Huntington’s Clash Revisited

Published: March 3, 2011            New York Times 

Josh Haner/The New York Times

David Brooks

Human beings, Huntington wrote, are divided along cultural lines —Western, Islamic, Hindu and so on. There is no universal civilization.Instead, there are these cultural blocks, each within its own distinctset of values.

The Islamic civilization, he wrote, is the most troublesome. People inthe Arab world do not share the general suppositions of the Westernworld. Their primary attachment is to their religion, not to theirnation-state. Their culture is inhospitable to certain liberal ideals,like pluralism, individualism and democracy.

Huntington correctly foresaw that the Arab strongman regimes werefragile and were threatened by the masses of unemployed young men. Hethought these regimes could fall, but he did not believe that thenations would modernize in a Western direction. Amid the tumult ofregime change, the rebels would selectively borrow tools from the West,but their borrowing would be refracted through their own beliefs. Theywould follow their own trajectory and not become more Western.

The Muslim world has bloody borders, he continued. There are wars andtensions where the Muslim world comes into conflict with othercivilizations. Even if decrepit regimes fell, he suggested, there wouldstill be a fundamental clash of civilizations between Islam and theWest. The Western nations would do well to keep their distance fromMuslim affairs. The more the two civilizations intermingle, the worsethe tensions will be.

Huntington’s thesis set off a furious debate. But with the historicchanges sweeping through the Arab world, it’s illuminating to go backand read his argument today.

In retrospect, I’d say that Huntington committed the FundamentalAttribution Error. That is, he ascribed to traits qualities that areactually determined by context.

He argued that people in Arab lands are intrinsically not nationalistic.He argued that they do not hunger for pluralism and democracy in theway these things are understood in the West. But it now appears asthough they were simply living in circumstances that did not allow thatpatriotism or those spiritual hungers to come to the surface.

It now appears that people in these nations, like people in all nations,have multiple authentic selves. In some circumstances, one set ofidentities manifests itself, but when those circumstances change, otherequally authentic identities and desires get activated.

For most of the past few decades, people in Arab nations were livingunder regimes that rule by fear. In these circumstances, most peopleshared the conspiracy mongering and the political passivity that theseregimes encouraged. But when the fear lessened, and the opportunity forchange arose, different aspirations were energized. Over the past weeks,we’ve seen Arab people ferociously attached to their nationalidentities. We’ve seen them willing to risk their lives for pluralism,openness and democracy.

I’d say Huntington was also wrong in the way he defined culture.

In some ways, each of us is like every person on earth; in some ways,each of us is like the members of our culture and group; and, in someways, each of us is unique. Huntington minimized the power of universalpolitical values and exaggerated the influence of distinct culturalvalues. It’s easy to see why he did this. He was arguing against globalelites who sometimes refuse to acknowledge the power of culture at all.

But it seems clear that many people in Arab nations do share a universalhunger for liberty. They feel the presence of universal human rightsand feel insulted when they are not accorded them.

Culture is important, but underneath cultural differences there arethese universal aspirations for dignity, for political systems thatlisten to, respond to and respect the will of the people.

Finally, I’d say Huntington misunderstood the nature of historicalchange. In his book, he describes transformations that move alonglinear, projectable trajectories. But that’s not how things work intimes of tumult. Instead, one person moves a step. Then the next personmoves a step. Pretty soon, millions are caught up in a contagion,activating passions they had but dimly perceived just weeks before. Theyget swept up in momentums that have no central authority and that,nonetheless, exercise a sweeping influence on those caught up in theirtides.

I write all this not to denigrate the great Huntington. He may still beproved right. The Arab world may modernize on its own separate path. Buthis mistakes illuminate useful truths: that all people share certainaspirations and that history is wide open. The tumult of events cantransform the traits and qualities that seemed, even to great experts,etched in stone