rich and poor nations of the world. They do not explain whether "responsible" in this case means "caused it to happen", which would be difficult to substantiate, or “allows it to continue while having the power to change it", which is a justifiable charge. Thus they describe (probably correctly) how the world feels about America without clarifying whether they believe those feelings to be justified or rational; possibly they do, or possibly they feel that such analysis is not their purpose.
To illustrate: the reason Wal-Mart always succeeds, when it moves to town, is because the local people do end up shopping there. They shop there because the shampoo is 20 cents cheaper. They forsake their local chemist’s shop for the sake of 20 cents, and they despise themselves for it; and the vehemence of their hatred for Wal-Mart is in part a cover-up for their own self-disgust because they are complicit in Wal-Mart's success. Similarly, no one forces the French to eat McDonald’s hamburgers or watch American movies; the French loathing of Americans is not simply because Americans peddle revolting hamburgers in Paris, but that they succeed at it, and that the French are complicit in their success. By refusing to acknowledge the extent to which hatred is a projection of self-blame, the authors appear to buy into the easier path of ascribing all the blame to one party. An American might be able to read the book as an accurate description of how people feel about America, but only if they can set aside their own defensive reactions about whether those feelings are reasonable or not, and whether it is reasonable for America to accept responsibility for them.
In a later article on Orientalism in The New Internationalist, Merry! Wyn Davies noted that one of the unfortunate side effects of ‘Orientalist’ prejudice towards Muslims was that Muslims themselves were forced into a defensive position and were therefore unable to assess and discuss those parts of the Orientalist assessment which might be valid, and which Muslims might need to take seriously. Americans also need — now more than ever — to take seriously the criticisms directed at them, and Why do people hate America? has certainly captured those criticisms in vivid detail. The risk is that by appearing to endorse the tendency to blame America for all of the ills of the world, they may make it more difficult for Americans to listen.
Merryl Wyn Davies is also the author of ‘Barbaric Others: a Manifesto on Western Racism’ (1993), ‘Darwin and Fundamentalism’ (2000) and the forthcoming ‘Pocket Guide to Islam’. She will be a featured speaker at the London SoF Conference ‘A World of Difference’ on 29 March. Ziauddin Sardar’s books include ‘Postmodernism and the Other’ (1998), ‘Orientalism’ (1999) and ‘The A to Z of Postmodern Life’ (2002).
Merryl Wyn Davies is speaking at the London Conference advertised opposite.