For the Unit 9 Assignment, you will compose a 500 word essay comparing Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations?’ article with one other political scientist and/or academic who has written a response to Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations?’ article.

clash_2.pdf

Home >Government homework help >For the Unit 9 Assignment, you will compose a 500 word essay comparing Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations?’ article with one other political scientist and/or academic who has written a response to Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations?’ article.

Beyond the Social Imaginary of ‘Clash of Civilizations’?_593 225..235 Fazal Rizvi Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

In recent years, the notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’, first put forward by Samuel Huntington (1996), has been widely used to explain the contemporary dynamics of geo-political conflict. It has been argued that the fundamental source of conflict is no longer primarily ideological, or even economic, but cultural. Despite many trenchant and largely debilitating academic critiques of Huntington’s argument, the popular appeal of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis remains undi- minished. In many parts of the world, the binary it describes is often taken to be self-evident, especially after the tragic events of September 11.This paper uses the ideas of ‘social imaginary’ (Taylor, 2004) and ‘political myth’ (Blumenberg, 1984) to understand the popular appeal of the idea of civilizational conflict, and suggests that this appeal is unlikely to be punctured by theoretical arguments alone, but by an equally plausible political narrative located in an alternative social imaginary, acquired through cosmopolitan learning.

Keywords: globalization, clash of civilizations, cultural conflict, social imagi- nary, political myth, education

It is often said that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 produced a major shift in the global politics structured around tightly defined ideological borders.The BerlinWall had represented an iconic separation of the world into two distinct camps. On more than one occasion this separation had brought the world close to annihilation. So the fall of the Berlin Wall understandably raised the prospect of a more peaceful world—less divided and conflicted. It was this possibility that led the American political theorist, Francis Fukuyama (1992), to claim that the world was now witnessing the ‘end of history’.What he meant by this was that human history no longer involved a struggle between irrec- oncilable ideologies; that liberal democracy and economic liberalism were becoming globally triumphant; and that this trend was irreversible.While this sentiment might have been a little exaggerated, many theorists were ready to accept that globalization had made physical borders porous and permeable, and that, in the context of growing levels of global interconnectivity and interdependence, ideological borders would also fall, and that, over time, liberal democracy and economic liberalism would inevitably prevail.

More recent events have proven these predictions to be overly optimistic. Not only is there now a renewed interest in building physical walls to address policy problems, there

Educational Philosophy and Theory,Vol. 43, No. 3, 2011 doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00593.x

© 2010 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2010 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

is also ample evidence of new ideological barriers, along the dynamics of identity politics. Over the past decade, we have witnessed the construction of walls that are stronger, taller and longer.The United States, a nation of immigrants built on the ideologies of freedom of movement and expression, is, for example, now building the world’s longest wall along its border with Mexico. It has built walls in Iraq, not only around the so-called Green Zone but also in and around the suburbs of Baghdad in an attempt to keep various religious sects apart.These walls have effectively institutionalized differences. In Israel, a wall has been erected to establish ‘new realities on the ground’, making the possibility of peace with the Palestinians ever more remote. Walls are now regarded as a perfectly legitimate instrument of public policies, both domestic and international. While the proponents of the walls insist that they are erected for security purposes only, it is hard to deny that they also represent a range of ideological assumptions. Indeed, it can be argued that physical walls are a merely material expression of the more deep-seated civilizational divisions.

The notion of ‘civilizational divisions’ is central to a thesis put forward by Samuel Huntington (1996), at about the same time as Fukuyama wrote about the end of history celebrating a new cosmopolitanism in international relations. Huntington argued that a ‘clash of civilizations’, along a very different set of axes than those that defined the Cold War, was now becoming a permanent feature of human existence. Accordingly, the world, he insisted, was likely to experience more rather than less conflict, and that the fundamental source of conflict would no longer be primarily ideological, or even economic, but cultural. He maintained that:

... the differences between civilizations are not only real; they are basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition, and, most importantly, religion.The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views on the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty, authority, equality and hierarchy. (Huntington, 1996, p. 6)

Far from being on the verge of a global cultural convergence, defined in terms of the modern, liberal, western, democratic, individualistic, capitalist way of life, Huntington predicted that interstate interactions in the post-Cold War period would no longer be between social classes but identities and interests shaped by civilizational heritage.

