Huntington's argument. Samuel Huntington, published in the 1990s the thesis that the Cold War struggle between "the West" and the communist world would be replaced in the 21st century by a struggle among civilizations. He argues that the existence of mutually antagonistic civilizations has been the historical condition of humanity, and that the fiercest and most unending wars have been fought along civilizational boundaries.
Huntington believes this fact has been obscured in recent centuries by the success of Western Civilization in suppressing other traditions, leading to the false belief that all peoples were being enculturated into one global, "modern", civilization. It has also been obscured by the challenge from within Western Civilization mounted by international communism through its centers of power in the USSR and China. Now, with the end of the Cold War, the defeat of the communist challenge, and the rise of non-Western peoples, the West will be forced to face on a more balanced playing field the challenge of non-Western civilizations that it has repeatedly defeated but never eliminated.
Huntington characterizes Sinic, Japanese, Western, Hindu, Islamic, Latin American, Orthodox, and "possibly" African as living civilizations. These are the entities that will struggle for dominance in the next century. He's unclear where Southeast Asia fits into his civilizational matrix, often including it in Islamic Civilization or vaguely accepting the Singapore-favored label "Asian". He has not decided whether Latin America will maintain a separate civilization in the 21st century or join Western Civilization as a full participant.
In making the case for civilizational distinctiveness, Huntington is the latest in a long line of historians and social philosophers. The most notable popularization of the idea of separate, fundamentally distinct civilizations was Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. Like Spengler nearly a century before him, Huntington believes that the great days of the West are behind it. Soon the West will enter a period of decline and withdrawal. Its creativity will shift from innovation to preservation, not unlike Egyptian Civilization in its last millenium. Unlike Spengler, he thinks of civilizations as evolving, rising, and falling over long periods, with no inevitability in their growth and decline. But like most philosophers of civilization, he believes that once a civilization's basic values and symbols have been created and instilled in the peoples with which it is identified, these are ineradicable.
A civilization is the largest cultural entity with which people identify. Its norms, values, institutions, and modes of thinking are woven together into a totality whose parts cannot easily be disassociated. In practice, Huntington regards religion as the defining aspect of civilization. To Huntington, Bosnia is doomed to unending conflict because its peoples, forced to live together in a limited area, represent three civilizations: Muslim, Orthodox, and Western (i.e. Catholic). Although these peoples have lived together for centuries under many political systems, have essentially the same language and literature, and enjoy the same degree of access to the modern world, he sees them as irremediably separate and hostile. Ottoman and Communist rule suppressed the hostility but could not eliminate it. The struggle in the Philippines between Muslim provinces and the Central government is analyzed in similar terms. Fixated on religion, Huntington writes of "Hindu Civilization" rather than Indian Civilization, thereby dismissing the centuries when Hinduism was not dominant in the subcontinent, as well as the complex mosaic of peoples and cultures that exist in the subcontinent today. From Huntington's perspective, the problem he faces in defining an "African civilization" is the continent's lack of a defining religion. The widespread persistence in Africa of many varieties of Christianity, Islam, and local pre-contact religions makes it impossible to define an African Civilization in religious terms. Japanese and Chinese Civilizations are also difficult to understand in religious terms.
Although religion is central to his definition of civilization, literary, philosophical, political, and other traditions are also defining. Huntington considers democracy to be a central aspect of Western Civilization. He implies the importance of democracy several times in his Foreign Policy essay ("The essence of Western Culture is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac"). He writes: "Japan and India are the only major non-Western societies to sustain democratic governments." Since he excludes Greece and Turkey from Western Civilization, one wonders why he failed to think of them as non-Western democracies-perhaps they were not "major" enough.
Huntington warns his readers that to disagree with his thesis is to believe in the "universality of Western Culture", a belief that is "false, immoral, and dangerous". It is false because "cultural diversity" continues to exist and will continue to exist (which surely no one denies for the foreseeable future). It is immoral, because to force everyone to accept Western Culture would require an unequalled and oppressive imperialism of unimaginable cost in lives and property. It is dangerous because an attempt to impose Western Civilization would lead to unremitting war between the core states of the competing civilizations.
Where Huntington goes wrong. Huntington is wrong both in his understanding of civilizations and their boundaries. More importantly, he is advancing a thesis that would endanger us all were it taken seriously. Let us consider why.
