Tuesday, January 20, 2009

The Clash of Civilizations or Ignorance? Pt. 3

"Civilizations die of suicide, not murder." -Arnold Toynbee

In his rebuttal to all of the rebuttals, Samuel Huntington responds to his critics by asking "if not a conflict of civilization, then what?" He primarily criticizes his detractors for not offering an alternative paradigm for understanding post-Cold War global politics. Utilizing Thomas Kuhn's famous theory of paradigm shifts from his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Huntington harnesses the scientific theory for the purposes of his political one. In Kuhn's words it states that for a theory "to be accepted as a paradigm, [it] must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it is confronted." Huntington seems to specifically emphasize this final point, noting that his political paradigm does not explain all of the facts, but that it does explain more of the facts and does so better than any other. However, though I am no Kuhnian, I would imagine if Kuhn were alive today, he would make mention of the fact that "truth," whatever vague concept we might imagine that to be, also need not be the prime criterion for a theory to be accepted. According to Kuhn, Copernicus's view of the heliocentric universe was not "right" because it was "true," it was "right" because it satisfied more data than the prevailing geocentric model. If we extend this metaphor to Huntington, it means that his thesis of civilizational conflict is also not "true" in the metaphysical sense, but Huntington believes that it satisfies more evidence than any other conceptual construct. The danger of this simplistic thinking is, of course, that it fails to concede that cultures and civilizations are all pluralistic, dynamic, and constantly changing. Pigeonholing and segregating the world's cultures into distinctly definable, edifying, and oppositional models simply does not account for the most realistic view of the world: an increasingly interconnected, diverse, and, yes, dangerous place.

Huntington does, perhaps reluctantly, admit that his theory has its flaws and that as a predictor, it may be untenable (he give the example of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 as a paradigm-breaker). But, holding true to the Kuhnian motor of his argument, he maintains almost defensively that his theory describes the world far better than any competing theory can or will. The two primary adversaries to his exemplar are what he calls the "statist paradigm," which he calls a "pseudo-alternative," and the "one-world paradigm," which he calls an "unreal alternative." The former theory continues the 20th century model of a world dominated by nation states as the primary bearers of power, but he rather effectively squashes this by asserting that his civilizational theory already accomodates this viewpoint and that, while nations will continue to be the primary actors on the global stage, they will do so within the context of their own civilizations. The second theory, which he completely rejects, states that a universal civilization is emerging or will emerge in the near future that will override other civilizations as the primary identifier. Certainly, this is not a viable surrogate for Huntington's theories, but it at least accounts for some of the complexities of civilizational encounters.

I think that a more likely alternative, and one which sadly I do not see expressed as much as I imagine it should be, is one that envisions a complex relationship among states, political groups, corporations, economic organizations and other entities the interplay amongst which could give rise to a lessening of conflict, a reduction of genocide and preventable disease, and the creation of a sustainable global economy and energy policy. Certainly, this may sound pie-in-the-sky and a description of the role that, presumably, the UN is supposed to play. But what I am proposing as an "alternative paradigm," if I am to play into Huntington's chimerical exercise, is a view of global politics that emphasizes the commonalities amongst all peoples around the globe, and I don't mean that in a "deep-down-we're-all-the-same" type of way. What I mean is that the interconnectedness of the global economic superstructure, the interconnectedness of the global communications network, and the fact that environmentally, all nations, cultures, and civilizations are effected by the actions of everyone else, supercede anything a "conflict of civilizations" can explain. This complex interconnectedness will describe the future conflicts that will surely occur once we begin to scramble for things such as basic energy, arable land, and water (Could the Iraq War be a shot across the bow?). Though Marxist and neo-Marxist historiography strikes me as a bit too self-consciously fatalistic and deterministic, the assessment that many conflicts throughout history may be viewed as a struggle for economic gain is not that far off the mark. One of the problems with their solutions is that it narrowly envisions "economics" as only the story of class struggle. The 21st century requires recasting and re-imagining the major struggles across the globe as not just "striving for more" in a monetary sense but, to use Huntington's term, as a "clash" between groups attempting to meet energy, agricultural, and environmental needs.

