Remembering Ashoka: Confronting Suffering, Desire, and Progress in History

I recently listened to a story on the radio show Speaking of Faith from NPR. It was an interview with Pankaj Mishra (right), an Indian novelist, essayist, and journalist. Mishra's newest book, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, details his travels through southern Asia and his own spiritual journey of self-reform and self-discovery from a Buddhist perspective through a collage of commentary on politics, religion, and history, both ancient and modern. The interview was interesting not so much for Mishra's own views on the state of affairs in south Asia or even his own perspective on the Buddha, but for his rather erudite distillation of how religion shapes politics, especially at the local and personal level. What most fascinated me was his brief discussion of Ashoka, the 3rd century BCE emperor of the Mauryan Empire, and how Ashoka's conversion to Buddhism led to sweeping reform throughout the Indian subcontinent.

Without going into too much detail, and at risk of over-simplification, Ashoka (below) was the emperor of the sprawling Mauryan Empire which in the 3rd century BCE covered most of India and Pakistan as well as parts of Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Known as a ruthless conqueror with a will towards domination, Ashoka invaded neighboring kingdoms one by one until most of the Indian subcontinent and much of South Asia came under his domination. The final military conquest came in the mid-260s BCE with the utter destruction of the country of Kalinga in east-central India, the pretext of which was Kalinga's supposed granting of asylum to the relative of one of Ashoka's enemies, though modern scholars have suggested that it was access to the Ganges that enticed Ashoka. Whatever the reason, Kalinga was subdued with particular brutality, and the result was the wholesale slaughter of its people, totaling by some estimates over 100,000. Following this event, according to the legendary interpretation of Ashoka, the emperor was eager to survey his new domain, but instead, seeing only burning villages and scattered corpses, was reduced to horror at what he had done. In an Augustine-like sudden conversion, Ashoka adopted Buddhism, then only around 150 years old, and became one of the first major Asian rulers to do so. In keeping with Buddhist teachings, Ashoka made non-violence a state policy that included leniency in the punishment of crimes and prison sentences, the banning of any warfare not necessary for self-defense, the outlawing of harm to animals in any way other than provision of sustenance and a promotion of vegetarianism, among many other changes. For the rest of his more than thirty year reign, Ashoka went from being hated and feared to being revered as one of the greatest rulers the subcontinent had ever seen.

Mishra's point in discussing Ashoka for several minutes in the midst of his lecture on Buddhism and its modern bearings on politics seems to be that Ashoka, though he is a well-known historical figure in India, is not as well-known or well-regarded in global history or in world history as has been manifest in the Western curriculum. Mishra compares Ashoka to his near-contemprary Alexander the Great (Ashoka's grandfather Chandragupta Maurya overthrew Alexander's successors in Central Asia), and asks why he is not given the same scholarly interest of the admittedly greater conqueror. Both men conquered wide swaths of land and presided over enormous empires made of myriad diverse peoples. The major difference, as Mishra points out, is that Ashoka finally quit, whereas Alexander's desire to continue over the horizon was so great, that only the near mutiny of his generals convinced him to turn back. It was the self-control through Ashoka's new-found Buddhism that reigned in his hostility. Mishra blames the 19th century "great men" historiographical theory for promoting the study of figures such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon Bonaparte over figures such as Ashoka. In fact, Napoleon, and later Hitler, studied Alexander intently. It seems the amount of land one conquers is directly proportional to one's later historical relevance, provided that the conquests remain edifying accomplishments following one's death.


It is perhaps odd that the 19th century saw such an interest in the study of these "great men," for although these figures represented to the colonial and imperialist powers who promoted their study a counterpart to the spirit of progress the age embodied, the major intellectual figures of the day were in many ways more concomitant with Buddhist thought than with the modern Western trends, at least according to Mishra. He calls the Buddha a "kindred spirit" with a surprising array of intellectuals ranging from David Hume (left) to Adam Smith. Hume, who like the Buddha, considered the self "ever changing and relative," came to the conclusion that "we are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity... The mind is a kind of theater where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations...." Permanence is an illusion; change, the only constant. Smith, the founder of modern capitalist theory, meditated heavily on the Buddhist concept that desire is the origin of suffering, and wondered publicly if an economic system based on the desire of the individual could be sustained. He optimistically concluded that educated men would be able to deduce the difference between wants and needs, though practically he realized that the system would fail without self-control (Do you hear that Wall Street?).

