Are civilizations clashing?

A few months ago while on a trip to Bogota, my wife and I saw a German film called Die Welle, or the Wave. It was a really good film, and made me think of a short exchange trip I took to Hamburg during my senior year of high school. The glorious, much-awaited European summer, German high schools with their modern architecture and sophisticated yet informal feel, the mix of maturity and innocence of German teens as opposed to their more jaded US counterparts. Above all I was reminded of that time in my life, perhaps between 16 and 20 years of age, when so much was exciting, new, delightful. It was a joy just to stroll around on my own or to share a beer with a friend, and every kiss was a new sensation.

The upside is that my life is still somewhat like that—my masters program in Europe, meeting my wife, our journeys and projects together since then. I feel like an adult now, but I still delight in the simple wonders of life lived. And my wife's pregnancy is a new wonder, as our baby will surely be. Soon I'll be living a new set of wonders vicariously, as our child discovers itself and the world.

The movie also got me thinking about cultures. In Die Welle as well as in many European movies I've seen, it seems that European society is decadent, cold, unhappy, lifeless. After the postwar decades of vitality, unity, and growth (in population, economy, infrastructure, etc.), Europe seems to be at a standstill. Needs are already met, population isn't growing, so there's no need to be dynamic or future-oriented. Good enough is good enough. But it's sort of sad. Maybe that's why we hear so much about (and I've seen firsthand) the existential malaise in Europe.

But maybe it's just culture. I read once on the website of the Confucius Institute Chinese cultural center that the Chinese are very humble, and self-deprecate impulsively. Perhaps then the sort of self-deprecation and grey mood of Germans and other Europeans is just a cultural quirk as opposed to an objective sign of societal decadence. Certainly the literature and history I've read from past eras in Europe would bear this out. Even in periods when much of Europe was growing in population, developing economically, and politically powerful, there was a lot of cultural output with sort of a winsome, decadent feel to it (Heart of Darkness, Hamlet, Lorca, Don Quijote, Camus, Crime and Punishment). Maybe this is just part of the European character. I hope so, because the idea of a post-historical society is very depressing.

This talk of cultures and the end of history reminds me of the Clash of Civilizations. This is an article that Samuel Huntington wrote in 1993 in Foreign Policy magazine. He expanded on Fukuyama's idea that the end of the Cold War portended the end of history, that is to say the end of clashes between different systems and ideologies for organizing society and markets. Huntington said that since the end of the Cold War the major drivers of progress, conflict, and change in the world would be cultures, not ideologies or systems of government. Obviously this type of thinking has some inherent logical problems, because it is shortsighted and hubristic to assume that the events happening at a given period in time are the events that will define the foreseeable future. It was silly of Hitler to dream of a thousand-year reign of National Socialism, it was silly of Stalin to think that the Soviet system would prevail and define the world, it was silly of analysts during the Cold War to think that the USA and the USSR would be locked in eternal tension, and it's silly of Huntington to assume that the gradual extension of Reaganist/Clintonian corporatist democracy around the world in 1993 marked the culmination of economic and political evolution for the rest of history. That said, Huntington's description of cultural tensions replacing large-scale political clashes rings very true in many trends we see today, 15 years after the paper's publication. Islamic terrorism, Chinese nationalism, tensions between native-born and immigrants in the US and elsewhere, even the culture wars that have dominated the post-war US, all seem to be predicted and explained well by Huntington's thesis.

One sort of moderated, qualified component of Huntington's thesis especially seems to ring true for me. He talks about civilization rallying, which is when in a conflict between two parties belonging to two different cultures, other parties tend to sympathize with one or the other contender according to cultural affinities. For example, if there are ethnic or economic tensions between Malays and ethnic Chinese in Malaysia, Chinese people elsewhere are wont to sympathize with the ethnic Chinese in the conflict, even if they have no prior knowledge of the situation. Likewise, whenever there are sanctions against Serbia on the world stage, Russia always protests. Even we in the States seem to have a visceral negative reaction to Chinese economic incursions in our country, at the same time as we continue to consider Chrysler a US company even though it's European-owned.

Nevertheless, I wish to point out some major holes in the Clash of Civilizations theory. It seems to hold a lot of explanatory power if we look at the world a priori through Huntington's lense, but under a more objective scrutiny of current events, the theory doesn't hold much water.

