The
manner in which we Iranians encounter Western culture and civilization exhibits
clearly morbid, indeed pathological traits. It is an encounter that is not
based on critical and historical understanding, but on a form of fascination,
passivity, and immediate, unfiltered acceptance. For this reason, I prefer —
unlike the writer and cultural critic Jalal Al-e Ahmad, who termed this
condition gharbzadegi (غربزدگی) [Occidentosis, Westoxification,
West-struckness] in the early 1960s — the term Euromania (غربشیفتگی gharbshiftegi). This term originates from the
specialized literature of psychiatry and more precisely refers to an excessive
attachment as well as a disturbance of judgment.
In
my view, Euromania in Iranian society can be characterized by three central
features:
- an excessive bonding,
- an uncritical admiration,
- a quasi-compulsive state
that
makes any epistemic distancing impossible.
More than two centuries have passed since our first encounters with the West,
yet these encounters have never led to a deep understanding of the internal
logic, the mechanisms of power, and the epistemological foundations of Western
civilization. The West was not perceived as a historically multifaceted,
contradictory totality, but predominantly as an ensemble of finished
achievements, institutions, and consumable models. Within this framework, the
internal connection between knowledge, power, institution, and subject in
Western modernity, in particular, remained unnoticed. Consequently, our
knowledge of the West largely exhausted itself in its manifestations and
external functional mechanisms and remained blind to a historical analysis of
the production of “truth,” “rationality,” and “normativity” within this
civilization. The West appeared in our thinking more as a neutral, universal
model than as a specific historical project that emerged in close intertwinement
with relations of domination, disciplinary processes, and the reproduction of
power.
Even
significant contemporary Iranian intellectuals, as well as religious and
secular reformist thinkers, were not spared from this epistemological
limitation. Their mostly relatively short stays in the West, often without deep
access to its philosophical, historical, and critical traditions, did not allow
for a structural and fundamental understanding of Western modernity. Therefore,
a significant part of their engagement with the West was based less on an
immanent critique of the modern tradition and more on selective and partly
idealized perceptions.
Unfortunately,
due to the avant-garde role of these thinkers in the Iranian intellectual
field, these interpretations themselves became a decisive factor in the spread
of Euromania among the urban middle classes. These strata gradually began to
regard the West no longer as an object of critical knowledge but as the
ultimate standard for rationality, progress, and even virtue. The result of
this attitude was the persistence of a condition in which Iranian society in
political, economic, and cultural spheres remained exposed to a form of soft as
well as hard Western hegemony.
This
destructive dominance manifested itself on the one hand in the submission of
state structures and in facilitating the exploitation of the country’s natural
and economic resources; on the other hand, it led, through the recruitment and
integration of Iranian intellectual and scientific elites into Western
institutions — in the context of migration and brain drain — to the
reproduction of epistemic inequality.
Furthermore,
the enforcement of Western lifestyles and thought patterns as the only
legitimate and rational mode of existence caused an alienation of the elites
from their own social and historical contexts and reinforced a structural
self-alienation.
The
consequence of this process was the inability of the elites to provide
effective answers to the real problems of society, as well as the repeated
failure of reform, development, and emancipation projects; because these
projects were mostly conceived based on a rationality and morality that did not
emerge from the historical and cultural context of Iranian society.
From
the perspective of the author — who has lived, studied, and worked at the
highest professional levels in one of the most central Western societies for
over four decades — the path to liberating Iran from its state of comprehensive
dependency and hegemony today lies neither in a simplistic rejection of the
West nor in its uncritical adoption, but in the conscious and critical
overcoming of the phenomenon of Euromania.
In
this context, the establishment and development of Western studies
(Occidentalism) as a critical and historical discipline of knowledge — in
tension and yet in correspondence with Orientalism — appears as an
indispensable necessity. Such research on the West can reveal the philosophical
and epistemological foundations as well as the internal mechanisms of modern
civilization, its relationship to power, ethics, rationality, and tradition,
and prevent the West from being reduced to a universal and alternative-free
model. Properly conceived, this knowledge can contribute to regaining epistemic
self-confidence, renewing collective self-certainty, and forming a
critical-indigenous rationality.
Iran’s
rise on the path to freedom, independence, strategic self-determination, and
sustainable development will not be possible without overcoming this collective
pathology of Euromania.
