A two-front war
Posted by Lex, Posted on November 11, 2007
A vector implies knowledge of position and velocity, the latter comprising both direction and scale. In his 1996 book “The Clash of Civilizations”, Harvard professor of political science Samuel P. Huntington took a look at the position we were at in Balkans and analyzed it in the light of history to predict the vector of several civilizations, including the West. His book was best remembered for his politically incorrect statement that “Islam has bloody borders,” which was taken as controversial by the multiculturalists then at the helm of the national dialogue, despite the fact that, you know: It does.
But perhaps it ought to be better remembered for its closing chapter on the future of civilizations, especially – at least from my own parochial perspective – the West. How does Professor Huntington’s vector analysis hold up, eleven years on?
Pretty well – Huntington opines that a war between the West and the “core states” of other civilizations was not inevitable, but that it could happen. When it did, as it turns out, not everyone came out to join the fight. The alternatives are a period of slow decline that started in the 20th Century and which might last for decades or perhaps centuries, or even a period of revival, a reversal of “its declining influence in world affairs.” What is not likely is that everything stays the same – no matter how much we might like it to.
Huntington quotes historian Carroll Quigley’s patterning of the rise and fall of previous civilizations and says that the West is now experiencing its “Golden Age”-
A period of peace resulting in, in Quigley’s terms “the absence of any competing units within the area of the civilization itself, and from the remoteness or even absence of struggles with other societies outside.” It is also a period of prosperity which arises from “the ending of internal belligerent destruction, the reduction of internal trade barriers, the establishment of a common system of weights, measures, and coinage, and from the extensive system of government spending associated with the establishment of a universal empire.”
In previous civilizations this phase of blissful golden age with its visions of immortality has ended either dramatically and quickly with the victory of an external society or slowly and equally painfully by internal disintegration. What happens within a civilization is as crucial to its ability to resist destruction from external sources as it is to holding off decay from within… (Quigley argues that) civilizations decline when they stop the “application of surplus to new ways of doing things. In modern terms we say that the rate of investment decreases.” This happens because the social groups controlling the surplus have a vested interest in using it for “nonproductive but ego-satisfying purposes… which distribute the surpluses to consumption but do not provide more effective methods of production.”
Huntington goes on discuss that historically at least, these mature civilizations inevitably enter a period of decay which
leads to the stage of invasion “when the civilization, no longer ableto defend itself because it is no longer willing to defend itself, lies wide open to ‘barbarian invaders’ ” who often come from “another, younger, more powerful civilization.”
He goes on to quote a number of indicators that the West might be in just this sort of decline for reasons not just economic and demographic – although he has concerns there – but also because of “problems of moral decline, cultural suicide and political disunity in the West.” He points to
- increases in antisocial behavior, such as crime, drug use, and violence generally;
- family decay, including increased rates of divorce, illegitimacy, teen-age pregnancy, and single parent families;
- at least in the United States, a decline in “social capital,” that is, membership in voluntary associations and interpersonal trust associated with such membership;
- general weakening of the “work ethic” and rise of a cult of personal indulgence;
- decreasing commitment to learning and intellectual activity, manifested in the US in lower levels of scholastic achievement.
Huntington frets that the conformational ethic of the West – Christianity – has been almost entirely abandoned on the Continent, while in the more religious US it suffers less from European-style indifference than from the antagonisms of a secular soi-disant elite. But this problem – if in fact it is a problem – is probably a very distant one, he says:
Christian concepts, values and practices nevertheless pervade European civilization. “Swedes are probably the most unreligious people in Europe,” one of them commented, “but you cannot understand this country at all unless you realize that our institutions, social practices, families, politics, and way of life are fundamentally shaped by our Lutheran heritage.”
The more immediate threat to our social cohesion in America, according to Huntington, comes from the multiculturalist attack on those principles of Western civilization and what he labels the “American Creed”: Liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the law, constitutionalism, and private property. The multiculturalists have
attacked the identification of the United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic and other subnational cultural identities and groupings. The have denounced, in the words of one of their reports, the “systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives” in education and “the dominance of the European-American monocultural perspective.”
And the consequences of such attitudes?
Rejection of the Creed and of Western civilization means the end of the United States of America as we have known it. It also means effectively the end of Western civilization. If the United States is de-Westernized, the West is reduced to Europe and a few lightly populated overseas European settler countries. Without the United States the West becomes minuscule and declining part of the world’s population on a small and inconsequential peninsula at the extremity of the Eurasian land mass.
Walking away from, in the words of former British Defense Minister Malcolm Rifkind, “shared belief in the rule of law and parliamentary democracy, liberal capitalism and free trade, and the shared European cultural heritage emanating from Greece and Rome through the Renaissance to the shared values, beliefs and civilization of our own century.”
It’s not nothing, nor is it fully clear where it is that multiculturalist set would like to take us. But this is, as the professor points out, the real clash.