Guest guest Posted March 30, 2004 Report Share Posted March 30, 2004 The following is written by a scholar named James Kurth. Very briefly, in his essay he outlined what is what he considers the causes that are hastening the decline and eventual destruction of Western civilization. This is really worth a read, because his description of the decline of the West is in many ways an analog for the possible demise of ISKCON. The Real Clash. by James Kurth WHAT WILL BE the central conflicts of world politics in our future? That is the question that dominates the current debates about international affairs. The most comprehensive, and most controversial, answer has been given by Samuel Huntington, whose concept of "the clash of civilizations" has provoked its own major clash of authors. I intend to engage in this clashing. I will first review the current clash of definitions over the nature of the new era in international affairs. I will then review Huntington's central argument bearing on potential conflicts between Western civilization and other ones, particularly between the West and a grand alliance of the Islamic and the Confucian civilizations. I will conclude, however, by arguing that the real clash of civilizations, the one most pregnant with significance, will not be between the West and the rest, but one that is already underway within the West itself, particularly within its central power, the United States. This is a clash between Western civilization and a different grand alliance, one composed of the multicultural and the feminist movements. It is, in short, a clash between Western and post-Western civilizations. The Clash of Definitions IN THE FIRST few years after the Second World War, it was common for people to refer to the time that they were living through as the post-war period. But a post-war or post-anything period cannot last long, and eventually an era will assume a characteristic name of its own. This began to happen as early as 1947 and was largely completed by 1949. The post-war period had become the Cold War era. There has been no such development yet in our time of transition. Until recently, it was common to speak of the post-Cold-War era, but to continue to refer to the current period in this way--fully five years after the end of the Cold War--does seem to be stretching things a bit. To speak of the current period as the post-post-Cold-War era, however, clearly would sound ridiculous. And yet there is just as clearly no commonly accepted designation for this indisputably new era that we are now in. The lack of a common term for the era is an outer manifestation of the lack of a common interpretation of the international situation and a common basis for foreign policies, as is every day illustrated by the vacillating and reckless foreign policies of the Clinton administration, the first completely post-post-Cold-War presidency. The problem is not that there are no reasonable contending definitions of the new era but rather that there are too many of them. Indeed, by 1993, there had developed at least four major candidates for the definition of the post-Cold War central axis of international conflict. Analogous to the war-centered definitions of past eras, these were: (1) trade wars, particularly between the United States, Japan, and Western Europe; (2) religious wars, particularly involving Islam; (3) ethnic wars, particularly within the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and the "failed states" of Africa; and (4) renewed cold wars, particularly involving Russia or China. And then along came Samuel Huntington, who published a now-famous article, which in large measure subsumed the four different kinds of wars into "the clash of civilizations."(1) Trade wars: In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its communism, it was natural for some analysts to focus on the triumph of liberal capitalism and the spread of the global economy as the central features of the new era. But it was also natural to think, in continuity or analogy with past eras, that the major actors in international politics would be the great powers, except that they would now be what Richard Rosecrance has christened "trading states" rather than "military-political states." The great powers would be the great economies, i.e., the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, led by newly-united Germany. International conflict within the world would principally take the form of economic conflict or trade wars. Religious wars: Other analysts found a different dimension of continuity or analogy with past eras, that of ideologies or world-views. With the collapse of communism, it was reasonable to think that there would be a new conflict with another radical ideology, or at least theology, that would take its place, i.e., Islamic fundamentalism. (The term Islamism is a better one, connoting the distinctive combination of traditional Islam and modern ideology.) To become truly powerful in international politics, an ideology or world-view needs its "defender of the faith," an "idea-bearing state" that serves as its core country. For communism, that role had been performed principally by the Soviet Union. So too, for Islamism, the role of the core country or idea-bearing state would be taken, albeit imperfectly, by Iran. As it happened, however, it was Iran's much more secular adversary, Iraq, that stepped forward to briefly fill this role in 1990. Subsequently, however, Iran has again appeared as the core country of Islamism. With the growing strength of the Islamist movement in the Sudan, Algeria, and even Egypt, there appear to be good reasons to argue that conflicts involving Islamism will be the defining feature of the new era. Ethnic wars: Some analysts focused upon the incidence of actual war itself, particularly on those associated with the resurgence of nationalist rivalries characteristic of pre-Cold War eras. The collapse of the Soviet Union was also the collapse of a multinational empire. The same was true of the collapse of Yugoslavia, which was in some ways a smaller version of the Soviet Union. The old communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia expired with remarkably little effort at violent repression. Once they were gone, however, there was violence aplenty among the ethnic groups left among the ruins of the multinational empires of communist parties, just as there had been at the end of the multinational empires of traditional dynasties, such as the Habsburgs and the Ottomans.