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David Brooks’ Farewell

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I finally found the time to read David Brooks’s farewell column.

His argument about the privatization of morality—and how it has burdened Americans with a task they could never reasonably be expected to shoulder alone—is spot on. I also share his frustration with an American education system that has lost its humanistic core, increasingly “driven by the belief that the prime purpose of education is to learn how to make money.” And he is surely right that every healthy society requires some shared conception of the sacred.

Where I am less convinced is his claim that “we are driven not only by selfish motivations but also by moral ones—the desire to pursue some good, the desire to cooperate, to care for one another and to belong.” Shared morality has to come from somewhere, but the “desire to pursue some good” cannot be it, because what counts as “good” for one individual may appear evil to another.

Historically, the West solved this problem through Christianity, by consecrating human life in the name of the one true God. Secular humanists once believed their ideology could replace God with the promise of endless progress. I suspect that many of them—Brooks included—are now discovering that without God, their worldview resembles a pyramid without a foundation, a shining city without police. Morality requires an enforcer. Why should one never endanger the life or property of another human being? Because they are God’s creation and therefore under His protection. Don’t believe that? Wait until you die. By contrast, the Chinese moral tradition suffers from the absence of such a supreme and eternal enforcer of morality, which helps explain why Confucianism has struggled to generate a similarly effective “shared conception of the sacred.”

That said, secular humanism did work for a time—thanks largely to consensus-forming institutions, of which The New York Times is a prime example. But as the internet and social media gradually rendered these institutions less relevant—and in some cases obsolete—the unraveling of shared morality began in earnest. Someone like Brooks must have found the transition from a powerful gatekeeper of moral consensus to a largely powerless bystander deeply unsettling. It may not be the only reason he chose to leave the Times, but it likely played a role.

Brooks writes that individuals and nations can still find new things to believe in through culture, and that he is leaving the Times to contribute to that project. He does not specify how. Whatever he attempts will be an uphill battle—and, in the end, unlikely to change much. Still, I admire his idealism, respect his craft, and wish him luck in what may well be the final great undertaking of an admirable life as a man of letters.

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可能性的艺术

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《可能性的艺术》出版于2022年，书的素材来自刘瑜教授为「看理想」平台制作的音频课程。刘教授专攻比较政治学，所以书的副标题叫“比较政治学三十讲”。这三十讲分成五大主题，大抵是除中国（含台湾香港）以外的世界各国政治案例分析。跟学院派政治学著作重理论架构和逻辑推演的风格不同，《可能性》采用的叙述方式是讲故事说道理，读起来有点像穿插了政治学原理的时评或观点。

刘教授有写畅销小说的笔力，加上多年博客大V的修炼，全书文字流畅，妙语连珠，尤其很多通俗又精当的比喻，有几分钱钟书的诙谐和洞察，却少了老先生的刻薄和恶搞。

比如她写，“移民容易，融合却很难，用一句流行歌曲的歌词来说，就是：相爱总是简单，相处太难。”虽然不小心暴露了年龄 （《心太软》是70后上大学时候的歌），但非常形象生动，引人共鸣。

又比如她解释“政体有限论”时说，制度就像足球赛的规则，“球赛好不好看，规则非常重要，但是最终而言，取决于球员会不会踢球。”简单又贴切的比喻，不知是不是她的发明，但非智者不能为。

还有“如果说自然科学的知识是在建造一座层层累加的高塔，社会科学的知识则更像是西西弗斯在推石头，推上去，掉下来，再推上去，再掉下来。或许有人认为西西弗斯的努力是一种徒劳，殊不知原地踏步或许正是对自由落体的抵抗。”第一次读像是人文学者的自嘲，但细品却大有深意。

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刘教授说比较政治学强调的是“比较的视野”，是把“所面对的政治现实当作一万种可能性之一来对待”的态度。我理解这门学科的目的是通过观察有着不同经济文化背景的政治体（polity）在不同历史时期的社会现实，比较异同，解析因果，揭示政治系统运行的一般规律，进而为某一特定政治体的制度完善、修正和改革提供指导。

那么读完《可能性》的读者，会对政治系统运行规律得出何种印象呢？换言之，刘教授所推崇的“政治理念“是什么呢？虽然刘教授极少在书中正面表达自己的观点，但细心的读者不难在字里行间读出她的好恶。如果非要给刘教授贴一个标签，我觉得她大概算是温和的自由派 。

刘教授认为“主权在民”是启蒙运动给人类带来的认知革命，也是近代世界政治史上所有革命之母，它“像一匹巨大的马，把世界从走了几千年的既有道路上拽出来，往另一个方向拉去。”

这个观点应该没有多少争议。凡有宪法的现代国家，主权在民大概总是写在最前面的。比如中国现行宪法的第二条就规定，“中华人民共和国的一切权利属于人民。”有争议的是何种制度安排才能实现主权在民。关于这一点，刘教授指出，世界民众普遍认为“程序性民主”是必要的，他们对“制度化的承认”之渴望不会被“一时一地的政治潮流终结”。 换句话说，天下大势，浩浩汤汤，民走向主制度化的脚步也许踉踉跄跄，过去20年甚至是进一退三，但大方向却不会变。

那什么是“程序性民主？” 刘教授三缄其口，但我认为她指的是欧美式多党代议选举制。她对程序性民主的渴望，有时甚至投射出跟她冷静的学者气质不大相容的理想主义色彩。印象比较深刻的是她提到韩国电影《1987》里一个情节：女孩劝大学生男友不要去参加争取民权的游行，男生回答，我也不想冒险，但是不去我的心太痛了。刘教授在此处点评：心太痛了四个字道破了启蒙观念的真正起源，那就是源于道德直觉的正义感。它有种令人敬畏的天真，

当所有政治的泥沙沉淀、所有理论的波涛平息、所有流行的趋势过去，最终，这种无与伦比的天真还是会从水底浮现。它熠熠的光芒，还是会诱惑你向它伸出手去。

是不是很美很纯粹？

因此，刘教授当是自由派无疑。

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但另一方面，刘教授也承认民主不能包治百病，一人一票无关成败。她强调 ，一个稳定成熟的民主政体，首先要有强大的国家机器做后盾；没有国家对外保障领土安全，对内维护社会秩序、提供基本服务，一切都无从谈起。其次，它还要保证公民的基本权利—包括财产权以及人身、言论、结社等自由—不受“多数人暴政”的侵害。这跟福山（注1）的现代政体三要素—国家（state），法治（rule of law）和人民的政府（accountable government）—本质是一回事。国家拥有公权，而法治保护私权不受公权侵犯，也就是自由之民主（liberal democracy）里那个“自由”。某种意义上，法治远比民主重要。失去了法治的保护，民主多半沦为威权的遮羞布，不过是以投票为主旋律的“你方唱罢我登场”罢了。

