Who read Edward Said before, and what is his point?

Without trying to rewrite the essay by explaining it to you, I’ll offer a parallel from history.

At the outset of World War II, before the US had been drawn into the conflict by the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor (and the Philippines), the Japanese and American governments had striking ignorance of each other’s culture. But they didn’t know that; they thought they each knew what they needed to know about the other side, and planned accordingly.

The militaristic leaders of Japan saw the USA as weak, lazy, corrupt and – at complete odds with how the Japanese saw themselves – basically dishonorable. They felt that the heavy strike at Pearl Harbor would dishearten the US, who would immediately recognize the implacable honor of their foe, sue for peace (because the Japanese did not want or expect a long-drawn-out affair with the US, they just wanted access to oil, rubber and iron so that they could pursue their main war: with China). For its part, the US government looked down upon the Japanese as somewhat backward, lacking in technological expertise and essentially incapable of the type of strategic thinking and planning – not to mention execution! – that would make an attack on such a powerful naval base as Pearl Harbor even thinkable. The US, it is thought, expected a weak sortie from Japan through much of the latter half of 1941, which they could then easily repel and drive a peace bargain on their terms.

In other words, neither culture was operating with real knowledge of the other. The USA obviously did not crumple after the attack on Hawaii; instead they joined a world conflict from a standing start and fought a two-front war to two eventual independent victories. And for its part, Japan eventually built and fought the world’s largest and most powerful battleship. Clearly they were not lacking military technological know-how.

The ignorance persisted throughout the war. In the Japanese military culture of the day, surrender was looked upon as dishonorable, as bad in its way as running away under fire. So when Allied soldiers surrendered to Japanese forces they were treated as scum, because in Japanese eyes they were somehow subhuman. And American military leaders considered the Japanese, who almost never surrendered, but fought against totally impossible odds – or committed suicide – as somehow insane.

It’s hard to look at “enemy” cultures in contemporary times (and this probably holds true through most conflicts throughout history, I suppose) and “understand” what drives them. (This was common for the American Civil War, too, where both sides shared a generally common national heritage, but the sectional differences made the fighters on both sides ignorant of “those others”.)

Bottom line is that it is not the differences between cultures as posited by Samuel Huntington that causes problems but the lack of understanding, or ignorance, of others cultures.

In other words, it is not that fact that I think that red is the best color and you think that it is blue that causes the issue; it is that I cannot understand why you think that is blue or you don’t even know that I prefer red, only that I don’t like blue.