A Critique of Huntington’s "Clash of Civilizations"

The late Edward Said while critiquing Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, states that this thesis is a fictional gimmick, something like the “War of the Worlds”. For those of you who are not aware of what the “War of the Worlds” was, it was a fictional account of how a group of aliens planned to attack earth and destroy humanity. It was first broadcast as a radio play and when the broadcast took place, the radio listeners were misled into believing that an actual “War of the Worlds” was taking place.

Why are such gimmicks, like the “Clash of Civilizations” created and for what purpose, why are they then given widespread coverage on the mass media (a media, by the way, that is erroneously assumed as free and fair by the masses, when it is anything but), and what are the sociological processes through which they then become self-fulfilling prophecies and assume a reality of their own. These are some of the questions that I would like to address in this presentation:

The motivation behind generating such ‘official’ mythology, by the US elite, and the multiple think tanks that push their agenda, is primarily ’prepping’ the domestic public for massive funds and manpower. In other words, legitimation is achieved by generating an ‘us versus them’ climate of fear and paranoia, or as the ex-U.S. senator, Vanderbilt put it, by scaring “the hell out of the American people”. We should note at this point that the agenda of the US elite is different to that of the masses in the US, most of whom are politically quite apathetic and are busy earning a living or chasing a dream that most never attain. The point being that such fear generation by the US elite is for ulterior motives and not for the sake of any benefit to the American people. As C. Wright Mills explained in his book, The Power Elite, in the 1950s and as William Domhoff has been empirically verifying almost every decade since then, these US elite have a social profile and a lifestyle very different to the profile of mainstream America, and their sense of community is such that they consider themselves ‘separate’ and ‘superior’ from the rest of society over which they rule.

This ‘prepping’ of the public so that it considers elite agenda to be in their best interest, with the accompanying language of fear and the pseudo-scholarship that legitimizes it, is necessary for conducting wars because the manpower as well as the funding for it is provided by the masses. They are also the ones who do the fighting but ironically never take part in the decision to go to war. The second and lesser reason for such a thesis like the “Clash of Civilizations’, is for altering the agenda of the rest of the world, particularly the underdeveloped part of the world, [the de-facto theater of US operations, regardless of the particular country in question], away from domestic issues towards conducting America’s wars. The ‘you are with us or with the enemy’ mentality, which is the privilege that the rest of the world grants the US based on its position in the global order, inevitably achieves that end. As a result, official US definitions of global reality, a rather crackpot version of reality divorced of facts, assumes a reality of its own, by setting in motion a dynamic that was contrived to begin with. The opponents, in this ‘cat and mouse’ game act out their parts when so labeled, providing fodder for this cycle of ignorance to repeat itself. Labeling theory and its empirical verification has adequately demonstrated that dominant groups, those who have the resources, power and legitimacy to assign labels to subordinates, ensure that the subordinates will internalize and follow through on the definitions given to them by the dominant group regardless of whether those labels and definitions were true to begin with or not. A fundamental principle in sociology, the Thomas Theorem states the same. As a result fringe groups, given the ‘major enemy’ status by the dominant group become mainstream.

In order to understand why this happens and the motivations that drive the US elite, we need to look at the institutional structure of the US, post World War 2. Simplistic explanations like blaming ’Salafist/Wahabi ideology’ or the likes, with a few examples of atrocities carried out by people purporting to follow those ideologies are simple distractions from real issues, issues having to do with power and wealth, and with the ability to define and generate “reality”- i.e. control of the cultural apparatus and the power to assign labels and set precedents for the rest of the world. When alternative socio-structural reasons having institutional precedent are presented by us to those pushing the narrow stereotypical ‘ideological’ explanations, they normally retort by saying “conspiracy theory”, yet they forget that the largest conspiracy, playing out center stage in today’s world, a conspiracy that even the simplest mind can grasp, is the fictional account of how the world’s most massive military machine, the U.S. is somehow facing a ‘clear and present’ threat from people living in caves, brandishing ak-47 and world war 2 vintage RPGs. That is the biggest fictionally inspired ‘conspiracy-theory’ that is being sold as “reality” to the rest of the world by the US elite and the so-called ‘intellectuals’ backing their case.

