It is essential in our political and social second to steer clear of extremes. One excessive is the assumption that the precise character traits and virtues that Western tradition prizes really signify common values, ones that should be exported and adopted throughout the globe. This view “holds that peoples in all societies want to adopt Western values, institutions, and practices,” wrote Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations. The Western universalist perspective towards the world is to reshape it in its own picture. Should the folks of those nations resist, “if they seem not to have that desire and to be committed to their own traditional cultures,” he writes, they’re stated to be “victims of a false consciousness.”
The different excessive is a perception {that a} conventional tradition can solely keep sturdy and distinctive if it resists all affect from exterior of itself. This is one thing Pope John Paul II warned about; whereas the content material of every tradition varies tremendously, there is one thing common within the human spirit that has the identical fundamental wants “in the most disparate cultures,” however “the legitimate defense of uniqueness and originality,” shouldn’t be “confused with the idea that a particular cultural tradition should remain closed in its difference and affirm itself by opposing other traditions.”
Universal Questions, Particular Answers
There’s one other error we should keep away from: considering that civilizations are monolithic—many accused Huntington of overlooking that actuality; I feel that criticism is legitimate however I can see why he wanted to make use of a common rubric.
When we use the phrase “the clash of civilizations” most Americans consider ISIS or terrorist teams. Many are inclined to assume when it comes to battle due to the phrase conflict, and subsequently consider how we can win in opposition to them. But to my thoughts, it’s the phrase civilizations that dominates—that’s consequential. This phrase has to do with our humanity. In each tradition folks ask the elemental questions like: Who am I? What is my place on this world? Where do I belong? And different such questions. This is mankind’s quest for that means.
These are common questions, however their solutions are explicit, not common. Every tradition solutions these universals in a specific method. So for example, there will probably be some cultures that worth the household unit as a complete greater than they worth the person—like my Iraqi tradition. Other cultures, like right here in America, set extra emphasis on the person, viewing it as main. That’s what the democratization of the household unit means in spite of everything, no? The drawback comes when one civilization believes its solutions to these common questions are common.
Cultures are supposed to be dynamic; “They change and advance because people meet in new ways and share with each other their ways of life,” Pope John Paul II wrote in Fides et Ratio. They are “fed by the communication of values, and they survive and flourish insofar as they remain open to assimilating new experiences.” This is the both-and approach that stays away from the 2 extremes.
Huntington tells his readers why the universality declare, or world order—or as others would say, the colonizing of non-Western nations by way of concepts—will not be an excellent path: “Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.” Cultural range, even when we don’t prefer it, he implies, is right here to remain. However, “imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universalism,” he wrote. If the West normally, and America particularly, ought to foist its concepts onto non-Western societies, it must destroy them and impose its lifestyle on them. But that’s harmful as a result of in doing so “it could lead to a major inter-civilizational war between core states and it is dangerous to the West because it could lead to defeat of the West.” That could be a “boomerang effect of imperialism upon the homeland,” as Hannah Arendt wrote.
Looking on the political class, and American society at giant, it’s simple to see that “Iraq fatigue” has set in. I imagine most Americans would reasonably not assume additional in regards to the state of affairs there for 2 causes: 1) We have been the aggressors, and a pair of) the plan had a boomerang impact, largely as a result of they (most Iraqis) weren’t as showing interest and excited to undertake the values we have been so wanting to implant in them. Our desires of the universality of striving for Enlightenment-era Liberty have been dashed, and lots of can’t cope.
“Western civilization is valuable,” Huntington writes, “not because it is universal but because it is unique.” What makes it distinctive—as in singular, particular—will not be “in the way it has developed [e.g. via the Enlightenment] but its values and institutions.” It is the ensemble of “Christianity, pluralism, individualism, and rule of law.” These distinctive traits made modernity potential—it allowed the event of “individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom.” These traits are distinctive to this civilization. Rather than making an attempt to reverse the decline of Western energy, Huntington advises, the prudent factor is “to learn to navigate the shallows, endure the miseries, moderate its ventures, and safeguard its culture. . . . The principal responsibility of Western leaders, consequently, is not to attempt to reshape other civilizations in the image of the West, which is beyond their declining power, but to preserve, protect, and renew the unique qualities of Western civilizations.” Western leaders haven’t heeded his warning and recommendation.
In line with the considered John Paul II, I might add that like all distinctive—as particularly—civilizations, the West has one thing to supply. But it additionally has many issues to study from the values and concepts of non-Western cultures. I discover it infuriating that the default American cultural and political stance is: “we think your ideas and values are backward and obsolete but we’ll commodify your goods and make money off of them.” It’s what America has carried out with oil within the Middle East, gunpowder precursors throughout the Pacific islands, espresso and bananas in South and Central America, and a number of different items. It’s what the British did with tea in Asia, and all of Europe did with valuable minerals in Africa, and different such issues. On a extra acquainted and speedy scale, we’ll take Mexico’s or Lebanon’s delicacies however not their religiosity or prioritization of multigenerational household unit buildings. This perspective has been a part of the historical past of Western civilization, and it was and is the hallmark of colonization. But it’s anti-Christian and anti-pluralistic. It is a perversion, a deformation of a significant openness to different cultures. It is smug, materialistic, opportunistic, decidedly uncharitable.