First, his analysis suffers from a weakness common to most discussions of cultures and civilizations: the indeterminacy of their edges in time and space. Terms such as "Islamic", "Sinic", or "Western" are handy labels that help to organize geographical and historical information. They do not identify real entities or "organisms" that have "struggled" or "will struggle" with one another. Rather than the record of the struggle of such reified entities, political history is primarily the record of the struggle of political entities that were not coextensive with the civilizations of their time. As even the most cursory review of the histories of Europe and Asia reminds us, most wars have occurred within rather than between "civilizations". Cultural history has been characterized by continual change within traditions, and by the continual shifting and intermingling of those cultural features that scholars carve up, freeze, and then store in discrete civilizational containers. These features include languages, religions, customs, attitudes, political systems, art styles, and technologies. Depending on the dates and features scholars focus on, they can make a case for separate or merged Chinese and Japanese civilizations, or for separate or merged Western and Orthodox civilizations. They can likewise make the case for the existence today of only one civilization within the geographical "West", or of many.
Huntington mistakenly identifies "democracy" as the characteristic political system of countries within the historical and geographical limits of Western Civilization. In the 1930s, the boundaries of democracy were drawn much more narrowly. In those years, non-Germans commonly assumed that Germany was irremediably antidemocratic. One example among many is a review of Mein Kampf in the New York Times in 1933 that condemns Hitler's anti-Jewish policy but praises Hitler for doing away with parliamentary government "so unsuited to the German character". Huntington has forgotten that in the fifties and sixties it was confidently asserted by Western scholars that Spain and Portugal adhered to a Catholic, Iberian culture that was fundamentally antithetical to democracy and that this cultural inheritance made democracy impossible in Latin America. Times change. Today, Spain and Portugal seem to fit comfortably within Huntington's West, and he is on the brink of admitting Latin America to his West as well.
Are we to assume that "the West" did not include Germany, Spain, and Portugal in the 1930s but includes them now? Or is "democracy" not an essential feature of Western civilization?
Huntington believes it is "immoral" as well as foolish to try to "impose" our civilization on others. He sees the missionary impulse as one of the worst characteristics of recent imperialism, and regards the attempt to envision the world as one modern, global civilization to be a dangerous extension of the West's missionizing tendency.
Yes, the West has been and remains a missionary society. But this is not surprising, nor confined to the West. Most successful peoples have believed that others should adopt their ideas, standards, and accomplishments. All major religions have had missionary phases: the peoples of Chechnya or Bosnia fighting today for an Islamic order learned of Islam from missionaries and conquerors only a few centuries ago. Our ancestors were all converts to the cultures they bequeathed us. Nations forget their conversions because the movement of people and information was so slow in the past that they are buried in memory.
The positive argument for missionizing is that if a people feels that other peoples would benefit from the adoption of certain aspects of their culture, then it is its responsibility to promote their adoption. The Allies played a major role in converting Japan, Germany, and Italy to democracy after World War II. Few now think this was a mistake, neither converters nor convertees. Much of the world has been converted to Western medical practices, such as inoculations that have eradicated smallpox and other dread diseases. The West introduced scientific agriculture to societies worldwide. It developed and sold the idea of women's rights far beyond the confines of Huntington's West, to the point that even Iran grants women the right to vote and hold office. Beginning in the nineteenth century, major Western countries moved to outlaw in all societies slavery based on the buying and selling of human beings, an effort unparalleled in history. After the success of this effort, slavery will not be reinstituted, even by those societies that see themselves as the bitterest enemies of Western imperialism. Today, Western countries promote a campaign against female genital mutilation anywhere in the world. As long as the leaders of this campaign maintain their self-confidence, including their self-righteousness, sooner or later these practices will be eliminated. This campaign is only one aspect of a more general effort to extend respect for human rights to all peoples. Yet human rights as we know them are a Western invention, accepted by the United Nations at a time when it was more under the West's domination than it is now. Should Westerners and the "Westernized" retreat from the advocacy of human rights, modern medicine, or modern agriculture to avoid being labeled "misguided" or "arrogant"?
Today, or perhaps tomorrow, the countries in Huntington's West will not be as strong, dominant, and self-assured as they have been. But as we enter the 21st century, this may no longer be as important to the future of modern world civilization as it was at the beginning of the 20th. All societies are so interpenetrated with ideas, customs, and technologies from the West, and, to a lesser extent, the West is so interpenetrated with borrowings from other traditions that modern civilization is now a universal, "World Civilization". Historically, it derives from Huntington's West, but World Civilization has evolved so far beyond this base that it is nurtured by and nurtures all peoples.