(2) The Yugoslav conflicts in particular have seemed to many to define the nature of the new era. Renewed cold wars: Other analysts have found a dimension of continuity or analogy in the military capabilities and political systems that had characterized the Cold War. The Soviet Union had been a threat because of its vast size, its military power, and its authoritarian regime. When the dust settled after the end of the Cold War, Russia was left with a population that was only half that of the former Soviet Union but that still made it the largest nation in Europe. It was also left with a territory that was three-fourths that of the Soviet Union and that still made it the largest country in the world. Most significantly, Russia was also left with twenty thousand nuclear warheads, that still made it the only state in the world that could destroy the United States. A renewed Cold War between Russia and the United States is a plausible prospect. A variation on this theme of a renewed Cold War is represented by China. With its vast population and territory, its large army and nuclear weapons, its booming economy, and its still-communist regime, it has many capabilities that could be combined into a threat to the United States. Thus, by 1993, there were four major contending definitions of the new era in international politics. Each was grounded, by continuity and analogy, in past concepts and experiences and each seemed to be supported by major events that had recently occurred in 1990-93. With so many reasonable contenders, there was no consensus on the nature of the new era or the focus for foreign policies. The Clinton Administration, in particular, has been torn between these contenders and has been unable to construct a coherent foreign policy. Enter Huntington IT WAS IN this complex context that Samuel Huntington entered the debate. With his customary genius at discerning a common underlying pattern in a mass, and a mess, of disparate phenomena, Huntington argues that the central axis of conflict in the new era will be between cultures or civilizations. Although he does not directly address the four contending definitions that we have identified, his concept of civilizations deals with them all. In regard to trade wars, Huntington implies that these might occur but that they will not be central. The United States and Western Europe are parts of the same Western civilization, and conflicts between them will be marginal and manageable. Japan is another matter, however, because, according to Huntington, Japan is its own distinct civilization. This is why, he observes, the economic conflict between the United States and Japan has been more acrimonious than that between the U.S. and Europe. Overall, however, Huntington sees Japan to be close enough in interests to the West to also make conflicts between them manageable. Conversely, the conflict between the United States and Islamism becomes central and perennial in Huntington's view. It is the perfect example of a clash of civilizations. Ethnic wars are also central in Huntington's scheme. He notes that the most prominent of these conflicts have occurred on the "fault lines" of civilizations. The most obvious is the conflict between Muslims, Serbs, and Groats in Yugoslavia, which represents a conflict between Islamic, Orthodox, and Western civilizations. Similarly, the conflicts within and among the successor states of the former Soviet Union have been not just between different ethnic groups but between different civilization groups, e.g., the Muslim Azeris and the Orthodox Armenians. Conversely, there has been almost no violence at all between different groups within the same Slavic-Orthodox civilization, e.g., Russians and Ukrainians.(3) Finally, from the Huntington perspective, one would expect renewed conflict between the United States and Russia or between the United States and China. The United States represents Western civilization, Russia represents Orthodox civilization, and China represents Confucian civilization. The conflict will take different forms than it did during the Cold War, when the language was ideological. The language of the new conflicts will instead be cultural. But they will still be conflicts between great powers, and nuclear powers at that, who represent different world-views and different ways of life. And although Huntington does not himself say so, they conceivably would take the form of a cold war, complete with those old and familiar features of nuclear deterrence and military alliances. The Huntington vision not only subsumes each of the contending definitions of international conflict, it also orders the relations and the priorities between them. Given a civilizational perspective, one could see the axis of conflict to be between Western civilization, which is now dominant, and all the others, which are now subordinate--"the West and the Rest," as the title of Kishore Mahbubani's article had it (The National Interest, Summer 1992). Huntington, however, does not see it this way but rather sees the central conflict to be between the West and a sort of grand alliance between the Confucian and the Islamic civilizations, with the Confucian civilization strong in industrial power and military weaponry, and the Islamic civilization strong in oil reserves and geographical proximity to the West. Given a civilizational