Despite the optimistic liberal hopes of the 1990s, we haven’t escaped history after all, and among its ugliest continuities is imperialism, which has been meditated anew and reinterpreted in response to its endurance and transformations. The rise and fall of militant Muslim ISIS, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chinese repression of Uyghurs and threats to annex Taiwan, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict all entail features of traditional imperialism, with the situation in the Middle East probably the most complex of all to understand and to evaluate fairly. Nor can we any longer believe—if we ever did—that economic factors are the only or even the main ones at work. Profoundly rooted cultural components and dynamics are operative, their genesis often centuries old and dependent on radically different readings of history, religion, and reality itself.
The work of the Palestinian–American literary scholar and cultural historian Edward Said (1935–2003) of Columbia University remains of central importance as having helped usher in a new ideological period and set of attitudes toward the understanding of culture, literature, imperialism, ethnicity, and immigration in universities, publishing, and other public and political commentary. There is much to be learned from Said’s two main books on the subject, Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), which presented a shockingly new view of “Western civilization” in terms of domination, manipulation, exploitation, subordination, and exclusion, a conceptual matrix that is now applied to domestic relations as well as foreign ones.
For good or ill, Said helped to inaugurate our current “great awakening” concerning a wide range of social phenomena, from ethnic-national consciousness and immigration to “intersectionality” and gender fluidity. And it would be an ignorant or imprudent person who would be confident enough to ignore a matrix of interpretive ideology that has become global in its reach through the unprecedented power of modern communications technology. There really are no more “backwaters” of tradition left, and we all do now to some extent sail, swim, or sink in the same sea.
Said drew on alternative Western and non-Western sources in his critique of what he took to be falsely confident, progressive, ethnocentric Western cultural histories and narratives, giving great prominence to oppositional thinkers early in the twentieth century such as the Lebanese George Antonius and the Trinidadian C. L. R. James. He attacked and critiqued once-famous and widely read pro-imperialist writers such as Rudyard Kipling and influential, sophisticated racial theorists such as Ernest Renan. Himself a lapsed Arab Christian, Said criticized the central Western cultural tradition of Platonist and Christian “logocentrism,” though to my knowledge never referring explicitly to his great, immediate predecessor in Comparative Literature at Columbia, Joseph A. Mazzeo, a distinguished, polymathic scholar of both Dante (on whom he wrote two influential books) and the development of modern scientific thought (The Design of Life: Major Themes in the Development of Biological Thought, 1967), who explicated and defended this tradition. Said admired but was ambivalent about the great Polish émigré writer Joseph Conrad, about whom he wrote learnedly and well. Conrad acquired English as a fourth language and became a British citizen as an adult.
Yet as a former student of Said’s, who was never close or sympathetic to him but has learned much from his writing, I believe Said omits two vitally important factors in his otherwise informative and wide-ranging body of work on culture and imperialism: one an ideological movement—Social Darwinism— and one an individual writer, G. K. Chesterton.
Said successfully exposes the deep and systematic self-interest, racialism, snobbishness, and dishonesty of European imperial institutions and individuals, and of many of their American successors. He draws on Marxist critiques of capitalism and imperialism, especially the Frankfurt Marxist school that found refuge in the U.S. during the time of Hitler. But one powerful ideological movement of central importance from the mid-nineteenth century onward in Europe and the U.S. that he never mentions in his two influential books is Social Darwinism, the theory that human races and groups are subject to natural selection just as animals were throughout the history of evolution.
A very large scholarly literature, at least from Richard Hofstadter (Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1944) onward to Richard Weikart (Darwinian Racism, 2022), has shown how poisonous and powerful this current of modern ideology was, and is, in the generation and maintenance of the inhumane, subordinationist, exploitive attitudes and regimes that Said deplores. In vivid and popular form, George Bernard Shaw made the critique of Social Darwinism in his Preface to Man and Superman (1903). The point is developed, drawing extensively on English-language sources, in the far-left French writer Michel Husson’s final book, Portrait du pauvre en habit de vaurien: Eugénisme et darwinisme social (Portrait of the Poor Person Clothed as a Good-for-Nothing: Eugenics and Social Darwinism, 2023). Husson praises Chesterton as the public leader in the anti-eugenics and anti–Social Darwinist movement in Britain in the early twentieth century.
