As this confusing year draws to a close, painfully punctuated by the excrescence of the attack on Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach, I was suddenly reminded of an incident when I was a younger man, a left-wing liberal.
I am neither young nor a left-wing liberal anymore, hewing more to the centre. Such are new perspectives of time’s passing.
The incident was a flare-up at a dinner party I attended in LA in 1993. A writer by the name of Samuel P. Huntington had just published an essay in Foreign Policy magazine titled “The Clash of Civilizations”, in which he had presented a startling and controversial hypothesis. He argued that culture and religious identity, rather than ideology or economics, would be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world.
He went further, arguing that Western universalism (the belief that Western values like democracy and human rights are universal) is naïve and dangerous. He predicted that non-Western civilizations would increasingly reject Western values in favour of their own cultural and religious roots, leading to a “West vs. the Rest” dynamic.
My liberal friends and I were appalled. As I remember, there was one hapless young fellow defending Huntington. We heaped derision on Huntington and his defender: Fascist! Racist! And all the other insults. We left the dinner party drunk on sanctimony.
Extreme example
It seems to me now that Huntington was right. We could start with Bondi Beach, an extreme example, to be sure.
The shooters did not care whether the celebrants were Zionists, Likud-supporters, Israelis, atheists, communists, capitalists, or Palestine-sympathetic secular adherents. They cared only that they were Jews – in their eyes, an abhorrent culture and religion. This view is widespread in Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and elsewhere in the region. Their enemies are Jews globally, and they proudly call it the “global intifada”.
It is in their writings, proclamations, speeches, and even in primary school textbooks where Jews are depicted as vermin.
It seems to me that Western liberals do not understand this – their beef may be with Netanyahu and his gang. But the other side doesn’t give a toss about that. They hate Jews, period, and have done so long before the Gaza affair.
What Huntington missed, of course, is that it is not only Islam (which he singled out, as well as Russian Orthodox, SInic, Hindu and others) versus tolerant universalism. Now the West is also fracturing apart internally. It turns out Western universalism is not as solid as he thought or believed – one only has to look at the vicious arguments in the US, UK, and parts of Europe.
Nevertheless, at its heart, his hypothesis was that there was no chance of a rapprochement between multiculturalists and monoculturalists. They are not going to negotiate a cosy arrangement. There is going to be no resolution between Israel and its angry neighbours.
No resolution
There is going to be no resolution between the 50% of the US who have found voice in Trump and those who are shattered by that reality. China is not going to do anything that allows for free expression beyond its tight remit. Russia is never going to become an open constitutional democracy (they tried, not too long ago – remember Perestroika?).
To give a personal example, I would prefer my grandchildren to be educated in religion-free schools. Others would be appalled by such a notion. Their grandchildren will go to different schools; that is all there is to say, because we do not have the language to convince each other that the other is wrong.
Let us for a moment assume that Huntington was indeed right. What then?
It seems to me that the only certainty is that we will continue to split into warring tribes, as we have done for millennia, and that our brief experiment with openness, tolerance, and enlightenment will recede, to be remembered only by a saddened few idealists clinging to notions which exist in utopian fantasy only. The rest of us will be bombing citizens and shooting up religious gatherings as a proxy for our cultural certainties.
Not a cheery thought as we head into the holiday season, I am aware. So let me try to squeeze some optimism from this rock:
Steven Pinker, the American intellectual and writer, wrote two books (among others) – The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now – in which he argued (supported by scads of graphs and charts) that the long view of history points to a trend that is at odds with my earlier dark view of humanity.
Shrinking
As education spreads and science and technologies continue to advance, societies will naturally move towards the sort of open and tolerant world that I now see shrinking.
Let me then allow this – perhaps what happened in Bondi is not our future when seen through a longer lens; perhaps it is simply the last shudders of a dying world, and to draw any conclusions from it is myopic and shortsighted.
[Image: reve.art]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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