No one should be surprised by this development or imagine that it stems from aggressive imperialism. The evolution of one world civilization has been inevitable. The "civilizations" that we confidently identify with times and places in the past diverged from one another, just as their constituent cultures diverged from one another, primarily because of the difficulty of movement of ideas and people. Since this difficulty has been radically reduced, it is not unreasonable to assume that individual civilizations can no longer exist. Of course, whether or not we speak of one or many civilizations today, separate cultures will be maintained and should be maintained. Nor does the emergence of one civilization guarantee universal peace. Constituent cultures may continue to provide symbolic languages for "struggles" such as we have experienced in Ulster, Kashmir, or Palestine. The Holocaust, after all, resulted from an imagined "cultural struggle" between peoples that Huntington would surely identify as partners in the West.
Overestimating the persistence of the past, Huntington has led himself to dangerous conclusions. He believes that civilizational boundaries (based primarily on differences in religious traditions) imply that NATO should expand only to the boundaries of Latin Christendom. It would then include only "Western" countries in the former Soviet sphere, while excluding others, such as Russia, because they are "Orthodox" or "Muslim". He wants to draw new security boundaries in the Balkans that would exclude Bosnia and Serbia, and he would move to disassociate Turkey and Greece from NATO because of their unacceptable Islamic and Orthodox backgrounds. He forgets that it was the penetration of Western ideas and knowledge of the West that brought down the Soviet Union and that this collapse has offered an opportunity to gradually entrench these ideas that is unlikely to come again. In many respects, the effort to promote aspects of Western civilization in the former Soviet sphere has been remarkably successful. That we should draw back from this opportunity by erecting new ideological and political boundaries would demonstrate a frightening lack of will.
Two final remarks about cultural change. First, it will not always be one way: democracies will fall, human rights will be violated, new authoritarian enthusiasms will emerge, there will be many steps backward. Huntington is surely right that many peoples resent the West and look for alternatives to what they see as its arrogance and imperialism. Cultural change is difficult, and we need to guard against assuming fundamental conversions have occurred when they have not. The West's political culture and spirit of scientific inquiry are undoubted gifts to humanity that should be advanced universally. But Westerners will have to rethink the universal validity of many other items in their inherited cultural repertoire. They must to this degree liberate world civilization from its past as a creation of the historical West. Second, whatever happens, the world will change. The United States will not always be able to play the leading role it does today. Eventually, other countries will rise up to surpass it economically and militarily. But as long as they can, Americans and other Westerners should see it as their mission to disseminate those aspects of Western culture that they believe can help all peoples. To do otherwise, would be to abdicate their historic responsibility.
We prefaced our answer with an analysis of the argument of a well-known Harvard professor who would tie the fate of the next century to the past. His work illustrates the continuing danger that preoccupation with the distinctiveness of historic civilizations poses for the next century. Let us now move beyond Huntington's work into a broader discussion of what civilizations are, how they differ from cultures, the degree and nature of their discontinuities in time and space, and why their study is critical to the humanistic enterprise.
Humanism and the Study of Civilizations. Humanistic education positions students in time and space so that they can more knowledgeably orient themselves in a complex and changing world. At first, they respond to this learning in terms of the life they have lived. As their education proceeds, a broader and broader tapestry of the human record emerges, as they progressively weave each new fact or understanding into their consciousness. The liberation that accompanies humanistic education is not so much a liberation of past from future or future from past as it is the liberation of students of all ages from the confines of the here and now, from the local, particular, and narrow.
The "enemy" the humanist educator struggles against is the present, not the present of daily necessity or responsible decision, but the present of overabsorption in the trivial and commonplace, in the prejudices and assumptions that punctuate ordinary conversation and the commonplace messages of the media, whether traditional or electronic. Behind this enemy lies its converse, unlimited open-mindedness. Immersed in understanding the limitless variations in human experience, an individual may lose any sense of its center, of its particular nature and tradition, the values that in the end will make possible a significant contribution to the human experience. The humanist educator must liberate students from both the self and all that is not self, from the narrowness of personal experience and the limitlessness of indiscriminate vicarious experience.
The way to begin this task is to deepen the student's understanding of humanity's cultural evolution from the life-ways of small, widely scattered, preliterate communities through the development of those complex, but still discontinuous ways of life labeled "civilizations", to the highly interrelated matrix of social, technological, and artistic patterns that make up "modern civilization".