It would also behoove us to understand how much conflict has changed in such a short time. Huntington's thesis implies that global conflict is inevitable and predicts that the alignments will follow a civilizational pattern. This may be so, but it will not be simply because they are from the same civilization. It will likely be based as much on historical partnership and geographical and political commonalities as it is on language and religion. But conflict today is not what it once was. Gone are the days when soldiers from comparably equipped armies duked it out over battlefields and the winner was determined by who didn't retreat or who lost fewer soldiers. In a sense, this ended with World War II, and indeed most of the wars since then have been asymmetrical: the UN conflict in Korea, the United States in Vietnam, the French in Algeria, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. In almost all cases the country who has started the war has lost, the more technologically advanced army has failed, and the country on whose soil the war was fought has won. The reality of asymmetrical war has been described more aptly elsewhere, and I will not attempt to rehash it here, but suffice to say that the future of warfare in the near future appears to be certainly asymmetrical, and the supposedly great ideological struggle of our time, the War on Terror, certainly fits that mold. (In fact, Gary Brecher, the "war nerd", describes only two major instances in the last half century of what we think of as traditional war: Ethiopia's conflicts with Somalia and Eritrea in the 1980s and 90s in the Horn of Africa and the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s--I might add the ongoing Congolese Civil War.) The point is that a clash of civilizations does not exactly describe this state of affairs. One such vision of the future that does, at least more so than Huntington's, is Thomas Friedman's description of the interplay among "superpowers, supermarkets [not grocery stores, but electronically-linked financial centers around the world] and super-empowered individuals." Friedman is often sloppy in his thinking, but at least in his basic descriptor, I think he hits the nail on the head. Currently, the United States is the world's sole superpower, but in the coming decades it is likely that this status will be rivaled by a more united Europe and an emerging China and India. And markets do not necessarily have to follow superpowers as places like London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore, and Seoul wield considerable economic clout independent of the power of thier respective states. And, the biggest wildcard is what Friedman calls the "super-empowered individual," who through increased communication tools, increased knowledge of global interconnectedness, and increased access and exposure to global news may enact change for good, such as Muhammed Yunus and his micro-economic theories enabling the poor to get small loans in the Third World, or for ill, such as Osama bin Laden and the network of al-Qaeda.

So, where does civilization fit into all of this? As intangible as it is, "civilization" is real and is certainly an important factor in the global structure. Perhaps it is better to talk about Civilization with a capital "C"--that is, the entirety of human civilization, even if that is as intangible, if not more so, than civilization with a lowercase "c". If we return to Toynbee once more, he says the lifetime and the prosperity of civilizations depends upon their ability to respond to challenges such as "hard country, new ground, blows, pressures [both internal and external], and penalizations." Certainly, these types of stimuli seem to be more applicable to the various civilizations around the world, however we may define them. A more modern approach, and one that enmeshes better with the interpretation of an interconnected world, is the one on display in Jared Diamond's marvelous book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Diamond's concern is nothing less than Civilization with a capital "C" and the warning that, for the first time in the history of the world, we as a single global community face the same possibilty of collapse that dozens of societies have faced in the past. Except of course, the stakes are far higher--about seven billion times higher. According to Diamond, several of the most spectacular civilizational collapses in the past--from Easter Island to the Anasazi to the Maya to the Greenland Viking--have occured because of an inability or, more alarmingly, an unwillingness of the society to deal with its environmental problems. Perhaps, if there is a "clash of civilizations" as Huntington seems so keen on, it will take the form of a fight for survival, as more arid countries (from the Sahel, the Middle East, Central Asia) fight wars over water while the great energy consumers (the US, Europe, China, India) may fight for dwindling energy sources. Indeed, all of our most pressing challenges are now global. The "clash of civilizations", if we are to survive as a species, as a Civilization, may have to become a war for sustainability in agriculture, energy, and economics. And this clash is one that will be more easily won if the civilizations of the world can actually work together.

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