ANTHROPOLOGY FINAL PAPER!!

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TWO The Seven Deadly Sins of Samuel Huntington

Hugh Gusterson

Culture is most easily conceived as a static generalization of

collective behavior. . . . Yet it is increasingly evident that no

civilization is ever actually static. It always flows.

Alfred Kroeber, “The Delimitation of Civilization”

In reading about the clash of civilizations we are less

likely to assent to analysis of the clash than we are to

ask the question, Why do you pinion civilizations into

so unyielding an embrace, and why do you go on to

describe their relationship as one of basic conflict, as

if the borrowing and overlappings between them were

not a much more interesting and significant feature?

Edward Said, “Clash of Definitions”

Harvard University’s Samuel Huntington is a member of America’s scholarly elite. His books are blurbed by Henry Kissinger and widely read by professionals in the fields of international relations and compar- ative politics. He has a knack for getting the ear of policy makers and pundits. In the 1960s he was an important adviser to the U.S. government and was reportedly an architect of the “strategic hamlet” policy in the Vietnam War. In the mid-1990s, at a moment when opinion makers were

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Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong : Anthropologists Talk Back, edited by Catherine Besteman, and Hugh Gusterson, University of California Press, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wou/detail.action?docID=227348. Created from wou on 2018-01-31 13:15:11.

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debating what would replace the cold war, his ideas burst onto the scene with, first, a widely discussed article in Foreign Affairs called “The Clash of Civilizations?” and then, three years later, a book by the same title.1

While Huntington’s political science colleagues picked holes in his argu- ment in the professional journals, in the wider world The Clash of Civilizations was—for a book by an academic with thirty pages of densely packed endnotes—a stunning success. It was translated into several for- eign languages, and its ideas were widely discussed by the foreign policy establishment and media elites.

Remarkably, Samuel Huntington has written a three-hundred-page, heavily footnoted book about all the cultural civilizations of the world without citing any foreign language sources and with scarcely any ref- erence to the anthropologists who study them for a living. The result is a book that should make any intelligent reader wince, but it will have a particularly jarring effect on anthropologists because it stereotypes entire cultures while denying the reality of change and diversity within cultures and the possibility of solidarity between them. If only Samuel Huntington had taken one or two good classes in anthropology, he could have avoided the seven deadly sins he commits in this book. I detail them below, but first let’s look at his argument in The Clash of Civilizations.

T h e C l a s h

In his book, Huntington argues that seven civilizational blocs are emerg- ing from the ruins of the old cold war global order. “Peoples and coun- tries with similar cultures are coming together,” he says. “Peoples and countries with different cultures are coming apart. Alignments defined by ideology and superpower relations are giving way to alignments defined by culture and civilization” (p. 125). These emerging civiliza- tional blocs “are the ultimate human tribes, and the clash of civilizations is tribal conflict on a global scale” (p. 207). He identifies these seven civ- ilizations as Sinic (Chinese), Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, West- ern, and Latin American (although, at times, he suggests that Latin

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America may be part of Western civilization). He says Africa is “possi- bly” a civilization.

Using a metaphor from geology, Huntington says the flashpoints for conflict in this new world order are found at the “fault lines” where dif- ferent civilizations adjoin. These fault lines are particularly dangerous if located within states, where they create what Huntington calls “cleft states,” since—he says—members of different civilizations find it hard to live in peace together under a single government. Shifting to a metaphor from physics, he goes on: “In a cleft country major groups from two or more civilizations say, in effect, ‘we are different peoples and we belong in different places.’ The forces of repulsion drive them apart and they gravitate toward civilization magnets in other countries” (p. 138). Ex- amples of “cleft states” include the former Yugoslavia—where West- ern Christians, Bosnian Muslims, and Orthodox Serbs were forced to cohabit—and India, where tensions between Hindus and Muslims often run high.

According to Huntington, except for the rather more anarchic Islamic bloc, each civilization has a “core state”—a primary power within the bloc — such as the United States for the West, and Russia for the Orthodox bloc. Adopting what one might call a mafia model of interna- tional relations, Huntington argues that these core states will coordinate assistance to members of their civilization who are attacked, and will also keep order within their bloc: “A core state can perform its ordering func- tion because member states perceive it as cultural kin. A civilization is an extended family and, like older members of a family, core states provide their relatives with both support and discipline” (p. 156).