perspective, the long (really more than thirteen centuries) conflict between Islam and the West would indicate continuing conflict for a long time to come. On the other hand, although the conflict between the West and Confucian civilization is not long (really less than two centuries, or since the Opium War of 1840-42), it has frequently been extremely bitter. Furthermore, the booming economies of Confucian countries now give them the power to think about redressing the old and unequal balance between them and the West. Conversely, Huntington does not see a central conflict between the West and the Orthodox civilization. He does not make an extended argument as to why not, but he does observe that Russia is a "torn country," the most important torn country in the world (others are Turkey and Mexico). Such a country is torn between two civilizations, perhaps with the elite and its policy drawn toward one, and the mass and its history drawn toward the other. Russia has been a torn country in this sense since Peter the Great or for almost three centuries--torn between "Westernizers and Slavophils," between Europe and Eurasia, between the Western and the Orthodox civilizations. Huntington seems to think that because there is so much of the West within Russia that a civilizational conflict will not develop between the two. One could just as easily conclude, however, that a civilizational conflict will develop within Russia itself and that the torn country will become a traumatized country, with a resulting rigidity and hostility in its relations with its repressed other self, the West. Perhaps Huntington also found weighty two historical legacies. First, Orthodox civilization's most enduring and profound adversary has been Islamic civilization. Second, Russia's most traumatic sufferings were under the "Tartar yoke" of Genghis Khan and his successors--hardly Confucian "civilization" but, from a Russian perspective, much the same thing. If so, Huntington probably thinks that it would be a foolish West indeed that allowed its differences with Orthodox civilization to drive Russia into the arms of its most ancient adversaries. Rather, Russia should be a natural ally of the West against the grand alliance of Islamic and Confucian civilizations. Similarly, but more simply, Huntington does not see a central conflict between the West and Japanese civilization. He explicitly states that the differences are largely economic and could be sensibly negotiated. It is also likely that he sees Japanese civilization as an isolated civilization, caught between Western and Confucian civilizations, and that a wise Western leadership can readily keep Japan as an ally rather than drive it into alliance with Confucian civilization. Indeed, a number of Huntington's critics in East Asia think that is precisely his purpose, to construct a way by which the West could once again divide and rule East Asia, this time by setting off an isolated and vulnerable Japanese civilization against a rising and threatening Confucian one. After all, on the face of it, there are good reasons and historical precedent to conclude that Japan is a part of Confucian civilization (or more accurately, that Confucian civilization is a part of Japan). Huntington versus Huntington HUNTINGTON HAS HAD a long and exceptionally distinguished career as a political scientist. His distinctive contributions to political science have focused on political institutions, in particular the state, military organizations, and political parties. His books on these topics are seminal works that have made him one of the most read and respected political scientists in the world.(4) Yet political institutions are virtually absent from his essay on the clash of civilizations. In fact, however, the origins, spread, and persistence of civilizations have been intrinsically linked with political institutions, such as traditional dynastic empires and modern nation states, and with the power that they have wielded. But different civilizations have produced different kinds of political institutions, and this will make for different kinds of clashes and conflicts. A Huntingtonian attention to political institutions will cause us to amend the Huntingtonian analysis of civilizational clashes. Islamic civilization: A legacy of weak states: Islamic civilization was created and spread by military prowess and political power. There were times when there was a leading Islamic power, most prominently the Ottoman empire (sometimes known as "the Ottoman Ruling Institution"). The Ottoman empire was a true civilization-beating state. However, there was never a time when there was only one strong Islamic power. Even the Ottoman empire had to deal with other Islamic empires in Persia and in India. Since the Ottomans' collapse at the end of the First World War, the Islamic civilization has been fragmented into many conflicting states. The closest approximation today to a core state for the Islamic civilization is Iran, but it is largely isolated from the rest of the Islamic world by either its Shi'ite theology or its Persian ethnicity (and, temporarily at least, also its dismal economy). It is virtually impossible for Iran to become the core state for the Islamic civilization; it is, however, also virtually impossible for any other state to become so. The other large states who might seem to be potential leaders (Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, and Indonesia) are so different from, and so contemptuous of, each other that no concerted policy toward the West or toward the rest (e.g., Orthodox, Hindu, or Confucian civilizations) is possible. Islam will remain a civilization without an empire or even a core state to carry out a civilizational foreign policy. This means that the clash between the West and Islam is not likely to take place at the level of conventional or even nuclear wars between Western states and Islamic states. (The