刘教授认可民主文化对制度选择的影响。什么是民主文化？我觉得大概跟秦晖老师经常批判的文化基因差不多。比如书中提到的社会自发结社的习性（社会资本理论），个体自主性和选择的文化（后现代文化论）等等。刘教授把民主文化总结为：“既是一种‘天下兴亡，匹夫有责’的参与精神，也是一种对规则的服从精神，还是一种‘允许专业之人办专业之事’的政治节制感。”很精当很到位。当然，她并非文化决定论者。相反，她举了日本和德国在二战后从军国主义快速转型为现代民主国家的例子，说明在“在一个大发展和全球化的时代，它【民主文化】甚至可能非常快速地变迁”。

刘教授也反对经济发展自然触发民主转型的所谓“现代化理论”。她认为民主的发端依赖于制度缝隙提供的机会。她把这比喻为，“有缝隙的地方青草才能生长，铁板之中无法成长出生命。”因此，如果民主政体是一粒种子，它首先需要有稳固的地基（国家机器），有合适的土壤（民主文化），还要有生长的空间（政治机会），才能破壳而出，长成参天大树。这么看起来，民主政体很是金贵，远非一纸政令、一部宪法、一次大选就可以锻造成功。而且，“真正的政治变革不可能仅靠自上而下的力量推动，它必须同时自下而上地生长。”

她写道，

在人们学会宽容、学会耐心、学会同情性理解、学会从各种集体主义的轮椅中站起来迈出个体的步伐之前，没有什么政治可以成为改造生活的魔法棒。

这似乎可以看作是她对政改在当前中国发生几率的判断。

刘教授反感当下西方左派对文化多样性的盲目乐观，以及建立在这种意识形态上的经济全球化主张和过度宽松的移民政策。她反对把左右之争（在美国语境下，即进步与保守之争）视为正邪之争，呼吁把讨论的前提定为“避免妖魔化任何一方。”她提醒激进者，

物极必反是个朴素的道理，却包含无穷的智慧。资本主义需要从“丛林资本主义”中拯救自身，宗教信仰需要从“原教旨主义”中拯救自身，爱国主义需要从“沙文主义”中拯救自身，民主，也同样需要从过度的政治激情中拯救自身。

总而言之，刘教授是个走中庸之道的温和自由派。从她对全球化、美国贫富差距问题，以及西方“自由霸权”的态度看，她在美国大概得被划成右派，至少也是中间偏右派（center right liberal）。

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刘教授在书的结尾专门提到，她对于坊间喜欢给她贴上“政治学常识的普及者”这个标签感觉 “不适”， 原因是“政治学几乎没有常识。”

所谓“政治没有常识”，我理解是指那些被外行当作是政治学常识的东西—比如曾经风靡一时的现代化理论、历史终结论、文明冲突论等等—往往被现实颠覆，从常识退化为谬论。所以她感慨研究政治的人像希腊神话里的西西弗斯，煞有介事，来回折腾，到头来发现自己竟是原地踏步，做的都是无用功。专业人士穷其一生都搞不清楚的事，又怎能说是常识？“政治没有常识”这个判断又与本书的主题密切相关：政治制度的走向受诸多因素制约影响，加上每个因素自身的不确定性，合在一起形成一个有万种可能的混沌系统。社会发展或者退化的过程就是人在这几乎无限的可能性中不断探索、前进、挫败、倒退的过程。

这个解释虽也言之成理，但据此就推出政治学没有常识，似乎还是矫枉过正了。 比如贯穿全书的，关于自由之民主（liberal democracy）和非自由之民主（illiberal democracy）的差异、政体三要素、国家形成机制的种种讨论， 虽然不能跟牛顿的苹果、薛定谔的猫那样的物理铁律相提并论，但也为理解古今中外的政治现象提供了大体上客观可靠的参照系，说是常识似乎也不为过。

我也不太理解刘教授为什么反感“常识传播者”这张标签。能写艰深难懂的政治学论文的学者不在少数，但有能力和意愿用“非学术化的语言和读者交流”并且做得像刘教授这么成功的有几个呢？ 在我看来，她倒是应该把这张标签像荣誉奖章一样挂在胸前展示，而不是提出抗议。

当然， 纯从学习思考的角度看，《可能性》确实更适合入门级读者。对那些比较了解西方政治经济学的读者来说，此书在思想上的深度和新意有些不足。但发表令人眼前一亮的洞见和为大众传播常识这两种需求之间，权衡很难，功力再深的作者大概也做不到两面取巧。

《可能性》覆盖的内容庞杂，而结构却相对松散，不同部分之间缺乏清晰的逻辑线关联。“政治有无穷的可能性“本身是个不错的主题，但似乎撑不起这么个面面俱到的写作提纲。所以到最后，读者留下的主要印象也许是好政治很难很复杂很难搞，需要全体民众一起努力，而且搞好了也未必就国富民强。但这是刘教授想要的效果吗？

松散的结构影响阅读体验。对习惯理工科思维的人来说，这个问题带来的困扰也许更明显。另外，书中阐述某个政治现象时，常不加注脚或批判地引用某个学者的观点，给人的印象似乎这是某种定论（例子见最后一节）。问题是政治学的结论或多或少带有价值判读，甚至道德判断，某个学者的观点往往受自身立场、背景甚至动机影响。因此，读不到反面观点的时候，一个习惯思辨的读者也许会条件反射般地对观点本身产生怀疑。

大概因为上述两点原因，我读《可能性》的时候常试图在脑子里搭建结构、厘清逻辑和寻找反方观点，这增加了大脑负荷，读起来感觉比较累。当然，这可能是我自己的问题。一个大脑完全处于放松状态的读者，放心跟着作家的笔在比较政治学中游弋，也许能吸收更多营养，享受更多精彩。

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最后，刘教授对西方民主制度，尤其是美国及其“自由霸权”似乎有过度美化的倾向，这大概跟她在海外求学和工作经历有关。举几个印象比较深的例子。

刘教授引用新保守主义代表人物Robert Kagen的观点来宣扬“美国霸权“在二战后对在世界范围内推广自由民主价值的关键作用。她写道，“霸权国家当然历史上常常有，自由国家在当今也不少见，但是信奉自由主义的国家同时是霸权国家，是历史上非常难得的组合。” 虽然她也承认美国并不是雷锋，但却坚持美国的利益最大化跟自由主义的扩张是一致的：“自由主义对于美国来说，既是理念，也是利益。”

事实是这样吗？至少不完全是。

如果刘教授顺便也引用一下批判新保守主义的作者（比如Noam Chomsky, Jeff Sacks等），读者就能看到自由霸权的另外一面。全世界的独裁者们很清楚，只要一直坚持做符合“美国国家利益”的事情，自由主义价值的狼牙棒就落不到他们头上，比如肢解华盛顿邮报记者的沙特储君，侵略东帝汶的印尼总统苏哈托，70年代伊斯兰革命前的伊朗王室。而民选出来的领导人，如果胆敢践踏“美国国家利益”，随时可以变成“自由世界”的敌人，比如伊朗的Mohammad Mossadeg，智利的Salvador Allende以及危地马拉的Jacobo Arbenz等等。Chomsky （注2）写到，仅在二战后的半个世纪里，美国在全世界范围内就实施了80次干扰他国民主选举的行动。也许刘教授认为民选不能跟自由划等号。但肆无忌惮地干扰他国人民的选择，至少违背了联合国宪章中民族自决的原则，跟自由主义似乎背道而驰。