Asserting that “the world will be ordered on the basis of civilizations or not at all” (p. 156), Huntington argues that a relatively peaceful and stable world is one where core states are allowed to order their own civ- ilizations without outside interference and where different core states respect one another’s spheres of influence, minimizing friction along the fault lines between civilizations. He identifies several possible threats to this potentially peaceful world. One is Islam, which he sees as an abso- lutist and aggressive civilization lacking the inner restraint enforced by a core state. Declaring that “Muslim bellicosity and violence are late twen-

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tieth century facts” (p. 258), he worries that “wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peacefully with their neighbors” (p. 256).2

Huntington sees China as a second threat to global stability because it is a rising power that will eventually, inevitably, challenge the United States for hegemony in Asia. Huntington argues that Asian states differ profoundly from Western states in their outlook on the world: they are unified by their emphasis on “the value of authority, hierarchy, the sub- ordination of individual rights and interests, [and] the importance of con- sensus” (p. 225). Because these societies have, in his view, “little room for social or political pluralism and the division of power” (p. 234), he expects Japan and other Asian states to band together with China when it challenges the United States for dominance in Asia.

A third threat to global stability is migration, which jumbles up people from different civilizations. Like Robert Kaplan, Huntington fears that “France and Europe [sic] are destined to be overwhelmed by people from the failed societies of the South.”3 In particular, Huntington worries that Islamic migration to Europe has created, in effect, an additional (trans- national) nation within the European Union (p. 200), and that Mexican migration to the United States may eventually enable Mexico to recover what the United States took by force in the nineteenth century. He fears that liberal support for multiculturalism within the United States will lead to domestic conflict and undermine Americans’ sense of their own iden- tity as a nation, hastening national decline.

The fourth threat to global stability that Huntington identifies is the Western impulse to spread democracy around the world and Westernize every country it can. Warning that “what is universalism to the West is imperialism to the rest” (p. 184), Huntington argues that democracy is a uniquely Western invention, and that attempts to spread Western values and democracy to other nations will only cause conflict. “The dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness,” he says (p. 183). He ends the book with a speculative scenario for a Third World War that begins when the United States comes to the aid of Vietnam as it is attacked by China. This triggers a global conflagration in which Japan,

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drawn to its Asiatic kin, allies with China against the United States, while India and Russia attack China, and the forces of Islam attack the West. Latin America sits out the conflict on the sidelines, then moves in to scavenge the pieces of a battered United States.

First Deadly Sin: Basic Definitions

Huntington’s argument rests on the premise that there are distinct civi- lizational zones that have been relatively culturally homogeneous and stable over centuries. However, we are long past the period in anthro- pology described by anthropologist Ulf Hannerz as one in which “the dominant imagery was one of many small and separate worlds, in which the Nuer, the Tikopia, the Kwakiutl, and all the others seemed to exist almost as separate species.”4 Most contemporary anthropologists would find Huntington’s assumption deeply problematic, as I explain below, but for the moment let it suffice to point out the terrible empirical mess it creates for Huntington when he actually has to draw the line between civilizations. Take this tendentious passage in which he demarcates the boundary between the Western world and its neighbors, alluding to “the great historical line that has existed for centuries separating Western Christian peoples from Muslim and Orthodox peoples. This line dates back to the division of the Roman Empire in the fourth century and to the creation of the Holy Roman Empire in the tenth century.”5 Huntington argues that “Europe ends where Western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodoxy begin,”6 and that therefore such countries as Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania are not part of the Western cultural bloc. He says that the enduring significance of this civilizational boundary is demon- strated today by the fact that the countries to the West of this line are those “that have made significant progress in divesting themselves of the Communist legacies and moving toward democratic politics and market economies.”7

Any reader with even a smattering of classical education will be puz- zled by this exclusion of Greece from Western civilization. Why are so many European and American students forced to read Plato and Aristotle, and why were conservative educators in the 1980s and 1990s so

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concerned to protect them as the core of “Western civilization” on college reading lists under attack by multiculturalists, if Greece was never part of Western culture anyway?8 And how can it be that Greece is placed on the other side of the line separating the democratic West from the nondemo- cratic rest, when it is a democratic nation-state whose ancestral city-states originated the Western democratic tradition in so many political genealo- gies? The answer, of course, is that Huntington’s attempt to draw this line of demarcation is arbitrary and flawed—not because the line is drawn in the wrong place but because complex webs of similarity and difference do not lend themselves to the geometry of straight lines.