After this orientation, we will be able to confront the essay questions more intelligently and directly. The past must be understood in its own terms, rather than in the terms of current values and standards. If we are to truly profit from the past, we must understand it as it really was. We must free it from the strictures and concerns of later peoples, and free it from the romantic images and values that modern peoples read back into their pasts, or the pasts of those whom they would emulate. The essay next considers the need to liberate modern, 21st century civilization from those differentiations and distinctions that made sense in the past but are no longer vital to the human enterprise. It concludes with a sketch of an evolving world in which peoples of many cultures co-exist within the framework of a common civilization.
What is a Civilization? Most "humanists" study the nature and development of civilizational traditions within discrete areas of endeavor. The humanist may study Chinese ceramics or Persian miniatures or ancient Greek drama. The traditions that are the object of humanistic study are generally identified with a particular historical or archaeological culture and related to a specific time or place. However, this need not be the case. Many civilizational traditions have been migratory, diffusing widely over a large area and through time. The story of writing relates, alongside many independent inventions, the development and diffusion of writing styles through space and time, often with little relationship to the conventional boundaries of peoples, political states, or cultures. Western "classical music" developed within a European context. However, from its inception it rapidly diffused across political boundaries. Today, it has become an important part of the "high culture" of countries far removed from Europe; observers believe, for example, that it now plays a larger role in the lives of Japanese than of Americans.
The first step in defining culture and civilization for our purposes is to realize that our concern is with the particularizing rather than generalizing use of these terms. Historically, all peoples have been both cultured and civilized in a general sense, but they have also been identified with particular cultures and civilizations. In this essay, the words are used in the latter sense.
Although culture and civilization are overlapping terms and are easily confused, for our purposes their careful distinction is essential. If we consider general usage within anthropology, history, and other areas of serious scholarship, we find that a civilization refers most often to relatively large, more advanced, and more complex historical units, while a culture refers to relatively small, less complex units, or to units within a larger civilizational unit. Thus, it is much more common to speak of "Swiss Culture" and "European Civilization" than the reverse. Going outside a single area, it is more common to refer to "Ancient Egyptian Civilization" and "Samoan Culture" than the reverse. This tendency in usage conforms to the difference in the origin of the words, in that civilization comes from the term for "city", referring by extension to developments that occur in or are related to cities, while culture has a more rural origin, relating to the tending of crops, as in "agriculture".
A civilization is often defined by the styles of intellectual and material production that characterize what are found to exist or have existed most widely within a historically bounded area and era. This includes production of many kinds, from scholarly treatises to scientific discoveries to works of art to food crops to political systems. Much of what is done within a civilizational area on a limited or restricted basis, such as an isolated food fad, may be tangential to the civilization unless it is understandable as a product of a more general style. As a civilization develops, the area it is identified with and the frequency of expression of its characteristic styles are augmented. As it declines, its "boundaries" contract and its styles become fossilized, ultimately to be replaced by the styles of succeeding civilizations.
Civilizations often subsume several cultures. Thus, before the arrival of Europeans, peoples representing a variety of universally differentiated indigenous cultures populated what is now the southwestern region of the United States. Most of these peoples participated to a greater or lesser extent in a common "civilization" that set them apart from the peoples to the west, north, and east, and, perhaps, from those to the south. A related distinction is afforded by what the anthropologist, Carleton Coon, described in the 1950s as the "mosaic" of Middle Eastern Civilization. Under the umbrella of this Civilization, many different "peoples" lived alongside and sometimes intermixed with one another. Lebanon, for example, was clearly "Middle Eastern", yet was made up of a variety of different peoples with different cultural traditions: one civilization, many cultures. Similarly, what we sometimes refer to as Graeco-Roman Civilization was originally composed of a variety of quite different peoples with different styles and propensities.
Civilization has also come to have a more technological and material connotation; culture, a more immediate and psychological connotation.A civilization may be defined in terms of the material artifacts associated with a geographical area and the peoples that inhabited it during a particular era. A culture is often described primarily in terms of the nonmaterial "way of life" of the people concerned. This leads to a difference in the approach of scholars and researchers to the two different types of units. To understand a living culture, an observer should live with a people and record their life nonjudgmentally. To understand past cultures, scholars must recreate this anthropological approach in so far as possible. A civilization, on the other hand, is defined as much by the outside observer as by the people who live or lived in the time and place that is under study. What is most important to the student of a civilization is the distinction between the invention and diffusion of items under investigation and their contribution to the human story.