诸多证据表明，自由主义扩张和美国国家利益并不总是一致，而当这两者矛盾的时候，自由世界的领袖几乎是不假思索地选择后者。遗憾的是，《可能性》在赞扬“自由霸权“之余，对这个明显的事实似乎视而不见。

又比如，刘教授在书中痛批萨达姆.侯赛因发动两次战争，使用化学武器的恶行。并且，

1979年萨达姆上台时，伊拉克的人均GDP接近3000美元，但是2004年萨达姆倒台时，其人均GDP不到1500美元。顺便说一句，伊拉克现在的人均GDP是6000美元，显著高于萨达姆时代。人们倾向于因为当下的悲惨而美化过去，但是，伊拉克的过去并不美好，可以说血泪斑斑。

这似乎是在为美国2002年发动侵略战争推翻萨达姆政权做温和的辩护。萨达姆确是独夫民贼不假，尤其对伊朗和自己的民众使用化学武器一事，罪行昭彰，天理不容。但刘教授没提的是，美国在上世纪八十年代两伊战争中一直公开支持萨达姆，并且对他滥用化学武器置若罔闻。更有甚者，美国还同时暗中卖武器给伊朗，在萨达姆背后捅刀子。刘教授说萨达姆倒台的时候伊拉克人比20年前穷了一倍，可她似乎忘了，这很大程度上是美国在第一次海湾战争以后对伊拉克实施各种严厉制裁造成的。斯坦福学者Lisa Blaydes（注3）说这些制裁让伊拉克一夜之间回到工业化之前的发展水平 。《柳叶刀》杂志估计那些年有50万伊拉克儿童死于制裁造成的营养不良和缺衣少药 （注4）。萨达姆治下的伊拉克是不美好，但跟侵略战争在伊拉克造成的一连串人道主义浩劫比起来，也未必就更差。

再比如，刘教授用了不小的篇幅来说明美国近年来贫富差距增大、社会流动性降低的问题远没有媒体报道的严重。她的总结呈词是：“阶级战争叙事并不坚固，美国的穷人没有那么仇恨富人，富人也没有那么压制穷人。” 她认为真正的问题在于“‘阶级斗争的话语‘经过传播、扩散构成‘自我实现的预期’。”  简而言之，是媒体通过“诠释现实”，夸大贫富差距，有意无意地想把“不平等状况从一座死火山变成一座活火山。”客观地说，这个调子跟美国保守派对主流媒体的敌视颇有几分神似。为了证明这个结论， 刘教授引用了若干研究结果，其中包括经济学家Raj Chetty等 在2014年发表的文章（注5）。关于这篇文章的主要结果，刘教授写道，

哈佛大学教授哈吉·柴提（Raj Chetty）的研究就意外地发现，虽然美国在过去四五十年经济不平等明显上升，阶层流动性却并没有像很多人认为的那样下降，甚至还略有上升。底部1/5的人口，如果生于1971年，成为顶部1/5的概率是8.4%，但如果生于1986年，这个概率反而上升为9%。

但上述分析还是犯了选择性取证的毛病。首先，它对经济不平等的后果避而不谈。Chetty  的研究同时发现，虽然以百分位衡量的代际流动性（rank-based mobility）相对稳定，但收入不平等增加显著。后果就像是拉大了社会流动性梯子每一格的间距。由于爬梯子这个游戏本身对应的经济回报和风险增大，“投胎效应“（birth lottery）加剧了。其次，Chetty的后续研究发现绝对流动性在美国下降了：上世纪四十年代出生的美国孩子中，90%比他们的父母收入更高；到了八十年代，这个数字降到了50% （注 6）。最后，与西欧和北欧国家横向比较，美国的社会流动性偏低（注7）而代际收入弹性（intergenerational income elasticity）偏大（意味着父母收入差异有更大比例“传递”到下一代, 注8）。前几天Michael Green的“斩杀线”（注9）一文在网上引发大讨论，也从一个侧面说明经济不平等引起的美国中下层社会不满情绪有真实的现实基础，并不全是媒体炒作的结果。这里无意对社会流动性做深入讨论（本人也是外行），多写几句只是想说明《可能性》在涉及到美国社会这些复杂的经济政治现象时流露出的“文过饰非”的倾向。

立场先行对任何持有立场的作者都难免，但是严谨的作者应该尽量让读者了解硬币的另一面。正如John Stuart Mill（注10）所言，“凡只知己方之说者，于其事所知无多 (he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that) 。”在大量涉及美国的问题上，选择性地忽略反方观点，给全书的信度蒙上了一层阴影，给批评者（尤其那些认为“一切责任都在美方”的粉红网友）留下“立场不中立”的口实，个人以为是本书最大的缺陷。

聂宇

2026年元旦

Notes:

  1. Fukuyama, F., 2011. The origins of political order: From prehuman times to the French Revolution. Profile books.
  2. Chomsky, N. and Robinson, N.J., 2025. The myth of American idealism: How US foreign policy endangers the world. Penguin Group.
  3. Blaydes, L., 2018. State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Princeton University Press.
  4. Frankopan, P., 2017. The silk roads: A new history of the world. Vintage.
  5. Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Kline, P., Saez, E. and Turner, N., 2014. Is the United States still a land of opportunity? Recent trends in intergenerational mobility. American economic review, 104(5), pp.141-147.
  6. https://news.yale.edu/2025/02/20/tracking-decline-social-mobility-us-and-how-reverse-trend。
  7. 从底部1/5的人口成为顶部1/5的概率，丹麦比美国高了几乎一倍，见https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/13/american-dream-broken-upward-mobility-us
  8. Corak, M., 2013. Income inequality, equality of opportunity, and intergenerational mobility. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27(3), pp.79-102.
  9. https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie.
  10. Mill, J.S. On liberty.
Book review, English writing

The Silk Roads

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The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan is an ambitious attempt to rewrite world history through the vantage point of the Middle East—the vast region stretching between the Mediterranean and the Himalayas. Although organized thematically, the book follows a loose chronological order, beginning roughly three millennia ago and concluding with the West’s fateful stumble in Iraq and Afghanistan at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Despite its title, the book is not primarily about the Silk Road that linked the great Chinese empires of the Han and Tang to the Mediterranean. China, in fact, is not featured prominently at all. Instead, Frankopan uses “Silk Roads” as a metaphor for the Middle East’s historical function as a place of origin, destination, and transshipment for goods, technologies, and ideas. His stated goal is to help readers—especially in the West—grasp “the bigger picture, the wider themes and the larger patterns playing out in the region,” so that they may learn to properly approach the Silk Roads that, in his view, “are rising up once more.”