I have illustrated the flimsiness of Huntington’s definitional approach by highlighting his problematic “eastern boundary” for Western civiliza- tion because that part of the world is most familiar to me and will be also to many readers, but one could easily quarrel with his characterizations of other cultural zones as well. The anthropologist Aihwa Ong observes, for example, that “Indonesia, which is only nominally Muslim, is con- sidered by Huntington to be a subdivision of Islamic civilization.”9

Perhaps most bizarre, even scandalous, is Huntington’s assertion that Africa is only “possibly” a civilization. Given that he makes no argument that Africans take part in any of his other seven civilizations, one can only conclude that he considers it possible that Africans are a people without culture, which is to say that they are not people in the complete sense at all. Given the postcolonial efflorescence of African literature, the Western interest in African art at least since the time of Picasso, and the docu- mentation of cultural norms and social practices in Africa by anthropol- ogists at least since the 1930s, Huntington’s dismissive portrayal of Africa as a civilizational blank zone is deeply perplexing.

Second Deadly Sin: Stereotyping Cultures

A corollary to Huntington’s assumption that civilizations can be clearly demarcated is his description of civilizations as if they were homoge- neous, with culture as a sort of computer program sitting in the heads of all people within a civilization instructing them to behave the same way. He defines civilization as “the values, norms, institutions, and modes of

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thinking to which successive generations in a given society have attached primary importance” (p. 41).10 This definition leads him to stereotypes such as the following: “Asians generally pursue their goals with others in ways which are subtle, indirect, modulated, devious, nonjudgmental, nonmoralistic, and non-confrontational. Australians, in contrast, are the most direct, blunt, outspoken, some would say insensitive, people in the English-speaking world” (p. 154). Although Huntington’s adjectives in this passage are as much slogans as precise terms of social description, anyone who has interacted with “Asians” or “Australians” will recognize that there is a grain of truth in these characterizations. However, they will also be able to think of exceptions among Asians and Australians they have met, and will realize that, if you watch them closely, individual Asians and Australians, like other human beings, vary their behavior in different contexts rather than robotically following a single script. That is because, even before the mass migrations of colonialism and globaliza- tion scrambled societies demographically, societies did not consist of individuals with personalities and belief systems that were mass-pro- duced to behave identically and consistently, but of complex patterns of integrated heterogeneity. As Edward Said puts it in his own critique of Huntington, to speak of civilizations in boxes as Huntington does “is completely to ignore the literally unending debate or contest . . . about defining the culture or civilization within those civilizations, including various ‘Western’ ones. These debates completely undermine any idea of a fixed identity.”11

Huntington’s notions are based on an antiquated view of culture. In the period before and after World War II, a group of anthropologists who liked to speak about “national character” and “modal” or “normal” per- sonalities within societies held sway in American anthropology. Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were the most prominent members of this group.12 Later generations of anthropologists concluded that such anthro- pologists’ empirical descriptions of cultures were often simplistic or even inaccurate, and that this was in part the consequence of theoretical blind- ers that led them to filter out diversity and heterogeneity, producing reductive stereotypes of complex lifeways. Today, in place of Margaret Mead’s talk of “national character” and “normal personality,” anthro-

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pologists tend to reach for such formulations as James Clifford’s image of culture as “collage” or Renato Rosaldo’s likening of culture to a “garage sale.”13

The problems with Huntington’s picture of civilizational traditions as integrated by “values, norms, institutions, and modes of thinking” become clear if we stop for a moment and think about American society. Who represents American values and modes of thinking? Would it be fol- lowers of Jerry Falwell, who reject evolution and believe in divine reve- lation of truth and strict biblical norms of morality? Scientists who ground their belief in evolution in appeals to the scientific method? Or devotees of, say, the rock star Madonna, who enjoys turning the trans- gression of Jerry Falwell’s strict biblical norms into a form of entertain- ment? Huntington characterizes Western civilization as Christian in its origin and unfolding; he also argues that it is deeply committed to ratio- nal thought. And yet the three American subcultures invoked above swirl around his characterization in ways that immediately destabilize it.