Gulf War is the exception that proves--and strengthens--the rule.) Rather, it will more likely take place between Western societies and Islamic groups, as a long series of terrorist actions, border skirmishes, and ethnic wars. Confucian civilization--A legacy of a strong state: The story of Confucian civilization is precisely the opposite of that of Islam. Confucian civilization has been centered upon a core state for 2200 years, ever since the time of the Han dynasty. Whereas the history of Islamic civilization has been marked by long periods of fragmentation, punctuated by brief periods of unity, the history of Confucian civilization has been marked by long periods of unity (or at least deference to an imperial center), punctuated by brief periods of fragmentation. Today, as in the past, Confucian civilization has only one contender for the role of core state, i.e., China. (Huntington may be wrong in holding that Japan is not Confucian enough to be a member of Confucian civilization, but he is right that it is not Confucian enough to be the leader of that civilization.) All of the other Confucian countries (and they are few and mostly small--Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) can be expected to revolve around, or at least defer to, China. The clash between Confucian civilization and the West (or the rest--i.e., Orthodox or Hindu civilizations) will really take the form of a clash between China and some other state (or states). This means that what happens to the Chinese state will be crucial to the direction, and the timing, of a clash of civilizations. Two generations ago, almost no one thought that the Confucian form of statecraft had any value in the modern world. For all the differences between Western liberals and Chinese communists, they both agreed about this. For the past decade or more, however, there has been a broad consensus that the Confucian societies have created states that are outstanding at industrial development. These are South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and (insofar as Confucianism rather than Shintoism or Buddhism should get the credit) Japan. They are the most successful trading states in the world. The Chinese state must make the great transition from being a communist state to being a Confucian one. This is not going to be a smooth and easy process. The ideal Confucian state in the modern era has been the Singapore of Lee Kuan Yew. Its achievements have been extraordinarily great, but its size is extraordinarily small. (It is really a city-state, with a population of only 2.8 million.) The other successful Confucian states have also governed rather small countries, with the exception of only partly-Confucian Japan. So there is a crucial question: Will the modern Confucian state be able to govern 1.2 billion people? There may indeed come a clash between Western and Confucian civilizations, but sometime soon there will intervene a clash between the communist past and the Confucian future in China itself. The nature of that internal clash will largely shape the nature and timing of the external one. A clash of civilizations that occurred after a long Chinese "time of troubles" would have different consequences than one that occurred in the near future. In any event, the clash between the Western and Confucian civilizations, like the clash between Western and Islamic civilizations, is not likely to take place at the level of conventional or nuclear wars. Rather, it will more likely take place between Western-style or liberal capitalism and Confucian-style or state-guided capitalism, as a long series of economic conflicts, human-rights disputes with an economic dimension, and trade wars. >From Christendom to "the West" A CLOSER LOOK at Huntington's list of major civilizations will raise a fundamental question about the nature of civilizations and the differences between them. He identifies "Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African civilization." This is, on the face of it, a motley collection of terms. Four clearly identify a civilization with a religion (in Toynbee's term, a universal church). However, the two civilizations with the most advanced economies--the Western and the Japanese--are identified in secular terms. We have already noted that Japanese civilization is a result of a synthesis of three religions--Confucianism, Shintoism, and Buddhism--so in its case the use of a national term rather than a religious one seems logical. The real anomaly in Huntington's list is the most powerful and most pervasive civilization of them all--Western civilization, which is identified with a term that is only a geographical direction. Instead of connoting the profound essence of the civilization, the term Western connotes something bland and even insipid, with no content at all. And instead of connoting the global sway of the civilization, the term Western connotes a locus that is limited and confined, with no breadth at all. The problematic quality of Western civilization goes deeper than an anomalous term, however. It reaches to the most fundamental character of the civilization, to its definition and its direction. The fact of the matter is that Western civilization is the only civilization that is explicitly non-religious or post-religious. This is the radical difference of the West from the other civilizations. It helps to explain why there are new conflicts between the West and the rest. It predicts that these conflicts will become more intense in the future. And it also points to a possible fatal flaw within Western civilization itself. Three hundred years ago, no one knew that there was a Western civilization, not even those that were living within it. The term then, and the one that would be parallel to Huntington's terms for the other civilizations, was Christendom. The story of how Christendom became Western civilization and how most other civilizations have retained a