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Here's a short refutation of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, published by the New York University School of Law:
Huntington is Wrong
by Gaspar Miklos Tamas
In what follows I examine only one aspect of Samuel Huntington’s famous book, neglecting the analytical and historical riches of his work. This may be unfair to the author, but I do have an excuse: the observation I wish to make is quite fundamental to his view and even more so for the debate triggered by it.
Professor Huntington says that after three centuries of ideological struggles we are faced with a different kind of conflict, that of civilizations. Socialism—at least, revolutionary, Marxist socialism—is defunct, and the West is threatened by some old enemies resurfacing from under the ruins of Stalin’s empire, Byzantine-Ottoman and Islamic adversaries. The old enmities are reborn, and thus we are more the heirs to Godefroy de Bouillon and Richard Coeur de Lion than the successors of Napoleon and Hegel. Our enemy today is that which it has always been since the days of Pompey: the Oriental. This is the kind of generalization that inflames the imagination of the learned but lay public as had those of Spengler or Unamuno, and I do not have any objections to this. Contemporary imagination needs all the jolts it can get.
But is it true that the concept of civilization is so radically different from the concept of ideology or Weltanschauung? Is there an authentically deep contrast between the two? I do not think so.
After two centuries of historist (not historicist!) reductionism, it is taken for granted by disillusioned and skeptical observers that political worldviews are far from what they purport to be, to wit, disinterested or unbiased philosophic theories of justice, the common good, good governance, liberty, and the like, and are rather nearer to being mere reflections of social, economic, and cultural necessities that have forced themselves unobtrusively upon schools of thought when they weren’t committed deliberately to serve one or another variety of political rule. If political Weltanschauungen had not been the courtiers of a Prince, then they were probably the servants of the Zeitgeist. The influences of the age, the limitations imposed on us by tastes and prejudices, the customs and traditions of the place in which we happen to live appear to the historist as the essential cause of the shape our ideas might take, and not the inadvertent impurities unavoidable in the thought of a mere human. Our cognitive limitations, forced upon us by time and space, are not to be obliterated and replaced with more perfect knowledge in a concerted effort to conquer truth, but are the intrinsically interesting feature of political thought, since they express an empirical truth about the predilections of our time and place—and so are informative for the historian. It is these predilections that the learned scholar will want to observe. The historist scholar does not presume to improve our lot, hence perfecting our knowledge of the human condition is of no interest to him or her (it is likely that he or she will not believe in the notion of a “human condition” at all). His or her interest lies in the metatheory of a social causation that might be able to explain why Jean Bodin had to think differently from Spinoza, that “unmasks” the local and temporal reasons behind Spinoza’s preference for eternal verities.
Historismus is a hypothesis most people share today. Nobody is willing to discuss whether Marx was right, but everybody is passionately interested in the crimes of Stalin. Political Weltanschauungen are of interest to us today only as factors in “real” politics, that is, as partial causes in people’s observable political behavior. Religion and Enlightenment are interesting as creators of “modernity,” which nowadays means, of course, capitalism.
But let us now limit ourselves to the problem of Enlightenment. The accusatory Historismus of today—the “blame game” known to us from Mother Russia: kto vinovat? who is the culprit?—regards the various strands of Enlightenment as efficient causes of capitalism and socialism. Both Heidegger and his greatest enemy, Adorno, believed that scientific and technological progress, which was considered by the Enlighteners themselves as a gloriously successful tool for the relief of the estate of man, caused both: liberal democracy and totalitarian tyranny are both rationalistic, technological, orderly, and directed against chaotic nature, including human nature—are in effect civilizations of domination (primarily a domination of nature, including human nature).
In spite of all these exaggerations, we can quietly concede that socialism and modern capitalism as far as they were thoughts (and they were that to a very large extent, based as they were on science, technology, social engineering, law, and the like) have been indeed, in a way, consequences of the Enlightenment. But were they not civilizations at the same time?
Revolutionary socialism (to take only this example) was indeed the product of one specific kind of emancipatory Enlightenment thought, and the fact that it was realized in so-called backward countries—a problem so fascinating for generation after generation of leftists—comes as no surprise to those who still remember that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had written constitutions for extremely backward countries (Corsica and Poland), and that French philosophers tried to prescribe constitutional arrangements for Catherine the Great of Russia and several Fredericks of Prussia, backward rulers of backward countries. This comes as no surprise for those who are aware of the profound cleavage between the “austerity” and “luxury” wings of the Enlightenment. Socialism, to put it simply or, indeed, simplistically, was an idea that had become a civilization.