Third Deadly Sin: Ignoring Change

Ulf Hannerz has observed that Huntington “shares with other versions of cultural fundamentalism the tendency to naturalize cultural immutability and persistence.”14 Huntington speaks of his seven civi- lizations as if they are timeless, and he repeatedly characterizes different civilizational traditions — especially the Islamic — as impervious to change. His Westerners are always already democratic, rational, and individualistic, just as his Asians were authoritarian and hierarchical yesterday, and will be tomorrow. The Roman and Holy Roman Empires have long since risen and fallen, but the line between Western and Orthodox civilizations that they embodied remains as firm as ever. Declaring that “political leaders imbued with the hubris to think that they can fundamentally reshape the culture of their societies are doomed to fail” (p. 154), Huntington argues that countries which have sought to change their civilizational identification—Russia and Turkey by West- ernizing, Australia by seeking to redefine itself as an Asian power—have all failed in their attempts and have created a fatal “schizophrenia” in

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their societies in the process. Concerning immigration, where others have seen the promise of new cultural mixings, Huntington warns of the dan- ger that, as Muslims resettle in Europe and Mexicans move to the United States, “Europe and America will become cleft societies encompassing two distinct and largely separate communities from two different civi- lizations” (p. 204). He argues that Islam has a sort of eternal cultural essence that makes it incompatible with the modern nation-state and with democratic liberalism: “The idea of sovereign nation-states is incompatible with belief in the sovereignty of Allah and the primacy of the ‘ummah’ [community of believers]” (p. 175). About prospects for lib- eral democracy, he argues that, “in one Muslim society after another, to write of liberalism and of a national bourgeois tradition is to write obitu- aries of men who took on impossible odds and then failed” (p. 114).15

Ulf Hannerz aptly calls this “cultural fundamentalism.” While no one would deny the striking cultural continuities across generations that enable us to recognize, for example, today’s Chinese as, in some complex but very real ways, the descendants of yesterday’s Chinese, it would be foolish to deny the equally striking changes that separate generation from generation within cultural traditions. The ethnographic and histor- ical literature is full of examples: the Ilongot of the Philippines giving up headhunting, the Semai of Malaysia learning in recent years to make war for the first time,16 and American Mormons (largely) giving up polygamy. On a larger scale, one thinks of Japan’s extraordinarily swift and complete transition from authoritarian to democratic rule after World War II—a story beautifully told in the fine book Embracing Defeat by the historian John Dower.17

Some of the problems with Huntington’s assumptions about continu- ity and change come into sharper focus if we consider, to take one small example, his observation that Westerners find it hard to do business in China because “in China trust and commitment depend on personal con- tacts, not contracts and laws” (p. 170). Quite apart from the fact that “per- sonal contacts” are hardly unimportant in the Western business context today,18 the problem with this formulation is that it misrepresents as immutably cultural a particular moment in the evolution of a set of bureaucratic institutions in China. Precisely because Huntington assumes

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that cultures are immutable, he mistakes a slice in historical time for an eternal cultural present. There was a time in the West also when “personal contacts, not contracts and laws” were the primary basis for business rela- tions. Indeed one could narrate the history of the West as the constant expansion and refinement of contract law into spheres of human life where it formerly had no place—most recently, for example, into the licensing of corporate ownership of genetic resources (such as medicinal plants and human DNA) once thought beyond commodification. Even as Western life is being ever more colonized by the laws of market and con- tract, so too in China: as the current wave of market reforms remakes Chinese society, and as China is drawn further into the global trade regime through the World Trade Organization and other institutions, we will see the form of economic rationalization represented by contracts assume greater importance — just as eastern European societies have begun to assimilate the economic practices of western Europe since the end of the cold war.