Before reading The Silk Roads, my own exposure to Middle Eastern history was limited. Beyond scattered recollections from school—the Code of Hammurabi, the Kingdom of Babylon (and its legendary gardens), and the ancient Persian empires—I had only read a handful of works that touch directly on this part of the world. Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People traces Jewish history through the rise and fall of the region’s dominant powers in antiquity, from the Assyrians and Babylonians to the Persians, Greeks, and Romans. Dan Jones’s Crusaders covers the intertwined histories of Palestine, Byzantium, and Egypt from the late eleventh to the fourteenth century. Tamim Ansary’s The Game Without Rules recounts the modern history of Afghanistan since the onset of the Russo-British rivalry known as the Great Game. Frankopan’s book offers a broader panorama and a more coherent narrative, presented through a distinctly Asia-centric lens that I found refreshing.

Broad themes

Anyone who reads the book from beginning to end, I suspect, will come away with several unmistakable takeaways.

Theme I

The Middle East was the birthplace of humanity’s earliest civilizations—home to magnificent empires that rose and fell in cycles, and a crossroads where different cultures and peoples interacted, clashed, merged, and evolved. For much of recorded history, it was the Middle East—not Europe or East Asia—that occupied center stage. Even the Greek and Roman worlds, often celebrated as the foundation of “Western civilization,” were deeply intertwined with this region. Alexander’s greatest achievements unfolded in the East, where his successors established Hellenistic kingdoms that flourished long after his death. Asia Minor, the Near East, and North Africa formed indispensable parts of the Roman Empire, which was locked in centuries-long rivalry with successive Persian empires—polities that, in fact, outlasted the Western Roman Empire itself.

Theme II

The Middle East not only inherited and preserved much of the world’s knowledge from late antiquity but also expanded it in remarkable ways—from science and mathematics to philosophy, medicine, and literature—at a time when most of Europe lived in the dust of the Middle Ages. It is widely acknowledged that the European Renaissance began in earnest when scholars in twelfth-century Europe gained access to classical Greek and Roman works through Arabic translations. From the Islamic world,  Europeans also learned papermaking—a Chinese invention—and the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, which proved essential for the development of modern mathematics.

Frankopan argues that the term “Renaissance” is a misleading self-aggrandizement, because it implies a rebirth of a heritage that medieval Europeans had directly inherited. In truth, he maintains, the peoples inhabiting most of Western Europe at the time stood largely on the periphery of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. As he puts it, “this was no rebirth. Rather, it was a Naissance – a birth.”

Theme III

The third—and perhaps the most important—theme is the long and tangled story of Western control of the Middle East, a struggle whose devastating consequences are still very much alive today.

Frankopan begins with the Great Game between the British and Russian Empires in the nineteenth century, each seeking to project power into Central Asia, especially Afghanistan and Iran. That long geopolitical contest subsided only when Germany’s expanding influence in the Middle East spooked Britain into seeking rapprochement with Russia. Their reconciliation, Frankopan suggests, helped set the stage for World War I and contributed to the eventual unraveling of European imperial dominance.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Britain discovered oil in Iran and secured a concession from the Shah—the origin of what would later become British Petroleum—under which the British received the lion’s share of the revenues. After World War I, Britain and France quickly moved to carve up and swallow the carcass of the Ottoman Empire. By then, oil had become the lifeblood indispensable to the war machines and treasuries of empires weakened by the war. In Frankopan’s account, oil was the central reason Britain—and later the United States—sought to maintain such a tight grip over the Middle East in general, and Iran in particular.

This strategic impulse persisted after World War II, even as colonial structures crumbled worldwide. The British and Americans orchestrated the 1953 coup against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, replacing him with a regime that was authoritarian, corrupt, oppressive, and heavily dependent on Western support. For the next quarter-century, the U.S. propped up the Shah’s government with billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and even nuclear technology, only to see it toppled by a revolution that installed an openly anti-Western Islamic government. Americans now suddenly realized that they had to extinguish a fire called Iran’s nuclear ambition—a fire, ironically, ignited by themselves only years earlier.

That was not the only fire the U.S. had to put out. The 1979 Iranian Revolution was followed by a cascade of violent and destabilizing events: the Iran–Iraq War, which the U.S. gleefully encouraged and in which it ostensibly sided with its later archenemy Saddam Hussein; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which ended with the jihadist fighters funded by CIA rising to power; the Gulf War, said to have been triggered in part by American “strategic ambiguity”; the 9/11 attacks, masterminded by a Saudi whose jihad in Afghanistan the U.S. had aided and abetted; and finally the U.S.-led “War on Terror”—a crusade, as one American president put it—which concluded only recently with a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Frankopan is right to portray the story as a century-long chain of interventions, rivalries, conspiracies, misjudgments, malpractices, and unintended consequences—a haunting geopolitical hot mess with no resolution in sight.

Notable anecdotes

Beyond these broad themes, The Silk Roads offers many fascinating historical anecdotes that were new to me. Given the space, let me briefly discuss three that were especially memorable.

Demise of the Ming Dynasty

The first concerns the book’s passing remark about how early globalization inadvertently helped seal the doom of the Ming Dynasty. I had thought I understood the Ming collapse reasonably well, having read widely on the subject. In my mind, the key factors included: a series of crop failures and ensuing famines caused by the Little Ice Age; widespread rebellions fueled by hunger and desperation; an oversized, inefficient, and deeply corrupt bureaucracy presided over by incompetent rulers; and finally the meteoric rise of a nomadic military power in the north.

What Frankopan emphasizes, however, is the crucial role of global silver flows. Because the Ming government levied taxes in silver, the metal became the de facto currency. China’s appetite for silver depressed the relative price of its own goods, producing a massive trade surplus—much as China today runs persistent surpluses with the U.S. dollar functioning as silver once did. The crucial difference, of course, is that the Ming state lacked anything resembling a central bank and therefore had no means to manage the inflationary pressures that came with sustained inflows of foreign currency.   As a result, the ensuing inflation gradually eroded the real value of tax revenues, helping to explain why a state with a tax base nearly two orders of magnitude larger than its rivals appeared to “run out of money” first.

The true disaster came when, almost simultaneously, silver production fell in the Americas, Japan restricted exports, and European powers hoarded silver for their own wars. Beginning in the 1630s, China confronted an unprecedented silver shortage that triggered deflation, tax defaults, and widespread fiscal collapse. The last emperor of the Ming Dynasty, Chongzhen, hanged himself in Beijing in 1644.

Hitler’s popularity in the Middle East

Another fact that had never truly registered with me is the degree of popularity Hitler enjoyed among segments of the Islamic world during World War II. Strategically, many former subjects of the Ottoman Empire saw Germany as a counterforce to the British and French, who had never shown much respect for their rights or aspirations. Ideologically, some leading Islamic figures embraced the kind of conspiratorial antisemitism that resonated with Nazi propaganda. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the highest religious authority for Sunni Muslims in Palestine and an early Palestinian nationalist, not only encouraged Arabs to support Germany’s war effort but also praised the Holocaust and urged its extension to the Middle East.