Huntington defines a civilization as ‘the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity that people have, short of that which distinguishes humans from other species’. Civilizations are constituted around common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, but also by subjective self-identification of people. In this way, Huntington’s account differs from other current arguments (for example, Castells, 2000) about the emergence of nationalism and ethnic movements in response to the universalizing tendencies of globalization. His argument is more about the shifting loyalties of people, away from the nation-state and towards larger

226 Fazal Rizvi

identity groups that transcend national boundaries. Huntington insists that the patterns of enmity between countries that are members of the same civilization are bound to disappear, with the patterns of cooperation between different civilizations becoming shallower. His argument is based partly on an evolutionary functionalist logic, based on an assumption that people have a psychological need for identification, the most basic and persistent sources of which are ‘blood, faith and beliefs’.

Since its publication, the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis has generated a great deal of academic and policy debate. On the one hand, realist thinkers in international relations have found it perfectly plausible, since it describes new forms of political conflict, often in response to the unevenness of the social consequences of modernization and global- ization. Even if it is considered a little overstated, it points to the importance of culture in international formations. In contrast, many sociologists and cultural theorists have shown Huntington’s argument to be fundamentally flawed. Chiozza (2002) has, for example, shown how Huntington’s thesis cannot be supported by empirical evidence; and that interactions across civilizational divide are no more conflict prone now that they have been in the past. Cultural theorists such as Edward Said (2001b) and Noam Chomsky (2001) have found the clash of civilizations thesis to be highly objectionable on both theoretical and political grounds. They have argued that the thesis is mistaken in casting the differences between civilizations as absolute, conceptualizing them in terms of a range of metaphysical postulates rather than in terms of the political conflicts that produce them, through a range of specific historical processes.

To articulate differences between civilizations in such absolutist terms, Said (2001b) argues, is to represent the world as essentially polarized—in binary terms that runs the risk of increasing levels of misunderstanding and conflict. In his recent book, Fear of Small Numbers, Appadurai, (2006, p. 115) has noted that Huntington’s thesis is based on a:

... primordialism with a macro-geographical base. [It overlooks] the vast amount of global interaction between civilizational areas, it erases dialogue and debate within geographical areas, and it deletes overlaps and hybridities. In a word, it evacuates history from culture, leaving only geography.

It is based on a functionalist logic that overlooks the role of political agency and historical processes.

Now despite these trenchant and largely debilitating critiques of Huntington’s argu- ment, the popular appeal of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis has remained undiminished. Even as the key theoretical premises upon which it is based are demolished in academic circles, it continues to circulate widely in the popular media, both within the West and elsewhere. In many parts of the world, the binary it describes is often taken to be self-evident, especially after the tragic events of September 11. It has even informed major policy deliberations, even if it is quickly realized that there is something ‘global, elusive and nonspatialized’ (Appadurai, 2006, p. 115) about the new patterns of conflict. Yet in the popular media, its intuitive appeal seems to be located in its generalized view

Beyond the Social Imaginary of ‘Clash of Civilizations’? 227

of culture, which is used to justify a range of policy positions from Jihad, on the one hand, and the ‘war on terror’, on the other. As a number of recent commentators, such as Seyla Benhabib (2002), have observed, many in America seem to have accepted the events of September 11 as offering a belated confirmation of Huntington’s thesis concerning an unbridgeable cultural divide between Islam and the West. So while Huntington’s thesis involved a generalized statement about the nature of political conflict, in the popular constructions after September 11, the civilizations have in fact been named—radical Islam versus the West. In its totalizing tendencies, it has rendered differentiations within civilizations insignificant, as broad brushstrokes are applied to differences across them.