One could make similar arguments in response to Huntington’s claim that Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy or with the nation- state. After all, at one time the countries in western Europe that Huntington naturalizes as democratic states were neither democratic nor states and, while Huntington is right that there is a profound tension between the nation-state and a pan-Islamic sense of transnational com- munity, there was once a time, before anything called “Germany” or “Italy” existed, when the pan-Christian community of the Holy Roman Empire seemed stronger than many states in Europe. If European nation- states could evolve from a period when there was a Holy Roman Emperor, no schism between Protestantism and Catholicism, and an assumption that kings ruled by divine right, to today’s secular and plu- ralistic democracies, we can hardly rule out the possibility of new forms of political community and institutions in the Islamic world.

Fourth Deadly Sin: Denying Multiculturalism

Given Huntington’s assumptions that cultures are homogeneous, time- less, and clearly bounded, it almost goes without saying that he is suspi-

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cious of multiculturalism and other forms of cultural hybridization. Warning that immigration threatens to undermine the coherence of soci- eties in Europe and the United States and that globalization threatens to produce local cultural backlashes against the West, Huntington advo- cates a strategy of cultural apartheid, assuming — like South Africa’s apartheid leaders—that cultural miscegenation is dangerous and unnat- ural. This is true whether he is speaking of the Westernization of other cultures or the intrusion, through multiculturalism, of non-Western cul- tures into the United States. In a striking passage that represents Westernization in hygienic metaphors of disease and madness, he warns that “the western virus, once it is lodged in another society, is difficult to expunge. The virus persists but is not fatal; the patient survives but is never whole. Political leaders . . . infect their country with a cultural schizophrenia which becomes its continuing and defining characteristic” (p. 154). He uses even stronger language to discuss the dangers of multi- culturalism in the American context. Accusing multiculturalists of turn- ing the United States into a “torn country” because they have “denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic and other subnational cultural identities and groupings” (p. 305), he warns that “history shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society” (p. 306):

The clash between the multiculturalists and the defenders of Western civilization and the American creed is, in James Kurth’s phrase, “the real clash” within the American segment of civilization. Americans can- not avoid the issue: Are we a Western people or are we something else? The futures of the United States and the West depend upon Americans reaffirming their commitment to Western civilization. Domestically this means rejecting the divisive siren calls of multiculturalism. internation- ally it means rejecting the elusive and illusory calls to identify the United States with Asia. Whatever economic connections may exist between them, the fundamental cultural gap between Asian and Ameri- can societies precludes their joining together in a common home. Ameri- cans are culturally part of the Western family; multiculturalists may damage and even destroy that relationship but they cannot replace it. When Americans look for their cultural roots, they find them in Europe. (p. 307)

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This is a remarkable passage, conveying a powerful sense that it is dangerous and polluting to mix cultural categories that should be kept pure and distinct.19 What is most striking about this passage, however, is a startling failure of language and perception: does Huntington really believe that when African Americans, Arab Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, or Native Americans “look for their cultural roots, they find them in Europe”? The extraordinary erasure of all but Euro- Americans in his declaration of “we” leaves one wondering what rock Huntington has been living under all these years. When he looks out at the students in his Harvard classes, does he see only white faces? He speaks of multiculturalism as a present and future danger without, apparently, noticing that massive immigrations from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have already transformed American national culture, and without acknowledging that the United States has, in any case, been a multicultural society since the first contact with Native Americans and the first imported slave. In other words, the society whose cultural purity and coherence he is so concerned to preserve was always already hybrid.

While I disagree with Huntington’s jeremiad against multiculturalism, my point here is not so much a political one about cultural politics in the United States as an analytical one about the relationship of hybridity to culture in the United States and elsewhere. Most anthropologists would agree with Edward Said, who asks, “What culture today—whether Japa- nese, Arab, European, Korean, Chinese, or Indian—has not had long, intimate, and extraordinarily rich contacts with other cultures?”20 Or with Aihwa Ong, who, in her own critique of The Clash of Civilizations, expresses “skepticism about whether any civilization can be anything but a blend of different ethnicities, cultures, and traditions.”21 Drawing on her own area of expertise, Asia, she notes that, although Huntington describes Japan and China as separate civilizations, Japan has historically been “much influenced by Chinese Confucianism and culture,” while Southeast Asian culture is “a mélange of Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and Christian religions intermixed with animistic traditions.”22 One could make similar observations about the reciprocal influences of the Islamic, Orthodox, and Western civilizations upon one another over centuries of contact or, within civilizations, about processes of cross-fertilization such