As an example of this distinction, consider the cultural and civilizational definition of Japan. Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is a study of Japanese culture as it was reported in the 1930s. It described a very different way of interaction among peoples than Westerners were used to in their own cultural universes. Japan was said to have, for example, a "shame culture" instead of the "guilt culture" we were used to in the West. But at the same time, Japan had adopted the industrial, scientific, and industrial skills and institutions of the West; it was this absorption of the material aspects of Western Civilization that made it possible for Japan to fight a major war against the more powerful West and almost win. Today, many aspects of Japanese culture, such as the public shame that leaders express when they fail, continue to be a part of Japanese life. At the same time, to compete in the post-war world Japan had to accept even more enthusiastically than it had in the thirties the material characteristics of World Civilization in industry, government, and finance. Japanese were also forced to become more fluent than they had been in the language of international business and international affairs - English, and to integrate their native political culture with that of the modern West.
Cultures and civilizations have many aspects in common, including the problem of boundaries. Most cultures and civilizations have been melanges of independently invented and borrowed items from many cultures and civilizations, preceding and contemporaneous. Their mixed nature makes them no less the cultures or civilizations of the people who are identified with them. From the scholar's perspective, however, the definition of such a congery as a separate civilization or culture is in doubt. If the creation or refinement of the cultural or civilizational items in a particular period and area are not clearly differentiated from those of surrounding areas and eras, the scholar will conclude that it is not studying a separate civilization or culture.
However we define civilization, it is impossible to define any particular civilization with precision in terms of time, space, or specialized distinctions. It is possible to draw any number of lines of demarcation, producing an infinite number of potential "civilizations" for study. This does not mean that we must abandon the undertaking. In most cases, conventional definitions offer useful starting points, particularly for the larger civilizations of the past. After identifying these starting points it should be possible for any potential audience to understand the limits that an analyst is using for the purposes of its discussion. Referring to our example from American ethnography, one can imagine many definitions of "southwestern pre-European civilization" in time and space. Yet, sufficient agreement should be possible to develop a meaningful discussion of this "civilization". This does not imply that it would not also be possible to develop a useful discussion of a much larger and more comprehensive "civilization" centered in what is now central and southern Mexico, in relation to which the putative southwestern civilization might be identified as an outlying "province", partially offset in time.
Studying Civilizations. A few social scientists and humanists have studied major civilizations as a class of historical "events" or human creations. Their highly generalized approach contrasts with the much more common study of the nature or development of particular civilizations, as well as those studies of culture and cultures that have characterized the history of cultural anthropology or ethnography. The products of their generalized work have been labeled "social philosophies" or "philosophies of history". Such "philosophies" attempt to understand the creation, development, and life course of major civilizations. Their objective is usually to develop or test generalizations about historical processes on the broadest scale.
Perhaps the best known philosophy of history is embedded in Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History. Most of the study was completed in the 1930s, although the well-known abridgement by D. C. Somervell (Oxford, 1947) and Toynbee's later volumes were completed after World War II. His work is filled with valuable information on the full span of major civilizations and will always be considered the outstanding example of great learning and synthesis in this field. Toynbee used his research as a basis for propounding a wide variety of generalizations about the nature of civilizational development (and, as in most such efforts, also used his conclusions as a basis for criticizing the social trends of his own time). Many of Toynbee's generalizations are instructive and useful. The idea that civilizations develop in reaction to challenges, but that when the challenges become too great their development may be "arrested" is well known, as is the thesis that civilizations develop out of a "time of troubles", followed by a "universal state". Toynbee believed that the "universal state" that is often seen as the most glorious period of a past civilization actually characterized its period of decline. Toynbee's argument that both internal and external "proletariats" aid this decline is instructive. Toynbee explicates the pre-human, ant-like nature of "utopian societies", real or imagined, and their limited ability to contribute to civilizational development. This was as true of Sparta and the Ottoman Empire as it would have been of Plato's Republic.
