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

Black Mass is a satanic parody of the Catholic Mass, a central act of worship in the Roman Catholic Church that commemorates the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Using this deliberate and profane inversion of a holy rite, John Gray delivers a scathing critique of Western thought in broad strokes. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the book dismisses nearly all Western political ideologies—from utopianism and Marxism to liberalism—as mere heresies of Christianity.

Gray is well known for his skepticism about human progress. He has been on my radar for quite some time, but only after watching a recent debate between him and Francis Fukuyama was I finally convinced that his books were probably worth reading. My hunch was right. I thoroughly enjoyed Black Mass, the pessimistic—sometimes disheartening—message notwithstanding.

According to Gray, the ideological foundation of the West is the pursuit of the salvation of humanity, which gives rise to historical teleology—the belief that history has a purpose. This idea entered Western thought with Christianity. As Gray put it,

Christians believed history had an end in both senses: it has a pre-determined purpose, and when that was achieved it would come to a close.

In the broadest terms, historical teleology views human history as a struggle between good and evil that is destined to end with the triumph of good and the transformation of humanity. This idea, Gray notes, originated in Zoroastrianism, a proto-monotheistic religion of ancient Persia.

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What is Gray against?

In short, almost everything, and it all began with millenarianism.

The Book of Revelation teaches that Christ will return to defeat Satan and establish a thousand-year kingdom of peace. Christian millenarianism, which Gray traces back to Joachim of Fiore (1132–1202), builds on this belief. Its novelty lies in the insistence that the return of Christ will usher in a transformation that is:

(i) imminent, because the present world is seen as irredeemably corrupt;
(ii) collective, in that it affects not just individuals but humanity as a whole;
(iii) terrestrial, meaning the kingdom is to be realized on earth, not in heaven or the afterlife; and
(iv) miraculous, since it depends on divine intervention.

In contrast, traditional Christian doctrine since St. Augustine has emphasized an unbridgeable gulf between the City of Man and the City of God, rooted in the belief that human life is hopelessly marred by original sin. Accordingly, it rejects the notion that evil can be defeated in this world. It is in this sense, Gray argues, that millenarianism represents a “heretical reversion to Christian origins”—hence the analogy to a Black Mass.

The central thesis of the book is that millenarianism is a highly contagious ideological virus that has deeply and repeatedly penetrated Western thought. As we shall see next, Gray argues that many of humanity’s self-inflicted disasters can ultimately be traced to this infection.

Utopianism

Humans have never stopped dreaming of a harmonious and prosperous society in which everyone lives happily ever after. However, such visions were initially located in a distant past, severed from the present by myth or rupture. Plato’s ideal republic, for instance, existed in a Golden Age before history; so too did Confucius’s legendary era of the “three generations” (三代).

Millenarianism is unique in its belief that a utopian society is achievable in the foreseeable future. Many Enlightenment thinkers inherited this belief but secularized it. Rejecting the possibility of divine intervention, they designated humans as the agents of transformation. Yet, humanistic as their ideology may appear, it “cannot do without demonology.” Utopia requires a struggle against evil forces—those said to have corrupted society or obstructed the path to perfection.

According to Gray, it was the French Revolution that first embraced violence as a legitimate tool for transforming society. Until then, he writes, “no one believed violence could perfect humanity”—not even in Medieval Europe. For the Jacobins, violence became not only a means of self-defense against internal and external enemies but also an instrument of civic education and social engineering. True revolutionaries, they believed, must show no mercy toward the enemies of human progress.

As Maximilien Robespierre put it eligantly, “pity is treason.”  Chairman Mao understood this well, though his rhetoric was intentionally crude to resonate with his peasant base. “Revolution is not about wining and dining people,” he proclaimed.  “It is the violence of one class against another.”(革命不是请客吃饭。革命是暴动，是一个阶级针对另一个阶级的暴力行动。)

Gray’s point is clear: there is a direct line between this secularized form of millenarianism and the most horrific political ideologies of the modern time.

Communism

Marxism holds that history will culminate in a classless society so prosperous that every person will be free—not just politically, but liberated from the tyranny of material necessity. However, the path to this ultimate freedom runs through the dictatorship of the proletariat and the abolition of private property.

