This is a stupid book. Unfortunately, it’s also been a very influential one.
Huntington starts out by playing the old “civilizations” game, popular from the late 19th century onward. Nobody any longer takes you seriously if you talk about nationalities in a silly, anthropomorphic way (“The Dutch are cheese-eating, practical people, but they are doomed to failure as nation because they smoke too much marijuana and their feet must hurt from wearing wooden shoes”). But if you shift the discussion to “civilizations”, big segments of the globe defined by arbitrary criteria, you can get away with it. You can define these “civilizations” any way you want, but usually they end up being nothing more than a map of the world’s major religions. This is not surprising, since these mega-religions are usually accompanied by enough visual cues that you can quickly guess which one you are in by the shapes of buildings, clothing, or other material evidence. There is, of course, some common-sense truth to the observation that places where Islam is predominant have similarities, and places where Christianity is practiced are connected to each other, etc. It is an easy, but intellectually dubious further step to assume that the human race is divided into mega-tribal subdivisions, almost like species, and that these can be neatly drawn on a map. Anthropomorphizing these divisions is merely the old fallacy of “innate national character” writ larger. It appeals to the impulse to see the world in cartoons. This is exactly what Huntington does, way, way too much to make his work credible.
There is also some reasonableness in seeing certain blocks of territory as units, for the purpose of discussion. These sometimes line up with the religions, but just as often they don’t. Most historians look at the land mass south of the Himalayas as a distinct, coherent area. That’s why people in predominantly Muslim Pakistan have no difficulty seeing their cultural kinship with people in predominantly Hindu Uttar Pradesh. But, of course, when religion is invoked, these become two different “civilizations” which are supposed to have little in common, according to Huntington’s particular scheme. The civilization game tends to become irritatingly pigeon-holey, like an argument between two music store clerks over whether to file John Mayall under “blues” or “rock”. Huntington, for example, files Korea with “Confucian Civilization” (i.e, with China), and not with his separate “Japanese Civilization”. Oh? Not glamorous enough to be a civilization of their own, the Koreans must be contented with being subsumed either by China, which strongly influenced their culture before 1700, or by Japan, which equally strongly influenced it after 1700. Which influence is more important? For once the civilization game places you in one tribe, you are supposed to be motivated and driven by a specific “philosophy”. This defining philosophy turns out, in Huntington’s case, to be nothing more than a bunch of clichés and images drawn from hearsay, or the pronouncements of a few, not very credible sources. You would not for a second assume that typical American and European politicians are qualified to make pronouncements about the philosophical essence of Europe and America, or that they must be taken seriously when they do, but a few inane phrases pontificated by Lee Kuan Yew are sufficient to establish the defining characteristics of Confucian Civilization. It turns out that one of these is “the importance of the family”. Wow, that sure is a distinct value. As we all know, nobody in North America thinks families are important. It isn’t surprising that if you ask a rich and powerful Asian who runs a country like a personal possession what he thinks is important for people to admire, it’s going to be obedience to authority, conformity, and deference to rank. That’s what anyone who is rich and powerful wants of people. Huntington is not about to walk through the slums and backwoods of Asia to uncover its “essential values”.
Underneath the illusion of erudition in the book, there’s a great degree of scholarly sloppiness. On two occasions, Huntington states that Armenians are Orthodox Christians, and uses this “fact” to buttress key arguments. Of course, anyone even slightly familiar with Armenia and Armenians knows that their church is not Orthodox. It is Miaphysitic, and is separated from Orthodoxy by a historical and theological gulf far wider than that which separates Orthodoxy from Catholicism or Protestantism. But no matter, Armenia is pronounced part of Orthodox Civilization by a process of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. The facts could have been checked in a few seconds, but the “civilizations” approach doesn’t place a premium on such boring procedures. And what of the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism that was seen by so many generations as a vast gulf, and produced so many theories identical to Huntington’s about a “clash of civilizations”? Huntington dismisses the difference between Catholics and Protestants as trivial.
Huntington’s knowledge of cultures is pretty shallow, because his main interest is really in the “clash” part of the book’s title. The book is really about dividing the world into football teams so that you can imagine strategies of play between them… who should align with whom, and who is the “natural” enemy of whom. That’s why the book appeals to so many armchair political pundits. You only need to remember a handful of “civilizations” and their accompanying cliché phrases to “get” everything. No need to bother remembering the names of hundreds of countries, or even consider the motives of individual human beings. Easy peasy.
What Huntington is really about becomes evident toward the end of the book, when he engages in a tirade against the evils of “multiculturalism”, a phenomenon which he grotesquely misrepresents. The human race is, in his view, divided into distinct species, and, surprise surprise, nothing but trouble can result if they mingle. He kind of sneaks up on it with hundreds of pages of stuff about regions and religions, but what it’s really about is how dirty foreigners should be kept out of America because then it will “no longer be America”. Why? Because they don’t have “Western values”. And what are these “Western values”? Well, among them he repeatedly lists “pluralism and tolerance”. So Americans and Europeans should, it seems, exclude people of different ethnicity in order to protect “pluralism”!! He even casually states, as if it were a forgone conclusion, that if the U.S. went to war with China, then Mexican-Americans would automatically refuse to participate, because it would “not be their war”. This was so silly that I actually bust out laughing when I read it, startling fellow riders in the subway. The subway car was a typical Canadian one — utterly and sublimely multicultural — so the silliness of it was particularly delicious. It’s plain that underneath Huntington’s wacky logic and feigned scholarship, there is nothing more than another sclerotic old man having an apoplectic fit because he went to the corner store and saw signs in the window in funny-looking alphabets.
This book has had an extraordinary influence. But two groups in particular have been most delighted by it: The Bush / Cheney / Neocon crowd that controlled the White House, and the Al-Qaeda / Taliban / Islamist crowd. Both were comforted by its cartoon visions of an inevitable “clash of civilizations” between “The West” and Islam. It is the cornerstone of their world view.
If people really want to understand the essential division underlying the affairs of the world, then they should face up to the fact that Cheney and Osama bin Laden are on one side, together — and decent human beings, everywhere, are on the other. That is the real “clash of civilizations”.
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