Let me cite here an anecdote that might not be a proof, but that provides at least some kind of empirical evidence for what I have in mind. A few years ago I met a Chinese astronomer and mathematician in Boston, a refugee from the People’s Republic of China, who was my age. We discovered—during a tedious campus party—that our respective childhoods were perfectly compatible. We had read the same children’s books by Gaidar, Katayev, Marshak, and Charushin, sang the same songs—about Warszawianka the Amur Partisans’ March—went to the same kind of Young Pioneers camps at the seaside, had our first doubts reading philosophy considered by the communists to have been the heritage of the working class (John Milton, Spinoza, Hegel), played volleyball, which for some reason communist headmasters preferred the world over, and wept as small children over the fate of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. And still, he and I are considered by Mr. Huntington to belong to inimical civilizations, although my childhood as a Protestant Transylvanian Hungarian has absolutely nothing to do with the childhood of an Austrian my age, and his, nothing with the childhood of a Confucian, say, of unlamented South Vietnam or sweet, nice Singapore. I might add here that the greatest musical success in Hungary in 1997 was the music CD “The Best of Communism,” communist marches, songs from the Moyseyev and Aleksandrov Ensembles of the Red Army. Are the buyers of this CD communists? The Hungarian Communist Party has fewer voters than the buyers of this compact disc. This is only a part of our civilization, unconnected to any substantive beliefs.
Not only is Mr. Huntington mistaken empirically as to where the fault lines between his “civilizations” lie, but he is, I think, mistaken concerning the very nature of civilizations or “cultures.” Civilizations do have worldviews. If someone takes the pains to study the state ideology of that great paradigmatic enemy of the West, the Islamic Republic of Iran, he will see that it is not at all medieval, but instead Rousseauean or Fichtean. It is a “closed commercial state” and a participatory democracy. It is indeed exactly what American conservatives believe in: a culture concentrating on the common good, family, religion, marital virtue, morality over legality, and the rest of it. Iran and the United States, unbeknownst to themselves and among themselves, are continuing the debate between Rousseau and Diderot, only with the US not quite believing in its Diderot.
The “clash of civilizations” is, I believe, a paper tiger. It is only that a few countries, such as ours, went over to the side of Diderot, and others, such as Iran and Israel, to the side of Rousseau, regardless of their customs. The country of my Chinese friend is now trying to combine Rousseau and Diderot, mine is trying to combine Diderot and Adam Smith. They both are facing the lazy, inertial resistance of custom and tradition. But our customs and traditions originate in a rationalistic ideology transformed into folklore. Byzantine neo-Platonism in Russia, Serbia, Romania play no role, as Suarez and Mariana don’t play a role in Austria or Hungary, or the Ismaili theology in Central Asia. We are all heirs to the Enlightenment as trash, indecipherable script, folk memory, exactly as the memory of Alexander the Great became a folk epic in the Balkans where he appears as a sinewy peasant hero. But for all that, like it or not, he was a disciple of Aristotle.
Gaspar Miklos Tamas is a research professor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy and a recurrent visiting professor at the Central European University, Budapest.
Huntington is Wrong
by Gaspar Miklos Tamas
In what follows I examine only one aspect of Samuel Huntington’s famous book, neglecting the analytical and historical riches of his work. This may be unfair to the author, but I do have an excuse: the observation I wish to make is quite fundamental to his view and even more so for the debate triggered by it.
Professor Huntington says that after three centuries of ideological struggles we are faced with a different kind of conflict, that of civilizations. Socialism—at least, revolutionary, Marxist socialism—is defunct, and the West is threatened by some old enemies resurfacing from under the ruins of Stalin’s empire, Byzantine-Ottoman and Islamic adversaries. The old enmities are reborn, and thus we are more the heirs to Godefroy de Bouillon and Richard Coeur de Lion than the successors of Napoleon and Hegel. Our enemy today is that which it has always been since the days of Pompey: the Oriental. This is the kind of generalization that inflames the imagination of the learned but lay public as had those of Spengler or Unamuno, and I do not have any objections to this. Contemporary imagination needs all the jolts it can get.
But is it true that the concept of civilization is so radically different from the concept of ideology or Weltanschauung? Is there an authentically deep contrast between the two? I do not think so.
After two centuries of historist (not historicist!) reductionism, it is taken for granted by disillusioned and skeptical observers that political worldviews are far from what they purport to be, to wit, disinterested or unbiased philosophic theories of justice, the common good, good governance, liberty, and the like, and are rather nearer to being mere reflections of social, economic, and cultural necessities that have forced themselves unobtrusively upon schools of thought when they weren’t committed deliberately to serve one or another variety of political rule. If political Weltanschauungen had not been the courtiers of a Prince, then they were probably the servants of the Zeitgeist. The influences of the age, the limitations imposed on us by tastes and prejudices, the customs and traditions of the place in which we happen to live appear to the historist as the essential cause of the shape our ideas might take, and not the inadvertent impurities unavoidable in the thought of a mere human. Our cognitive limitations, forced upon us by time and space, are not to be obliterated and replaced with more perfect knowledge in a concerted effort to conquer truth, but are the intrinsically interesting feature of political thought, since they express an empirical truth about the predilections of our time and place—and so are informative for the historian. It is these predilections that the learned scholar will want to observe. The historist scholar does not presume to improve our lot, hence perfecting our knowledge of the human condition is of no interest to him or her (it is likely that he or she will not believe in the notion of a “human condition” at all). His or her interest lies in the metatheory of a social causation that might be able to explain why Jean Bodin had to think differently from Spinoza, that “unmasks” the local and temporal reasons behind Spinoza’s preference for eternal verities.