First off, by my reckoning the major conflicts in the world today are in Iraq, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, Colombia, Sudan, Mexico, Congo, Somalia, and South Asia. Iraq is a civil war between people from basically the same culture, set off when a major world power deposed a secular nationalist dictator for economic and geopolitical reasons. I don't see any clash of cultures going on there, despite the best efforts of outside Islamic fundamentalists and US pundits to paint it in that light. Afghanistan is a country that was invaded for geopolitical reasons, and now local militias are fighting against the invaders and amongst themselves. The Caucasus is a bunch of small ethnic republics trying to assert their independence from larger countries. Obviously there is a cultural difference between Chechens and the rest of Russia, or between Abkhazians and the rest of Georgia, but I see the roots of these conflicts as geopolitical and not profoundly cultural. In Colombia we are in the midst of a 40+ year civil war with roots in the unfair distribution of wealth and differing conceptions as to how to run a democracy. In Sudan the war between north and south was admittedly cultural, but now in Darfur we are seeing Muslim Arabic-speakers oppressing and massacring other Muslim Arabic-speakers, over questions of natural resources and national unity. In Mexico there is a lot of violence for purely economic, drug-related reasons, as well as a movement in the south that wishes to reshape economic life in the country. Somalia is a bunch of local warlords of more or less the same ethnic, linguistic, and cultural extraction, duking it out for who knows what. The DRC is a big clusterfuck involving national governments, natural resources, and private militias, and I'll concede that ethnicity probably plays a role somewhere in all the confusion. In South Asia there are economic wars (Nepal, the Indian Naxalites) and wars about the role of religion in society (Pakistani terrorists vs. the Pakistani secular government). Even the oppression of religious minorities in India or the tension between India and Pakistan is essentially violence between people of very similar cultures. While I concede that there are legitimate cultural elements behind many of today's conflicts, they are by no means the defining or even the dominant reasons for the conflicts, in my opinion. Huntington admits that not all conflicts in the future will be intercultural. But by my reckoning, most of today's major conflicts are either economic or intracultural, or both.

Huntington gives a facile reading of the Crusades as an example of cultural conflict between Islam and the West, but in fact from Spain to the Holy Land, European and Islamic countries were engaged in a complex, ever-changing web of conflict and cooperation. El Cid drove out certain Muslim rulers and allied with others. The Fatimids were conquering and building an empire in the Middle East when the Christian armies (many of whose countries were at war amongst themselves) piled into the Holy Land. And let's not forget that the Fourth Crusade was a Venice-funded Christian pillaging of Christian Constantinople.

Huntington talks about Latin America as a natural cultural ally to the US. I am a firm believer in pan-Americanism, that is to say the belief that all of us in the Western Hemisphere share certain cultural traits. We're all the product of mixing between black, white, and indigenous people, we are influenced by the collective memory of virgin wilderness and the pioneering culture, we eat a lot of ranched beef, etc. But again, I think economics often trumps culture in this sphere. Regardless of any civilizational affinities, many people in Latin America resent the incursion of US companies and the US military in local affairs. These people are not thinking about the merits of US culture, or its similarities with their own, but rather the positive or negative effects that their country derives from its interactions with the US.

Another observation that weakens Huntington's argument for me is his effort to delineate all the cultures of the world in a few finite categories (European Christian Orthodox, Latin American, Confucian, South Asian, etc.). This reminds me of the Classical Greek scientists' attempts to classify and explain a world whose complexity they knew little about, or alchemists' efforts to fit every material thing into classes of fire, water, earth, and air. I would assume that Huntington might counter that his list of world cultures is an incomplete sketch to guide thought as opposed to an exhaustive accounting, but this would be a cop-out. Either a theory has descriptive power, or it doesn't. It's silly to insist on the validity of a claim, and then explain away its shortcomings by saying it isn't meant to describe every situation. In fact, I find Huntington's theory to suffer from much of this. When describing the Indo-Pakistani conflict a Huntington-ite could claim that the two countries are very different culturally, while ignoring the overwhelming similarities between the two cultures, and also the lack of conflict between even more widely disparate cultures within India. Basically the theory can be too conveniently scaled up or down to find a cultural difference between two conflicted parties, and grasp at that difference as the prime explanation for the conflict.

