Manu Joseph: America and the bearable loneliness of losing the West

When I was a kid, I believed the West was a place. Then I realized that all of the West was not entirely the West. The West was an idea, an invention. When you put it this way, it looks as though it is some kind of subterfuge to overwhelm human instincts. 

But I like that about the West—that it was an invention. What is so great about nature and human nature anyway? We worship nature without thinking. Human intervention against our own animal biology is probably the very meaning of human wisdom.

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What is happening in America will help us understand the meaning of the West— through its collapse there. A lot of what Donald Trump is doing actually makes sense. Or let us say it makes logical sense; it is even familiar. 

A powerful man is setting out to consolidate his power, to do what he wants without the inconvenience of being resisted. He favours his rich friends, and a gang of rich people are trying to see how they can benefit from his rule. Together, they want to convey that falling in line will be rewarded and fighting them painful. This makes sense because this is how leaders behave in most of the world. Now America is beginning to appear like any other country.

And now we see clearly what the West stood for, in theory—the idea that a popularly elected leader has to be controlled and tamed by conscientious clerks, that the point of a society is not to be practical, but for the strong to care for the weak, that everyone must be free to express themselves, especially minorities. The West said all this without fables of divinity or anything mystical. As for why idealism was better than pragmatism, it had no evidence, but persuaded us all.

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But then, even before Trump, it was becoming clear that the ideals of the West were a theology that used morals to favour some people. And its evangelism of democracy was not meant to make the world a better place, but to weaken other countries’ revolutions—the chaos that America once thought it was safe from. Just as rogue states promoted terrorism to weaken their enemies but were consumed by the same thing.

Everything the West did, buoyed by its cultural heft, was better than what I was used to. Even intellectually, the West seemed superior. Rich or poor, people in every generation who want to make something of their lives want to head to a place where all the magic is. Once it was Alexandria, and there was Nalanda, or so I am told. The West held that magic in modern times. People not only flocked to it physically, but also mentally.

Trump keeps talking about the US trade deficit, but there was always a cultural surplus that America and Europe maintained with the rest of the world. There was a demand gap. 

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We were more interested in them than they were in us. Whatever they said was good, we read. I remember as a teenager marvelling at some of the literary works of the West. Now, when I read them, I find many were mediocre. I can see through the ordinariness of Western acclaim and how that acclaim is an industry in itself—meant to promote a certain way of thinking, a certain set of people.

Nobody in Somalia or India, or even China, hosts an award that Western artists covet. This should give you an idea of the cultural gap. It was underpinned by the notion that Western intellectuals are very discerning of the arts and intellectual pursuits, that they are free, and their savants are not people who suck up to a strongman but independent thinkers that only the West could foster. 

One way or another, in some form, we accepted that. That is why we read the works of those people more than they read ours, and we watch their films and listen to their music even though they know almost nothing about us. What tariffs could bridge our cultural deficit with the West? That is a subject for another column.

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Now that the West has been diminished and it is hard for us to adore everything it produces, I find its humanities lingo unbearable, especially when one of its eggheads says something like this: ‘…a richly layered meditation on the loss of an ideal and a mournful critique…’

But the West’s loss of moral and intellectual heft feels like a form of loneliness. For years, many of us had something to enjoy, something to accept, and a sense of direction, but now we only have home. Like villagers forced to return to a village from a great city.

There is also a surprising area where the West has failed. 

It has turned inefficient in a banal way. Recently, when I was at Berlin airport, my luggage took one hour to arrive. Trains were delayed by hours every day. This was not the image I had of Germany. The country simply doesn’t have enough people to do mindless tasks. Germans are confused about poor migrants who can do that for them. They want them, but don’t want to see them. And the promise of mindless machines doing all repetitive jobs is yet to come true.

I still enjoy the spectacle of the West. All the beauty and order and street joys that their wealth and past plunder have created. Of all the things that the West once meant to us, we are now only left with winding cobbled ways.

The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’.