Russia and China shed a tremendous amount of blood trying to turn this enticing blueprint into reality—only to arrive at demonstrably tragic outcomes. Gray argues that the failures of these regimes did not stem from the supposedly backward cultures or traditions of the host countries—so-called “oriental despotism.” Instead, he writes, Russia’s misfortune was due to her exposure to “the Enlightenment in one of its most virulent forms.”

In the same vein, Mao’s China was driven by “an Enlightenment ideal of universal emancipation” in its relentless effort to remake an Oriental tyranny in the image of Western ideals.  Liberals often interpret post-Mao China as an experiment in re-westernization. Gray disagrees. Ideologically, he argues, post-Mao China has been moving toward de-westernization—and the belief that globalization and modernization would bring China closer to the West has always been, in his view, a pipe dream.

Judging by recent geopolitical developments, he may well have been right.

Nazism

Like communism, Nazism was also a brainchild of the modern West. The Nazis shared with secular millenarians a vision of a corrupt world spiraling toward catastrophe. Where Nazism differed was in its overwhelming negativity—a fixation not on the content of a future paradise but on the obstacles to it.

The Nazis were most notorious for their racism and superstitious hatred of Jews. Neither was new in the West. While racial prejudice may be rooted in human nature, Gray writes that “racism is a product of the Enlightenment.” He goes so far as to argue that liberal racism—unlike its tribal counterpart—left open “the possibility of the forcible destruction of other cultures, and even—if all else failed—genocide.”

Antisemitism, meanwhile, was a defining feature of medieval millenarianism, which often portrayed Jews as “devils with the horns of a goat… whose goal was the destruction of Christendom, even of the world.” When Hitler implemented his infamous Final Solution, it is conceivable that he believed he was doing the world a favor—ridding it of a mystical evil force, whose elimination was a necessary precondition for the ascension of the German Volk to a state of harmony.

Radical Islamism

I had always assumed that Islam must bear some—if not most—responsibility for the rise of “radical Islamism,” which has waged an asymmetric war against the West for decades. However, Gray has a different take. According to him, the intellectual founder of radical Islam, Sayyid Qutb, was deeply influenced by European thinkers, particularly Nietzsche.

Qutb’s conception of a revolutionary vanguard dedicated to the overthrow of corrupt Islamic regimes and the establishment of a society without formal power structures owes nothing to Islamic theology and a great deal to Lenin.

In this light, jihadists, in their pursuit of a world of faithful, have much in common with the Jacobins, who were inspired by Rousseau’s ideas of popular sovereignty and the general will. Like the Jacobins, they see revolutionary violence as a purifying force. Like the Jacobins, they blame the sorry state of their world on conspiracies—only the Jacobins targeted counterrevolutionaries, while the jihadists’ enemy is “the West.”

Perhaps the only major innovation of radical Islam is its theological justification for suicide attacks as acts of personal purity that guarantee one’s place in heaven.

What surprised me most was Gray’s reprimand of neoliberalism and neoconservatism.

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism emerged as a reaction against communism and socialism. It was founded on the belief that the free market could do everything: organize the economy, foster trade, and promote peace—if only governments would leave it alone. Thanks to this immense power, the free market was seen as destined to win over the world, thus representing a logical and desirable end of economic history.

These beliefs, Gray contends, are closer to religious faith than to the results of scientific inquiry. According to him, Adam Smith’s reference to the “invisible hand” reflects a kind of faith-based political economy—but Smith himself never tried, as some of his 20th-century followers did, to “deduce free markets from dubious axioms of rational choice.” On the contrary, Smith understood the flaws of market societies and never entertained the illusion of an omnipotent market that naturally regulates, stabilizes, and corrects itself.

Therefore, it was not the religious Smith but his secular disciples—the likes of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman—who turned the free market into a religion. In his famous Road to Serfdom, Hayek argued that “a successfully planned economy is a Utopia.” And yet, Gray observes, “he failed to notice that the same is true of the self-regulating market.” Hence the irony:  “the free market became a religion only when its basis in religion was denied.”

Like all fundamentalists, Gray quips, neoliberals ended up worshiping tenets that was “a caricature of the tradition they seek to revive.”

