Huntingdon's Clash of Civilizations?

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Has anyone here read this, as required reading for a class, or just out of curiosity?

I had been reading a lot of criticisms of his work in my classes so I eventually decided to sit down and read the actual book. I have to say he provided quite a bit to criticize and pick at.

I'm familiar with it, having read at least the distillation of it that appeared in Foreign Affairs magazine a few years back. I reject its central hypothesis & find it quite disturbing, especially considering how this tract has been used to rationalize our endless wars in the Middle East.

There is one point that did ring true to me, however. To paraphrase, we in the West are conditioned to believe that the reason we have come to dominate the world is because of the superiority of our ideas, or because of our putative moral superiority. But in fact such domination is mainly because of the superiority of our weaponry. We sometimes forget this, but those on the receiving end of our missiles, bombs & bullets never do.

We Americans & Westerners would do well to reconsider our policies & change our ways, for we're not going to dominate the world forever.

I do think it's a bit silly how Huntington generalizes "Islamic" culture, etc., as if each of his cultures were one monolithic entity.

Read Guns, Germs and Steel.

Niall Furgeson has a different view. See his lectures on the 6 "killer apps" of Western Civilization.

http://www.advisorperspectives.com/news ... r_Apps.php


ruveyn

Guns, germs and steel is vastly overrated, if you read he glosses over China in about 3 pages but spends 150 pages comparing the west to tiny tribal societies.

Does he provide any remotely convincing evidence for why India or China didn't industrialise ahead of Britain based on his geography and biology lessons? Nope.

His exceptionally weak argument about China is because their stupendous coal reserves are sited inland but the majority of the population was coastal, he completely ignores the fact that China was easily capable of massive feats of engineering as evidenced by The Great Wall or the 2,500 year old 2000km long Grand Canal.

Niall Ferguson in that article is also being totally dishonest, for example he compares the academic performance of Shanghai to the USA as a whole and pretends he is making a fair comparison.

He isn't.

Either compare Shanghai, a city of the intellectual elite and China's tech centre to Harvard or Oxford, or if you want to compare nations compare the average USA performance to the average Chinese performance which inconveniently for him means also including 500 million rural chinese peasants that didn't attend secondary school because they couldn't afford to.

It's easy to see you're Americans, largely sheltered from Islam. You've read several criticisms before even reading the book, and even after reading the book, you're getting the author's name wrong. If you lived anywhere with a large enough muslim minority, you'd probably agree with the main premise of the theory. Apparently, he stated that current conflicts would be mainly cultural rather than mainly economic or political.

As far as I know, a lot of current wars do support that theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_wars

Of all conflicts since the year 2000, a total number identified there of roughly twenty-seven, I've identified at least fifteen as being caused largely by culture. Interestingly, most of those are between islamic and non-islamic groups, or between islamic groups fighting each other. Taking into account the man died a few years ago, and many of these conflicts are more recent - even more interesting when you consider he wrote most of this in the early 1990s - he seems to have predicted that part of the future correctly. Even if you interpret Lebanon's current unrest, Syria's current unrest and Egypt's current unrest as being political, it's still fought between religiously and culturally-divided camps. Apparently, even though the official reason for Lebanon's unrest is clashes between pro-Assad and anti-Assad groups, these groups happen to coincide with distinct sects of Islam.

If he describes "Islamic" culture as a monolithic entity, he's equally wrong in describing 'Sinic' culture as a monolithic entity, or 'Western' culture, implying Europe is practically the United States with some castles and minor cultural oddities, and describing sub-Saharan Africa as a monolithic entity rather than a collection of hundreds of distinct tribes usually in a state of informal war with each other. However, these generalisations do serve a purpose - they divide the world, culturally, into the most basic cultural groups available. Indeed, to me, African cultures do seem practically identical, and when I was at a Chinese-Indonesian restaurant today, I couldn't tell the Chinese from Indonesian parts of the interior and the Chinese staff from the Indonesian staff. I've even heard Americans implying they didn't know that some parts of Europe existed.

And that's why I adhere to this theory - I see it around me. While the United States has had a relatively good deal with muslims, we've had a bad one. Apparently, just over 0.5% of the population of the United States is muslim. They're not a force to be reckoned with, socially, culturally and politically. They've blended in, because they weren't given preferential treatment, and they're surprisingly well-adapted and tolerant compared to the 7.2% of Europe's population that has inspired a lot of unrest, cultural conservatism and religious imperialism in the past century. What's the difference between muslims being a problematic group in general in Europe and muslims not being one in the United States? Two things - size of the group, and political and cultural acceptance of the group. Our politicians sometimes defend Islam more than those in Indonesia.

Actually, I think that makes a lot of sense. If these people can build large structures, it does not mean they have a reason to mine for coal. If they have the means, they don't immediately have the incentive. I know how to refill a car's oil, but I don't go hopping around a parking lot with a can of oil. If most of the population was coastal, that's a good reason for them not to do it; the coastal areas, apparently, had more attractive and culturally-settled living conditions. Why would they have a massive move hundreds of miles inland during a time when industry wasn't massively important for them just to mine some coal?