1993, Huntington replied to those who had accused him of oversimplification with a defiant plea of guilty as charged: ‘When people think seriously, they think abstractly; they conjure up simplified pictures of reality called concepts, theories, models, paradigms. Without such intellectual constructs, there is, William James said, only “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion”.’
True enough, up to a point: free thinkers should always keep Occam’s Razor within reach, to cut through needless complexities and obfuscation. But Huntington’s arbitrary bladework served only to obliterate the reality that most conflict is not between civilisations but within them, as the inhabitants of Rwanda, Northern Ireland and countless other tribal cockpits know to their cost. As Edward Said pointed out, the theory made no allowance for ‘the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilisation; or for considering that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture; or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilisation’.
Each of Huntington’s supposedly monolithic ‘civilisations’, even that of the West, includes different currents – fundamentalism, traditionalism, modernism, liberalism and so on. Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma, like the sarin gas attack on Tokyo subway passengers by the Aum Shinrikyo cult, was a spectacular (though mercifully rare) manifestation of the tensions to be found within even modern and democratic cultures. These destructive assaults differ only in scale, not in kind, from the more frequent atrocities perpetrated by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria against fellow-members of their own ‘civilisation’.
For all its apparent novelty, Huntington’s eye-catching model was largely a reworking of the classical ‘realist’ theories that have long dominated the study of foreign relations, in which international politics is essentially an unending struggle for power between coherent but isolated units, each striving to advance its own interests in an anarchic world. The only difference, as critics pointed out, was that Huntington ‘has replaced the nation-state, the primary playing piece in the old game of realist politics, with a larger counter: the civilisation. But in crucial respects, the game itself goes on as always.’
Curiously, Samuel Huntington’s conservative pessimism – with its emphasis on cultural predestination, its narrow religiocultural definition of what constitutes a ‘civilisation’, its reluctance to accept the possibility of cross-pollination between cultures – echoed many of the tenets promoted by those self-styled radicals in the West who had marched down the dead-end of ‘identity politics’. Both effectively denied people the freedom to choose their own affiliations and associations, imposing lifelong allegiance to a club which they never applied to join. The Nobel laureate Amartya Sen described the Clash of Civilisations theory as nothing less than ‘a violation of human rights’, which may sound like hyperbole until one recalls that the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the murder of Salman Rushdie because the Londonbased ‘blasphemer’ had Muslim forebears; had The Satanic Verses been written by a white Anglo-Saxon, no fatwa could have been promulgated. Professor Sen cited the bloodshed in Rwanda, Congo, Bosnia and Kosovo – and the rise of violent Hindu chauvinism in his own birthplace, India – as further evidence that the amplification of one distinctive identity ‘can convert one of many co-existing dividing lines into an explosive and confrontational division’.
The Clash of Civilisations and the End of History were invariably regarded as opposites – often, indeed, the only two alternatives available. ‘These are the two touchstones of any debate about the future direction of the world,’ the Washington Post reported. ‘They’re the theoretical elephants in the room. The old debate about capitalism vs. communism has been replaced by Fukuyama vs. Huntington.’ Because of the yearning for binary simplicity, and the obvious tonal contrast between the respective optimism and pessimism of these two academic jumbos, few noticed just how much they had in common. Both were rigidly determinist in their insistence that humanity’s fate had been preordained, whether ideologically or culturally, and grotesquely reductionist in their refusal to acknowledge the complex pluralities that constitute those vague abstractions ‘history’ and ‘civilisation’. Just as Fukuyama effectively erased Nazism and Stalinism from his account of the past 200 years because they didn’t fit, so Huntington ignored the fact that neither the number nor the causes of conflicts had changed much over the years. People still took up arms for the traditional reasons – territorial hunger, economic desperation, religious zeal, lust for power, defence against external threats or internal rivals. Nevertheless, the polished sheen of his neat Manichean theorising dazzled many Western policy-makers – not least because the phrase ‘global chaos theory’ gave an extra veneer of scientific method to his coarse generalisations. Although he would be horrified by the comparison, Huntington aped the techniques of Soviet Communists who boasted of the inevitability and irrefutability of ‘scientific socialism’; and perhaps he had learned a trick or two from the post-modernist intellectuals of the 1980s whose freestyle riffs about truth and reality were given a semblance of empirical rigour by being expressed in the language of advanced physics and mathematics. It might seem an unlikely influence, since the deconstructionists presented themselves as radicals bent on demolishing reactionary grand narratives such as the Clash of Civilisations.
But were they? As we shall see, these self-styled progressives had more in common with the conservatives than they would care to admit.
4 The demolition merchants of reality
You propose then, Philo, said Cleanthes, to erect religious faith on philosophical scepticism; and you think that if certainty or evidence be expelled from every other subject of inquiry, it will all retire to these theological doctrines, and there acquire a superior force and authority. Whether your scepticism be as absolute and sincere as you pretend, we shall learn by and by, when the company breaks up: We shall then see, whether you go out at the door or the window; and whether you really doubt if your body has gravity, or can be injured by its fall; according to popular opinion, derived from our fallacious senses, and more fallacious experience.
DAVID HUME, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)
Colin MacCabe, an obscure young Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, was denied a lectureship by the English faculty’s appointments board in January 1981. Not the sort of news that would usually merit a paragraph in the university newspaper, let alone the national press: yet the rebuff to MacCabe, an expert on the novels of James Joyce and the films of Jean-Luc Godard, was reported on the front page of the Guardian. When MacCabe returned to England from a trip abroad a couple of days later, he found himself mobbed by reporters and photographers at Heathrow airport. His failure to gain tenure at the university provoked demonstrations in the streets of Cambridge and earnest debate on current affairs programmes. Newsweek cleared a page for the story (under the inevitable headline, ‘Unquiet Flow the Dons’), which it described as ‘one of the most extraordinary debates in the [university’s] eight-century history’:
Dons who normally confine their disputes to sherry parties leak damaging rumours about each other and threaten libel suits. Charges of academic sleaziness and intellectual persecution fly back and forth. Television crews roam King’s Parade to catch the carping of talkative academicians … Angry students began seeking to have the entire English faculty board suspended, and MacCabe sympathisers spoke of breaking away to form their own department.
Even some of his enemies agreed that MacCabe was an excellent scholar and teacher; but he was also a ‘post-structuralist’ who believed in analysing literature through study of its linguistic rules and cultural assumptions. Although MacCabe argued that these methods were no great radical departure from the traditions established by earlier generations of Cambridge dons – I. A. Richards and William Empson both undertook close formal analysis of the language of literary texts, while F. R. Leavis and Raymond Williams attempted to place novels within the general cultural history of the country – he did admit that it was the ‘enormous explosion of work in the mid-Sixties in Paris’ by structuralist and