A Poetic Misunderstanding

Poetry is among the oldest arts in all the humanities. The oral culture of our pre-literate ancestors was one in which the most important mythological tales were told through bards who, in order to better facilitate memorization and rhythmic recitation, narrated their tales in meter. The earliest literature from the West and the Near East--the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey--has come down to us in verse, perhaps inextricably bound by what today we call mythopoeia, itself a self-conscious psychological interpretation of archetypes from our own collective unconscious. But the place of poetry in the 21st century, where not only the prose novel but also audio-visual media has lessened the impact of this once hallowed form, is not so highly regarded. Once the mark of an educated man, poetry, even among those of us ensconced in the arts and humanities, holds essentially no place in our curriculum. Since World War I, poetry has atrophied from the consciousness of the educated and is seen now as little more than a hobby or a habit.

However, if there's one area that poetry seems to exist in a particularly purposive way and in an especially decontextualized way, it is in politics. Certain poems, because of their rhythm, language, or form, have a certain ability to invoke inner emotional states that simple language often cannot. But what happens when, after so much decontextualization, after so often hearing the same phrases and words unattached from the themes of their author, that the meaning morphs, not beyond simply what the poet intended (I suspect most poets perfectly understand that the imperfection of language to convey abstract ideas will inevitably lead to their poems being read in ways other than that which they intend), but takes on a new meaning entirely independent from the poem itself. Politicians, and I suspect their critics even more so, make a career from taking things out of context and bending them to the will of their ideologies and political platforms. It is this misunderstanding that I feel has killed poetry far deader than the fickle vicissitudes of modernity.

I spent much of the morning watching Ted Kennedy's memorial service, and it is ineluctable that in the discussion of a Kennedy, whether deferring to the "curse" or not, someone feels the need to quote Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Ulysses's final line about striving, seeking, finding, and never yielding, if I may paraphrase, and it is almost always quoted, in the words of David Yezzi, of The Wall Street Journal, as a "buoyant rallying cry." And those who hear these words in this context are most often apt to think of them as such. But, though I am no literary theorist or critic, it bothers me as a fan of this poem, when these lines are uttered in triumph rather than in lament as they, to my mind, are meant to be read. The poem underscores Ulysses' realization that, with age, comes invalidity, decrepitude, and the feeling of uselessness accompanied by a greater understanding of the fragility of life. Tennyson describes Ulysses--who once ruled Ithaca, fought gallantly in the great Trojan War, and braved the Mediterranean Sea for over a decade before returning home--as an "idle king", a "man made weak by time and fate." "How dull it is to pause," Ulysses bemoans, "to make an end, to rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!" reminding us all not of his greatness, but that all greatness, no matter the heights, shall one day succumb to that which fells us all: the unalterable progress of time. The Kennedy's always quoted this poem (especially Robert, but also Teddy) to promote the drive and determination that so defined their political lives. And now, perhaps with Teddy's passing, it can finally take on the authorial intent of introspection into the fate which awaits us all. These themes are not the most romantic in poetry, but as the age of poetry waned, it became a theme all too common amongst her greatest children. T.S. Eliot, perhaps more than others, in his Gerontion and Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, understood that all that shines will one day burn out, the art of poetry included.

Perhaps, as Kirsten mentioned as she leaned over while we watched the service, the Kennedys really were aware of Tennyson's meaning all along and took Ulysses' advice to heart. Perhaps they understood that, with but one life to live, it is in striving and seeking and finding and never yielding that we find most fulfillment in life. And the tragedy that this family has endured has surely imparted to them the lessons of this reality. And that, in the end, when we are at the precipice, weak with age, deteriorated, our halcyon strength behind us, the words and deeds which we bequeath to our younger generations really are "buoyant rallying cries" and, in true Greek fashion from which the myth of Ulysses derives, it is our words and deeds which echo throughout eternity long after we have yielded to time. If Ted Kennedy's words and deeds do this, they may have been quoting Tennyson correctly after all.

Can We All Just Tone Down the Socialism Rhetoric Please?

I don't want to go into some politico-economic diatribe here, but I've honestly been getting a little disheartened at the slinging around of the words "socialist" and "socialism" in the context of the stimulus package, bail-out of Wall Street, and the Obama presidency in general. Here's the cover story from last week's Newsweek. Here's another one from yesterday on Fox News. From the usual suspects like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, to the McCain/Palin campaign trail rhetoric, to every scared ideologue of the Right, "socialism" has become the new terrorizing watchword of the young 2009. The problem I have isn't really in the political nature of the mud-slinging or the partisanship but in the basic lack of understanding in the vocabulary used to describe the situation. Ask the average American what socialism means, and you'll probably get a response something akin to "government controls the economy" or "the opposite of capitalism" or "that thing the Soviets did" and all of them would be, by and large, wrong.

Dictionary and encyclopedic definitions can often shed light on meaning, but even here, there is a major disconnect with what the term is supposed to mean and what it is perceived to mean: most emphasize the Marxist and Soviet varieties, which are but two out of many. Socialism, arguably, has a much broader meaning than capitalism. Capitalism at its most basic level is a system whereby all means of production (companies, land, etc.) are privately owned and operated and the investment of money into these means of production is a source of wealth itself. Socialism, however, has a larger economic meaning in the sense that the means of production are distributed to a greater variety of individuals, and could be controlled, depending on the society, by groups of individuals (co-ops or syndicates), the public at large through democratic means, or controlled by a state hierarchically from the top down. The problem with the misleading rhetoric coming out of most mainstream media is that the focus is on the latter at the expense of all other meanings. In fact, the original envisioning of socialism did not even include the statist variety - this was essentially created by Lenin and Stalin. It does not reflect well on the economic intelligence of our society as a whole that a seventeen year old blogger seems to understand this far better than the supposed experts in the field. The perception of socialism as a particularly heinous form of government control comes, I assume, from the fact that the galvanizing enemy against which the United States defined itself for 60 years was the U.S.S.R. - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. However, this is only one form of socialism, the statist variety, and a brief history of the movement shows that most socialists in the world today reject this variety. One could argue, in fact, that anything that is statist is, by definition, not socialism, since true socialism requires some form of cooperative ownership and control. State control of all means of production is really like having one corporation run everything.

Here's where the current situation comes in to play. What is going on now - pumping money into corporations, banks, state and local governments, and the economy at large to create jobs - is not really socialism, since the control of the capital and the means of production hasn't actually changed. A better term for this would be something like oligarchic hypercapitalism or plutocratic hypercapitalism or interventionist hypercapitalism. True socialism would involve something along the lines of firing all of the heads of the companies getting bail-outs and giving ownership equally to the workers of the companies regardless of how much money they have invested, or even whether they have money invested. Or, it would be giving all taxpayers an equal stake in the companies, with decision-making power at the ballot, with the money to be returned in kind as these companies rebuild. At least the Newsweek article gets one thing right: it points out that Republican administrations spend a great deal of money as well, and Reagan and both Bushes actually showed a net increase in spending during their terms. If the stimulus package is socialism, people on the Right should take solace in the fact that Obama has at least this one thing in common with his Republican predecessors.

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.