The existence of civilizations today. In developing universal rules of civilizational development, Toynbee established a baseline for considering civilizations. He believed that by the 1940s most historical civilizations were extinct, and that, except for Western Civilization, those that remained (such as the Hindu and Sinic) were fast approaching annihilation. The dissolution of alternatives to Western Civilization has continued and accelerated since Toynbee wrote. Today, Western (or modern) science and technology are everywhere the only accepted science and technology; ineluctably English has become the medium of their development on an international scale. Today, there is only one economic system that nations emulate, and increasingly only one set of political institutions is acceptable to the world's peoples. International business is steadily increasing the percentage of the world's economic product (GWP) that it controls and exchanges. To coordinate and communicate among and between these systems, a common language is necessary. That language is necessarily English: it was spoken by more people and by more educated people during the period of Western expansion than any other language. The advantage of the English language was at first small and tenuous; once it took hold, reversing the drift toward English became impossible. Increasingly, English is becoming the language of World Civilization-people in every country have come to believe that success for themselves or their children will require English as a first or second language.
The progress of globalization in the shadow of English has not needed any special plotting by the West or English speakers. That the world has only one thriving civilization is a natural consequence of recent history. That the past was characterized by the simultaneous existence of different civilizations was the result of the limits of social and technical means of movement and communication that were available in the past. Civilizations have always tended to be universal within areas in which communication was relatively easy, and to have been bounded or limited, linguistically or otherwise, by regions through which communication was especially difficult (oceans, deserts, and high mountains - often reinforced by politically inspired and maintained boundaries). Today, communication within the world as a whole is much easier; the natural boundaries that encompassed the major civilizations of the past no longer exist. Therefore, it was inevitable that the world would be characterized by one civilization as soon as political and natural barriers became less decisive. The only question the twentieth century was left to answer was "what civilization" should become universal.
If there had to be only one civilization in our era, why was this civilization necessarily "Western"? The answer to this question is two-fold. On the one-hand, the particular strength and creativity of Western Civilization at the historical moment when natural barriers came down gave it an overwhelming advantage. Its traditions, its script, and one of its languages (English) easily won the day. On the other hand, as it has been universalized, it has become increasingly questionable to call it simply "Western". What we now label Western Civilization is the product of a highly incorporative tradition. Its arts have been heavily influenced by African, Asian, and other traditions, large and small. This too should not be surprising. If we look closely at the history of other civilizations of the past, we find that they too were incorporative, borrowing from the civilizations of the areas that they traded with or expanded into. The history of the evolution of Christmas and Easter celebrations and of the symbols and practices associated with them are classic examples of the incorporativist nature of Western Civilization in its developmental stage.
To undo the universality of modern World Civilization would be a daunting task for any group that would attempt it. Success would require the imposition of massive blinders on any population that the "reformers" would isolate from the mainstream. Unless there is widespread failure of World Civilization in areas such as health, violence, or the environment, it is doubtful any people would long tolerate isolation from its benefits.
We study past civilizations to increase our understanding of humanity, the human record, human possibility. If this study is carefully pursued, it will also provide a basis for the comparative understanding of human behavior and human society. However, as humanists, this is not our primary objective. In the language of the psychologist Gordon Allport, our objective is ideographic rather than nomothetic. In the social sphere, nomothetic science attempts to categorize individuals and societies in an attempt to develop and test propositions about their behavior. This is ordinarily labeled "social science". Idiographic science seeks to understand the nature of particular individuals, societies, and cultures and how each of these work together to form wholes. Most students of civilization are idiographers, intent on understanding the particulars of what they see before them.
The relevance of this work is internal to its subject. The purpose of a study of tenth century Iran is not primarily to help us discover information about the nature of Iranians that is relevant to understanding contemporary Iran or of humanity as a whole. Tenth century Iran should be studied because it increases our understanding of tenth century Iran and what its people accomplished in that milieu. Neither is the student of tenth century Iran necessarily a student of modern Iran. This ideographic approach is best exemplified in the work of Arthur Waley, perhaps the greatest translator of ancient Chinese literature in the twentieth century. Waley never visited China, and when asked if he would like to, his reply was that he would not. He may have missed something by not visiting, but his restriction to what he believed was most important, of greatest value to humanity, is likely to have enhanced his contribution as a humanist. Students of Ancient Egypt or Sumeria have little to gain by understanding modern Egypt or Iraq, or by learning to speak modern Arabic. (They may extend themselves in this way, and find their work more rewarding as a result, but this is another issue.) The field of ancient studies exists within its own parameters; it is the task of the humanist scholar to free it from the concerns of our day. For insofar as ancient studies are understood through the prism of modern interests and concerns, to that extent they will provide a less complete picture of ancient societies and their creations as these were produced and experienced in their own times.