Persians, meanwhile, found a different point of connection with Nazi Germany in what they believed was their shared “Aryan” heritage—mistaking a linguistic term (arya, meaning “noble” in Sanskrit and Old Persian) for a racial category. In reality, Nazi racial theorists never considered Persians part of the so-called Aryan master race. Yet in the 1930s, Iran launched a sweeping cultural campaign to “purify” its language and customs, even renaming the country “Iran” as a nod to a semi-mythical Indo-Iranian past. The Shah’s flirtation with Germany eventually grew intolerable to both Britain and the Soviet Union, prompting a joint invasion in 1941 that dethroned the king and installed his son.

With this context, I suddenly understood why Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin chose to meet in Tehran in 1943: Iran was already under Allied occupation by then, making Tehran, in effect, just another piece of real estate firmly in Allied hands.

America’s double dealing in the Iran–Iraq War

Frankopan’s account of the Iran–Iraq War exposes an arrogance and cynicism in American policy that was genuinely shocking to me—and I thought I already had my fair share of exposure to the darker side of Americanism.

I had known vaguely that the U.S. “tilted” toward Iraq, but I never realized the extent to which it was also undermining its own ally. On one side, Washington supplied Iraq with intelligence, satellite imagery, and diplomatic cover, even turning a blind eye to Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against his own people. On the other side, the U.S. was secretly shipping arms to Iran in order to fund anti-communist rebels in Central America—behind the back of its presumed ally and behind the back of Congress. The logic, I suppose, was to keep the region in a delicate balance that maximized American interests by ensuring that neither Iran nor Iraq could win decisively. As Henry Kissinger famously quipped, “It’s a pity they can’t both lose.” Washington’s strategists seemed to have taken his remark to heart.

The result was a brutal war prolonged unnecessarily, with immense human suffering and a legacy of mistrust and animosity that would soon fuel further conflagrations—and that continues to shape America’s relationship with the region to this day. This embarrassing episode in U.S. foreign policy culminated in the elegant word salad President Reagan served the American public when denying prior knowledge of the scheme in a televised address:

“A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me otherwise.”

In other words, he lied—even if, as he insisted, he did not mean to.

Critique

An engaging and capable writer, Peter Frankopan is a Cambridge-trained historian and currently a research fellow at Oxford. Given this pedigree, The Silk Roads contains a surprising number of factual errors and interpretive overreaches.  There are claims that even a lay reader like me can spot at first glance.  I begin with a few of the more striking ones.

Factual errors

Frankopan asserts that the Seljuks—the archenemy of the First Crusade—were “originally Christian or perhaps even Jewish.” His evidence? The dynasty’s founder supposedly gave his sons names like “Michael, Israel, Moses, and Jonah.” This is an incredibly thin basis on which to build so sweeping a claim.

It is true that many scholars believe the Khazars, a Turkic kingdom between the Black Sea and the Caspian, converted to Judaism in the ninth century. Perhaps Frankopan imagines that the Seljuks were evangelized by the same “merchants who had introduced Judaism to the Khazars.” But I could find no credible scholarship linking the Seljuk ruling clan to either Christian or Jewish ancestry, nor any historical connection between the Seljuks and the Jewish Khazars. The anecdote serves little purpose beyond startling the reader—it may briefly prevent him from falling asleep but only at the cost of the author’s credibility.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, Frankopan holds an unusually positive view of the Mongols. At one point he writes that “fundamental to European expansion was the stability that the Mongols provided across the whole of Asia.” This vastly overstates the longevity and geographic reach of the so-called Pax Mongolica, which lasted barely a century and had long vanished by the time European overseas expansion began to gather steam around 1500. Here, Frankopan seems so eager to overturn old stereotypes that he slips into mythmaking in the opposite direction.

He also makes at least two significant errors regarding Hitler’s relationship with the Middle East.  He writes that Hitler “championed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine for the best part of two decades.” But Hitler never supported Jewish sovereignty. While the Nazis did, in the 1930s, facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine through the Haavara Agreement, this was purely a mechanism of expulsion—and by the late 1930s, Nazi policy had shifted decisively against allowing Jewish refuge anywhere, including Palestine. Frankopan also claims that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem referred to Hitler as “al-Ḥajj Muḥammad Hitler,” implying that he sought to elevate the Führer to a sacred position within an Islamic framework. Yet there is, to the best of my knowledge, zero evidence that the Mufti—antisemitic as he undeniably was—ever granted Hitler such a title.

Frankopan also alleges that the United States deliberately set a trap for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, citing as evidence Ambassador April Glaspie’s remark to Saddam: “Secretary [of State James] Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.” Did the U.S. intentionally lure Iraq into attacking Kuwait in order to secure a casus belli? That sounds more like a conspiracy theory than a conclusion supported by mainstream scholarship. Glaspie’s words were indeed ambiguous—but in the same meeting she also warned, “We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods short of force,” a line Frankopan conveniently omits.   To be sure, U.S. diplomacy in the lead-up to the Gulf War left much to be desired. But this is no excuse for a serious historian to stretch the historical record into conspiratorial territory.

Overcorrection

The most problematic aspect of the book, however, is its explanation for Western dominance over the past few centuries. Frankopan suggests that economic growth was slower in Islamic societies because they generally distributed wealth more evenly than their European counterparts, “largely thanks to very detailed instructions set out in the Qurʾān about legacies.” He marvels that a Muslim woman was “much better looked after than her European peer,” and argues that this generosity allowed wealth to remain within families and circulate more broadly.  Since wealth was therefore “redistributed and recirculated more widely,” he reasons, “the gap between rich and poor was never as acute as it became in Europe”—though he concedes this egalitarian structure inhibited capital accumulation over generations.

Even if one grants that Islamic societies were more economically egalitarian, it hardly follows that economic equality is an intrinsic good or that inequality is an adequate explanation for the West’s eventual ascendancy. Economic inequality may have created certain incentives, but it was hardly the primary driver of sustained growth. A host of other ideas—self-government, secure property rights, the rule of law, freedom of speech and inquiry, the separation of church and state, and above all the systematic pursuit of useful knowledge—played equally, if not more, decisive roles in fostering what Joel Mokyr calls a “culture of growth.” These institutional and intellectual developments are, in large part, contributions of the Western canon to humanity—a fact conspicuously missing in Frankopan’s polemic.

Frankopan also attributes the rise of the West to “Europe’s distinctive character as more aggressive, more unstable and less peace-minded than other parts of the world.” While he concedes that aggression existed elsewhere, he insists that “the frequency and rhythm of warfare was different in Europe,” where brutal and relentless conflicts unfolded without respite. Frankopan appears to forget that the “other parts of the world”—including China and the Middle East—experienced repeated patterns of state collapse, mass famine, and dynastic warfare of staggering scale. Chinese dynastic transitions, in particular, were exceptionally brutal and destructive. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker ranks historical atrocities by estimated death tolls adjusted to the mid-20th-century world population. Among the top ten are the An Lushan Revolt (ranked first), the Mongol conquests (second)—whose barbarism Frankopan dismisses as “wide of the mark”, the Middle Eastern slave trade (third), the fall of the Ming Dynasty (fourth), and the Taiping Rebellion (tenth). It is difficult to square these facts with the notion that Europeans were uniquely bloodthirsty or barbaric among Homo sapiens.