religious identity is crucial for understanding the clash of civilizations in the future. Western civilization is, as Huntington notes, the product of a series of great cultural and historical movements. The featured tableaux in this grand parade are the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Huntington's own list does not include the Counter-Reformation. This may be natural enough for Americans; Europeans, however, have good reasons to include it. The Enlightenment brought about the secularization of much of the intellectual class, the idea-bearing class, of what hitherto had been called Christendom. The civilization was now no longer called that, even though much of its ordinary population remained Christian. The French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution spread Enlightenment ideas and secularization to important parts of this population, but the Christian churches continued to be a vital force within the civilization. But ever since the Enlightenment, it has not been possible to refer to the civilization as Christendom. For a time in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, "Europe" became the preferred term for the civilization. But this was also the very time that saw the rise of European settlements in the New World to the status of independent nations. This soon made impossible the term "European civilization." For a brief and exuberant time in the nineteenth century, when this civilization seemed to be the only dynamic and growing one and with all the others in manifest decline and decay, the preferred term was just "Civilization" itself, since this civilization seemed to be the only one around. But this term, too, could not be sustained. It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that the term "Western civilization" was invented. The term registered the awareness that this civilization, unlike others, did not place religion at its core. It also registered the awareness that this civilization was only one among many. It was a civilization past the enthusiasms of faith and also past the exuberance of being a civilization so blessed that it was in a class by itself. In short, the term Western civilization was the product of a high degree of intellectualism, perhaps even a sickly self-consciousness. The term was itself a sign of the first appearance of decline. It is no accident that, almost as soon as it was invented, it began to be used in this pessimistic context, as in Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918). Had the term been left in the hands, or rather the minds, of Europeans alone, it probably would have had only a short and unhappy life. It was the New World that was called in to redress the pessimism of the Old. The Americans breathed a new meaning into the term Western civilization, first as they dealt with the European immigrants in America and then as they dealt with the European nations in Europe itself. For Americans then, and for Huntington now, Western civilization was the ideas of "individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state." The new content of Western civilization became the American creed. Conversely, the new context for the American creed became Western civilization. The combination of American energy and European imagery gave the idea of Western civilization both power and legitimacy. The power helped the United States win both the Second World War against Nazi Germany and the Cold War against the Soviet Union. The legitimacy helped it to order the long peace within Western Europe that was so much intertwined with that Cold War. The term Western civilization has experienced, therefore, its own heroic age. That age, however, is now over. It is over partly because the term no longer provides the United States legitimacy among the Europeans. Even today, however, when there is no longer any obvious great power threatening Europe, the Europeans are often willing to defer to U.S. leadership (as the successive crises in the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, and Africa have illustrated in different ways). The main reason why the heroic age of the term is over is because it no longer provides any energy within the United States itself, and this is because it no longer has any legitimacy among Americans. The decline of Western civilization is a tale that scholars have been telling ever since the fin-de-siecle of the nineteenth century. As I have argued, the rise of the term "Western civilization" was itself a sign of the first stage of that decline. Now, at the fin-de-siecle of the twentieth century, the decline of that term is a sign of a much more advanced decline. The tale of the decline of "Western civilization" as a term is part of the longer tale of the decline of Western civilization itself. This is connected with certain transformations within the West that have matured in the 1990s. The Great Transformations ONE BIG EVENT of the 1990s, of course, has been the end of the Cold War. Many observers naturally see this development to be the most important one for international affairs, particularly those who focus on international security and the national interest (and who read The National Interest). But the 1990s have also seen the maturing of other major developments that will have major consequences for international security and the national interest, and that will shape the clash of civilizations: first, there has been the transformation of the most advanced countries from industrial to post-industrial economies, and their associated transformation from modern to post-modern societies; second, there has been the transformation of the international economy into a truly global one. The transformation from industrial to post-industrial economy: At the most obvious level, this means the replacement of industrial production with service processes. These changes have been noted and discussed for more than a generation, at