Saturday, January 05, 2008
Was Samuel P. Huntington right after all?
Fouad Ajami, one of the earliest critics of Samuel P. Huntington's famous "Clash of Civilizations" thesis in the mid-nineties, is having second thoughts:
Nearly 15 years on, Huntington’s thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time. In recent years, for example, the edifice of Kemalism has come under assault, and Turkey has now elected an Islamist to the presidency in open defiance of the military-bureaucratic elite. There has come that “redefinition” that Huntington prophesied. To be sure, the verdict may not be quite as straightforward as he foresaw. The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels: in that European shelter, the Islamists shrewdly hope they can find protection against the power of the military.
“I’ll teach you differences,” Kent says to Lear’s servant. And Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism’s conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)
I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are “nowhere men,” children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.
More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington’s pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West — openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington’s that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.
I admit, I have never read Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
. Perhaps it is time.9 Comments:
By 
, at
Sat Jan 05, 10:13:00 AM:
As a longtime reader of this blog, I'm surprised you haven't read "The Clash of Civilizations." I read the article while in college, and the book about seven years ago. It always seemed prescient and persuasive to me.
By 
davod, at
Sat Jan 05, 10:19:00 AM:
"Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission"
Multiculturalism is the cause of most of the West's problems. The concept of keeping true to your heritage sounds benign. However, the practitioners of the concept took it to another level by emphasizing the migrants heritage and deriding the new country.
The migrant has nothing of the new country to become attached.
By , at
Sat Jan 05, 10:48:00 AM:
do it. "read who are we" as well.
By Steve M. Galbraith, at
Sat Jan 05, 11:10:00 AM:
We in the West assumed that commerce, and with that the development of a middle class, would act like solvents on closed societies. That's our approach, of course, to China.
I think that's still true; that over the long run, closed societies and cultures will wither away. But over the long haul, as Keynes said, we're all dead.
There's something to Kaus's argument that welfare states prevent the type of assimiliation needed for alien cultures to survive or succeed.
The above is called stream of consciousness posting.
By , at
Sat Jan 05, 02:40:00 PM:
Davod said:
> Multiculturalism is the cause of
> most of the West's problems.
Yes, but this is only part of the wider story.
One of the great advantages of the western world is the breakdown of internal borders within a given society meaning that there is much less internal fragmentation. I am talking about clans, the big extended family, tribes, etc. This made it possible that I don't turn to my tribe/clan/family for protection or justice, but instead, I passed on these responsibilities to the state in the knowledge that in the eyes of the state, there is no difference between me and my opponent regarding rights. I don't have to worry that the cop/judge belongs to (and is defined by) the other tribe/clan/etc.
This breakdown allowed me to judge my neighbour the same way I judge somebody across the country. I don't judge him/her based on which group he belongs to but based on his/her character. Of course, there are still internal fragmentations, but these now run around the borders of the immediate or a little bit wider family. As a side note, should I mention that the family, the very bedrock of any society, is also being destroyed???
In other words, in the west, we are judged as individuals and not as part of groups.
And this is the thing which is slowly disappearing, and this will be a very very sad journey.
Now we are more and more are judged by the group we belong to. Think about gay rights, womens' right, and yes, multiculturalism. Mark Steyn present problems with Canada's Human Rights Courts is an excellent example.
In other words, and to sum up succintly (not my words), the individual rights are being replaced with group rights.
This is my biggest quarrel with the left. The slow but definite replacement of individual rights with group rights and the destruction of the family. There are many things I can forgive but not these two.
-------------------------
There is still a simmering flamewar between Little Green Footballs and the Brussels Journal. I am not going to comment on who is right, but let me allow to refer to one post on LGF, where a Vlaams Belang supporter accuses Charles (LGF) of being more dangerous than Osama bin Laden: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=28233_More_Dangerous_Than_Osama_Bin_Laden&only
There is truth in both sides. Charles' truth is that it is ridiculous that he is more dangerous that OBL. But there is a truth in the other side, too. Honestly, OBL is a nobody, whom we could swat like a mosquito had we had the internal strength and self confidence. But the million dollar question is, why we cannot still kill him, or put and end to the West's islamization?
There is a good phrase in my mother language, Hungarian: You can protect anybody from anybody else except from himself.
This is a supreme truth. A big civilization, like the West, is indestructible but by one thing: itself. So how is it that we cannot defend ourselves from the Islamist threat? Because we weakened ourselves internally. We are fragmenting society, and we look at others not as individuals but as which group they belong to. In this view, the islamist are merely another group whom we must protect from the west's "prejudices". Keep in mind the phrase "cultural relativity".
We can say thanks for this to the self-described "liberals" who created this self doubt within the west. The whole islamist danger would be nothing but a storm in a teapot had we had the civilizational self confidence that we are right.
As long as we don't put an end to this replacement of individual rights to group rights, or in other words, as long as we go down the path of judging others based on which group they belong to, we are losing. And multiculturalism, which creates internal fragmentation, is also about treating people as part of groups and not indiduals.
Vilmos
By , at
Sat Jan 05, 04:25:00 PM:
Vilmos,
Perhaps it is just ugly reaction to try and use identity politics and collective judgement, because in many instances, individuals do not want the kind of personal judgement and responsibility the has been the hallmark of the civilization you describe.
Just as socialism and Communism were reactions against the so-called "ruthlessness" of free-market capitalism (capitalism was a term invented by Marx), so, it might seem, that "multiculturalism" and group rights and identities is an intellectual construct. Multiculturalism plays into our more ancient notions of tribe and clan to confound and resist the notion of personal rights and responsibilities, and a more 'cosmopolitan' world, where all can participate (as free men and women) and find fulfillment.
-David
By , at
Sat Jan 05, 11:23:00 PM:
Greetings:
I'm always surprised and disconcerted when I read criticisms of Fouad Ajami, especially in web sites which are aware of the Islamic threat to America and the non-muslim world.
I have read one of Mr. Ajami's books, "The Foreigner's Gift" and many of his columns in US News & World Report. I have found his analyses insightful, especially those involving the insidious synergy between the Arab tribal-type culture and the Arab supremacism of Islam. His prose, I am sure all can admit, is a thing of beauty.
I am concerned that those, who don't recognize this fearsome synergy of culture and religion, will underestimate the depth of the problem and type of antidote needed for its correction.
By , at
Sun Jan 06, 12:22:00 AM:
islam is a failed and dying ideology. if iran gets nukes it will be gone in 10 years, if nukes are kept out of the middle east it will last maybe 50 more years. we are ascendant, not they. the left here is also in its death throes, and thrashing about viciously. the sky is always falling for conservatives, and has been for 3000 years.
By , at
Sun Jan 06, 01:00:00 PM:
So not only have there been 'conservatives' for three millenia, but they've thought the same way?
Fascinating.