So, even as it is shown that the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis cannot be sustained on both empirical and theoretical grounds, it retains its popular appeal. How should we explain this persistence? How is it that a flawed theoretical construction can remain so popular? In what follows I want to argue that an understanding of this disjuncture requires an analysis of the complex and highly contingent relationship between theoretical and popular beliefs.To do so, I want to invoke the idea of ‘social imaginary’, and suggest that the clash of civilizations thesis should no longer be treated as a coherent theoretical argument but as something that involves the work of social imagination and political myth. It is only in these terms that we can appreciate how it relates to the continual process of work on a common narrative by which political classes and the media seek to understand and represent the contemporary political conditions and experience. By understanding the mechanisms through which a social imaginary operates, I believe it is possible to show how a theory that has been strongly criticized and rejected as being far too simplistic and scientifically inadequate has turned into a successful political myth, and has perhaps even become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In its popular constructions, the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis is located in a broader context of social relations and practices, or in what Charles Taylor (2004) refers to as a ‘social imaginary’, a framework that is at once descriptive and prescriptive of conceptions of how things work and how practice is organized around a set of norms that provides them with meaning. ForTaylor, the idea of social imaginary involves a complex, unstruc- tured and contingent mix of the empirical and the affective; not a ‘fully articulated understanding of our whole situation within which particular features of our world become evident’ (Taylor, 2004, p. 21). In this sense, his idea of social imaginary is somewhat akin to Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of ‘habitus’, or Raymond Williams’s (1978) idea of ‘structures of feeling’. It describes a social phenomenon that is tacit and unconscious, and is adhered to by a group of people in an un-reflexive manner.

Social imaginary is a way of thinking shared in a society by ordinary people. It consists in the common understandings that make everyday practices possible, giving them sense and legitimacy. In this way, a social imaginary is both implicit and normative: it is embedded in ideas and practices and events, and carries within it deeper normative notions and images, constitutive of a society. It involves:

... something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am

228 Fazal Rizvi

thinking, rather, of the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations. (Taylor, 2004, p. 23)

A social imaginary is carried in myths, parables, stories, legends and other narratives and most significantly, in the contemporary era, in the mass media. It is through their shared social imaginary that relations and sociability among strangers within the same society become possible.

For Taylor, the distinction between social theory and social imaginary is highly sig- nificant.Theories are often in possession of a relatively few people, while social imaginary is more broadly accepted, and makes possible a widely shared sense of legitimacy, without which people might not be able to work collectively towards common goals. Theories emerge out of an established social imaginary, even if they suggest an alterna- tive way of interpreting the world. While they might start off as theories held by a small group of people, for them to be successful theories must infiltrate the wider community, and then the whole society, creating a new sense of imaginary. For a theory to become a part of the social imaginary, it must evolve into a kind of common understanding that enables us to carry out our everyday social practices. In this way, a social imaginary is both factual and normative, ‘that is, we have a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what missteps would invalidate the practice’ (Taylor, 2004, p. 24). It articulates the dynamic relationship among our dis- courses, social practices and institutions.

It is important to stress, then, that a social imaginary is not simply inherited and already determined for us, it is rather in a constant state of flux. It is an enabling concept that describes the ways people act as world-making collective agents within a given symbolic matrix that refuses to assume an ‘ontology of determinism’ (Castoriadis, 1987). It is a creative force in the making of social-historical worlds, a force that has to be attentive to the ‘signs of the time’ and interpret all those particular, rather uneven and emotionally charged, events that make up everyday life (Maffesoli, 1993). A social imaginary thus involves a collective social force that is not only specific to time and space but is also always multiple and highly contested within particular and across communi- ties. It is through the collective sense of imagination that a society is created, given coherence and identity, but is also subjected to social change, both mundane and radical. In this way, communities are created differently, subsist differently, and are transformed differently through the exercise of collective political agency. It follows then that com- munities interpret and engage with the world outside their borders differently, but always within their always-emerging social imaginary.