least since Daniel Bell published his seminal The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973). It will prove useful for our purposes, however, to emphasize one dimension of this transformation--that of gender. The agricultural economy was one that employed both men and women. They were, it is true, employed at different tasks, but they worked at the same place, the farm, which was also the home. The industrial economy largely employed men. They worked both at different tasks from those of women and at a different place, the factory, which was away from the home. The service economy is like the agricultural economy in that it employs both men and women. But it employs them at much the same tasks and at the same place, the office. Like the industrial economy, that place is away from the home. These simple differences in tasks and place have had and will continue to have enormous consequences for society. The greatest movement of the second half of the nineteenth century was the movement of men from the farm to the factory. Out of that movement arose many of the political movements that shaped the history of the time--socialism and anti-socialism, revolutions, and civil wars. The full consequences of this movement from the farm to the factory culminated in the first half of the twentieth century with the Communist revolution in Russia, the National Socialist reaction in Germany, and the Second World War that included the great struggle between the two. The greatest movement of the second half of the twentieth century has been the movement of women from the home to the office. Out of that movement there have already arisen political movements that are beginning to shape the history of our own time. One is feminism, with its political demands ranging from equal opportunity to academic deconstructionism to abortion rights. Feminism has in turn produced a new form of conservatism. These new conservatives speak of "family values;" their adversaries call them "the religious right." The full consequences of this movement from the home to the office will only culminate in the first half of the twenty-first century. They may not take the form of revolutions, civil wars, and world wars, as did the earlier movement of men from the farm to the factory. Feminists have constructed elaborate theories about how women are far less violent than men. But there are other factors at work. The movement from farm to factory in large measure brought about the replacement of the extended family with the nuclear family. The movement from home to office is carrying this process one step further. It separates the parents from the children, as well as enabling the wife to separate herself from the husband. By splitting the nuclear family, it is helping to bring about the replacement of the nuclear family with the non-family ("non-traditional" family, as seen by feminists; no family at all, as seen by conservatives). The splitting of the family's nucleus, like the splitting of the atom's nucleus, will release an enormous amount of energy (which feminists see as liberating and conservatives see as simply destructive). Some indication of that energy, and its direction, may be gleaned from the behavior of the children of split families or single-parent families, especially where they have reached a critical mass forming more than half the population, as in the large cities of America. In such locales, there is not much evidence of "Western civilization" or even of civility. For thousands of years, the city was the source of civilization. In contemporary America, however, it has become the source of barbarism. The transformation of the international economy into a global one: At the most obvious level, this means the replacement of national production that is engaged in international trade with global production that is engaged in a world-wide market in trade, investment, and technology. These changes too have been noted and discussed for a generation, ever since Raymond Vernon published his seminal Sovereignty at Bay (1971). But their maturity has only come in the past decade, as Vernon has recently discussed in his Defense and Dependence in the Global Economy (1992). We will only note one of these aspects. The globalization of production means the relocation of industrial production from high-wage and high-skill advanced-industrial countries to low-wage but high-skill newly-industrial countries (NICs). This is the de-industrialization of the advanced countries, the dark half of the post-industrial transformation that we discussed above. The two transformations--from industrial to post-industrial and from international to global--are intimately connected. The conjunction of two processes--the de-industrialization of the advanced countries and the industrialization of the less-advanced countries--means that the most advanced countries are becoming less modern (i.e. post-modern), while the less advanced countries are becoming more modern. Or, viewing it from a civilizational perspective, the West is becoming less modern and the rest, especially Confucian civilization, are becoming more modern. Americanization vs. Multiculturalism THE MOST SIGNIFICANT development for Western civilization, however, has occurred within its leading power, which was once its "defender of the faith." Increasingly, the political and intellectual elites of the United States no longer think of America as the leader, or even a member, of Western civilization. Western civilization means nothing to many of them. And in the academic world, Western civilization is seen as an oppressive hegemony that should be overturned. The American political and intellectual class instead thinks of America as a multicultural society. The preferred cultures are those of African Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans. These cultures are derived from the African, Latin American, Confucian, and Islamic civilizations