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as those between Germanic, French, and Scandinavian cultures that com- bined to produce what we now refer to as English culture. There is a famous story told by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz about an infor- mant who said that the world is carried on the back of an elephant which, in turn, stands on the back of a turtle; when asked what the turtle was standing on, he replied that from there it was “turtles all the way down.”23 And so it is with cultural identity: hybridity all the way down. Cultural syncretism is not a dangerous program of naive liberals but a fact of cultural life. While it is true that cultural differences can become flashpoints for conflict and that nations can fragment and disintegrate along ethnic, religious, and cultural fault lines, as we recently saw in Yugoslavia, it is also true that without difference there would be no cul- ture and that interactions across cultural differences are always produc- ing new cultural integrations and conversations. Huntington sees danger in difference, and the danger is real, but by speaking about cultures as if they are pure, distinct, and unchanging, he is blind to the fact that, cul- turally speaking, we are all mongrels, and that hybridization is not some- thing which threatens cultures but is, rather, one of the essential cultural processes.

Fifth Deadly Sin: Maligning Islam

The Clash of Civilizations has been popular in conservative circles largely because it has been read as a prophetic book explaining a coming war with either China or the states of the Islamic world (which he character- izes as, in many cases, “tribes with flags).”24 Arguing that the West was already, even in the mid-1990s, in a “quasi war” with Islam that had burst into flame with the Iranian revolution, the Lockerbie bombing, and the Gulf War (pp. 216–21), Huntington argues that “the underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civi- lization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power” (p. 217). He argues that conflict between Islam and the West is overdetermined by the fact that both cultural traditions are universalistic and proselytizing, by an Islamic abhorrence for Western secularism and commercial culture, by

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the lack of a “core state” to keep order in the Islamic world, and by a recent huge population surge in the Islamic world.25 He casts Muslims as inherently violent, observing that, “wherever one looks along the per- imeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peacefully with their neighbors,” and that “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards” (pp. 256, 258). He finds the roots of the antagonism between the West and Islam not in recent historical developments but in an essential antipathy expressed through centuries of violent antagonism, and warns that “Islam is the only civilization which has put the survival of the West in doubt” (p. 210). He suggests that “the twentieth century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity” (p. 209).

There are three major problems with this formulation. The first is that, in portraying Islam as a monolithic entity, it underestimates the pro- found diversity of Islamic life and of Islamic attitudes toward the West in particular. This diversity was readily apparent in divergent Islamic re- actions to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Even as the hijackers who undertook these attacks appar- ently perceived themselves as enacting God’s will in a holy war against the West, and their acts met with applause by some Muslims, other Muslims in the West and the Middle East reacted with horror and saw the attacks as a perversion of Islamic teachings. While some Islamic nations remained neutral in the ensuing conflict, others — Egypt and Pakistan, for example — aligned themselves with the United States’ war on terrorism.

We can make the same basic point about the diversity of Islamic cul- ture in a more academic way with the help of Clifford Geertz’s book Islam Observed.26 Geertz is an anthropologist who, having conducted fieldwork in Morocco and Indonesia, the two geographical extremes of the Islamic world, sought to identify the ways in which both countries could be said to belong to a single cultural bloc, and the ways in which the distinctive cultural traditions of the two countries infused the practice of the same religion with difference. While Huntington argues that Islam is militant and aggressive because it has historically expanded its reach by military

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conquest, Geertz points out that Islam was brought to Morocco by the sword but to Indonesia in the baggage of traders. “To say that Morocco and Indonesia are both Islamic societies,” Geertz says, “is as much to point up their differences as it is to locate their similarities” (pp. 13–14).