Historismus is a hypothesis most people share today. Nobody is willing to discuss whether Marx was right, but everybody is passionately interested in the crimes of Stalin. Political Weltanschauungen are of interest to us today only as factors in “real” politics, that is, as partial causes in people’s observable political behavior. Religion and Enlightenment are interesting as creators of “modernity,” which nowadays means, of course, capitalism.
But let us now limit ourselves to the problem of Enlightenment. The accusatory Historismus of today—the “blame game” known to us from Mother Russia: kto vinovat? who is the culprit?—regards the various strands of Enlightenment as efficient causes of capitalism and socialism. Both Heidegger and his greatest enemy, Adorno, believed that scientific and technological progress, which was considered by the Enlighteners themselves as a gloriously successful tool for the relief of the estate of man, caused both: liberal democracy and totalitarian tyranny are both rationalistic, technological, orderly, and directed against chaotic nature, including human nature—are in effect civilizations of domination (primarily a domination of nature, including human nature).
In spite of all these exaggerations, we can quietly concede that socialism and modern capitalism as far as they were thoughts (and they were that to a very large extent, based as they were on science, technology, social engineering, law, and the like) have been indeed, in a way, consequences of the Enlightenment. But were they not civilizations at the same time?
Revolutionary socialism (to take only this example) was indeed the product of one specific kind of emancipatory Enlightenment thought, and the fact that it was realized in so-called backward countries—a problem so fascinating for generation after generation of leftists—comes as no surprise to those who still remember that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had written constitutions for extremely backward countries (Corsica and Poland), and that French philosophers tried to prescribe constitutional arrangements for Catherine the Great of Russia and several Fredericks of Prussia, backward rulers of backward countries. This comes as no surprise for those who are aware of the profound cleavage between the “austerity” and “luxury” wings of the Enlightenment. Socialism, to put it simply or, indeed, simplistically, was an idea that had become a civilization.
Let me cite here an anecdote that might not be a proof, but that provides at least some kind of empirical evidence for what I have in mind. A few years ago I met a Chinese astronomer and mathematician in Boston, a refugee from the People’s Republic of China, who was my age. We discovered—during a tedious campus party—that our respective childhoods were perfectly compatible. We had read the same children’s books by Gaidar, Katayev, Marshak, and Charushin, sang the same songs—about Warszawianka the Amur Partisans’ March—went to the same kind of Young Pioneers camps at the seaside, had our first doubts reading philosophy considered by the communists to have been the heritage of the working class (John Milton, Spinoza, Hegel), played volleyball, which for some reason communist headmasters preferred the world over, and wept as small children over the fate of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. And still, he and I are considered by Mr. Huntington to belong to inimical civilizations, although my childhood as a Protestant Transylvanian Hungarian has absolutely nothing to do with the childhood of an Austrian my age, and his, nothing with the childhood of a Confucian, say, of unlamented South Vietnam or sweet, nice Singapore. I might add here that the greatest musical success in Hungary in 1997 was the music CD “The Best of Communism,” communist marches, songs from the Moyseyev and Aleksandrov Ensembles of the Red Army. Are the buyers of this CD communists? The Hungarian Communist Party has fewer voters than the buyers of this compact disc. This is only a part of our civilization, unconnected to any substantive beliefs.
Not only is Mr. Huntington mistaken empirically as to where the fault lines between his “civilizations” lie, but he is, I think, mistaken concerning the very nature of civilizations or “cultures.” Civilizations do have worldviews. If someone takes the pains to study the state ideology of that great paradigmatic enemy of the West, the Islamic Republic of Iran, he will see that it is not at all medieval, but instead Rousseauean or Fichtean. It is a “closed commercial state” and a participatory democracy. It is indeed exactly what American conservatives believe in: a culture concentrating on the common good, family, religion, marital virtue, morality over legality, and the rest of it. Iran and the United States, unbeknownst to themselves and among themselves, are continuing the debate between Rousseau and Diderot, only with the US not quite believing in its Diderot.
The “clash of civilizations” is, I believe, a paper tiger. It is only that a few countries, such as ours, went over to the side of Diderot, and others, such as Iran and Israel, to the side of Rousseau, regardless of their customs. The country of my Chinese friend is now trying to combine Rousseau and Diderot, mine is trying to combine Diderot and Adam Smith. They both are facing the lazy, inertial resistance of custom and tradition. But our customs and traditions originate in a rationalistic ideology transformed into folklore. Byzantine neo-Platonism in Russia, Serbia, Romania play no role, as Suarez and Mariana don’t play a role in Austria or Hungary, or the Ismaili theology in Central Asia. We are all heirs to the Enlightenment as trash, indecipherable script, folk memory, exactly as the memory of Alexander the Great became a folk epic in the Balkans where he appears as a sinewy peasant hero. But for all that, like it or not, he was a disciple of Aristotle.
Gaspar Miklos Tamas is a research professor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy and a recurrent visiting professor at the Central European University, Budapest.
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