rather than from the Western one. Together, they form a sort of series of beachheads or even colonies of these civilizations on the North American continent, and are now contesting the hegemony there of Western civilization. The United States, however, has always had a large African American population, and it has long had a large Latino American one. Conversely, although the U.S. Asian American population has more than doubled since the changes brought by the immigration law of 1965, Asian Americans still represent only three percent of the U.S. population. The gross demographics of the United States are still much the same as they have been for decades. Something else had to be added to convert a long-existing multiracial demography into a multicultural ideology, establishing a multicultural society. It is not merely the addition of large numbers of immigrants from different cultures in recent years. This is not the first time that the United States has experienced large numbers of immigrants from different cultures, with prospects for their acceptance of the dominant culture seemingly problematic. A similar condition existed a century ago, particularly from the 1880s to the 1920s, when the culture formed within the U.S. by Western Europeans (principally by those of British descent) had to confront large numbers of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe (principally Poles, Jews, and Italians). These immigrants were all from Western civilization, but this was no consolation to the Americans who were already here. Most of these "old-stock" Americans did not even know that they were part of Western civilization (the concept had hardly been invented yet), but rather thought of themselves in terms of religious, national, or (spurious) racial identities. The reaction of the political and intellectual elites of that time to their multicultural reality was precisely the opposite of that of the political and intellectual elites of today. They did not rejoice in multicultural society and dedicate themselves to making it even more multicultural. Rather, they undertook a massive and systematic program of Americanization, imposing on the new immigrants and on their children the English language, Anglo-American history, and American civics (what Robert Bellah would later term the American "civil religion" and what Huntington has elsewhere termed the "American Creed"). The Anglo-American elite was aided in its grand project of Americanization by the booming U.S. economy during this period, which gave immigrants ample economic reasons to assimilate, and by the restrictive immigration law of 1924, which essentially halted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe and allowed the Americanization process to operate upon and shape a settled mass. This grand project of Americanization was relentless and even ruthless. Many individuals were oppressed and victimized by it, and many rich and meaningful cultural islands were swept away. But the achievements of that project were awesome, as well as awful. In particular, when the United States entered into its greatest struggles of the twentieth century, first the Second World War and then the Cold War, it did so as a national state, rather than as a multicultural society. (Hitler consistently underestimated the United States because he thought it was the latter rather than the former; he was thinking that the U.S. was still what it was at the time of the First World War.) It was because of the Americanization project that the United States could become the leader and the defender of Western civilization. Indeed, one of the consequences of this grand project of Americanization was the spread within the American academic elite of the concept of the Western civilization. The political elite remained comfortable with Americanization of the mass population. The academic elite (particularly at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Princeton), however, was in the business of teaching the elite of the future. For this purpose, simple Americanization was too rough and primitive. Rather than imposing Americanization unilaterally on people who were in some sense both European and American, it would be better to find a new common denominator for both Europeans and Americans. This became "Western civilization." As we have seen, very little in this Western civilization happened to contradict the American creed. All of the elements that Huntington identifies as being the elements of Western civilization were in the American creed also. Deconstructing the West THE PRESENCE OF African Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans might have been sufficient to create a multicultural ideology in the 1980s and 1990s. But these three groups alone probably would not have been sufficient to have that ideology adopted by much of the American political and intellectual elites, or to have it translated into policies aimed at establishing a multicultural society. Even a grand coalition between them would not have been grand enough to take power and make policy. A truly grand coalition had to include, indeed had to have as its core, a group that was much closer in social and educational background to the existing elite and much more central to the emerging post-industrial economy. That group, which was not really a group but a majority, was women. We have already noted the importance of women in the post-industrial economy and the consequent importance of feminism in post-modern politics. The feminist movement is central to the multicultural coalition and its project. It provides the numbers, having reached a central mass first in academia and now in the media and the law. It promotes the theories, such as deconstructionism and post-modernism. And it provides much of the energy, the leadership, and the political clout. The multicultural coalition and its feminist core despise the European versions of Western