In the 1950s C. Wright Mills, the American Sociologist in his book, the Power Elite, which became a pioneering work in the study of the power structure of US society, stated:

“ What the main drift of the 20th century revealed is that …the military has become enlarged and decisive to the shape of the entire economic structure; and moreover the economic and the military have become structurally and deeply interrelated, as the economy has become a seemingly permanent war economy..” C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956)

Let me explain what Mills was getting at: Arguments by media pundits regarding the ‘war on terror’ and how the U.S. can ‘win’ it, similar to what Huntington seeks in proposing his ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis, assume without question, or take as a given, that the U.S. is fighting a genuine war in which it seeks victory and ultimately peace. They also assume the moral superiority and goodwill of the US decision makers. Both these assumption are based on a flawed assessment of the causes of war and its relationship to the U.S. political economy, and the historical role of the US in world affairs.

In the past, war was a means to an end, be it self-defense or protection (a just war) or ruthless conquest, political or economic (an unjust war). The military, as an institution was subservient to the political economy. That hierarchy of institutions, i.e. that relationship of institutions does not exist anymore. War now, for the American social system, and by extension the World system, which is a projection of it, has become a ‘fact’ of life, and other institutions have adjusted to accommodate this new reality. Victory or no victory, post World War 2, the U.S. has never settled for peace; when one conflict ended, it has started another.

In order to understand the flawed nature of Huntington’s thesis, we need to consider history as well. This “Clash of Civilizations” thesis is dismantled historically, as soon as we realize that it is nothing new, it is the same “cold war” methodology, re-branded for maximum impact, a contrived clash, that the US was pursuing for several decades, by converting an old ally into a foe, post World War II. This ‘repackaging’ for a new era was necessary because the old enemy, the Soviet Union, does not exist anymore. Further, the sources that describe this so-called ‘Clash of Civilizations’ are not new either. They are the same age-old Orientalist stereotypes of Islam, nurtured and crystallized historically by the West that have been resurrected for fresh geo-political motives.

Consider the fact that during the ‘Cold War’ there never were two foes that met directly on the battlefield; there was no genuine battle in which victory would determine peace. The desire for continuous war, a war without end, was pursued regardless of the environmental or human cost. For that reason, ideological differences were exploited for militarism, the continual preparation for war, and as a jump off point for many smaller conflicts. Demilitarization was equated with appeasement, peace with being unrealistic, the world divided into competing spheres of influence, and domestic issues relegated to the background, as war dominated lives and contoured perceptions of reality for entire generations. As a consequence of this, decades of development were lost by the ‘third world’ as spheres of influences geared themselves more towards the conflict of the major powers than their own. More or less similar things are happening now and the benefactors are the military industries, the super rich and their facilitators, while the very vast majority of humanity is at the losing end. In our time, war itself is the driver of war; war itself the perception of mass reality, war itself is the enemy, so to speak. To achieve peace, we will have to look for its causes in the US institutional structure, and perceptions of reality that go with it, therefore we need to look past fictional renditions like the “Clash of Civilizations”.

When war becomes a rescuer of global capitalism from collapse, an averter of economic crisis, a distraction from pressing domestic and international issues, when war related expenses predominate the national budgets, and military and related industries dominate the corporate sector, when war becomes an easy escape from responsibility for the ruling elite and a major stimulus for a sagging economy, then the foundation is set for it to become institutionalized in a social structure as the feeder of the status quo, or in other words as an automatic default position in times of crisis: peace in these circumstances is dealt a mortal blow. Post World War 2 this has happened in the US, and the developing world unfortunately, has been at the receiving end. Various legitimations were used by the US to launch both the first Gulf War as well as the current war on Iraq. Now we know that most of them were false, every opportunity to achieve peace was squandered and human rights issues were used as slogans that were presented by the US in a most hypocritical manner. Consider the case of Saddam Hussein: the US was supporting him during the height of his atrocities and then decades later when an ally was converted into a foe for ulterior motive, the same atrocities were resurrected as legitimation for war.