This liberation of the past means that we should not read the struggles of our own day back into the struggles of the past. The peoples who live in the countries that make up our world are not the peoples that fought the battles that history records hundreds and even thousands of years ago. Racially and culturally peoples have throughout history been continually evolving and differentiating and amalgamating in so many ways that it is impossible to distinguish what is "pure" or "authentic" in terms of a particular lineage or cultural tradition from what is not. The unique civilization created in fifth century Greece had only a tenuous connection with the "Greece" of the tenth century b.c., and an equally tenuous connection to the "Greece" of the tenth and twentieth centuries a.d. Countless tribes and peoples have entered, conquered, and been absorbed by the land we call "Greece", and they have brought the widest variety of cultural traditions with them. Similarly, the people that now inhabit Turkey have little in common with the successive waves of Central Asian tribesmen that have swept into Anatolia since before recorded history. Those of western Anatolia are more "Greek" than Central Asian in their genetic background. Culturally, Turkey today is a fascinating mixture of many peoples and many traditions, varying by region and social class across the full breadth of the country, taking us back millennia to the Hittites and beyond.
To understand the past, to respect its life as we respect our own, and the life of the generations that will follow, requires us to scrape away the romantic images of the past that have been applied in layers ever since the first people spun out the theory of their "golden age". We must remember the past with all its glories and all its warts, with its humanities and inhumanities. This means more than that we refrain from judging the past by our standards and in terms of knowledge that was unavailable to our ancestors. It means that we understand a past that even in terms of its own proclaimed standards and values was often defective. Whether we look at Islamic, Judaic, Christian, or Buddhist history, we find that the gap between the ideal and the real was pervasive, that in practice treasured theoretical values such as peace and justice were as often absent as present.
The danger of romanticizing the past is particularly noticeable in technology and health where millions of modern citizens, in countries as different at the United States and India, cling to the belief that natural remedies or natural herbs are better than those of modern science. This belief gains ground in the most advanced countries in spite of the remarkable increase in the life span and health of the aged that has been achieved by modern medicine and modern hygiene. We devalue our ancestors when we forget that they had to make their day-to-day decisions in a context in which death in childbirth was an ever-present reality and a family in which children could expect to have both natural parents alive at the time of their own marriages was a rarity. The coarseness, violence, and moral insensibility that are often found in the historical record cannot be evaluated without consciousness of this context.
If we understand the past in its own terms, enter into its reality without the fetters of the present, we will be able to imagine ourselves into a future in which the past and present have been treasured, profited from, and transcended. The tragedy of Yugoslavia is that successive governments failed to adequately educate the young in the history of the country and its constituent peoples. Under Tito, its educators indoctrinated the citizenry in a false tradition that had little to do with either what had happened before or what was happening in the country at the time. The demise of Yugoslavia left behind a dazed, ethnically uneducated people that had only the fables, concerns, and loyalties of a vanished time to turn to. In reverting to their tribal traditions, its peoples became prisoners of the past, unable either to create a new federation, or newly minted states, that could see beyond the past into a better future, a future that would be compatible with the economic and social relationships that had evolved since 1900.
Ayatollah Khomeini's transformation of Iran had similar roots, and in its own way has been equally disastrous. During the long period of Pahlevi rule, a glorified, in large part falsified history of Iran became the state ideology. The people were, at least on the surface, thoroughly indoctrinated in the belief that modern Iran was a reincarnation of the Achaemenid Empire. When the superstructure of ideas and institutions that the Pahlevis had weakly built was swept away, the people had only archaic Islamic institutions to turn to, institutions bereft of the advances that had been made by Islamic and other scholars over the last century. The equally anachronistic Iran that was now thrust upon the people radically separated men from women, demanding that women be once again subjugated by a dress code that ill-fitted the twentieth century. The result has been the creation of a schizophrenic Iranian people that remains as attracted as ever to the institutions and cultural models of the West, but that at the same time must pretend to live in the tenth century. Millions of Iranians remain entranced by the fantasies of the West, often dancing before them on their own TVs and in their own movie theatres, yet they lack a modern ideology that would sustain a positive appreciation of a way of life that in tenth century terms is pure evil. The Iranians are left without a coherent platform from which to contribute whole-heartedly to the 21st century.