As someone interested in economic systems and how societies organize themselves, I am particularly sensitive to the economic roots behind many of today's conflicts. In fact, I would argue that a good part of the conflicts today are at root debates about how to organize wealth in society. Despite the specious claims of many that neoliberal capitalism has proven itself as the undisputed best way of organizing a society, conflicts everywhere from India's war on resource-rich tribal areas, to Nepal's civil war, to the different models of government present in Latin America, remind us that many people are not sold on unfettered markets as the best way to create and distribute wealth. Time and again we witness conflicts between oligarchic capital and the governments that kowtow to it, and grassroots movements that believe that the state should provide a certain basic level of welfare for people. An example is this article discussing the resistance by indigenous people in Guatemala to big mining projects. This has nothing to do with a clash between ancient, divergent cultures. And here's an article about India's newest craze, its war against supposed Maoist guerrillas. As in the Guatemala example, this does outwardly seem to be a clash between tribal peoples and other, mainstream cultures. But the issues being debated here are not cultural things like which god to worship or the relationship between the individual, the family, and society, but rather an economic struggle between oligarchic forces that would appropriate and exploit land and natural resources, and local people who want to continue a sustainable use of the land and resources that they rely on to live.

A big danger is that if we uncritically accept Huntington's theory, then we will see the world and many of its realities as a Clash of Civilizations, which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For instance, Russia's harsh response to a political Chechen separatist movement, or the US invasion of secular Iraq, have created and encouraged a radical Islamist presence in the war zones, thus turning potentially solvable political issues into intractable religio-cultural ones. A proponent of Huntington's theory could easily be driven to conflict or noncooperation with other countries due to a belief in irreconcilable cultural differences. Indeed, the suggestions at the end of the essay would seem to advocate such an attitude on the part of the US government.

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I am in charge of maintaining my family's household, which entails much cleaning, cooking, knife sharpening, etc. I often listen to recorded lectures and presentations as I perform this housework. A major source for the lectures I listen to has been Chicago's Pritzker Military Library, which my cousin turned me on to. They regularly invite authors to present their latest books, which range from subjects like George Washington's spy ring, the kamikaze pilot that successfully attacked the USS Bunker Hill, and even a discussion of the letters exchanged between Emily Dickinson and a famous abolitionist.

Fairly frequently the presenters are sort of right-wing ex-military blowhards. Usually these are not authors of historical books but rather of strategic or ideological tomes. These presentations often leave me feeling sort of disjointed. Sometimes I agree with the major theses of the lecture, sometimes I don't, but above all I'm stricken by the tone. It's a tone that betrays a vision of the world as a sort of strategic battlefield, like one big game of Risk, where the US is the undefeated champion and intends to remain so. I want to devote the rest of the present article to pointing out some of the inherent flaws with this sort of a vision.

First off, my living in another country has exposed me to other ways of conceiving nationality and even nationalism. A proud, patriotic Colombian loves his or her country and wants to make it the best it can be, but no one here entertains the illusion that Colombia is the best country in the world, or that other countries should adopt its model, or that Colombia needs to maintain some sort of dominance over the rest of the world. We just want to create a decent, dignified life for ourselves and our countrymen. I would imagine the case is similar in Ghana or Belgium or most other countries. I can't see Fijians chauvinistically insisting that theirs is the model everyone else should follow!

This is somewhat different from the discourse I grew up with in the US. I feel like in the US there is a constant discussion underway as to whether our society, our values, our culture, our everything is the best or most exemplary in the world. Even those in the US who don't believe this is the case sometimes assert the exact opposite; namely that the US is somehow the worst, most corrupt, most immoral place in the world. But in the US's public discourse you don't hear much from people who don't have some sort of American exceptionalism in mind, who simply want to make their country a bit better, not because it's the best in the world, but because it's theirs, the one they were born into. I believe that many people in the US, in their thoughts and in their words, do in fact hold this vision of the US as a home and not as a big ideological discussion, but these aren't the voices that dominate public discourse.

This is one of the reasons why Ralph Peters, in the discussion of his book, “Wars of Blood and Faith,” turns me off so. It seems that Huntington's thesis fits into Peters's sort of realpolitik vision of the world, in which countries strategically compete and ally with one another. This is not a very accurate reading, because countries and governments are not like a big game of Risk. Countries are comprised of citizens living, working, cooperating, fighting, buying, selling. Most of the life of a typical citizen anywhere revolves around the local sphere. Both those one loves and those one hates tend to be neighbors, and large-scale geopolitics are rarely the major influence on a person's life. That's why it's ridiculous for me to hear Peters talking about the Russian or Arab genius for stupid acts or failure, or the genocidal propensity of Europeans, or how English-speaking peoples were the saviors of the 20^th century. What do these things mean? Do they apply to my Arab friend who is by no means a failure in life, or to my progressive European friends, or to British people I've met who've never saved anyone in their lives? To which members of these cultures is Peters referring when he makes these generalizations?