The ‘Clash of Civilization’ thesis is part of an attempt to justify to the masses this ‘continual war’ that has become part of the US political economy. Rather than present the actual reasons for conflict in today’s world, a conflict that has institutional precedent and is conducted by the US across religious/ethnic lines when need be, regardless of the belief system of the opponent, this thesis tries to ferment a foe that is well recognized by the US public due to a well developed history of stereotypes against Islam and Muslims (and to a lesser extent against China). The Islam of today and the belief sets of Muslims do not constitute a monolithic “civilization”. In presenting it as such, the US elite deliberately confound the facts and present images of oneness that are borrowed from utopian dreams by fringe groups like the Hizb ut Tahrir, which is then generalized to the entire world population of Muslims. Neither are Muslim beliefs so easily classified, so as to form a uniform index of religiosity across national boundaries which can be measured. The differences among Muslims in belief and practice are well known to the U.S. elite who have exploited them for its own ulterior motives, time and again, as they are doing in Iraq currently between the Shia and the Sunni. However, when it comes to identifying an enemy for easy recognition, they convert these divergent groups, as Huntington has done, into a standardized civilization that is out to destroy the West.

In a political economy as the US, peace is not what is deemed desirable or profitable. War is the ultimate goal for system survival and to legitimize such wars ‘master symbols’ easily recognized by the public, symbols like freedom, democracy and so on, are deployed as legitimation, part of which is the ‘us versus them’ mentality which inevitably, due to enhanced social solidarity shifts focus from pressing domestic (what I call real issues) towards those that are international and involve the military. As Mills and Gerth explained, and I quote:

“ Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized (by the masses). These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, “the votes of the majority”, (“freedom”, “democracy”)…etc.Various thinkers have used different terms to refer to this phenomena: Mosca’s “political formula” or “great superstition”, Locke’s “principal of sovereignty”,Sorel’s “ruling myth”,Weber’s “legitimations”, Durkheim’s “collective representations”, Marx’s “dominant ideas”…Mannheim’s “ideology”, Herbert Spencer’s “public sentiments” (Gramsci’s “hegemony”) all point to the central place of master symbols in social analysis.” (Hans Gerth & C. Wright Mills, Character & Social Structure, 1964:277)

Finally, the “you are with us or with the enemy” mentality, plunges poor countries in a cycle that ensures that they go from one humanitarian crisis to another, from one dictator to the other, from one coup to the other. As with people that are malnourished, mortality and disease are high, so with underdeveloped institutions. Institutions of the state and the economy in the developing world can never mature to benefit their local masses as long as they are geared towards serving international goals, unrelated to the lives of the local populations. Honest politicians and a responsive state institution is not possible as long as it is held subservient to the military, an institution that has historically done the bidding of externals.

The elite target their “persuasion” resources specifically towards existing influential institutions, for greater impact. For example, where religion is influential, the elite use it to legitimize their benefits, sometimes politically institutionalizing a distorted version of it. For example, the use of religion to justify racism in the early history of the U.S.; Use of religion to justify colonialism, the use of Religion by the CIA in the 1980s to convince the Afghans and Bin Laden’s Arab fighters that it was their religious duty to fight the Soviets. The use of religion by Israel first to dispossess the Palestinians of their land, by claiming a Biblical right to it and then creating HAMAS to counter the influence of the Arafat’s relatively secular PLO. All these things set a dynamic in place, they might have been contrived to start with but they assume a dynamic and a reality of their own, this “reality” if you can call it that is what the media tells us about, by detaching facts from their historical and their institutional roots, and thereby clouding the issues. Huntington’s “fairy tale” is just such mythology that is assuming a reality of its own in people’s minds, it should be rejected because it has no basis in fact.

Authority by definition involves power that is considered legitimate. If people reject the definition of reality pushed upon them by the U.S. elite, their authority will disappear. When their authority disappears, their ability to conduct warfare, and assign labels that distort and alter lives of people and nations will end and the institutional structure of the developing world with an abnormally developed military institution that interferes with the political, designed to serve just such a contrived “reality”, will inevitably atrophy. Thus, the real ‘war’ that is to be fought, is between the people and these elite, it is a war over definitions of reality. The U.S. elite, being in command of the cultural apparatus, meaning the mass media and formal education, are winning this ‘war’, having out resourced all opponents. Their victory means that actual wars will continue, it also means that the poverty and misery of the majority world will continue unabated (regardless of technological advancement), even though the few sectors that serve these puppet-masters becomes ’developed’ (as is the case with telecommunications and IT in our parts of the world). Let us direct our efforts towards challenging their projected perceptions of reality, looking past the official distractions and untruths, only then can consciousness be cultivated and peace and development achieved.

Muhammed Asadi (www.asadi.org) can be reached at masadi@aol.com.