Posted on 01/05/2009 7:18:18 AM PST by BGHater
Never have things been better for one half of humankind, and never have things been worse for the other.An old joke divides the world into two kinds of people:those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't.
The decisive divide in today's world lies between nations that have a future, and nations that don't. Contrary to the prevailing pragmatism,which demands that we take every society on its own terms,an objective criteria has emerged that does not easily fade in the wash, namely the desire to live.
Samuel Huntington, who died last December 27, did the world an enormous service by changing the subject, away from comparative social systems, to civilizations based on religion. His 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order reintroduced a radically tragic dimension into geopolitics that statesmen have yet to embrace. "The Iraq war was the supreme expression of the belief that Islamic civilizations are not different from Western ones in any fundamental way. It was the expression not of a hard-headed doctrine but of a woolly-minded one and, as such, a repudiation of ideas Huntington held his whole life," Christopher Caldwell observed in the Financial Times on January 2.
After boldly introducing the subject, Huntington unfortunately left the next set of questions to forage for themselves.That great incompatibilities exist between some civilizations and others is an important insight. Why do some civilizations, for example "Confucian" (that is, Chinese) and Western seem highly compatible, while others, such as Western and Islamic, appear condemned to clash? A three-stage answer is required to answer the great question that Huntington left open. First, why do civilizations exist? Second, by what criteria can we judge their success or failure? Third, why should their goals conflict with each other?
(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
Before the "public intellectual" became fashionable, academia nurtured a deep abhorrence of anything "popular". Writing to a friend in 1950, British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, for example, apologised for hibernating in Oxford "writing a book of infinite pedantic exactitude on a character of infinite dullness; but I must rehabilitate myself with the learned world after writing a bestseller."
The influence on the wider public discourse by the likes of Edward Said, Henry Kissinger, and even Amartya Sen, and the glamour surrounding their interventions, may have eroded the Senior Common Room's faith in the recondite but it hasn't destroyed it altogether. From the publication of his celebrated (some would say, notorious) "Clash of Civilizations" in 1993 till his death on Christmas Eve, Samuel Huntington was often taunted by the charge that he was willfully playing to the galleries, abandoning scholarship for polemics, if not prejudice.
These low blows were couched in a lethal combination of envy, anger and incomprehension. Huntington was neither a soothsayer nor a prophet. He was just a Harvard don trying to make sense of the post-Cold War world. In suggesting that the contemporary world could be better understood within the framework of conflicting civilizations, Huntington was actually trying to deflate the triumphalist assumptions prevailing in the West. In his view, the spread of American "soft" power wouldn't automatically be accompanied by the spread of liberal democracy.
"Somewhere in the Middle East", he wrote presciently in 1993, "half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap, and between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner." At that time, few people had even heard of Osama bin Laden.
After 9/11, this passage was elevated to the realms of prophecy which it was not. Huntington had just assembled disparate pieces of a puzzle and arrived at the conclusion that the Cold War had been replaced by a tussle which had the potential of turning into a big conflict.
His observations struck an immediate chord in the wider world because it corresponded to what many people instinctively felt but lacked the intellectual tools to put into a coherent framework. Huntington became a celebrity because he articulated a fear that dare not speak its name. He wasn't advocating a global clash; he was merely pointing to its growing imminence. In denouncing him as the evil Satan, his critics were shooting the messenger.
It has become customary for politicians, international bodies and the inter-faith industry to respond to every terrorist outrage and gunfire in West Asia with the assertion that there is no "clash of civilizations". What they actually mean is that there must not be a clash of civilizations — a noble proclamation of good intent rather than an acknowledgement of reality.
It was this willful denial that probably triggered Huntington's final and more prescriptive book 'Who are we?' In his study of the American ethos, he argued that the American Creed wasn't merely built on the US Constitution and a social ethos where opportunity and individualism reigned supreme. To Huntington, it was bolstered by a national culture built on Christianity, the English language and the Anglo-Protestant culture.
Predictably, Huntington was viciously attacked for being an American Raj Thackeray. Certainly, he was guilty of ignoring the cultures of non-European immigrants. But Huntington's logic was different. In his view America was what it was because of its distinct intellectual inheritance. Take that away and you are still left with a US but a very different and fractured US. Such a country with a "denationalized elite" at the helm was by definition incapable of confronting the two immediate threats: militant Islam and Chinese nationalism. For the US to defend itself, Huntington said, it must first realize its national character. He could well have been speaking about Britain, and even India —infected by the plague of national ambivalence.
In intellectual and policy circles it is obligatory and fashionable to rubbish the Huntington thesis as alarmist and divisive. Yet, the epitaph of the man debunked for anticipating the barbarians at the gate will surely read: "In your mind you know he was right."
http:/timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Columnists/S_Dasgupta_Theres_clash_dont_deny/articleshow/3932146.cms
Thanks for posting this. It’s refreshing to read intelligent commentary.
There is not one religion with which Islam does not clash, in marked contrast with the others, yet we continue to allow Muslims to emigrate here. I have met/worked with many immigrants who don't have a problem integrating, live and let live if you will. Not so the Muslims, who, in the majority, expect us to accommodate them. This, after 50+ years experience in the workforce here and around the world. Too bad, I knew and liked a lot of them on a individual basis, but together . . .
ping
“Somewhere in the Middle East”, he wrote presciently in 1993, “half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap, and between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner.” At that time, few people had even heard of Osama bin Laden.
He figured this out in 1993, and was condemned by liberals for what he believed. Interesting.
China, the US and India. Nations with life-affirming belief systems (though nascent in China, it grows), and Israel, the prototype -- vs. the culture of death, Islam, which must be allowed, no matter how tragic, to achieve its wish of self-annihilation.
Well, not all belief or not in every god. As Spengler says: As a universal religion, Islam can only universalize the aspirations of the tribes it assimilates, rather than transform them, and cannot rid itself of its pagan heritage. Instead, it lashes out against the encroachment of more adaptive civilizations: Western, Chinese and Hindu.
Spengler knows what the Pope knows, that the God of Christianity and Judaism (and even the major non-Christian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism) is not the same as the god of Islam, which is a legalistic, limited, death-dealing entity. When the Muslims started attacking us this time around, one of them boasted that we would never win because we love life and they love death. And that is why Islam cannot build a culture, and why the West must rebuild its own, which it can only do by rediscovering God.
"Spengler's" starting to repeat himself. It was cool once to think of this Chinese guy on the other side of the world coming upon Rosenzweig and spinning these theories, but now that we know that he's not so exotic, the interest is less.
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