In any confrontation between peoples, there are twin excessive tendencies for the completely different cultures to wish to both dominate the opposite or to withdraw into themselves. It may be very troublesome to hew to the imply and keep true to 1’s own id whereas being open to the opposite.
A Western Anti-Culture?
In his essay on the 25th anniversary of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Gregg writes that,
Many Western-educated, younger Middle-Eastern Islamic males [. . . ] had not develop into ‘just like us’ following subjection to Western societies characterised by liberal constitutionalism and market economies. Neither financial affluence nor the experience of bourgeois norms had mollified their views. If something, their antipathy in direction of the West had grown.
Why? Because the issue of being open to individuals who don’t share our cultural id is compounded when that id is an anti-id, as it’s within the West. What do I imply by this?
If there’s a conflict—and that I imagine there’s, as I wrote in National Affairs—it’s not between the Judeo-Christian West and Islam, the East versus the West, as Huntington and others have seen it. The conflict is between all those that espouse a metaphysically knowledgeable view of the world and people who don’t. American spiritual conservatives normally proceed to make the error of assuming that Western civilization is the Judeo-Christian civilization. It will not be. It stopped being that a very long time in the past. Conflating the 2 retains those that espouse a metaphysically wealthy actuality from working collectively—whether or not which means with immigrants from these conventional cultures or with these overseas who share this view—to re-humanize a world that has been dehumanized by an anti-metaphysical thing philosophy.
A robust sense of place; belonging to a household unit, neighborhood, and tradition; a pub what place you’re recognized, a restaurant that is aware of what you want, a church, mosque, or synagogue to which you belong—these and different such issues are what give that means, certainty, and security to the human particular person.
To be clear, i’m not saying that Muslims qua Muslims will not be in heated discussion with Christians qua Christians. But the macro heated discussion between the West and the remainder—to make use of Huntington’s phrase—is between a secular materialist (notice: not secular humanist) West and a spiritual East. (Parallel conflicts on a smaller scale echo inside the civilization between the secular West and the remnant of the spiritual West.) It is between a West that has deconstructed household unit life and atomized to the acute. It is a tradition that celebrates rights with out obligations. It is a tradition that, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote, “excludes God from the public conscience, [believing Him to be] irrelevant to public life.” Ratzinger continues, observing that the present tradition within the West is the “radical contradiction not only of Christianity, but of the religious and moral traditions of humanity. . . . Muslims . . . do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundations, but by the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own foundations.”
The secular anti-God West doesn’t stand an opportunity in opposition to non-Western nations which have sturdy spiritual and cultural traditions. “Where divinity is derided or else ignored, human sensitivity assumes a kind of absolute validity since man is hungry both for certainty and for safety,” wrote the poet Elizabeth Jennings in Every Changing Shape. Roots! A robust sense of place; belonging to a household unit, neighborhood, and tradition; a pub what place you’re recognized, a restaurant that is aware of what you want, a church, mosque, or synagogue to which you belong—these and different such issues are what give that means, certainty, and security to the human particular person. It is on this context that we see a human being act as a human being. “It is not possible to understand man on the basis of economics alone, nor to define him simply on the basis of class membership. Man is understood in a more complete way when he is situated within the sphere of culture through his language, history, and the position he takes toward the fundamental events of life, such as birth, love, work and death,” wrote Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus.
Market economies and bourgeois norms don’t feed the soul—if something, they emaciate.
It appears to me—I may very well be misreading Gregg—that whereas recounting Huntington’s prediction that non-Western civilizations will re-exert their civilizations’ distinctiveness, he disapproves of and disparages the truth that these non-Western civilizations are reasserting themselves, that they “speak in civilizational terms.” But I might ask, why is the West allowed to—as Huntington steered for it to do—”protect, defend, and renew the distinctive qualities of its civilization,” however Russia, China, Turkey et al., can not? Moreover, they’re purposely thwarted and chastised when doing so? How is {that a} signal of liberty and tolerance, values that the West proudly claims as its own?