Neoconservatism

Like neoliberals, neoconservatives embraced a radicalized version of progressive thinking—the idea that humanity is gradually progressing toward a just, equal, and inclusive society in which everyone is entitled to, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Like neoliberals, neoconservatives claimed access to a universal truth. What sets them apart was their emphasis on aggressively proselytizing their truth around the world. This mission was often justified by the dubious claim that liberty could not be secure anywhere unless it was secured everywhere. As George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address:

The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.

Neoconservatives interpreted the West’s triumph in the Cold War as a vindication of their historical teleology. As Fukuyama famously wrote in The End of History:

What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

Intoxicated by such utopian thinking, neoconservatives eagerly took up the project of preaching—and, in some cases, forcefully installing—this “final form of human government” across the globe. That their deeds bear the religious imprint of medieval millenarianism is evidenced by two convictions.

First, even preemptive wars are justifiable if they further “human progress,” echoing the Jacobin belief in violence as a purifying force.

Second, “truth is whatever serves the cause.”

On this second point, Gray’s tart commentary on the bogus casus belli for the Iraq War—fabricated and sold to the world under the watch of Tony Blair and George W. Bush—deserves full quotation:

It is not so much that he [Blair] is economical with the truth as that he lacks the normal understanding of it… When he engages in what is commonly judged to be deception he is only anticipating the new world that he is helping to bring about… When Bush and Cheney rejected intelligence that conflicted with the case for war they were not suppressing the truth… For these seers, victory was the same as truth—not truth of the ordinary kind, to be sure, but the esoteric truth that is concealed in the deceiving mirror of fact.

Of course, this notion of a “higher truth”—a truth not based on facts but on its utility to “the cause”—was a hallmark of modern totalitarian regimes. The Soviet Union’s infamous propaganda outlet was aptly named Pravda, the Russian word for “truth.”

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 What is Gray for?

As the long list above suggests, Gray’s cynicism can be overwhelming. While what he detests is laid bare in the book for all to see, it is harder to pinpoint what he supports. This is understandable, since Black Mass is written primarily as a critique of Western thought.

At his core, I believe Gray is a pacifist who sees human institutions as instruments for managing conflict. He condemns all violence, regardless of the moral justifications made in its name. This conviction leads him to embrace what can only be described as a morally relativist position. In the book, he quotes the Bulgarian-French historian Tzvetan Todorov to argue that there is little moral difference between America burning Japanese civilians alive with atomic bombs and Nazi Germany murdering millions of Jews in gas chambers. It is a revealing argument worth quoting in full:

 Atomic bombs killed fewer people than the famine in the Ukraine, fewer than the Nazis slaughtered in the Ukraine and Poland. But what the bombs and the slaughters have in common is that their perpetrators all thought they were but a means to achieve a good. However, the bombs have another feature: they are a source of pride to those who made and dropped them … whereas totalitarian crimes, even if they were considered by their perpetrators to be useful and even praiseworthy political acts, were kept secret … Both the Soviet and the Nazi leadership knew that the world would damn them if it knew exactly what they had done. They were not wrong, because as soon as their crimes were revealed they were treated as the emblems of absolute evil. Things are quite different in the case of the atomic bombs, and for that very reason, even if the crime is less grave, the moral mistake of the people who killed in the name of democracy is greater.

It is this desire to preserve peace and minimize violence that compels Gray to reject the idea of progress itself. As the term has come to be understood in the postwar world, progress implies that human beings can improve society through reason, collective action, and moral development.

Case against progress

Progressives assume that ethics and politics follow discoverable laws, much like those in science, and that society improves cumulatively: each step forward enables further advances, and the elimination of one evil paves the way for eradicating others.

They believe that human beings are born with natural rights and that governments exist to protect them. Freedom, in this view, is a natural condition that emerges once tyranny is removed. These principles are treated as axiomatic in modern legal documents such as the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights.

Unlike Marxists, progressives don’t always promise a full-fledged utopia. Yet the logic of historical teleology is all the same: an infinite process of improvement implies a convergence to a world far better than the present, and human progress will continue until liberty and universal rights are secured for all.

Gray builds his case against progressivism on three core arguments.

First, universal human rights derived from Faith rather than Reason. 

