Graham McAleer
Huntington was right to highlight the West's civilizational achievement. About Samuel Huntington’s “seminal book,” Zbigniew Brzezinski says, “the sheer size of [the] book’s global readership testifies that it satisfied the widespread craving for a comprehensive understanding of our currently turbulent historical reality.” Published after the ideological wars of the twentieth century, Huntington’s 1996 The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order argued that moving forward, the central and most dangerous phenomenon in global affairs would be “conflict between groups from differing civilizations.” Despite the best-seller numbers, commentators from the left and the right reacted negatively. In The Nation, Edward Said rebuked “this belligerent kind of thought.” John Gray pointed out that history shows war happens more within civilizations than between them, citing the catastrophes of WW1, WW2, and the Cold War as examples.
Huntington is well able to blunt Said’s point, for his conflict claim had a corollary, that “an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war.” In fairness, Huntington, who died in 2008, was more interested in order than in war. Gray contends that the great twentieth century conflicts were resource wars, not disputes between value orders. Yet hierarchies of worth promoted by civilizations must shape how peoples value land. Huntington identified Sinic, Japanese, Orthodox, Christian West, Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, African, and Latin civilizations. The list is obviously unstable, with all manner of overlaps, yet some such classification of order rings true, and this is why “big picture” philosophies of history work along these lines.
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