The Clash of Civilizations or Ignorance? Pt. 2

So, what is a civilization? I may have breezed over that question a bit too quickly in the previous post, but I believe it is at the core of Huntington's argument. "Civilization" is often used synonymously with "culture" but I don't believe this is what Huntington means. If this is the case, he could theoretically be talking about the differences between Western civilization and the Guarani Indians of South America or the Ainu of the northern Japanese islands or Hippies or the manga/anime lovers across the United States. All could legitimately be called "cultures." Civilization means something both much broader than these subsets but also much more specific: to Huntington, it seems to be about the relationships amongst several specific aspects of culture that constitutes specific civilizations. He enlarges his circle of definition to the point at which he feels he can enlarge it no further without somehow redefining his meaning. Like Toynbee, Huntington views religion as the single most important defining characteristic of any given civilization.

Let us examine some glaring fallacies is his own definition. First of all, if religion is the most important determining factor in the delineation of civilizations, how does he explain the division of Western Christianity from Orthodox Christianity? (Again, here is the map.) Certainly, there are major distinctions between the two branches--culturally, hierarchically, historically, linguistically--but how much more distinct are they from one another than between Catholicism and Protestantism, the two primary divisions of Western Christianity? Have these divisions not caused extraordinary conflicts (the Thirty Years War, conflicts in Northern Ireland)? What distinguishes these as "inter-civilizational conflicts" versus wars between Eastern and Western Christians? Similarly, Latin America is predominantly Catholic, yet is considered its own civilization. Does ethnicity, geography, and political ideology abrogate religion in this instance? And what about other religions? Why is Islamic civilization unified? The distinctions between the Shi'ite and Sunni versions have been the source of numerous conflicts, and continue to do so today. What overriding issues have caused Huntington to keep Iran (distinct from Arabs ethnically and culturally and the majority of Islam religiously) in the civilization of Islam, but not keep Greece or Bulgaria in the West? Is Huntington saying that Malaysian Muslims have more in common with Moroccan Berbers than with a Malaysian Buddhist? The ubiquity of proselytizing religions around the world also confounds this theory. Millions of Christians live under neither Western nor Orthodox nor Latin American civilization. Sub-Saharan Africa, South Korea, Israel, and other Middle Eastern nations (the Ahl al-Kitab) are home to many Christians, several of whom do not fit neatly into the Western/Orthodox dichotomy. Are these people somehow unwitting expatriates of one of the previous three civilizations or are they anomalies of "their own" civilizations? America, the most multi-cultural nation on the planet, contains significant populations from all of Huntington's civilizations, and I think the vast majority of them would identify themselves as much as Americans as they would identify themselves with wherever else it is they come from. Huntington views Mexican immigration into the U.S. and African and Middle Eastern immigration into Europe as an example of a clash of civilizations rather than a domestic issue that can be resolved through domestic means.

There are no neat answers to these questions, just as there are no neat divisions between civilizations. Is civilization like obscenity: something which has no specific definition, but something which one will know when one sees? Or can the entire concept be subjected to the structuralist abstract of binary opposition, with a definition something akin to Ursula K. Le Guin's statement that "Primitiveness and civilizations are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war." The greatest critique of Huntington's thesis has been made by the inimitable intellectual and cultural critic Edward Said. His article for The Nation, "The Clash of Ignorance," which informs the second part of this post's title, convincingly dismantles many of the primary cornerstones of Huntington's contentions. He especially derides Huntington's failure to imagine a complex world where black and white divisions do not exist as many would like to believe and chides him for having little "time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization, or for the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization." Indeed, it does. Said spends most of the article, however, not offering an alternative to Huntington's way of thinking, but by affronting the "us-vs.-them," "ours and theirs" mentality. In the aftermath of 9/11, he asks if Osama bin Laden's followers have more in common with the Branch Davidians, Timothy McVeigh, or the Reverend Jim Jones rather than with Islamic nations supposedly belligerent to "the West". Said implicitly asserts that the dangers posed by these types of threats are related not to culture or civilization at all, but to the pitfalls of fundamentalism; and the irony is that the mutual hatred shared between radical Islam and the fundamentalist Right of the West (and the U.S. in particular) is between two groups who are, with the exception of religion, ideologically congruent.

In the final post, I will attempt to answer a question, as best I can, that Huntington himself poses in his rebuttal to all of the rebuttals: If not a clash between civilizations, then what? Certainly, as erudite as Said's rejoinder is, it certainly does not offer another conceptual framework with which to imagine a "new world order." I don't think that's Said's style. But it is mine, and I'd like to explore, though not necessarily extrapolate, another vision of the future, taking into consideration some things that Huntingon ignores such as environmental concerns, issues of sustainability and energy needs, and the increasingly globalized economic system, as global politics unfolds into the 21st century.