Buddhism, as Ashoka realized, could be envisioned as a reformist movement within oneself. In the 19th century context, this presents a paradox of thought. On the one hand, the perceived greatness of the Western world was built on desire in the form of progress -- scientific, political, religious, philosophical -- and the rest of the world was being pulled up by it bootstraps as, to paraphrase Kipling, the white man endured this burden. The history of the West from the Crusades through the Age of Imperialism, according to Mishra, may be viewed as a result of this desire in the communal, civilizational, and cultural sense, and the resulting suffering that comes from uncontrolled desire demonstrated itself in the destructive power of World Wars I and II. Scientific and social progress is a "good" thing, which can go very badly when used for misanthropic purposes. On the other hand, Buddhism necessitates only a reform of the self, as opposed to the major collectivist Utopian movements in the West, from Fascism and Marxism to even capitalism and democracy. All ostensibly require control not over the self but over the other.

So, what can we learn from Ashoka? Mishra centralizes him in the context of politico-religious history and asks what it means to be on the "winning" side of history. Surely, Ashoka would be considered a "winner," but is he more valued historically because of his conquests or because of his self-reform? The wielding of power has gotten us far, if progress is indeed the propeller of history, but violence always begets more violence. If desire is necessary for progress, Mishra's argument seems to imply that suffering is also an inevitable by-product. In studying history for nearly a decade, I've grown particularly wary of any generalizations, but one thing I've found that is difficult to argue against is that there is rarely a war that does not lead to more violence, and non-violent movements, when they are not violently crushed in their infancy, often achieve political and social goals if given the chance. And Mishra reminds us that the disposition towards violence exists or has existed in all cultures and that treating one form of violoence as endemic to one particular culture or ideology (Islamic terrorism, Western militarism, authoritarian despotism) misses the point in that it views violence from the perspective of the perpetrators and not the victims. The lesson to be gleaned from the life of Ashoka is that true reform, what has often been attempted from the top down in the form of communism and fascism, must proceed from the bottom up to be truly effective. Non-violent movements, organized civil disobedience, democracy itself is a process that works best when it develops locally, and it must be localized in the individual before it may spread. Unlike other systems of government, democracy cannot be imposed -- we must learn this before we attempt to introduce much of the world to its ideals. Reinhold Niebuhr, (above) whom our current president counts as an intellectual influence and who is perhaps among Mishra's "kindred spirits" with the Buddha, was an early recognizer that the ills of the world cannot be solved simply by "converting" the world to democracy and capitalism, that this was a failure of imagination, and that political and economic proselytization was not the answer. It is no surprise that 19th century historians an politicians looked to figures like Alexander the Great as models because they represented the great progress that Western leaders of the period wished to emulate. Let is return to the implication that desire is necessary for progress. If desire truly is the beginning of suffering, must progress always be coupled with it? Because suffering is a reality, it is one thing, regardless of religious affiliation or lack thereof ,that we must confront in this world. I want to end with an extended quote from Mishra's work, during his visitation of a madrassa in Pakistan, that in part illustrates the difficulties in interpreting suffering in the world: where it comes from, how we might deal with it, and why violence as a solution will only create more problems if we allow it to become our primary weapon of change. Progress, in the sense of self-reform as a Ashoka so championed, seems to be a viable option for our uncertain future.