Thomas Aquinas laid the groundwork for natural law theory, which was later used to justify universal rights and moral standards. But Aquinas’s law was part of the “eternal law of God,” revealed to humans through Reason. Similarly, Locke’s notion of a state of nature is inextricable from his belief in divine creation: we are all equally free because we are all made by God, and harming oneself or others is wrong because it violates God’s property. Gray rejects this conception of freedom as a natural condition. To him, freedom is a product of the modern nation-state, whose formation often involved the violent integration or exclusion of “alien” groups.

Second, imperfection is a permanent feature of the human condition. 

Humans are, as Gray puts it, “an extremely violent species,” for whom a conflict-free existence is impossible. We want incompatible things—excitement and tranquility, freedom and security, truth and vanity—and cannot agree on what morality or the ideal society should look like. There is no single moral truth, only visions of perfection inherited from religious tradition.

Liberal thinkers since Hobbes have placed their faith in rationality to resolve conflict. Because humans “dread violent death more than anything,” they would supposedly choose peace through mechanisms like the Leviathan (Hobbes), the social contract (Locke), or democratic institutions. But Gray argues this rationalization leaves out the most intractable human drive: the need for meaning. “Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”

Third, there is no guarantee that the “better angels of our nature” will prevail.   

This view starkly contrasts with optimistic humanists like Steven Pinker, who argue that society has become progressively more peaceful. Gray disagrees. Knowledge may accumulate, but “humans do not become any more civilized as a result.” On the contrary, they remain prone to barbarism—especially “when it comes clothed in virtue.” Material prosperity has grown alongside technological and scientific progress, but so has the capacity for destruction.

Gray’s model of history

Gray concludes that the idea of ever-continuing progress is an illusion, as it presupposes a fundamental transformation in human behavior. Instead, he offers a model of history as a cyclical movement between order and anarchy:

Anarchy could be overcome as evolving patterns of social cooperation crystallized into civil institutions; but the order in society that resulted would regularly break down, and when this happened no social contract could restore order. States are at the mercy of events as much as any other human institution, and over the longer course of history all of them fail.

Gray’s model strikes me as a rather precise depiction of Chinese history between the founding of the first unified empire—the Qin Dynasty in 221 BCE—and the abdication of the last Qing emperor in 1911 CE. During those two millennia, China witnessed the rise and fall of twelve major dynasties and around 400 emperors. Each episode, regardless of its origin, followed a remarkably consistent script: a brief period of order and prosperity, followed by inevitable descent into corruption, rebellion, and collapse.

This historical regularity became so deeply embedded in Chinese consciousness that it gave rise to idioms like “Thirty years on the east bank, thirty years on the west bank” (三十年河东，三十年河西) and “That which is long divided will unite; that which is long united will divide” (分久必合，合久必分)—as well as poetry such as “When the state rises, the people suffer; when it falls, the people suffer” (兴，百姓苦；亡，百姓苦).

My history education in China was entirely shaped by Marxist historical materialism, which depicts history as a linear progression from primitive communal societies to utopian communism. The inherent contradiction between this teleological framework and the cyclical pattern of Chinese dynastic history was never acknowledged, let alone explained. According to my teachers, Chinese history was simply another data point confirming the greatness of Marxist theory.

After moving to the U.S., I began to view Chinese history from Qin to Qing as a profound anomaly in the supposed universal arc of progress. For whatever reason, China appeared locked by historical contingencies in a perpetual cycle of dynastic rise and fall. This trap stymied institutional innovation and long-term economic growth, subjecting generations of Chinese to recurring, man-made catastrophes.

The traumatic historical experience etched into the collective psyche a deep-seated urge to trade stability for anything, at any price. As a result, the ability to provide stability remains the most compelling justification for the rule of any Chinese regime—repressive or otherwise. It also explains why today’s Chinese state prioritizes “maintaining internal stability” (维稳) over nearly all other governmental functions.

I think Gray would understand this impulse. His rejection of progressivism reflects a similar longing for peace and security—not through utopian schemes, but through humility, restraint, and a sober understanding of human nature.