Often the speakers/presenters at the Pritzker Military Library want to reclaim the warrior ethic, the honor given to our soldiers. I understand that as soldiers or ex-soldiers they value the warrior mentality, and certainly if our government calls on people to perform a given duty, those people deserve the respect and recognition due them. But we do not live in ancient Sparta. The US military's role as I understand it is to uphold the Constitution that defines the nation, and to defend the nation from attack. The military is a tool to protect things we hold dear, but it is not and should not be an end in itself. Unlike a Viking or a Cheyenne Indian, a US soldier is not noble merely because he fights, but because he does duty to a rule of law. For us to honor anything else about the military is to be immoral according to our own national code.

When Peters discusses military strategy, he seems to me to make sense (he's certainly better-placed than I to address the subject). But when he makes empty, pious proclamations about how fine our soldiers are, or when he laments that our schools teach things like slavery and social studies instead of pure military history, he could be a mouthpiece for Uribe's Colombia or North Korea or Pinochet's Chile, that is to say any government that values militarism as an end unto itself. He likewise takes jabs at journalists, foreign service officers, civilian and democratic control of the military, and academics, which in true Spartan fashion he considers not to contribute anything of value to society. He sets up the tired false dichotomy of the treasonous, cowardly urban intelligentsia as opposed to the honest, small-town working men in the US. He toes the militaristic status quo line when he recycles the disputed claim that dropping the two nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945 ultimately saved lives, or the more recent and dangerous myth that if the US doesn't undertake preemptive wars in the Middle East then the terrorists will come to the US to attack us. Peters may be right when he says that freedom has a cost, but I've never seen how waging wars in far-flung nonagressor countries promotes or protects the freedoms our Constitution establishes for us.

David Bellavia is another author that has presented at the Pritzker Library to discuss his memoir of fighting in Fallujah. His speech was full of tough-guy swagger, disjointed sentence fragments, and a glorification of the warrior ethic. I wanted to remind him that was not a Mongol raider nor a Medieval Crusader, but rather a citizen-soldier of a democracy that values self-rule and justice above all, with violence as a mere means (and ideally a little-used one) to assure those things. Peters also had some big-swinging-dick quotes, like, “Sometimes you gotta break a lot of stuff and kill a lot of people.”

But my aim here isn't to pick apart the logical fallacies of Peters's speech, but rather to parse his vision of a chess-game world where the US has to retain its primacy. Thomas Friedman articulates a similar vision in this article about spying and competitivity, while Amitai Etzioni makes arguments to deconstruct such a worldview. Peters makes the claim that in all his travels, no country comes close to the US, and everyone in the world still wants a green card to go and live in the States. The second point has not been the case in my experience. Most of the people I have met in the world want to stay put in their country. In fact, the foreigners I have met that want to come to the US tend to value not our traditions of democracy, social justice, or tolerance, but rather the illusion of making a lot of money and buying a lot of shit.

As for the claim that no country “comes close” to the US, I don't even know what that means. I assume it's an assertion of the superiority of the US to all other nations. Obviously each country is different, and most countries have some merits and some ugly things about their government, their culture, their society in general. The US is like this too. In lots of indicators we come out looking really good. Average income is pretty high, hunger is low, we have beautiful landscapes, and there are lots of possibilities for entrepreneurship. On the other hand, we have pretty bad health statistics compared to other developed countries, we've got lots of violent crime and inequality, we compulsively consume a lot of disposable goods and unhealthy food that don't make us happy.

But the real problem isn't Peters's response to the question of “which country is the best?”, but the question itself. It's absurd to even ask, because there is no objective, meaningful measure to declare one country universally better than another. I've found that those that ask this type of question usually aren't looking for an objective answer, but rather to support their pre-existing belief in their own superiority. When this is the case, obviously people are going to look selectively for data and statistics that confirm their hubris, and they will ignore other information. So the question of which country is the best is not only silly and unanswerable, but any responses that come out of the exercise will be pretty meaningless.

As with Huntington's vision of a Clash of Civilizations, I worry that Peters's chess-game vision of the world can become a sort of tautology, a way of viewing things that essentially makes them that way. If you regard the present-day poverty and backwardness of many Middle Eastern countries as the logical, unavoidable result of their inherent, cultural lack of capacity and competitivity, then you will be wont to dismiss many pertinent new developments in those countries, as well as ignoring the historical and political factors that brought these great civilizations of the Middle Ages to a sort of societal crisis today. Likewise, if you regard your own society as so inherently superior to any other, you will be less likely to consider certain shortcomings that are important to address in order to make life better for yourself and your countrymen.