Even although he suggests precisely how the West can protect its civilization, Huntington warns in opposition to vanity:
These pictures of the West as smug, materialistic, repressive, brutal, and decadent are held not solely by fundamentalist imams but in addition by these whom many within the West would contemplate their pure allies and supporters. Few books by Muslim authors printed within the 1990s within the West obtained the reward given to Fatima Mernissi’s Islam and Democracy, usually hailed by Westerners because the brave assertion of a contemporary, liberal, feminine Muslim. The portrayal of the West in that quantity, nonetheless, might hardly be much less flattering. The West is “militaristic” and “imperialistic” and has “traumatized” different nations by way of “colonial terror” (pp. 3, 9). Individualism, the hallmark of Western tradition, is “the source of all trouble” (p. 8). Western energy is fearful. The West “alone decides if satellites will be used to educate Arabs or to drop bombs on them. . . . It crushes our potentialities and invades our lives with its imported products and televised movies that swamp the airwaves. . . . It is a power that crushes us, besieges our markets, and controls our merest resources, initiatives, and potentialities. That was how we perceived our situation, and the Gulf War turned our perception into certitude” (pp. 146-47).
Such views, Huntington reminds the reader, “are not the views of a bearded, hooded ayatollah.”
What the West has carried out and continues to do is hypocritical and unjust: the plundering, manipulating, and colonizing of the underdeveloped world by the developed world—of the poor by the wealthy. I’m hardly the primary to say so. The instructing of the Catholic Church has regularly identified the unchristian conduct on this area. In Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, in Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra, Pacem in Terris, and Gaudium et Spes, Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio and Octogesima Adveniens, John Paul II’s Sollicitudo Rei Socialis and Centesimus Annus, Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate, Francis’ Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti. i’m not saying that different civilizations have clean hands, or that they don’t act unjustly; I’m saying that Western civilization can not declare Christian values as its hallmark and act on the world stage utilizing anti-Christian values. As the Christian Bible says: “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” Insofar because the Christians within the West help this anti-Christian agenda, their hands are dirty as well. They ought to know higher—they need to neither submit to those concepts being the standard-bearer of their civilization, nor give their vote to these espousing them.
Civilization and Exile
In recounting the controversies surrounding Huntington’s e-book, Gregg mentions Edward W. Said, a cultural critic that got here to prominence by way of his post-colonial writing. Said was enraged by Huntington’s argument and didn’t hesitate to say so—he was unsparing in his invective.
Said, that complicated man who made an enemy out of virtually all American conservatives, understood the agony of uprootedness and the injustices of colonialism at a intestine stage. But as an alternative of addressing this metaphysical disconnect, as an alternative of culling the great from this work, he goes after Huntington—he might solely learn him with hostility. He scatters reasonably than gathers. Said’s anger made him miss issues on which he would have agreed with Huntington. Huntington wrote: “The unity of non-West and East-West dichotomy are myths created by the West. These myths suffer the defects of the Orientalism which Edward Said appropriately criticized for promoting ‘the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’)’ and for assuming the inherent superiority of the former to the latter.”
If anybody understood the disorientation of a lack of id, the anguish of being torn “from the nourishment of tradition, family and geography,” as he describes it in his essay on exile, it was Said, who knew acutely that “discontinuous state of being” that many people experience. Given Said’s anti-imperialism, one would assume he could be sympathetic to a minimum of a few of Huntington’s ideas: the destruction of Western imperialism, Huntington’s recognition of Western vanity and its double requirements, and the West’s “devastating impact on every other civilization,” as Huntington wrote.
I suppose I’m a distinct kind of exile than Said, and so I take a look at issues in a different way—presumably as a result of I didn’t have the privilege of a Princeton and Harvard formal training once I got here to America, presumably as a result of I’m a girl, presumably as a result of Said lived by way of the decolonization interval whereas I got here into the world after, and from a household unit who considerably appreciated British colonial presence in Iraq (not as a result of Britain was consciously sympathetic to the plight of Christians in Iraq—removed from it. The British thought solely of Britain, however exerted some salutary affect due to collateral items.) What could presumably be essentially the most defining distinction between the 2 of us is that whereas Said was displaced from Palestine by the incoming Israeli state (which made him a deep opponent of the State of Israel), one might say that I used to be displaced from Iraq by Islam, by a society that made it troublesome for Christians to really feel at house within the land of their heritage. This is to not say that Christians and Muslims didn’t have friendships, or that each one Muslims have been in opposition to all Christians—no, it was extra like a ubiquitous rigidity within the air. My mother and father weren’t forged out of Iraq, they left of their very own volition, so I’m not technically an exile. And but, Said’s writing on exile resonates—despite the numerous issues we don’t share, I discover a kinship there.
The uprootedness, the estrangement the exile experiences, is formative, and so too is its reverse: rootedness, belonging, and a way of a robust id. Surely, that’s the first and first lens with which we see the world—with which we perceive things like cultures and civilizations. It is a disgrace that Said couldn’t, together with folks resembling myself, and to a sure extent Gregg, see that Huntington’s undertaking included alerting the West to its own weaknesses and failings.