Final remarks

I don’t disagree with Gray’s analysis of the very real danger posed by progressive fervor. Progress and fanaticism may well have a symbiotic relationship, and violence may be the price humanity must pay to move forward. However, the hopelessness offered by Gray feels darker and more despondent than the evils he so dreadfully warns us about. If Chinese history is any guide, there is no reason to believe that subscribing to his worldview offers a greater prospect for peace and stability.

Of course, a good philosopher like Gray surely knows that some readers will find his view of human affairs “dispiriting.” He does offer a solution: God. Put bluntly, Gray suggests that if humans need to find meaning in life, they’d better get it from God than from any other nonsenses.

Gray regards religion as an indispensable human institution. He mocks modern atheists armed with Reason and Science—Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens come to mind— for trying to make religion disappear by simply “showing it is an illusion.”  To Gray, religion persists because it serves genuine human needs, the most important of which are to “live with what cannot be known” and to “find meaning in the chances of life.” That’s why heavy-handed suppression of religious belief has never succeeded. Instead,

like repressed sexual desire, faith returns, often in grotesque forms, to govern the lives of those who deny it.

Gray’s solution is all the more remarkable considering that he himself is an atheist. But he does not see this as a contradiction. In Gray’s mind, he is simply prescribing medicine to soothe and pacify his fellow Homo sapiens who cannot help themselves. In doing so, he tells yet another version of Plato’s noble lie: that “while philosophers may know the truth, they also know that truth is deadly to the mass of humankind.”

Marco Nie, July 27 2025

I don’t recall exactly when I first heard Professor Mahmassani’s name, but it was likely in the fall of 1999, shortly after I began graduate school at the National University of Singapore. My advisor, Professor Der-Horng Lee, had also just arrived in Singapore, and—perhaps because I was his first and, for a while, only student—we spent a great deal of time talking that fall. Having earned his PhD in transportation and worked in the U.S. for several years, he seemed to know the field exceedingly well. He was also a gifted storyteller, and one of his specialties was to share anecdotes about academics. A quarter century later, I no longer remember the details of those conversations, despite my fond memory of them. What I do remember clearly is that Hani’s name came up often—as a leading authority in dynamic network analysis, the creator of DYNASMART, and a charismatic scholar known for his sharp wit and formidable intellect.

Those stories and names—especially Hani’s—left an indelible impression on me and ultimately played a role in my decision to pursue an academic career myself.

I must have seen Hani from afar at various conferences many times in the early 2000s, when I was a PhD student at UC Davis.  Yet, I have never worked up the courage to introduce myself.  For a young student, having a word with him at those events was no easy feat—it was a fierce competition that required social skills and persistence to win.

The first time I actually spoke with him was at the INFORMS annual meeting in Pittsburgh in the fall of 2006, right after I joined Northwestern University as an assistant professor.  I caught up with him after a session we both attended.  Upon learning that I was new to the profession, he immediately offered advice on how to navigate the tenure process.

By now I’ve forgotten most of what he said except the part about the importance of getting the NSF CAREER award, likely because I never got it (sorry, Hani). What has stayed with me to this day, however, was how gently and candidly he spoke to me.  I remember thinking afterward: Wow— this isn’t the imposing figure that I had admired in awe from a distance, but a humble and empathetic mentor, someone you could trust and turn to for guidance.

As fate would have it, just a few months after we first met, Hani came to interview for the William Patterson Chair Professorship.  On the day of his seminar, I ran into the Dean of Engineering, Julio Ottino, in the hallway.  He casually asked for my opinion about Hani’s candidacy and said something to the effect of, “I heard he’s like a god in your field.” I nodded without the slightest hesitation.

Hani arrived in Northwestern to join my department in the summer of 2007.  Soon after, he also assumed the role of the director for the university’s renowned Transportation Center.  His leadership at that critical juncture transformed the center—from an endangered entity into a thriving institution that truly lived up to its promise: a world-class think tank and laboratory for cross-disciplinary transportation research and education that matter.

It took me months to accept the seemingly surreal fact that Hani—someone everybody in the field knows and talks about, whose name I had mostly encountered in books and papers—was now a colleague who sometimes sat next to me at faculty meetings. It will take much longer to come to terms with the gigantic void he has left behind.

There is no need for me to tout Hani’s legacy in transportation research, industry, government agencies, and the broader scientific community. A short piece of personal reflection cannot do it justice anyway. As a colleague who had the fortune to observe him up close, it’s not hard to see why Hani accomplished all that he did.