Now if this is the case, how might we explain why some social imaginaries becomes dominant, while others remain confined to smaller groups of people? Why has the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis captured popular imagination?To address this important question, it might be useful to look at the writings of the German philosopher, Hans Blumenberg on political myth, and the role it plays in both traditional and modern societies. In his

Beyond the Social Imaginary of ‘Clash of Civilizations’? 229

book, Work on Myth, Blumenberg (1984) seeks to show how the Enlightenment view that myth and reason are mutually hostile is fundamentally misguided. Blumenberg’s philo- sophical strategy lies in showing the continuing role of myth in human life, not so much by looking at anthropological evidence from the so-called primitive societies, but by considering how highly literate and highly ‘developed’ societies use myth to develop a sense of themselves in the world. A myth, Blumenberg argues, is not a single narrative that is given once and for all, but is a process, a process of continual work on a narrative structure that changes according to the circumstances. He speak of our ‘work on myth’—that is, our use and re-use of given mythical materials, names, stories and narratives. Drawing a fundamental distinction between ‘work on myth’ and ‘work of myth’, he argues that ‘work on myth’ is done by all of us who tell stories to make sense of the world, through which we are able to name and distinguish various aspects of our world.

To the extent that Enlightenment thinkers value myth, Blumenberg argues, it is as a placeholder for as yet undiscovered scientific explanations. They view history in general as progress from mythos to logos, from folk to scientific knowledge, from useful but imaginary explanations of our environment to explanations that allow us to control our environment. Blumenberg denies such a linear view of progress, and suggests that enlightenment rationalists are wrong in dismissing the value of narrative institutions, like myth, that might not have any rational foundation but have nonetheless grown out of a long process of cultural selection. It is important to note however that Blumenberg is not suggesting the abandonment of scientific rationality. Nor is he embracing, at the other extreme, the romantic view, which regards myth as more fundamental to human nature. Instead, he seeks to overcome this duality, and to extract a middle position between enlightenment and romanticism. He insists that scientific rationality and on-going work on our inherited myths are not only compatible but are also indispens- able aspects of the comprehensive effort that enables us to make sense of the world around us.

More recently, the Italian philosopher, Chiara Bottici (2006), has used Blumenberg’s insights into ‘work on myth’ to argue that a political myth is a process, one of continuous work on a basic narrative pattern that responds to a need for significance. Following Blumenberg, she argues that ‘human beings need meaning in order to master the world they live in, but they also need significance in order to live in a world that is less indifferent to them.’ She maintains that this is particularly true in the realm of politics. Political myths are ‘narratives through which we orient ourselves, and influence the way we act and feel about our political world.’ Bottici suggests that in order to understand the appeal of contemporary phenomena, such as the purported ‘clash between civilizations’, we need a new approach in political philosophy. If we want to save reason, she says, we need a new understanding of myth. In my view, such an approach can be used to show how the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis has become a powerful social imaginary through which contemporary world is experienced.This imaginary is sustained through continu- ing work on political myths that have long existed, myths to which Edward Said refers

230 Fazal Rizvi

collectively as ‘Orientalism’.These myths do not simply survive in the same forms but are constantly rearticulated in more contemporary forms.

Since September 11, a whole range of myths about civilizational differences has been brought into play to understand the nature of political conflict. In the process, a range of myths about Islam and its role in the emerging geo-political structures are ‘worked over’. But these myths could not have acquired the significance they have unless they were located within a broader ‘Orientalist imaginary’ inherited through the long history of colonialism, but now rearticulated to explain the role Islam played in the horrific events on September 11. This is not the same imaginary as is found in the period of high colonialism but a new formulation created around old myths about Islam within the contemporary global communication systems. Nowhere is such an imaginary more actively ‘worked’ on through myths than in the popular Western media, where stereotypes of Islam are now employed freely to explain the causes of September 11, in religious rather than political and economic terms. The roots of Islamic fundamentalism are assumed to be located within the teachings of Islam itself. In the popular media, informed accounts of Islamic traditions are difficult to find, as are accounts of religious debates within Islam. Yet myths are always used selectively, for their accuracy and their significance, but always in the service of the new social imaginary.

In his introduction to the revised edition of his book Covering Islam, published after September 11, Edward Said (2002) points out that the focus on Muslims and Islam in the American and Western media has become characterized by an even ‘more exagger- ated stereotyping and belligerent hostility’. Indeed, the Orientalist imaginary that had begun to be discredited has been revived—‘ideas which have achieved a startling promi- nence at a time when racial or religious misrepresentations of every other cultural group are no longer circulated with such impunity’ (Said, 2002, xi-xii). It would be wrong, however, to suggest here a media conspiracy here but rather to point to the importance of political myths that are promoted, and the preference the media appears to give to what Ahmad (2003) refers to as the ‘exclusivists’ views of Islam—the views that are opposed to the values of inclusion and global integration.