To Frankopan, the “natural state of man” described by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan is solid evidence that pre-civilization Europeans lived in a perpetual state of violence—and, remarkably, that this characterization applied only to Europeans, not to other humans. He thus rejects the standard interpretation that Hobbes had identified something universal about the human condition; instead, Frankopan treats Hobbes’s account as something uniquely and inherently European. A credulous reader could easily infer that Europe’s violent expansion was “caused” by immutable traits that set Europeans apart from the rest of humanity—an “epiphany” that is as naïve as it is misleading and, frankly, dangerous.

Aside from the absurdity of his essentialist approach to history, Frankopan also fails to acknowledge that many European thinkers, including Rousseau and Hume, disagreed with Hobbes’s bleak view of human nature. Rousseau famously wrote that “man is born free,” though he is “in chains” everywhere—presumably in Asia and the Middle East no less than in Europe. If one follows Frankopan’s logic, should we therefore take Rousseau’s belief in innate human goodness as proof that Europeans are naturally virtuous?

Ultimately, Frankopan denies that Europe ever developed a superior civilization, even though its armies and merchants swept across the globe and, at one point, controlled the vast majority of the earth’s landmass. He writes:

“Although Europeans might have thought they were discovering primitive civilisations and that this was why they could dominate them, the truth was that it was the relentless advances in weapons, warfare and tactics that laid the basis for the success of the West.”

No one would deny the importance of military innovation, but Frankopan’s framing implies that militarism alone was sufficient to produce “advances in weapons, warfare, and tactics.” If that were true, Sparta would have developed nuclear weapons thousands of years ago.

European dominance on the battlefield was made possible not only by scientific and technological advances that directly shaped weaponry, training, and logistics, but also by efficient governance, stable social institutions, and sustained economic growth on a scale unprecedented in human history. The Europeans were not simply better at making guns and bombs; they were better at building and maintaining the institutional and intellectual foundations that secured military successes.

To be sure, material superiority does not grant Europeans any moral right to enslave, colonize, or invade—nor is Frankopan making a moral argument, which I am not disputing here. In fact, I am sympathetic to the dilemma he faces. To illuminate the Middle East’s role in the world—past, present, and future—he must first account for the region’s long and painful decline from its historical heights. As a deliberate historiographical corrective, Frankopan chooses to elevate the Middle East by pushing back against the hegemonic narrative of the Western canon.

Unfortunately, in his eagerness to rebalance the story, he goes too far.

Marco Nie,  November 30th, 2025

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Michel Foucault vs. Yoshua Benjio

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I read a story today about Yoshua Bengio, one of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence and a key figure behind deep learning. He has just become the first living person whose Google Scholar citations have surpassed one million. I checked his page myself, and indeed, his total has reached over 1.01 million citations as of today.

What truly surprised me, though, was learning that Michel Foucault—the French philosopher best known for his influence on postcolonial and critical theory—also has well over one million citations. I have several of his books on my shelf but have never quite found the motivation to read them. I recently finished Orientalism by Edward Said, whose name often appears alongside Foucault’s, and had planned to take a break from such dense works. But this new discovery has rekindled my curiosity—perhaps it’s time I finally read some of Foucault’s most cited work such as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

Recent research

Can LLMs help align transportation policy making?

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Transportation policy shapes how cities and regions grow, move, and thrive. Yet even the most carefully modeled policies can falter when they meet public opinion. Traditional approaches rely on mathematical optimization to identify “best” solutions under formal objectives and constraints—but these models often rest on rigid assumptions about behaviors and preferences. The result is a persistent gap between policies that look good on paper and those that communities actually support.

Our new study explores whether large language models (LLMs)—the same AI systems that power tools like ChatGPT—can help bridge that gap. LLMs are trained on vast troves of human language, giving them a rich contextual understanding of social values, trade-offs, and reasoning. Could such models serve as a new kind of decision-support tool, helping policymakers anticipate public preferences before a policy is implemented?

To test this idea, we built a multi-agent voting framework in which autonomous LLM “citizens” represent diverse communities within a large city. These agents participate in simulated referendums over transit policies involving three levers: sales taxes, transit fares, and driver fees such as congestion charges. Their choices are compared against the benchmarks of a standard travel demand model grounded in transportation economics.

The results are intriguing. Across cities and models, the LLM-based referendums produced collective preferences that broadly align with model-based predictions—except that the AI “voters” show a stronger aversion to taxes. GPT-4o agents tended to vote more consistently and decisively, while Claude-3.5 agents were more nuanced, yet both converged on similar priorities. Interestingly, their choices also shifted between cities: in Houston, for instance, GPT-4o agents favored lower taxes and higher driver fees than in Chicago.

These findings suggest that LLMs can mimic public reasoning in meaningful ways—offering policymakers a new tool to explore how communities might respond to complex, real-world trade-offs.

You may download a preprint here.

Comment, English writing

Less is more

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Less is more: Academic publishing needs ‘radical change,’ Cambridge press report concludes 

An interesting article about the challenges facing the academic publishing enterprise.  There is, of course, nothing surprising in what it says, for anyone who makes a living by publishing.

As long as academics wear publication counts and citation metrics like badges of honor, universities parade “highly cited scholars” as their most prized assets, and profit-driven “non-profit” ranking agencies embed these statistics in their secret formulas underwriting what is essentially a zero-sum game, the arms race for numbers will continue to be a race to the bottom. The real winners in this game are the arms dealers: the publishers, the ranking agencies, and the businesses that help write papers and “manage” citations. The players themselves—the academics and the institutions that employ them—end up as victims of their own success.

 

English writing, Essay

Orientalism: A Mirror of Our Differences

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Introduction

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is often described as his magnum opus—a work that changed how the West thinks about its relationship to the East. Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and raised partly in Egypt. He studied at Princeton and Harvard before joining Columbia University’s faculty in 1963, where he would remain for the rest of his career. Written in the wake of decolonization and the turmoil following the Yom Kippur War, Orientalism offered a scathing critique of how the West (the Occident) has historically represented—and misrepresented—the “Orient,” especially the Arab and Islamic world. The book’s acclaim propelled Said into international prominence and helped launch the field of postcolonial studies.

After Said’s death in 2003, an endowed professorship in his name was established at Columbia by his son and other donors. The first holder was historian Rashid Khalidi, who co-founded Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies and chaired the History Department. Khalidi became a central figure in Middle Eastern scholarship and a prominent public voice for Palestinian causes. It is hardly a coincidence, then, that Columbia has found itself at the epicenter of the political storm that swept through America following Hamas’s massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s ruthless and prolonged retaliatory campaign in Gaza. In 2024, Khalidi retired in protest of what he regarded as Columbia’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

By then, it was clear that Columbia—as well as many other universities—had been caught between a rock and a hard place: chastised by left-leaning, pro-Palestinian voices such as Khalidi while also investigated for antisemitism, first by a Republican Congress and later by the second Trump Administration. Within less than two years, Columbia saw two presidents (Minouche Shafik and Katrina Armstrong) resign, and the university struggled to find someone willing to take what, in calmer times, would be considered a coveted job. Earlier this year, Columbia agreed to pay approximately $200 million over three years to the federal government as part of a settlement package. In response, Khalidi canceled his fall course on modern Middle East history, citing the university’s “capitulation” to political pressure. His departure marked not just the end of an era but also cast a long shadow over Said’s intellectual legacy at Columbia.