Hani has one of the most brilliant and inquisitive minds that I’ve ever known. He was always open to new ideas and able to grasp their essence as quickly as anyone in the field. That’s why his expansive research portfolio—now including autonomous vehicles, tele-work, urban air mobility, machine learning and AI—remains cutting-edge, often ahead of his much younger colleagues, myself included.

At PhD prospectuses and defenses—where our intellectual interactions most often took place—he always asks the most penetrating questions, the kind that could only come from someone with a profound understanding of the topic at hand.  It was hard to walk away from those encounters without feeling that he knew almost everything.

What amazed me the most was that, even in his 60s, Hani could still be animated by new ideas like a graduate student.  It was not uncommon for our discussions during PhD defenses to be carried away by one of Hani’s bursts of human ingenuity, leaving the thesis defender standing by in relief and amusement.  As far as I could tell, his passion for developing DYNASMART—the software he began almost 40 years ago—never wavered in the slightest.

Hani is also one of the most hard-working academics that I’ve ever known.  He maintained an excruciatingly busy schedule that includes a tremendous amount of travel.  When I was an assistant professor, I once complained to Hani that I could not concentrate on writing proposals because I had to teach at the same time. Hani reply with a smile, “Marco, you have to multi-task.“  Since then I’ve taken that advice to heart—but I know I could never be as good a mulit-tasker as he was.

Hani was famous for sleeping only four hours a day, typically going to bed in the early morning hours. I once read that there is a genetic mutation that allows a person to function well on much less sleep than normal—about six to seven hours a night. Roughly one percent of people have that mutation. I have no doubt that Hani was a one-percenter. Still, a four-hour-a-day sleep schedule, sustained over decades, must have taken a toll on the body.

In any case, because of Hani’s unusual hours, many of his associates learned to get his attention by writing to him after midnight—because that’s when he replied to emails. When I was younger, I occasionally took advantage of this trick. It worked nearly every time, though in recent years, I could no longer keep up with him.

The busy life Hani led meant that he could sometimes be hard to reach by email. A non-trivial proportion of the messages I sent him never received a response. For a while, I found this spontaneity to be an annoying inconvenience. But eventually, I came to realize that—like every human being—Hani also had only 24 hours in a day. Yes, he slept three hours less than most people, but even that wasn’t enough to share with everyone who wanted a piece of his attention.

The truth is, all my important requests were answered in a timely manner. More importantly, whenever he did respond, he made the time count: he would sit me down and ensure I was treated with warmth, respect, and care. In those moments, he made me feel as if I were the center of his attention.

In retrospect, every milestone I achieved at Northwestern owes something to Hani.

• He was a co-PI on my first NSF grant, a critical component of my tenure package.
• He guided me through the tenure process. We had lunch together at one of his favorite Evanston restaurants—whose owner Hani knew personally (he had great taste in food and restaurants, by the way)—to discuss who should write letters for me (and who should not). As always, he insisted on paying.
• After my daughter was born in 2010, he surprised me with a nicely wrapped gift one day when I showed up at the Transportation Center for a meeting.
• In 2016, when I was debating whether to go up early for promotion to full professor, it was Hani who reassured me that I was ready and promised his full support, without reservation.
• Most recently, when I was tapped to be the next department chair, Hani was among the first who congratulated me and expressed his confidence. He met with me for an hour to offer a wide range of advice in late May, about a month before his passing. That was the last time I saw him.

As I write down this long and woefully incomplete list of things Hani did for me, I can’t help but ask myself what I ever did for him. The answer is: almost nothing. I didn’t even buy him a single meal—and I can’t count how many times we dined together. I had never given it much thought, but I realize now that I had quietly assumed there would be time to return the favor. After all, we were colleagues; there would always be another opportunity, right?

Now that he’s gone, the thought that I will never have the chance to buy him a meal—even just as a small token of gratitude—makes me feel incredibly sad and powerless.

Yesterday, the Transportation Center organized an informal gathering in Hani’s memorial. I sat at a table with my colleagues Joe Schofer and Pablo Durango-Cohen.  We chatted about how the sudden death of someone close to you sheds light on the fleeting fragility of life and the importance of living in the moment, not in the future.

