In some quarters these terrible events have revived the idea in our political discourse, no matter how spuriously, that "The West" and "Islam" are somehow locked into conflict. People look for answers as they try to understand unimaginable events.
Meanwhile unprincipled, opportunistic demagogues, explicitly or implicitly, exploit the notion of a fundamental incompatibility between these two societies. They define this conflict in relatively arbitrary and expedient terms, and alarm and bewitch the electorate to mobilise political support. This can take the form of Donald Trump's highly specific Islamophobia, or the deliberately more vague and less well defined references to "immigration" and "foreigners" used by advocates of Brexit in the UK, for example.
The idea that we are embroiled in a "Clash of Civilisations," whether articulated in precisely these terms or not, is used as a rallying call in both cases.
But the "Clash of Civilisations" is entirely a figment of the imagination of those who find it convenient to describe things in these terms.
There is no "Clash of Civilisations." Otherwise why define "The West" in terms of all the most positive things associated with North America and Europe - ignoring all the genocides and slavery for example - while defining "Islam" in terms of all the most negative things associated with the Middle East and North Africa - ignoring the mathematics and poetry and philosophy and astronomy? Or vice versa, for the opposite agenda. A pattern of arbitrary selection of evidence, often out of any context, and over-generalisation to draw the necessary conclusions, is repeated over and over.
The Indian economist Amartya Sen has pointed out that "diversity is a feature of most cultures in the world. Western civilization is no exception. The practice of democracy that has won out in the modern West is largely a result of a consensus that has emerged since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and particularly in the last century or so. To read in this a historical commitment of the West, over the millennia, to democracy, and then to contrast it with non-Western traditions (treating each as monolithic) would be a great mistake." Random incomplete snapshots of fluid, complex, highly interactive dynamic historical processes are cherry-picked to fabricate a monstrous jigsaw with which to scare us.
The current idea of a "Clash of Civilisations" was articulated by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntingdon from 1992 to 1996 in lectures, an article in the journal Foreign Affairs, and eventually a book, but the concept itself stretches back through Spengler's angst about the "Decline of the West" in the 1920s to discussions of the "clash of cultures" during the Belle Époque. These occurred when colonising and colonized societies were thrown together and confronted each other in the kasbahs and teterias of the North African cities of European empires, like a latter day Outremer.
Huntingdon's dubious achievement is to take this idea and strip it of all context, then impose a new context on it in order to make it serve a different purpose: to revive and sustain obsolete Cold War approaches to geopolitical analysis. Noam Chomsky has criticized the concept of the "Clash of Civilizations" as being nothing more than a new justification "for any atrocities that [the United States] wanted to carry out", which was required after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union was no longer a viable threat. This is why the way civilisations interpenetrate and influence each other is replaced by the static, sterile standoff of the Cold War in the way they are described.
Civilisations, in so far as they are distinguishable from each other, mingle. In "the West" we owe an enormous debt to Arab scholarship. Many intellectual achievements of antiquity were only preserved in Arab libraries during the Dark Ages. We all look up at the same stars and we refer to them using Arabic names. The Arabs themselves conveyed to "The West" developments that originated in India, such as our number system.
But to read Huntingdon's thesis is to experience a view of a divided world that is as artificial and immutable as a map of Westeros or Middle Earth. Huntingdon's work reads like a commentary on a long, elaborate game of Dungeons and Dragons. Reality eludes his rigid categorisations and rules. Conflict is as built in to his representation of the world as it is to a game of Risk.
The problem is this can be taken seriously. It can be used to legitimise equally artificial and erroneous attitudes towards other societies today.
One reason populist politicians exploit the idea of a "Clash of Civilisations" at the moment is that it remains a powerful idea even after you have stripped out the interests of the entrenched elites of the civilisations in question, the elites the demagogue rejects. It encompasses the interests of the very people to whom the demagogues are directly making their appeal. It raises the prospect of threats to their way of life which confirms their prejudices. Edward Said argues that the "Clash of Civilizations" thesis is an example of "the purest invidious racism, a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed today against Arabs and Muslims."
The phrase "Clash of Civilisations" was used by the French novelist and intellectual, Albert Camus. In 1946, while discussing "the Algerian problem", he observed "the Russian-American problem will soon be replaced by a greater problem (and here we return to Algeria). We will not witness a clash of empires, but the clash of civilizations. Gradually, the colonized civilizations around the world will rise and stand up to the colonisers."
We should note here that the "clash" Camus predicts is contingent upon an historic injustice in which one civilisation was subordinated by another. He does not propose anything intrinsic to the civilisations themselves that makes this clash inevitable. A logicical sequence of actions and consequences is suggested. The civilisations themselves are not identified as being fundamentally violent. Conflict is avoidable, not inevitable.
And there is no ranking of societies in terms of their degree of civilisation. That ranking is provided subsequently by those wishing to initiate and actively, enthusiastically participate in a clash, those who point out who the "barbarians" are. The context and conditionality of Camus' statement is discarded in favour of a blunter message, but one which is these days electorally more effective, a story of "them and us." Camus' anti-hero, the outsider, an enigma that is deplored and condemned, would be celebrated for killing an arab by the crowds attracted by the likes of Donald Trump. Indeed, Camus' "Étranger" is "the only Christ that we deserve."
The arbitrariness of the "Clash of Civilisations" thesis is revealed by its inconsistencies.
The bogey man currently implicated by this thesis is Islam. But consider the most populous Islamic country in the world: Indonesia. It is not in the Middle East. Despite the horrific crimes committed by its government in the 20th century - the CIA endorsed massacres of hundreds of thousands of "communist" peasants by Suharto for example - somehow it retains an exempt status. This is due to its alliances with "The West."
Or consider the Islamic country in which fundamentalism flourishes the most. Not Afghanistan, not Iraq, not Syria, not Iran, but Saudi Arabia. Again its political relationship grants it exemption. So short term political expediencies allow the "Clash of Civilisations" to be suspended? In that case the thesis that this clash represents some basic heuristic with which to understand history is pretty flimsy.
Indeed most violence attibutable to "Islam" is sectarian violence of which muslims are victims. That's no way to run a "Clash of Civilisations."
I will close with Chomsky again, illustrating the use of the "Clash of Civilisations" as misdirection for what is really happening.
"Just where is the 'Clash of Civilizations?' I mean, there is a clash alright. There is a clash with those who are adopting the preferential option for the poor no matter who they are. They can be Catholics, they can be Communists, they can be anything else. They can be white, black, green, anything. Western terror is totally ecumenical. It’s not really racist: they’ll kill anybody who takes the wrong stand on the major issues.
"But if you’re an intellectual, you can’t say that. Because it’s too obviously true. And you can’t let people understand what is obviously true. You have to create deep theories, that can be understood only if you have a PhD from Harvard or something. So we have a 'Clash of Civilizations,' and we’re supposed to worship that. But it makes absolutely no sense."
No comments:
Post a Comment