Said’s omission of these powerful and related conceptions—Social Darwinism and eugenics—in his analysis of imperialism and exclusionary elitism is a serious deficiency: perhaps also a symptom of a scientism that he occasionally mentions and spurns but never really challenges.
Indebted to Christian Arab intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century such as Antonius and his own family relation Charles Malik, Said doesn’t want their Christian metaphysics (or Muslim metaphysics either) and prefers neo-Marxist and acrobatic French dialectics as antidotes to the instrumental and self-interested metaphysics of scientism and Social Darwinism. It’s an elaborate logical and rhetorical maneuver, but hardly convincing beyond certain rarefied university precincts.
Said’s second troubling omission is of an individual anti-imperialist writer of the first third of the twentieth century who died in the same year Kipling did: G. K. Chesterton. It can be argued that Kipling and Chesterton were the last two truly popular poets in the English language before the onset of the new world of film, radio, and television decisively changed expectations about poetry and literature. But these two influential writers and public figures were also ideological opposites and rivals.
Said devotes a good deal of critical attention to Kipling in Orientalism and especially in Culture and Imperialism, and Kipling well deserves such emphasis due to his vast influence in the English-speaking world and beyond. Kipling was intermittently a great writer, of poems and stories as well as the great novel about India, Kim (1901). Poems such as “If,” “Recessional” (T. S. Eliot: “true prophetic inspiration”), “The White Man’s Burden,” “The Fabulists,” “When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted,” and “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” remain among the most popular and influential poems in the English language. C. S. Lewis even says that some of Kipling’s “poems could not, on internal evidence alone, be distinguished from Christian” literature.
As befits so vastly influential a writer, Kipling has attracted a large body of commentary, much of it critical (George Orwell: Kipling is “the prophet of British Imperialism”), and much of it very distinguished and nuanced: essays by Eliot (introduction to a volume of A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, 1941, reprinted in On Poetry and Poets), Lionel Trilling (1943; reprinted in The Liberal Imagination), Orwell (1942; reprinted in Critical Essays), Lewis (“Kipling’s World,” 1948, reprinted in Selected Literary Essays), Malcolm Muggeridge (“Kipling Sahib,” BBC 1, 1965; reprinted in Muggeridge Through the Microphone and Things Past), and Bernard Bergonzi (“Kipling and the First World War,” 1972; reprinted in The Turn of a Century). There have subsequently been important books by David Gilmour (2002), Charles Allen (2007), and David Sargeant (2013) and collections of essays edited by Andrew Lycett (2010), Jan Montefiore (2013), and Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai (Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation, and Postcolonialism, 2010).
Said is not alone in seeing seductive and sinister features in much of Kipling’s writing: Lewis’s great 1948 essay on Kipling is partly appreciative but devastatingly critical in seeing him as guilty of a kind of subtle but ultimate egotism and chauvinism, worshipping an “inner ring” of those in power, in contexts small and large. Several decades later in his book Anglomania: A European Love Affair (1998) the Dutch writer Ian Buruma wrote of this “in-group” egotism and snobbery as the charismatic heart of Anglophilia abroad and class consciousness in England itself. The French Académicien René Girard saw the dynamic of arrogance and envy as the central historical “danse macabre” of Western and world cultures.
So Said is certainly in good critical company about Kipling; but he nowhere acknowledges an earlier critic of Kipling who was his contemporary and rival—Chesterton. Said insists that no major English writer in the period from 1885 to 1935 was a serious critic of imperialism, mentioning only William Morris and W. S. Blunt as dissenters. But Chesterton was indeed such a critic, on Christian grounds, from the time of the Boer War (1899–1902) onward; and he was also a critic of Kipling as an imperialist. Said nowhere mentions Chesterton in Orientalism or Culture and Imperialism, and in an essay in his award-winning book The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) he summarily dismisses Jorge Luis Borges’s admiration for him: Chesterton is an “odd figure . . . a shadowy writer” hardly worth Borges’s “surprising seriousness . . . of attention” to him.