Living in the moment means to do what feels important to you now, whether that’s writing an essay that speaks your truth, visiting a faraway place that occupies a special place in your heart, saying “I love you” to your family, or making a trip just to tell an old friend “I miss you.”

The conversation reminded me of something I once read about the Japanese eschatology captured in the word sayonara. Commonly translated as “goodbye,” it literally means “so be it.” To the Japanese, life moves along an unpredictable path. Every moment holds the potential for abrupt change—even death. So they say sayonara not just to mark parting, but to appreciate the moment and its mortality. As John Toland wrote in The Rising Sun, this eschatology gave the Japanese “the strength to face disaster stoically and a calm determination to let nothing discourage or disappoint.”

In every sense, Hani was a living embodiment of the ideal behind sayonara. He was always on the move—full of curiosity, conviction, and fortitude—chasing his dreams while savoring every step along the way.

The fact that Hani lived the fullest version of his life is the small comfort I take as I mourn the premature passing of a giant in our field.

Sayonara, Hani. May you rest in peace.

Marco Nie, July 19, 2025

Introduction

In a recent public lecture given at Peking University (https://youtu.be/03i_Ojbx5do?si=iZzTfL-s_DQQrXfE), Prof. Michal Sandel of Harvard University made a passionate plea to end “the tyranny of meritocracy.”  The event lasted two hours, but thanks to Sandel’s pedagogical skills and oratorical prowess, it felt much shorter. Throughout the lecture, Sandel deftly engaged his audiences and implored them to wrestle with a provocative question:

Does the winner truly deserve their success in a meritocracy?

The Thesis

Sandel’s thesis centers on what he calls “the rule of luck in life,” which covers two key aspects. First, abilities and talents are largely shaped by natural endowments and social circumstances. For example, it is well known that educational achievement is highly correlated with genes. Second, whether a particular talent is valued by society is also a matter of chance. A math prodigy who earns millions as a Wall Street trader today might have lived in destitution in a self-sufficient agrarian society. In the words of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, “merit is a bit of an accident not only in its origin, but also in its being treated as merit.”

Beyond the role of luck, Sandel also argues that no winners are truly self-made or self-sufficient, as they inevitably owe much of their success to others. You may recall that Barack Obama tried to make a similar point during his 2012 presidential campaign; however, his unfortunate phrasing—“if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that”—animated his political opponents and may have cost him a considerable amount of conservative votes.

Thus, although merit in Latin connotes “to earn” or “to deserve,” Sandel maintained that successful individuals in a meritocracy do not truly earn their success—certainly not all of it. Stripping away the notion of “deservedness” allows Sandel to build his case against the tyranny of meritocracy.

If those who succeed must deserve their success, so must those who struggle deserve their failures. Meritocracy not only flatters the winners and humiliates the losers but also legitimizes and perpetuates inequality. By pitting winners against losers, meritocracy undermines the idea of the “common good” and makes the pursuit of solidarity and community an impossible project.

When Sandel spoke of those who lose out and felt looked down by the winners, he was likely referring to the working class, especially those from America’s rural areas and Rust Belt. He firmly rejected the unsolicited advice often directed at these “losers”—to go get a college degree, if not for themselves, then certainly for their children.   While acknowledging the intrinsic value of education, Sandel does not believe it is an adequate answer to inequality.  He noted that only about 35% of American adults hold a college degree.  If about two thirds of our fellow citizens do not have a college degree, Sandel reasoned, “it is a mistake to create an economy that makes a university degree a necessary condition for dignified work and a decent life.”

On this point I am with Sandel. No amount of education could eliminate losers in a meritocracy. The Austrian Economist Fred Hirsch, in Social Limits on Growth, characterized education as a positional good, where rewards depend on one’s relative standing on a slope.  There is no such thing as leveling up—that is, closing the gap between winners and losers—because the slope itself ensures inequality. As Hirsch put it, the value of education to a man depends on how much education the person ahead of him in the job line has.

The Antithesis

At its core, Sandel’s case against meritocracy is a moral one.  The hubris of winners is immoral; so too is the denigration of losers for their lack of credentials. Yet, what is truly immoral, Sandel argues, is prioritizing merit over virtue, pride and honor over dignity and decency, and inequality over the common good. He opposes meritocracy because he sees it as a principal driver of this moral failure.

