Huntington and Said: Both Miss the Mark

Central to Huntington's thesis is the division he makes between West and "The Rest". In his book, The Clash Of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Huntington explains

Spurred by modernization, global politics is being reconfigured along cultural lines. People and countries with similar cultures are coming apart forming alignments defined by culture and civilization. Political boundaries increasingly are redrawn to coincide with cultural ones: ethnic, religious, and civilizational.... The world is in some sense two, but the central distinction is between the West as the hitherto dominant civilization and all the others, which, however, have little if anything in common among them. The world, in short, is divided between a Western one and a non-Western many.

What might have Said thought of this? As Mark Levin pointed out in his 1997 essay, Said has in fact provided a response directly, and a speech he gave on the topic was published in the March 5, 1995 Seattle Times. Said was extremely critical of Huntington, stating that "what he's giving is a recipe for more conflict and more war . . . a brief and rather crudely articulated manual in the art of maintaining a wartime status."

Said and Huntington's many other critics have made strong arguments of this nature, many pointing out that coming from such an important and influential academic as he (the man holds a chair in political science at Harvard and has worked at the highest level on the National Security Council, under the Carter Administration), the essay could be in many ways a self-fulfilling work were it to influence the U.S. government to adopt this world view in making foreign policy. Seizaburo Sato has been particularly critical in this respect, saying that

If the leadership of a major power, especially that of the United States which is the only superpower left alive, should come to accept a world image such as this, and systematically adopts and implements policies based upon it, other countries belonging to other civilizational spheres will be forced to take measures to counter such a move, producing a process of interactions which will self-fulfillingly turn Huntington's analysis into a reality. [1]

But Said's alternative evaluation of global politics is not entirely satisfying either. In Culture and Imperialism, Said argues that Western imperialism's most effective tools for dominating other cultures have been literary in nature as much as political and economic. By tracing the themes of 19th- and 20th-century Western fiction and contemporary mass media as weapons of conquest, Said makes the claim that through the über-intellectual mode of the novel, Western powers have been able to influence and permute foreign cultures, and exert a globalizing force upon all of them.

This universalizing argument of Said has much truth in it, but it is also in many ways a failure, because he misunderstands the true workings of human psychology. While Said properly identifies the capacity of imperial empires to impose it's cultural values on other civilizations (backed by military and technological force), he over-estimates the capacity of human beings for true cognitive change. In so doing, Said commits the same mistake as Russia's intelligentsia of the nineteenth century who, following the philosophical lead of Chernyshevsky and the Enlightenment influenced "New People", believed that human beings are ruled by reason and not by deeper psychological motives, and could thus accept rapid change that transcends their civilization. As history has repeatedly shown, such is not the case, and cultures which attempt to abandon their deeper cultural traditions in favor of fancy, imported ideologies (e.g., the Russian importation of a German Hegelian philosophy) tend to crash and burn in the flames of millions of lost human lives. In this respect, Huntington does well to see that however much exposure foreign civilizations have to each other, none will likely take on more than surface structures of their cultural identities, and will at their core remain forever divided.

Said's universalizing argument is indicative of the larger issues surrounding cultural definitions, and he himself is unable to escape the Western outlook on civilization that he describes in his book. As Said reveals the decidedly Western impulse to universalize, which is fundamentally tied to its cultural baggage, he makes clear how this universalizing impulse is wedded inevitably to both the expressive form of the novel and the desire for empire. In his outlook, western novelization and literary instruction then becomes nothing more than a secularized form of proselytizing, which, drained of any religious impulse, can sway the minds of a culture's non-religious leaders.

Said holds an optimistic view of human beings as being able to listen to the rational teachings of an external ideology and fundamentally change their own behavior. He avoids the fact that human beings are first members of families and communities distinguished by ethnic, class and religious cultural perspectives before they are members of any philosophical movement, and that their cognitive development (even down to the cellular level) depends on these family and cultural structures. These "natural" communities shape human desire and self-understanding in much deeper ways than novels or liberating philosophies of the educated elite, and this is even true of those educated elite themselves. And so, just as the Russian Czar ignored the warning in the copy of Devils that Dostoevsky gave him about the deadly direction this philosophical movement would take, so does Said ignore the warning that Huntington puts forward in Clash of Civilizations, a warning that is backed by history, psychology, and even modern cognitive science, which demonstrates the unchangeable power of the culture an individual is raised in.

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[1] Seizaburo Sato, "Clash of Civilizations or Self-Renovation through Mutual Learning," Special Column on Huntington's treatise "Clash of Civilizations" : First of the Series, July 1997. http://www.sbpark.com/inn60.html