In Samuel Huntington’s 1993 book “The Clash of Civilizations” was that after the cold war, the great divisions in the world would be not between ideologies but cultures. It seems plausible but the edges of these cultures are hard to draw. Islam, after all, has been a major contributor to what we now call Western civilization: in the Middle Ages, after Christian fundamentalists had done their best to extirpate pagan philosophy, it was Islamic scholars who preserved important classical texts as well as making great strides in the fields such as mathematics. George W. Bush characterized the difference as Muslim extremists hating our freedom, and perhaps he was right. Islamic protesters outside Western embassies holding signs saying, “ To Hell with Freedom” suggests as much. That’s easy for them to say; here in the West a lot of people still quite like freedom. But after decades in which the rhetoric of freedom has been debased into a question of consumer choice — “I can choose a blue car or a red; therefore, I am free” — people in the West have been dulled to the harder challenge posed by September 11 and it’s implications: “Does my insistence on freedom include my freedom to insult the prophet Mohammed? Which will provoke some to want to kill me?” In the eyes of some Muslims, somehow, material abundance- along with sexual freedom and the relative impotence of religion in the West, not to mention music and Democracy – has become, without our noticing, not universally desirable, as most people had thought, but just another cultural marker. They see going to the supermarket or a holiday resort or the beach in a swimming costume as some kind of political act. An insult to oppressed Muslims everywhere. An insult to God for fuck sake! An ample justification of murder. A least a dialogue of sorts has begun and people are writing about this sort of thing on the usernet – that’s some good news. The bad news is that Huntington suggests that the world has eight major cultural groupings, of which the West is but one, that could clash. So — one down, six to go. GW.
Despite his intellectual style I thought his thinking was weak. Interesting that it is Islam versus the West rather than Islam versus Christianity. To me the clash of civilization Is cultural conservatism including Islam versus libertarianism, versus simplistic kindness, versus hedonism, versus modern corporate neo-feudalism. A five way free for all playing out globally within all nations.
These days Christianity is just a part of the mix, along with everything else you can bundle into the Western Civilizations basket. Christianity really hasn't been a umbrella ideology in the West since the 19th century, i.e. British Empire style muscular Christianity and that was just a means of advancing the British Empire foreign policy. But the Muslim world seems to place everything under the cloak of Islam, that's something that Western nations haven't done since the Middle ages. So I guess the term "West" and all that entails is the right definition, and Middle Eastern motivations are invariably colored through the veil of Islam (Sic).