As noble and inspiring as Sandel’s critique sounds, I found it ultimately unconvincing. The main problem is that he does not offer a viable alternative to meritocracy—at least not in the lecture (perhaps he does so in his book of the same title, which I have yet to read). The ideal society he describes seemed to verge on an egalitarian utopia. He never clearly defines what the “common good” entails, as if the concept were self-evident. To me, it closely resembles Rousseau’s notion of the “general will,” which has, for better or worse, inspired generations of revolutionaries around the world. Notably, Sandel’s vision is more vague than that of John Rawls, who at least quantified the goal of a just society as maximizing the welfare of its least advantaged members.

Sandel also does not explain how, in the absence of meritocracy, society can achieve the common good and ensure dignified work and a decent life for all. I imagine the programs he envisions would involve centralized, government-led interventions—either actively allocating “dignified work” from the top down, massively redistributing income and wealth on a regular basis, or some combination of both.  Yet, we have seen such programs implemented at scale before, and their track record is far from encouraging.

A case in point is the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives that have swept through the American institutions over the past five years. A popular piece of anti-DEI rhetoric rebrands the acronym as standing for “Didn’t Earn It.” This seemingly crude distortion is not merely an internet troll to “own the libs,” but rather a pointed critique of DEI’s underlying anti-meritocratic spirit (after all, merit originally means “to earn”).  If Sandel is right, anti-meritocracy is indeed not a bug, but a feature.   However, DEI has not unified the country around the common good, as Sandel might have hoped. On the contrary, it has provoked strong backlash from right-wing politicians, pundits, and activists—indeed, DEI became a rallying cry for the MAGA movement during the last presidential campaign.

Ironically, many—perhaps even the majority—of those opposing DEI are precisely the “losers” Sandel seeks to liberate from the tyranny of meritocracy. Liberals might once again conclude that these fatheads were acting against their own self-interests.  Yet presuming to know a group’s self-interest better than they themselves do is arguably the ultimate manifestation of the winner’s hubris the very arrogance Sandel scorns and scolds with indignation.

The Audience

I was curious how the students at Peking University would react to Sandel’s dismantling of meritocracy. After all, they are the undisputed winners in an education system that has worshipped meritocratic ideals for thousands of years.   I suspect many would feel their hard-earned success worth defending. Yet, I was somewhat disappointed that no one—neither students nor faulty—was willing to dissent from an opinion that must have struck many of them as baffling.

To be fair, it is an intimidating task to engage a world-renowned Harvard professor of Philosophy in a public debate about metaphysics. It probably did not help that these students were raised in a culture that encourages deference to authority, fosters group conformity, and penalizes contrarians. Moreover, the notion of “the common good” may not have sounded foreign to them at all, as they have been accustomed to similar slogans such as the “China Dream” (中国梦) and “Common Prosperity” (共同富裕).

While the students did not challenge Sandel directly, they did raise a few thoughtful points. The most interesting concerned the phenomenon of involution (内卷) hyper-competition that renders life miserable for everyone, especially for the so-called winners. This discussion prompted Sandel to share a remarkable anecdote.

He recalled that when he was in high school (which I estimate was in the late 1960s), his math class would reseat students every few weeks according to their cumulative GPA—in other words, a student’s academic ranking was publicly broadcast by where they sat in the classroom. I doubt this revelation startled many in the audience, most of whom were likely survivors of similarly excruciating mental experiences. But it was genuinely shocking to me, because in the America that I know, such practices have long been considered beyond the pale.

Needless to say, Sandel shared the story to highlight how much progress American education has made over the past five decades. Yet, one cannot help but wonder if the MAGA America would view that earlier era with nostalgia—seeing its passing as evidence of decadence rather than progress and a deafening call to “make American education great again.”

The End

I will close by conceding that meritocracy has its own problems. Yet I find it hard to swallow wholesale Sandel’s idealistic and simplistic approach to addressing them.  For those seeking a more nuanced analysis, The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits, a Yale law professor, may be worth reading.

 

Marco Nie

Wilmette, April 27, 2025