It was a seriousness of attention shared by tens of thousands of readers all over the world, English-speaking and otherwise, then and now, and the failure to recognize it skews Said’s view of the literature of the world since 1890. Kipling’s 1897 poem “Recessional,” written in honor of the jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign, remains a great poem. But Chesterton wrote a parody of it in a series he called “Answers to the Poets” that is worth knowing. He called it “Post-Recessional,” and in it he mocked the pretentious piety of Kipling that he thought hid a deep chauvinism and national vanity:
God of your fathers, known of old,
For patience with man’s swaggering line,
He did not answer you when told
About you and your palm and pine,
Though you deployed your far-flung host
And boasted that you did not boast.
Chesterton sees—as clearly as any Marxist—the taint of pharisaical self-interest, what Kant called “the radical evil,” the use of the language of ethics as a screen for self-love, which Kant (and the New Testament writers) thought had to be avoided at all costs for ethics to be genuine:
Though drunk with sight of power and blind,
Even as you bowed your head in awe,
You kicked up both your heels behind
At lesser breeds without the law;
Lest they forget, lest they forget,
That yours was the exclusive set.
The poem continues with this grave irony about the pretentious self-importance and covert selfishness of the British imperial regime, then in ascent to its highest reaches:
Cut down, our navies melt away,
From ode and war-song fades the fire,
We are a jolly sight today
Too near to Sidon and to Tyre
To make it sound so very nice
To offer ancient sacrifice.
For Chesterton there is something truly blasphemous about Kipling’s poem and his whole stance about “the white man’s burden,” and he himself doggedly opposed British imperialism from the Boer War until his death in 1936. He hardly wrote in an obscure corner but was one of the most widely read writers in the world, even influencing the great Indian sage Mahatma Gandhi and showing generous interest in small countries abused by big, brutal neighbors, as Ireland was by Britain and Poland was by Russia. Suspicious of international Jewish financiers and investors in and after the Boer War, which was fought against farmers for access to South African gold and diamonds, he was nevertheless pro-Zionist, opposing German militarism and Nazi anti-Semitism.
Chesterton wrote classic books in several genres, and one of the wisest and most beautiful is his often-reprinted literary-critical work The Victorian Age in Literature (1913). Its hero is the Christian democrat Charles Dickens, about whom he also wrote a fine book—often called the best ever written on him—and introductions to each of the novels for the Everyman’s Library editions. Born in 1874, Chesterton considered himself a Victorian and wrote about the period with profound and poignant insight. He also saw figures such as Darwin, W. E. Henley, Cecil Rhodes, and Kipling as departing in damaging ways from the central humanitarian ethical tradition of Christianity and the eighteenth-century liberal revolutions. He thought that Kipling inherited the pagan or narrowly Hebraic side of Thomas Carlyle, and he thought “the triumph of Kipling . . . was the success of the politician and the failure of the poet”—the allure of power and pride was too great to be resisted. He conceded that Kipling was a writer of “genius,” but concluded that he was beyond the Victorian age, having none of the virtues or the idealism of the ethically strenuous Victorian thinkers, writers, and reformers: “The world was full of the trampling of totally new forces, gold was sighted from far in a sort of cynical romanticism: the guns opened across Africa; and the great queen died.” Conrad is the great narrative moralist of this period.
For Edward Said not to have seen and discussed the Social Darwinism that fueled Western imperialism, chauvinism, and racialism, and not to have acknowledged the witness and work of Chesterton in opposing and critiquing them across nearly four decades, are omissions that reduce the value of an otherwise distinguished body of cultural criticism. And the verbal and conceptual acrobatics and relativistic evasions of what Said repeatedly calls “secular” criticism can hardly do analytical justice to the painful complexities of our contemporary political, social, and cultural challenges, from “micro-aggressions” to full-scale wars.
