Indeed, though Said and many others have refused to countenance it, often it was the imperialists themselves who experienced foreign locales firsthand, and who consequently gained a nuanced appreciation of foreign systems unavailable to their untraveled compatriots at home. This is how imperialism, cosmopolitanism, and universalism are all connected. Burton helped lead the way. Said sought to correct his errors. One paradigm replaced another, more or less as Huntington suggested. It is all part of a process that may eventually lead to a common world culture beyond East and West.

And Lewis, with his amazingly clear and concise histories of the Middle East, which buttress the literary sweep of events with telling details culled from his research in the Ottoman archives or some such, in terms of style and viewpoint lies midway between Burton and Said.

Nor is Lewis completely out of date. The whole business of political forecasting requires generalizations, often about countries and sometimes even about national cultures, since it is not only exceptional individuals who make history but the vast average of populations, which less and less make it into the reports of elite journalism and policy studies, as the victory of Said’s mindset has intimidated journalists and others from offering up analyses that might be criticized as orientalist. This partly explains the growth of the geopolitical forecasting industry since the end of the Cold War. As someone who worked for years as a senior analyst for both Stratfor and Eurasia Group, two prominent forecasting firms, I can attest that generalizations of the kind Huntington defends, Lewis employs, and Said condemns occasionally help advance the analytical process at those firms.

That is why the complete defeat of orientalism in journalism and policy studies has its ironic side, since it discourages the category of broad observations that, while risking prejudice, can also make readers and practitioners less surprised by the middle-term future in various countries. What is the solution? The late Russian-American poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky observed, “A semblance of objectivity might be achieved, no doubt, by way of a complete self-awareness at the moment of observation.” The whole trick is to be self-aware. Indeed, the more we are honest about ourselves, and who we are in the eyes of others, the surer will be our judgments about those we encounter in foreign places. Edward Said, though he may have overreached in his attack on Bernard Lewis and other orientalists, has certainly encouraged this process of criticism of ourselves and of our own culture as it relates to other cultures. Said’s work is thus fundamental to the spirit of globalization and to making the world smaller.

Robert D. Kaplan holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A foreign correspondent for decades for The Atlantic, he is the author of twenty books, including The Arabists (1993), The Revenge of Geography (2012), and Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age, forthcoming in April with Random House.

Image: Reuters.