The ‘exclusivist’ myth lies at the heart of a post-September 11 social imaginary that increasingly demands simple solutions to complex problems; clear and unambiguous responses to the new social and cultural challenges stemming from the terrorist attacks. People, in the United States in particular, want their government to make them feel more secure, and punish severely those who have caused them harm. They are prepared even to concede to the government many of their democratic rights, with the expectation that the government will necessarily look after their interests. In more rational terms this of course involves a major risk of depoliticizing legitimate public debates about specific policy measures taken to counter the threats of terrorism. As Jayasuriya (2002, p. 56) argues, under the cloak of security, there is a danger that we usher in a debilitating form of ‘anti-politics’ that sidelines constructive debates and discussion, if they are regarded somehow as being unpatriotic or against the presumed national interest. But this is

Beyond the Social Imaginary of ‘Clash of Civilizations’? 231

precisely what social imaginaries do: they express sentiments that are tacit and implicit in ways that discourage possibilities of discussion and debate.

According to Jayasuriya, ‘some of these effects are already apparent in the US, where self-censorship in the media has made discussion of the politics of terrorism all but impossible’. Moreover, and perhaps more seriously, ‘the language of security serves to frame facets of transnational governance in terms of “risk”, thereby occluding important issues of conflict and power’. Spurred by a new climate of fear, not only the United States but also a number of other countries have developed a new, highly circumscribed, conception of security, one that increasingly places less emphasis on social and historical causes of insecurity and more on policing its citizens, especially those who were already marginalized in society. As Jayasuriya (2002, p. 140) observes, new forms of risk man- agement involve applying risk profiles to a set of relationships, institutions, and even geographic sites, rather than endeavoring to manage or transform the behavior of people. In such procedures as risk management, political myths are inevitably made to imagine some cultural differences as more significant than others.

One of the key problems with the new social imaginary of ‘clash of civilizations’ is that it is couched in absolutist and binary terms. Far too often, words like ‘war’, ‘justice’, ‘victory’ and indeed ‘security’ are used as if they have single, uniform and incontestable meanings. Former President Bush, for example, has spoken of a ‘crusade against the enemies of America’ and of ‘eliminating evil from the world’.This rhetoric, expressed as a social imaginary, serves clearly to shape debate about the causes, expressions and outcomes of terrorism and a whole variety of possible remedies that could be considered to meet the new challenges. Paradoxically though the social imaginary within which this rhetoric is located is, in its broad linguistic structure, broadly similar to that used by Al-Qaida and militant Islam. It is an imaginary based on myths of moral certainty and political absolutes, as Tariq Ali in his book, The Clash of Fundamentalism (2002), has observed.

Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (2001) have called it a ‘war between absolutes’.The militant Islam speaks a language that has only one meaning, which celebrates faithful- ness to its ‘fundamental’; the true meaning of Islam to which it claims to have access. To treat this language with disdain and with absolute conviction, while declaring ‘them’ to be absolutely evil is to respond in exactly the manner which Al-Qaida hopes to induce. As Lukes and Urbinati argue, ‘the new terrorism therefore has an insidious power, one which derives from the non-political character of its language and objec- tives and which encourages its victims to use the same language. And in the victims’ traditions there are, of course, ample resources of religious dogmatism from which to draw.’ This dogmatism invites the translation of all human and social phenomena into religious language: ‘just’ becomes ‘Good’, ‘wrong’ becomes ‘Evil’, ‘the political adver- sary’ becomes ‘the infidel’.