Indonesian Islam has been, at least until recently, remarkably malleable, tentative, syncretistic, and, most significantly of all, multivoiced. What for so many parts of the world, and certainly for Morocco, has been a powerful, if not always triumphant, force for cultural homogenization and moral consensus, for the social standardization of fundamental beliefs and values, has been for Indonesia a no less powerful one for cultural diversification, for the crystallization of sharply variant, even incompatible, notions of what the world is really like and how to set about living in it. (p. 12)

The second major problem with Huntington’s argument is that it attributes to an ancient and immoveable antagonism between cultures what might just as plausibly be seen as the consequence of particular U.S. policy decisions. Thus, instead of seeking the essential attributes of Islam that doom it to eternal confrontation with the West, we might find some of the origins of the current “quasi war” between Islam and the West in, for example, recent policies of U.S. intervention in the Middle East—poli- cies that have led the United States to sustain unpopular regimes such as the Shah’s in Iran and to throw its considerable resources behind the Israeli state’s occupation of Palestinian territory. (It is, incidentally, remarkable that, in a book now best known for its prediction of a clash between Western and Islamic civilizations, Israel is barely mentioned.)

The third problem with Huntington’s argument about Islam concerns the methodology through which he claims to “prove” that “Muslims have problems living peacefully with their neighbors” (p. 256). This brings us to Huntington’s sixth deadly sin.

Sixth Deadly Sin: Phony Scientific Methods

Huntington does not just state that there is a “Muslim propensity toward violent conflict” (p. 258); he claims to prove it with statistics, saying, “The

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evidence is overwhelming” (p. 256). The “evidence” in question is three- fold: first, he cites studies that counted ethnic or civilizational conflicts in the early 1990s and says that “Muslims were engaged in more intergroup violence than were non-Muslims, and two-thirds to three-quarters of intercivilizational wars were between Muslims and non-Muslims” (pp. 257–58). Second, he counts the number of military personnel per thou- sand population in different countries and points out that the ratio is particularly high in the Islamic world. And, third, he divides military personnel by gross domestic product to produce something he calls “mil- itary effort indices” and argues, again, that the figure is particularly high in the Islamic world. “Quite clearly,” he says, “there is a connection between Islam and militarism.”27

While the use of numbers and measurements lends a superficial sheen of objectivity to Huntington’s declamations here, he is playing with a stacked deck. With different indices, he could have shown instead that the United States is one of the most militaristic societies on earth. The United States focuses on the accumulation of advanced weaponry rather than the mobilization of mass armies as a source of military strength and, if Huntington had measured militarism as the proportion of government research and development money spent on the military, or as the pro- portion of physicists and engineers with doctorates working on military projects, then Islamic countries would have moved down his league table of militarism and the United States would have moved up. The same would be true if he had used as his measure the number of foreign military bases a country maintains—surely a good indicator of its “mili- tary effort.” Moreover, the United States tends to intervene militarily in other countries through indirect means; instead of fighting directly, it has in recent years funded one of the parties in civil wars in Israel and Palestine, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. If the measure of militarism is whether or not one’s own troops are directly involved in fighting those from other countries, then the particular forms that U.S. militarism often takes will be overlooked.

We might also point out that, even by his own slanted criteria, if one had gone through Huntington’s counting exercise in the late nineteenth

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century to the mid–twentieth century, Western civilization would surely have come out listed among the most militaristic on earth. Its armies in the colonial period were everywhere engaged in conflict with other civi- lizations, and the military effort it expended in World Wars I and II was stupendous. Fortunately, civilizations change, and American defense intellectuals now complain that Europe—a continent whose internecine wars were greatly feared by American leaders in recent memory—is too focused on creating a prosperous free trading zone and is not devoting enough of its resources to preparation for war.

Seventh Deadly Sin: The West as the Best

Finally, Huntington assumes that the West is the only civilization capable of secular reason, liberal democracy, and true individualism. At one point, disregarding twentieth-century Western experiences with fascism, he speaks of “the dominance of individualism in the West compared to the prevalence of collectivism elsewhere” (p. 71). He also says, “The great ideologies of the twentieth century include liberalism, socialism, anarchism, corporatism, Marxism, communism, social democracy, con- servatism, nationalism, fascism, and Christian democracy. They all share one thing in common: they are products of Western civilization. No other civilization has generated a significant political ideology” (pp. 53–54). This is an extraordinarily ethnocentric statement. What about Maoism, Gandhianism, and Nasserism? The first two were important not only in the Asian societies where they took shape but also, through cultural dif- fusion, in Western society. Martin Luther King and the civil rights activists of the 1960s, for example, were deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhi. Maintaining that the only important political ideologies have been Western requires one to believe that only Western political ideolo- gies have been important.