I hadn't expected to be moved by the casual sight in one madrassa of six young men sleeping on tattered sheets on the floor. I hadn't thought I would be saddened at the human waste they represented--the young men whose ancestors built one of the greatest civilizations in the world, and who now lived in dysfunctional societies under governments beholden to, or in fear of, America, and who had nothing to look forward to except possibly the short career of suicide bomber. The other kind of future once laid out for them had failed. This was the future in which everyone in the world would wear a tie, work in an office or factory, drive a car, practise birth control, raise a nuclear family, and pay taxes. There were not nearly enough secular schools to educate these young men in the ways of the modern world--and few jobs awaited those who had been educated.... But the fantasy of modernity, held up by their state, and supported by the international political and economic system, had been powerful enough to expel and uproot them from their native villages. This had also been the fate of their fathers and countless others like [them]. But the journey from the old to the new world had become harder over the years for most people. Now, this journey seemed never-ending, and it seemed to consume more and more people as it lengthened: hundreds of millions of stupefied and powerless individuals, lured by the promise of equality and justice into a world they had no means of understanding, whose already strained and partially available resources they were expected to exploit in order to hoist themselves to the level of affluence enjoyed by a small minority of middle-class people around the world.... Having lost the protection of the old moral order, their particular bonds and forms of authority, they hoped to stave off chaos and degeneration by joining such authoritarian movements as Hindu nationalism and radical Islam, by surrendering their dreams to demagogues like Bin Laden.

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.

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.

The Clash of Civilizations or Ignorance? Pt. 1

Perhaps it was fate that Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order fell into my reading pile when it did, the day after Christmas. It's been on my list of interests for several years now, since I first heard of it in the aftermath of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. I actually read several rebuttals of it before I read the actual article by Huntington in Foreign Affairs magazine, upon which the book is based, and the concept has intrigued me ever since. Huntington died on Christmas Eve of 2008 and I began reading shortly after the fact.

The reason it's come to the forefront of my mind is that, for years, I had heard nearly everyone I knew who had read or read about this article or book, describe it as a legitimizer of the neoconservative version of foreign policy, or at least of the theory that Western civilization was at its core mortally and naturally opposed to the civilization of Islam, and that the new 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were manifestations of this concept. Huntington himself seems not to be a neoconservative (he used to work for the Carter administration), but he certainly is a war-hawk and Westophile who believes in a pseuodo-colonial way that the West is the best and it's therefore the West's goal to preserve the essential values of our civilization at all costs, even if this means the utter destruction of other civilizations in our way. Needless to say, I immediately plunged into this book, trying to keep an open mind despite the knowledge about the author and topic I had going in. Here's part one, of what I hope to be a three part series of my analysis of the book:

The thesis of Huntington's argument is that the ideological struggle between capitalist liberal democracies and authoritarian communism was an aberration of global politics and that the end of the Cold War marked a return to the "natural" state of political struggles on the planet which takes the form of a clash of civilizations. Huntington's definition of civilizations is a bit murkier, and he borrows a bit haphazardly from the likes of Braudel, Spengler, McNiell, Durkheim, and others, but in the end he seems to draw mostly from Toynbee--that civilizations are the broadest cultural entities with which one can identify. That is, I can identify myself as a Midwesterner who has some differences from a Californian, but we both may identify ourselves as Americans with more in common with each other than, say, a German. But, Germans and Americans, drawing from the same cultural well, have more in common with each other than a Westerner does with someone from China or the Middle East. He argues that commonalities between people beyond the civilizational level are essentially biological and that the common objective elements that help to define a civilization include language, history, religion, customs, etc. Huntington argues that throughout most of history the principle fault-lines of conflict have not been ideological, as they were in both World Wars and the Cold War, but civilizational, as it has been with Western European conflicts with the Islamic world in the Middle Ages, between subcontinental Indians and Muslims during the Islamic expansion, between China and the Buddhist kingdoms to its South and West, and between European colonists and the Africans and Native Americans displaced by their settlement. With the fall of communism throughout most of the world, Huntington contends throughout the bulk of this book that the struggle between civilizations is about to ascend back to the top as the force behind foreign policy decisions the world over.

In many ways, this book reads as a rebuttal of Francis Fukayama's other neoconservative theory concerning global politics, enunciated in his book The End of History and the Last Man. Fukayama's argument was that, with the fall of the communism, the world had entered a sort of final stage in political and ideological eveolution in which liberal democracy and the free-market system had proved themselves as the penultimate form of human government and economics; and history was effectively over, insofar as history could be defined as a teleological progression from hunter-gather society through successions of monarchies, various forms of feudalism, nationalism, and all the other -isms that pervaded global political structures. As ludicrous as this sounds, it was taken seriously for a brief period by many intellectuals in the late 80s and early 90s. While Huntinton's arguments obviously have their drawbacks, among policy wonks and conservative thinkers, his concept of civilizational conflict filled in the gaps in thought that Fukayama seemed to forget about--the cultural, linguistic, and religious divisions that were, in his mind, far more important than political and economic ideologies. In that, at least, Huntington seems to be right.