While the social imaginary in which the opposition between militant Islam and those who oppose it is expressed is broadly similar, the world they represent is polarized into a binary. As NiraYuval-Davis (2001) points out, in times of war, the pressure to conform to binary oppositions—to absorb them not only into our language but also our very thought processes, our ‘structures of feeling’—is especially great. We are tempted to divide the world into discrete ‘civilizations’: ‘us’ and ‘them’. It is in terms of this logic, of

232 Fazal Rizvi

which the social imaginary (and within it the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis) is a part, that the world is divided up into two unbridgeable blocs, religiously and culturally. It is a world of absolute and self-evident differences, which are assumed to be self-evident and thus serve to provide simple explanations for our discomfort and anxiety—in cultural rather than political terms.

Yet this ‘culturalization’ of conflict is as wrong as it is dangerous. It is wrong because while the origins of some disputes are certainly cultural, prolonged conflict is always much more complex, involving factors that are not only cultural but also economic, political and ideological. Nor is it possible to differentiate one civilization from another in such a holistic and abstract manner. As Edward Said (2001a) and others have pointed out, Huntington has made civilizations into ‘shut down and sealed off’ entities, over- looking the exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing that has always been responsible for cultural change within all communities, not only as a result of current and counter currents of trade but also colonialism. A most serious problem with the Clash of Civilizations thesis is, as Modood (2002) points out, that it poses a real danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, precisely at a time when a more complex under- standing of cultural traditions is most needed. The popular suggestion that Islam and Christianity represent two different and separate ways of looking at the world is funda- mentally flawed, and serves only to reinforce the forms of fundamentalism promoted by extremists. Historically, both Islamic and Western traditions developed in the same part of the world. Not surprisingly, therefore, they share a set of common legal, religious and cultural beliefs. Both are monotheistic, and rest their faith on a set of common religious narratives. During the middle ages, the Judeo-ChristianWest borrowed and learned from Muslims, whether it was in terms of the humanities or science and technology, just as Arabs had done from Athens and Rome. The social imaginary of ‘clash of civilizations’ masks close historical links between the two traditions, and, in doing so, rules out any serious theoretical attempt at exploring them.

If this so then the question arises as to how it might be possible to challenge the social imaginary of ‘clash of civilizations’, in a hope of replacing it with another more pro- gressive imaginary. Clearly, it cannot be overcome with rational theoretical arguments alone, because its significance lies in the political myths through which it is constituted, as well as through the political work that is invested in rearticulating its Orientalist history in a more contemporary form. Its popular appeal relates to its dynamic form— its ability to sideline refutational considerations. It follows then that theoretical objec- tions to its validity are not sufficient; and that its transformation might additionally require the exercise of collective political agency, in imagining things differently; in attempting to present equally plausible accounts that appear commonsensical. In this way, a social imaginary exists in a double sense. It exists through representations or implicit understandings embodied in existing discursive and material practices, but it is also the means by which individuals and communities are able to understand their identities and their place in the world, and are able to suggest changes to the prevailing social relation. Indeed the transformation of social imaginaries is never easy to achieve,

Beyond the Social Imaginary of ‘Clash of Civilizations’? 233

and requires a whole range of formal and informal strategies to shift the popular images that are found in the various communicative systems through which it is disseminated.

Arjun Appadurai (1996) has analyzed the role of social imaginary in the formation of subjectivities within the globalizing context in which we now live, a context that is characterized by diffusion of social images, ideas and ideologies across communities around the world. This diffusion is facilitated by electronic media, mass migration and the mobility of capital and labor, creating conditions through which most societies around the world have become culturally diverse and hybrid, and cannot avoid, in a fundamental sense, engaging with social relations transnationally. We live in a world in which ideas and ideologies, people and capital and images and messages are constantly in motion, transforming the vectors of our social imaginaries. We now live amid many social imaginaries, in addition to those that are dictated by the dominant national expressions. Each has a different point of origin, a different axis, travels through different routes, and is constituted by different relationships to institutional structures in different communities and nations. It is this multiplicity of perspectives, widely circulating around the globe, which points to the possibilities of using alternative narratives and myths to forge a new social imaginary, which does not assume the inevitability of conflict along civilizational axes, but works together to form a global order based on the principles of global democracy and justice.