Huntington argues for the uniqueness of Western civilization: “West- ern civilization is valuable not because it is universal but because it is unique. The principal responsibility of Western leaders, consequently, is not to attempt to reshape other civilizations in the image of the West . . . but to preserve, protect and renew the unique qualities of Western civi- lization” (p. 311, italics in the original). While there is a superficial rela-

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tivism, even liberalism, to Huntington’s arguments that each civilization has its own unique values and that the West should not seek to impose its own values, including democracy, on other civilizations, the insistence that only the West can originate political ideologies seems quaintly old- fashioned—like a fedora in a sea of baseball caps—in our current post- colonial era. The argument that democracy is Western and Western alone is simply belied by the development of democratic polities (which Huntington apparently fails to recognize) in Japan, India, Taiwan, South Korea, and other non-Western nations. The rise of such democracies in different corners of the world gives hope that, instead of Huntington’s prescription for a rigid system of global cultural apartheid, there are pos- sibilities for convergence and consanguinity in the current global system that are not dreamt of in Huntington’s philosophy.

C o n c l u s i o n

I like to imagine that Samuel Huntington has a doppelgänger who is lit- tle known in the West. The doppelgänger ’s name is Osama bin Huntington, and he teaches at the University of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, where his work is held in high esteem by the conservative elite. Like Samuel, Osama anticipates that globalization will produce a “clash of civ- ilizations” at the center of which will stand a conflict between Islam and the West. Osama, like Samuel, believes that it is dangerous to mix differ- ent cultures, and he is particularly concerned that the purity and vitality of Islamic culture is threatened by Westernization. Pointing to the Crusades of the medieval period, he says that history shows that Islam and the West cannot comfortably coexist. Peaceful coexistence is made more difficult, he argues, by the West’s intrinsic militarism and love of violence. Here he points to several centuries of colonial expansion by the West, two world wars that originated in the West, the fact that the United States has, since the end of World War II, fought wars in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, and Kosovo, and the relent- less celebration of violence in Hollywood culture. His recent book fea- tures a table of the number of violent incidents and deaths per hour of film, showing that Hollywood films have a higher “violent incident

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index” than films made in other civilizations. “It is incontrovertible,” he claims in a much quoted passage, “that Western culture is irremediably violent to the core.”

Although he does not advocate the conquest of other civilizations by Islam, arguing that each civilization can coexist with the others if it stays within its own sphere of influence, Osama bin Huntington is read by his colleagues and followers to say that Islam is clearly the greatest of the civilizations: its religion is the most austerely monotheistic; it has not fallen prey to the decadent consumerism that besets the West; and polit- ical discipline in the Islamic world is relatively uncompromised by the divisive theatrics of democracy, and by constant regime shifts, found in Western countries. Writing about the West—here he has been attacked by French scholars for equating the West with the United States—he argues that the West is headed for an internal crisis because it is a civilization of decadent unbelievers who derive meaning in life from the pursuit of promiscuous sex and the futile accumulation of commodities while ignoring the plight of the poor in their own civilization and abroad. He argues that Western culture has been materialistic since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and that its descent into arrogant con- sumerism and undisciplined pluralism was in a sense inevitable.

I indulge this exercise in fantasy to make a number of points. First, one can quite plausibly construct a narrative in which it is Westerners, not Muslims, who “have problems living peacefully with their neighbors.” Second, we can see how simplistic and reductive are the kinds of general- izations Huntington makes when we imagine them being made by some- one else about our own civilization. (What about all the churchgoers, we ask, in response to Osama’s stereotyping of Americans as decadent un- believers.) My choice of the name Osama for Samuel Huntington’s Islamic twin is, of course, not accidental, and it is remarkable how much reso- nance there is with the ideology of that more notorious Osama when we translate Samuel Huntington’s ideas into an Islamic idiom. If we reject the cultural fundamentalism of the Osamas of this world, as I believe we should, then we should give no more respect to their doppelgängers in the West, foremost among whom is Samuel Huntington.

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