Clash of Civilizations

I'm a sucker for sweeping generalities when they are well argued and elegantly articulated.  Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond remains one of my all-time favorite books. I just finished reading The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order by Samuel P Huntington. It joins GGS on my list of really important books.

Clash of Civilizations was written in 1996. It's interesting to read a history of events that have happened mostly in my lifetime and see how predictive it has been of the most recent 20 years.

One of Huntington's central premises is that clashes among groups of people are inevitable. Despite the fact that we in the West foolishly dreamed of a universal culture after the fall of the Soviet Union, it isn't in human nature for everyone to agree on common principals and just get along.  We define ourselves, and our tribe, by how we are different from others.

Huntington argues that the Cold War was an anomaly in the history of civilizations because it was a clash of politics and ideals rather than of fundamental cultural and religious differences. But now that the Cold War has ended, the world is reverting to a norm where peoples disagree over the fundamental things that they believe -- culture, values, and religion.

The world today, he argues, has seven major civilizations:

• Sinic (Chinese)
• Japanese
• Hindu (primarily India)
• Islamic (vast but lacking a primary core state)
• Orthodox (Russian)
• Western (that's us and Europe)
• Latin American

And when push comes to shove, people will align with others who share their civilizational and cultural identity.

He identifies the key beliefs, values, and institutions that characterize "the West," and admonishes that we in the West wrongly assume that these are shared and universally correct values:

• Classical legacy coming from the Greeks and Romans
• Catholicism and Protestantism
• Separation of spiritual and temporal authority
• Social pluralism
• Representative bodies
• Individualism

"What is universalism to the West is imperialism to the rest."

The vast center of the book illuminates the history and fundamental characteristics of the other major civilizations. Huntington then examines the major and minor conflicts that continually arise along the "fault lines" where different civilizations come in contact. "Fault line wars are intermittent," he says. "Fault line conflicts are interminable."

The most sobering and prescient part of the book is the final section, where Huntington reprises the classic phases of civilization identified by other notable historians and describes a civilization in decline.  I'll quote at length because it is both important and frightening:

Civilizations decline when they stop the "application of surplus to new ways of doing things. In modern terms we say that the rate of investment decreases." (Carroll Quigley) This happens because social groups, controlling the surplus, have a vested interest in using it for "non-productive but ego-satisfying purposes... which distribute the surpluses to consumption but do not provide more effective methods of production." People live off their capital and the civilization moves from the stage of the universal state to the stage of decay. 

It's pretty hard to avoid equating that description with the huge wealth gap that is growing in Western countries, particularly the U.S., and with multinational companies hoarding huge amounts of cash instead of reinvesting.

Huntington continues, quoting Quigley at length:

This is a period of acute economic depression, declining standards of living, civil wars between the various vested interests, and growing illiteracy. The society grows weaker and weaker. Vain efforts are made to stop the wastage by legislation. But the decline continues. The religious, intellectual, social, and political levels of society began to lose the allegiance of the masses of the people on a large scale. New religious movements begin to sweep over the society. There is a growing reluctance to fight for the society or even to support it by paying taxes. 

Huntington wrote this tremendous opus before globalization and the information age had really taken hold. And he died before he could reprise his arguments in light of recent events. So much of what he predicted has come true, but I hope that his advice for saving the West is no longer completely valid. Coming from the perspective of someone who believes so strongly in the power of civilization, Huntington argues that the West won't survive if it insists on embracing multiculturalism and pluralism rather than reverting to its fundamental Christian roots.

Basically, I guess that means I love the book and hate the ending.