As a faculty member at one of the colleges caught up in these controversies, I had a front-row seat to the incendiary rhetoric and raw emotions that animated both sides of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Yet I often felt like a confused and frustrated bystander, struggling to make sense of what I saw and to sort truth from distortion. My search for clarity led me to Jewish and Middle East History, and recently to Orientalism.

The book first caught my attention when Douglas Murray, in The War on the West, branded it a symbol of “anti-Western” thought. For the record, I found it hardly lived up to that scandalous label. Orientalism was not an attempt to retell the history of the Middle East from “the other side,” as I had assumed. Instead, it is a scholarly critique of how the field of Oriental studies—or Orientalism—emerged and evolved over centuries, and how it sustained and legitimized colonial power. Unlike Murray’s polemic, Orientalism was not written for mass consumption. In fact, it was a challenging read: Said’s pages were dense with references to Orientalist scholars and texts I scarcely knew, and much of the detail was difficult to absorb. Yet the book contains enough illuminating passages to make the effort a worthwhile one. Above all, his central insight stood out clearly: cultural representations are never neutral—they are bound up with visible and invisible struggles for power. That idea offered me a new vantage point from which to process the unsettling upheavals we all bear witness to today.

What Is “Orientalism”?

On the surface, Orientalism refers simply to the study of the East. Armed with the tools of modern scholarship, Orientalists believed they were “rescuing the Orient from obscurity, alienation, and strangeness.” By rediscovering and reconstructing the East’s lost languages, arts, and histories—such as Egyptian hieroglyphics or the Dunhuang Mogao Caves—they helped preserve and reassert the achievements of ancient civilizations. Over more than two centuries, this enterprise produced a vast body of knowledge that stands as one of humanity’s great intellectual accomplishments. Many who entered the field were motivated, at least ostensibly, by curiosity and a genuine passion for discovery.

Yet Orientalism was always more than an academic discipline. It was also a distinctive way of seeing—a mode of perception and representation shaped as Europeans confronted the Orient’s special place in their history: a source of fascination and desire, but also of fear and control. In Edward Said’s account, Orientalism did not merely rationalize colonial domination after the fact; it helped create the very conditions that made such domination not only acceptable but also preferable.

Said quotes Karl Marx to illustrate this mindset.  Reflecting on British rule in India, Marx asked:

“Can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”

Although Marx was writing about India, hid rationale applies to much of what Europe called “the Orient.” However self-serving or brutal Western rule might have been, he saw it as a necessary evil in humanity’s progress—a step on the predetermined path toward revolution and enlightenment. That professed faith in historical inevitability, I think, was the common denominator among Orientalists, even if they differed on what glorious ends Western domination was meant to serve.

Critique of Orientalism

Essentialism

Said’s first and foremost critique of Orientalism is its assumption of an absolute and systematic difference between the West and the Orient. The West is rational while the Orient is aberrant; the West is humane while the Orient is aloof; the West is progressive while the Orient is backward; the West embraces liberty and self-government while the Orient passively endures serfdom and despotism—and so on.

Moreover, Orientalists regarded these differences as fixed and unchanging, rooted in the “inherent” traits of geography, race, and culture. In their view, there existed a causal link between a civilization’s behavior and these supposedly objective determinants—one that could be generalized, systematized, and even used for prediction. From this flawed foundation grew a vast body of texts, academic traditions, and cultural representations that, as Said observed, “create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe.” In the end,

“objective structure (designation of the Orient) and subjective restructure (representation of the Orient by the Orientalist) become interchangeable.”

Said saw Henry Kissinger’s writing as an exemplar of such cultural essentialism.

Thanks to the Newtonian revolution, Kissinger wrote in his 1974 book American Foreign Policy, the West “is deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data—the more accurately the better.” The developing world, however, has a very different relationship with empirical reality because “they never went through the process of discovering it.”

Did Kissinger mean to suggest that a proper relationship with empirical reality could never be learned by those who did not “discover it?” That seems implausible, because few people alive today—even in the West—participated in that discovery themselves.  It would make sense only if he was referring to civilization or culture rather than individuals. Regardless, the clear implication is that this difference remains so fundamental that it continues to shape global affairs and must be taken into account in the making of American foreign policy.

 Prejudice

Said’s second objection is that Orientalism was never an innocent scholarly pursuit. Although most Orientalists saw themselves as impartial scholars, their work was inevitably shaped by the prejudices of their own societies.

For medieval Christendom, the Orient was the land of infidels, violent hordes, and slave traders. Since the rise of the Arab empire, Islam had symbolized terror and barbarism in the European imagination. Saladin’s victories over the Crusaders, the Khwarezmian sack of Jerusalem, and the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople all left deep scars on the Christian psyche.

The Arab world also stood at the center of a vast medieval slave trade. Merchants in Prague, Verdun, and Venice profited handsomely by selling Slavic boys and girls—often as eunuchs—into servitude in the East. Arabs even believed, Said notes, that castration could “purify and improve the Slavic mind.” The horror of slavery endures in language itself: the English word slave shares its root with Slav, and in Arabic, the term for eunuch derives from the same ethnic label. Even today, the Italian greeting ciao originates from a Venetian phrase meaning “I am your slave.”

Having suffered centuries of defeat and humiliation at Muslim hands, it is hardly surprising that medieval European thinkers cast the Prophet of Islam as an impostor destined for Hell—as Dante fancied in the Inferno. Shaped by this inherited cultural bias, the Orientalists who came of age during Europe’s imperial ascendancy continued, almost reflexively, to portray Islam as a degenerate faith. Their distorted perception gradually broadened into a caricature of the entire Orient—something “either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).”

Orientalist tropes still permeate modern politics and culture. Stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims as violent, irrational, or backward remain so pervasive that they are difficult to resist. I once took it for granted that suicide bombers were mostly Islamist jihadists—presumably lured by visions of martyrdom and paradise with seventy-two virgins.  Only after reading John Gray’s Black Mass recently did I learn that this horrific tactic, now symbolized by the terrifying explosive vest, was pioneered not by jihadists but by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist group in Sri Lanka. Until the early 2000s, it was the Tigers, not Islamic extremists, who carried out the majority of suicide attacks.

Entanglement

Finally, orientalists often conveniently concealed their interests behind a façade of scholarship. Whether as consultants, merchants, or citizens of imperial powers, they all benefited—directly or indirectly—from empires that relentlessly extracted resources from the Orient.  Many took it upon themselves to “dignify simple conquest with an idea,” transforming material ambition into moral or intellectual justification.  Others continued to insist that “there were subtle distinctions between Orientalism as an innocent scholarly endeavor and Orientalism as an accomplice to empire.” Yet, as Said concluded,

“Orientalism can never unilaterally be detached from the general imperial context that begins its modern global phase with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.”