Where he fails to understand or even imagine a different type fo world, is in his lack of a coherent understanding of what makes a civilization. What is a civilization? In the broadest historical and etymological sense, the word civilizations derives from the Latin word civitas which means "city" and replaced the Latin word urbs, the original word for a city. The reason for this replacement seems to have been prestige oriented, perhaps because of the notion of citizenship in the Roman Empire. Civitas came from the word civis which meant a city-dweller. In any case, the early meaning of the word "civilization" which did not appear in the English language until 1704, certainly connoted a society that reached a pinnacle in which surplus of food and an organized class structure had created a hierarchy where the building of cities, the creations of laws, the maintaining of a professional army, and so on had been achieved. This implicitly leaves out any society in which city building and complex structuring of social relations had not been achieved, and indeed, Europeans during the Age of Discovery did not regard any of the peoples with whom they came into contact, such as Native American and African tribes, as civilized. At the very least, the cultures of China, India, and the Middle East, though they were thought of as lesser peoples thatn those of Europe, were at least regarded as civilized. Henry Kissinger once said that "History is the story of states" and by this he seemed to mean, as Huntington does, that only civilizations are worthy of having their stories told. The problem with this, of course, is that it purposely leaves out the stories of all the peoples and cultures in the world, a great many of which did not encounter "civilization" until relatively recent times.

Throughout the first several sections of the book, I failed to see what was so neoconservative about Huntington's argument. In fact, I failed to see what was so political about it at all. Despite the fact that Huntington is a professor of strategic and international studies and the book is marketed as "political science," it reads much more like world history, and for the first several chapters I felt like I was reading a late twentieth century equivalent of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History. Toynbee, like Huntington, was concerned with the division of the world into clear-cut and unambiguous civilizations, and he spends the majority of his magnum opus describing contemporary and historical civilizations. Western, for example, is described as beginning somewhere between the fourth and eighth centuries, as the Classical civilization of Rome and Greece came to end. Western civilization was a synthesis of this civilization with Germanic culture and Christian religion. This is mostly true and is in line with most medievalists visions of a creation of a particularly European society distinct from the Mediterranean oriented society of the previous several centuries. So, what are today's civilization that Huntington views as so black-and-white?

As this map shows, Huntington divides the world into fairly recognizable patterns of culture, language, religion, and geography. The West is made up of Western Europe, North America above the Rio Grande, Australia, and New Zealand; Islamic encompassed all regions where Islam is the dominant relgion, including places like Indonesia and parts of India and the Philippines; Orthodox civilization includes Russia and the other Orthodox Christian countries in Eastern Europe, and so on. Notice that civilizational lines do not necessarily correspond with national boundaries, and this is especially apparent in the line between Islam and African civilizations in the Southern Sahara and in the Sinic and Buddhist civilizations in Southeast Asia and the Tibetan plateau. As the book progresses, Huntington gives more and more analyses, criticisms, and predictions of the future of global conflict, and most of them revolve around intercivilizational conflicts. The book was published in 1996, well before the election of George W. Bush, 9/11, and the Iraq War, and in light of the direction of US foreign policy over the past eight years, many have hailed Huntington's prescience as nearly prophetic and many, especially those on the right, have embraced the concept of civilizational clash as the new motivating factor of politics and indeed, history in general. Bush's "with us or against us" attitude has unfortunately given credence to the more pessimistic and culturist facets of Huntington's arguments, and for some, the "War on Terror" is seen as a substitute for a more direct War on Islam. In my next post, I plan on deconstructing some of Huntington's specifc arguments, describing some fallacies, bringing light to some rebuttals, and giving Huntington's rebuttal of the rebuttals a closer look.