civilization, which they see as the work of "dead white European males." They also despise the American version or the American creed, particularly liberalism, constitutionalism, the rule of law, and free markets. (They also in practice reject the separation of church and state, because they want to use the state against the church, especially to attack a male-dominated clergy as a violation of equal opportunity and to attack the refusal of church hospitals to perform abortions as a violation of women's rights.) The multicultural project has already succeeded in marginalizing Western civilization in its very intellectual core, the universities and the media of America. The Real Clash THE IDEAS of the Enlightenment were invented in Britain in the aftermath of the religious wars of the seventeenth century. They were then adopted by the intellectual elite of the greatest power of the eighteenth century, France, which then proceeded to spread them throughout Europe. The ideas of the post-Enlightenment were invented in France in the aftermath of the ideological wars of the mid-twentieth century. They were then adopted by the intellectual elite of the greatest power of the late twentieth-century, the United States, which is beginning to spread them throughout Western civilization. The overthrow of the Enlightenment by the post-Enlightenment is also the overthrow of the modern by the post-modern and therefore of the Western by the post-Western. At the very moment of its greatest triumph, its defeat of the last great power opposing it, Western civilization is becoming non-Western. One reason is that it has become global and therefore extra-Western. But the real, and the fatal, reason is that it has become post-modern and therefore post-Western. The real clash of civilizations will not be between the West and one or more of the Rest. It will be between the West and the post-West, within the West itself. This clash has already taken place within the brain of Western civilization, the American intellectual class. It is now spreading from that brain to the American body politic. The 1990s have seen another great transformation, this time in the liberal and the conservative movements that have long defined American politics and that, whatever their differences, had both believed in the modern ideas represented by the American creed. Among liberals, the political energy is now found among multicultural activists. Liberalism is ceasing to be modern and is becoming post-modern. Among conservatives, the political energy is now found among religious believers. Conservatism is ceasing to be modern and is becoming pre-modern. Neither these liberals nor these conservatives are believers in Western civilization. The liberals identify with multicultural society or a post-Western civilization (such as it is). The conservatives identify with Christianity or a pre-Western civilization. A question thus arises about who, in the United States of the future, will still believe in Western civilization. Most practically, who will believe in it enough to fight, kill, and die for it in a clash of civilizations? IT IS HISTORICALLY fitting that Samuel Huntington has issued a call to Western civilization and to Americans within it. In the seventeenth century, the first Huntingtons arrived in America, as Puritans and as founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the eighteenth century, Samuel Huntington of Connecticut was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a lender to General George Washington of the funds necessary to sustain his army at Valley Forge. In the nineteenth century, Collis P. Huntington was a builder of the transcontinental railroad. In the twentieth century, Samuel P. Huntington has been, for more than forty years, the most consistently brilliant and creative political scientist in the United States. Huntingtons have been present at the creation for most of the great events of American history, which in turn have been linked up with great movements of Western civilization--the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. It is fitting indeed that, in our century, Samuel Huntington has been not just an analyst of Western civilization but an exemplar of its creative intelligence. The American intellectual class of our time is present at the deconstruction of Western civilization. When that civilization is in ruins, however, it will be its glories, and not multiculturalism's barbarities, that will be remembered. And when that intellectual class has also passed away, it will be the brilliant achievements of Samuel Huntington, and not the boring cliches of the deconstructionists, that will be remembered also. 1 Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993), pp. 22-49. The tide included a question mark, which was both inconsistent with the article's strong assertions and with Huntington's customary style. A debate between Huntington and his critics followed in the next two issues of Foreign Affairs. 2 See my "Eastern Question, Western Answer," The National Interest (Winter 1993-94), pp. 96-101. 3 There have, however, been violent clashes in Moldova, between Orthodox Slavs and Orthodox Rumanians. When the civilization is defined as Slavic-Orthodox, rather than the more obvious Orthodox alone, this anomaly can be overlooked. 4 Especially The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); The Common Defense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); and American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). James Kurth is professor of political science at Swarthmore College. -1- ---------- Publication Information: Article Title: The Real Clash. Contributors: James Kurth - author. Magazine Title: The National Interest. Issue: 37. Publication Fall 1994. Page Number: 3+. COPYRIGHT 1994 The National Affairs, Inc.; COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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