The development of such an alternative social imaginary requires a different focus on learning than that which is embodied within the current ‘work on myth’. In education, this demands a new pedagogic approach that helps students to understand how the binaries represented by the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis are neither historically accurate nor morally and politically productive, because it has locked us into a condition of perpetual fear and suspicion of each other. An alternative to this view of conflictual intercultural exchange can be found in the principles of cosmopolitan learning which I have discussed in some detail in a number of other papers (for example, Rizvi 2008, 2009). These principles highlight both the cognitive and ethical dimensions of intercul- tural learning, and suggest that learning about others requires learning about ourselves. This implies a dialectical mode of thinking, which conceives cultural formations as neither absolute nor necessarily antagonistic, but deeply interconnected and interdepen- dent, so much so that they reveal how the tensions between cultures indeed can be comprehended and transcended. In such a dialectical approach, we understand others both in their terms as well as ours, as a way of comprehending how both representations are socially constituted. This relationality denies that our cultures are fixed and essen- tially distinct, and suggests the possibilities of continuous self-examination, learning and transformation. It underscores an ethic that urges people to engage differences and explore possibilities of learning as a basis for imagining cosmopolitan futures essential for the survival and moral growth of the human species.

References

Ahmad A. (2003) Islam Under Siege (Cambridge, Polity Press). Ali, T. (2002) The Clash of Fundamentalisms (London, Verso). Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural dimensions of globalization (Minneapolis, MN,

Minnesota University Press).

234 Fazal Rizvi

Appadurai, A. (2006) Fear of Small Numbers (Durham, NC, Duke University Press). Benhabib, S. (2002) Unholy Wars. Reclaiming Democratic Virtues After September 11, in: C.

Calhoun, P. Price & A. Timmer (eds), Understanding September 11 (New York, The New Press), pp. 241–253.

Blumenberg, H. (1984) Work on Myth (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press). Bottici, C. (2006) A Philosophy of Political Myth (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Bourdieu, P (1977) Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste (London, Routledge). Castells, M. [1996] (2000) The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd edn. (Oxford, Blackwell). Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society, K. Blamey, trans. (Cambridge, MA,

MIT Press). Chiozza, G. (2002) Is There a Clash of Civilizations? Evidence from patterns of international

conflict involvement, 1946–97, Journal of Peace Research, 39:6, pp. 711–734. Chomsky, N. (2001) Clash of Civilizations. Available online at: http://www.india-seminar.com/

2002/509/509%20noam%20chomsky.htm (accessed May 2008). Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man (New York, Avon Books). Huntington, S. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York,

Simon & Schuster). Jayasuriya, K. (2002) September 11, Security, and the New Postliberal Politics of Fear, in: E.

Hershberg & K.W. Moore (eds), CriticalViews of September 11 (NewYork, The New Press), pp. 131–150.

Lukes, S & Urbinati, N. (2001) Words Matter, Open Democracy, 27 Nov, p. 1. Maffesoli, M. (1993) Introduction: The social imaginary, Current Sociology, 41:2, pp. 1–7. Modood, T. (2002) Muslims and the Politics of Fear of Multiculturalism in Britain, in: E.

Hershberg & K.W. Moore (eds), CriticalViews of September 11 (NewYork, The New Press), pp. 193–208.

Rizvi, F. (2008) Education and its Cosmopolitan Possibilities, in: R. Lingard, J. Nixon and S. Ranson (eds), Transforming Learning in Schools and Communities (London, Continuum).

Rizvi, F. (2009) Towards Cosmopolitan Learning, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30:3, pp. 87–99.

Said, E. (2001a) Clash of Ignorance, Nation, 18 October. Available online at: http:// www.bintjbeil.com/articles/en/011018_said.html (accessed May 2008).

Said, E. (2001b) The Myth of ‘Clash of Civilizations’, Cairo: Al-Ahram, 18 October. Available online as a video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boBzrqF4vmo

Said, E. (2002) (new edition), Covering Islam (New York, Vintage Books). Taylor, C. (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC, Duke University Press). Williams, R. (1978) Marxism and Literature (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Yuval-Davis, N. (2001) ‘Binary Wars’ Available online at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/forum/

document (accessed August 2002).

Beyond the Social Imaginary of ‘Clash of Civilizations’? 235

copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written

permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.