‘European imperialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, formally dismantled in the twentieth century but surviving in many forms, is in certain important ways unique. It wasn’t simply a matter of one set of people dominating others, it involved a move from one kind of society to a profoundly different one. It is this deep metamorphosis and the difficulty of finding a viewpoint from which to judge it, which is the real problem of imperialism. It cannot be seem in terms of imperialist-baddies and resister-goodies. No amount of restraint or tolerance on the part of the ruled, could avoid at least some measure of a transvaluation of values. By what standards can we judge this? Like the emperor who found Rome brick and left it marble, these conquerors found the world agrarian and left it industrial, or poised to become such. This raises tremendous problems. Their solution is in no way advanced by inventing a bogey called Orientalism - and still less by the insinuation that if the bogey is overcome, all will be made plain.’ (p.159.)

[Gellner speaks of] the problem of the cultural interaction set off by imperial expansion [and remarks] ‘If there is, anywhere in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, a discussion of this problem, it has entirely escaped me. Said’s one values, as expressed in the culminating passages of the book, are unexceptional [quotes remarks to the effect that the lesson of the book means ‘not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them into hierarchies’, and responds:] Amen. It would be hard to dissent from the underlying moral current of this: we are all human [...; but i]s categorisation between consenting adults to be allowed at all?’

‘But still, there is something wrong with this anondyne expression of our shared pieties. was it really imperialism which first imposed rigid classifications on people? Deeply internalised, socially enforded distinctions between categories of people constituted a general characteristic of complex societies. They were only loosened and partly eroded by that modern turbulence which brought in its train, but is not exhausted by, “imperialism”. Mobility, egalitarianism and free choice of identity have better prospects in the modern world than they had in the past. Should there not be [...] some expression of gratitude towards the process which has made such a free choice so much easier - even if it also for a time engendered an initial disparity of power between earlier and later beneficiaries of the modern?’

Gellner offers a critique of the four assumptions that he detects in Said, viz., 1) recent domination by the West can be seen ‘as an event in its own right’, not ‘a temporary and unstable imbalance of power’ due to ‘the transformation of the world by a new technology’; 2) the cruelties imposed by the imperialists are ‘somehow worse or more reprehensible than those which customarily take place within either traditional or modernised societies’; 3) these inequalities are ‘reflected in the culture or literature of the societies affected’ and deserve attention; 4) these cultural aspects were ‘essential to it, and not mere superficial accompaniments’. (pp.161-62.)

‘The prevalent mood of expiation is often associated with a wild subjectivism, which would happily endorse all cultures (which leads to a contradiction, by endorsing the ethnocentric absolutism found within so many of them). Said never goes that far: there is no shrill “postmodernist” pan-relativism in his book. He simply makes himself a present of a stance from which he can pass moral judgement and tell us how things really stand, without facing the difficulties of validating it.’ (p.162.)

‘I fear that this kind of unsustained, facile inverse colonialism has grave danges for the moral sensibility of anyone practising it’ [Gellner instances Said’s unthinking reliance on for Thomas Hodgkin, who supported Nkrumah ...] (p.163.)

Charges that Said ‘lets off the founding fathers of Marxism too easily’ [163], noting that in Marx ‘the East can only be liberated by courtesy of the West’ (p.163.)

Discusses at some length Said’s reading of Gide, and suggests that Said lets the latter off the hook in regard to his employment of Algeria as an embodiment of his own homosexual release from Protestant puritanism [‘few men have so shamelesslyused another country as a name for their own fantasy’]; notes that Ben Badis, the puritan reformer who gave much of its character to the new Algerian (and made it ‘the Eire of the Muslim world’: 165) is ignored in Said, while Fanon, who ‘meant nothing to the Algerians themselves’ and was ‘only for export’ is extensively treated ...

Gives account of the state of language education under French rule and the reversals in culture and judiciary but not in administration’... the Algerians succeeded where the less powerfully motivated Irish failed. The Irish secured puritanism but not the recovery of the national language; the Algerians attained both.’ (p.166.)

Charges Said with numerous omissions including Jacques Berque’s autobiography of a pied-noir gradually converted to anti-colonialism, the Témoin du siècle of Malek Bennabi; Ali Merad’s books on the Reformist movement ... &c. (p.167); and at some greater length, Montherlant’s La Rose de la Sable (p.168), and finally Emile Masqueray, and Robert Montaigne

The disregard of the concrete realities of Algeria, the barely restrained indulgence of a kind of metaphysical projectioin of an abstract theme, would make it difficult to defend Said against the charge that he his indeed an Orientalist, in the negative sense that he bestows upon the term.

‘Truth is not linked to political virtue (either directly or inversely). To insinuate the opposite is to be gulty of that very sin which Said wished to denounce. Like the rain, truth falls on both the just and the unjust. The problem of power and culture, and their turbulent relations during the great metamorphosis of our social world, is too important to be left to lit crit.’ (p.169; End.)