Is Orientalism anti-west?

Douglas Murray devoted a lengthy critique to Orientalism in The War on the West, alleging that Said viewed “everything in the West through a lens that was not just interrogative and hostile but amazingly ungenerous,” and that he “held the West to standards expected of no other society and then castigated it” for failing to meet them. Murray was not alone in this view. In the 1994 “Afterword” to Orientalism, Said himself expressed dismay that the book had been “misleadingly” labeled anti-Western “by commentators both hostile and sympathetic.”

Yet there is some truth to the charge. Indeed, it is difficult to miss Said’s contempt for Western exceptionalism and his indignation at the destruction, misery, and death that ideology inflicted on the peoples of the Orient.  He famously wrote in the book, which he probably had come to regret,

It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.

Here, Murray is right to complain that Said slips into the very essentialism he condemned in Orientalist thought.

“My objection to Orientalism,” Said wrote elsewhere, “is that as a system of thought it approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic, and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint.” If Europe itself is such a human reality, then to claim that every European is racist is, without any doubt, “uncritically essentialist.”

Alas, the impulse to overgeneralize and stereotype is truly, deeply human!

That said, Murray’s critique also oversimplifies, if not distorts, Said’s argument by quoting him out of context. Said never suggested that Europeans were uniquely capable of domination or cruelty. On the contrary, he insisted—immediately following that infamous line—that when confronted with “other” cultures, human societies have almost invariably relied on imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism. As a descendant of a once-proud empire that believed itself to be the center of the world, I can easily relate to this observation. Orientalism dominates the discourse of our time only because, for the past five centuries, the West has been more powerful than the East. Would humanity have fared better had the hegemonic culture of the modern era arisen from the East instead? I doubt it, and I suspect Said would have agreed.

The paradox of our differences

Ultimately, Orientalism is a book about coming to terms with our differences. At first glance, these differences seem to arise from identities such as race, culture, history, and nation. Yet identity, whether of the self or of the “other,” is neither static nor objective. Rather, as Said wrote, “identity is a much worked-over historical, social, intellectual, and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies.”

Nation-building, for instance, is an act of identity creation. Many nation-states emerged from wars and treaties, sustained by collective imagination and perpetuated through indoctrination (aka public education). Nothing illustrates this dynamic better than the Israel–Palestine conflict. It was not two preexisting states suddenly plunging into decades of war; rather, it was the conflict itself—whose origins reach back at least to the Crusades—that ultimately gave rise to the two national identities now locked in struggle. Identities and differences, therefore, are neither fixed nor independent; they evolve together, continuously shaping and reinforcing one another.

As the foundation of social life, identity offers belonging and security. Preserving it can feel as vital as self-defense, for to lose one’s identity can seem akin to losing life itself. When people believe their identities are under attack, this instinct can trigger fierce, almost autoimmune responses. You can feel its force in Charlie Kirk’s proclamation that “our form and structure of government was built for people who believed in Christ,” or in J.K. Rowling’s impassioned defense of womanhood against what she sees as the overreach of the trans-movement. The profound crisis of American politics today is, at its core, a crisis of identity—a nation divided over what it means to be American. In particular, is America still a melting pot, or has it become a scrambled salad?

Said urged us to look beyond such rigid identities. We must not, he wrote, continue to “divide human reality into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races.” Identities that present themselves as “radical and ineradicable” end up “setting the real boundaries between human beings” and turning our vision away from shared human realities—joy and suffering, love and fear, justice and oppression—that unite us far more than they divide us.

Said’s passionate plea to focus on our common humanity rather than our petty differences is as inspiring as it is utopian.

In the decades since the publication of Orientalism, progressives have embarked on a mission to demonstrate that many—perhaps most—human identities once thought immutable are, in fact, social constructs. Not only are nation and race social inventions, we are now told, but so too are woman and man. In this view, no artificial boundaries—biological or otherwise—should separate humanity. Yet it has become clear that not all of these claims have been equally well received by the public. Ironically, the effort to dissolve the very boundaries underlying identity has inadvertently reinforced politics of identity that now dominate American life.

Another legacy of Orientalism is the tendency to view social and political relationships primarily through the lens of power. In this framework, power corrupts and oppresses: the stronger party (for instance, the West) is presumed to be the oppressor, while the weaker (the Orient) is the oppressed. Applied to the Israel–Palestine conflict, this logic leads naturally to the conclusion that Israel, being the stronger side, must necessarily be at fault. I suspect many of the young people protesting on campuses for the Palestinian cause have been persuaded by this line of reasoning. The irony is that such a reductionist view is even more essentialist than Orientalism itself, for it flattens complex and evolving human realities into a single variable—power—which, like identity, is also a social construct that shifts with context and interpretation.

As much as I want to agree with Said that we should rise above our petty differences, I do not believe we can simply wish those differences away when grappling with complex social, political, and geopolitical realities. Nor do I think that power dynamics alone hold the key to understanding them. Power structures arise from historical contingencies and, in turn, interact with human identities—both real and imagined. To ignore the latter is to risk reducing the former to a hollow academic abstraction. Ultimately, for each person living in a particular historical moment, their own identity—and the identity of those they perceive as “others”—is real and consequential. We disregard that reality at our own peril.

That, ultimately, is the lesson I took away from Orientalism.

 

Marco Nie

October 11, 2025

Recent research

How our means and values shape transit policy

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Few topics in urban mobility spark as much debate as fare-free transit (FFT). On one side, advocates argue that eliminating fares can guarantee the “freedom to move”, boost ridership, and make cities more sustainable. For example, Boston’s mayor Michelle Wu, a big fan of FFT, has implemented a limited FFT program in the
city. The idea also featured prominently in the platform of Zohran Mamdani, who has launched a closely watched bid
for the New York City mayoralty.    On the other, skeptics worry about overcrowding, misuse, and—above all—how to replace the revenue that keeps buses and trains running. Behind the heated arguments lies a deeper question: how do our moral values and financial means shape the “best” transit fare policy?

In our new study, How our values and means shape optimal transit fare policy, we set out to answer that question with a rigorous modeling framework. We designed a system that can evaluate not just the economics of different fare options—ranging from full-fare-free (FFF) to partial discounts to today’s standard fares—but also their equity implications. The model captures real-world features such as the “zero-price effect” (the psychological boost of free services), the cost savings from removing fare collection, and the operational dynamics of running a large transit system.

Applied to Chicago, our model led to some interesting findings. When money is plentiful, making transit completely free can indeed be both efficient and fair. But under tighter budgets, targeted discounts often do more to help low-income riders while keeping the system financially sustainable. Perhaps counterintuitively, we also found that giving planners unlimited resources doesn’t always lead to better outcomes—sometimes moderate constraints produce solutions that more people would support.

As cities everywhere grapple with post-pandemic ridership losses and strained finances, these findings matter. Fare policy isn’t just a technical choice—it reflects what we value as a society and how much we’re willing (and able) to pay to uphold those values.

Read the full preprint here.