India represents the most diverse technological and spiritual mixture of peoples of any similar area in the world. Its cultural universe incorporates congeries of cultural items that fill a spectrum from the most materialistic to the most otherworldly. Even Hinduism itself, the most widely accepted tradition in India, is more a category of religious elements than a unified religious system. It has no generally accepted hierarchy, and the attitude of many Hindus toward its major religious texts is quite different from that accorded Jewish, Christian, or Muslim texts by the adherents of these religions. While the followers of its many religions and sects have actively proselytized in the past, in the twentieth century most Indian religious groups or "communities" have lived alongside one another in relative harmony, accepting the reality that peoples of different traditions can live together without great damage to one another. This harmony was rent decisively by partition and the events that led up to it. As in post-Communist Yugoslavia, it was rent by modern leaders who could think of no better way to organize their followers than to lead them back into the past, into heroic ages in which sectarian communities destroyed or were destroyed by sectarian enemies. More recently, another generation of Indian leaders has again found this to be an easy road to power, echoing in their enthusiasm for the past the bloody cries of the former Yugoslavia's newfound nationalists.
Such tragedies repeated on a larger canvas by more powerful captives of the past could engulf the world in war should world leaders take theories like those of Huntington seriously in the 21st century.
Humanist educators cannot be expected to fashion simple solutions to the retrograde movements of our time. But they would move much of the way toward a solution if they could inculcate in the next generation values and beliefs appropriate to the 21st century that could make possible the stabilization and blossoming of World Civilization, thereby avoiding the dead ends that will inevitably result from clinging to the past.
We can imagine the outline of these values and beliefs if we consider what is happening all around us, particularly among younger people in the most advanced countries. These young men and women are much less likely than their parents to see their futures in terms of their families, either existing or prospective. Instead, they are immersed in scientific, technological, business, and educational communities that transcend the boundaries of the past and that in succeeding decades will reinvent themselves. The inheritors of a long tradition of liberal thought, progressively developed over generations in the media, academia, and many churches, and with years of experience with the manifold cultures and classes of the world, either through personal travel, unparalleled opportunities to meet people of different backgrounds, or vicariously through television, young adults today are noticeably more tolerant than any generation before them. Majorities in the most advanced countries and significant minorities in many developing countries are more willing than those who came before them to judge the worth of individuals in their own terms regardless of gender, age, race, sexual orientation, or ethnic background.
This generation is far from being restricted to the wealthiest and most advanced countries; it is found in greater or lesser numbers everywhere and is being added to with each passing year. Countless examples can be adduced. The strength and near universality of this movement can be illustrated by the content of two recent Iranian movies that captured the imagination of Teheranis in the 1990s. Both were feminist expositions of modern values in every aspect but women's street clothes. The Spouse (Shouher) was a comedy based on the difficulty of a husband adjusting to the fact that the management of his corporation had chosen his wife rather than himself as Director. Unable to adjust to reporting to this new Director, he makes every effort to undercut her. In the end, he accepts the new situation and supports her new role. Leila is a tragedy based on the inability of a married woman (Leila) to conceive. Her mother-in-law pressures her to allow her husband to take a second wife so that he might have a child. Although the husband and nearly everyone on his side of the family and hers oppose the move, eventually the mother-in-law wins. After a child is born to the second wife, the marriage ends in disaster. Leila refuses to have anything more to do with her husband; he responds by divorcing his second wife and vainly struggling to win back Leila. He and Leila will remain single for the rest of their lives; he will bring up his new daughter as a single father. The film's explicit messages are that a loving marriage is much more important than the production of children and that both husbands and wives have rights to their own lives irrespective of the wishes of their families of orientation. Neither movie has any traditional religious or political themes or expresses in any way antipathy toward the West or modern civilization. These movies are not exceptions: both are part of a vibrant Iranian film tradition that demonstrates that Persian culture can be an independent contributor to an evolving world civilization rather than a languishing captive of the past.
The international generation that identifies with movies such as this could live anywhere. Its members may or may not have traditional religious beliefs. But if they do, these are sharply compartmentalized, not guides to everyday action. The religions that guide their lives are respect for others and respect for nature. They believe in human rights for all people everywhere, and their list of inalienable human rights is continually expanding.
Given the material and spiritual world they inhabit, the existence of a universal World Civilization is not open to doubt, whether or not they use this label. At the same time they are both anti-imperialist and anti-nationalist. The latter means that the countries they live in, and of which they may be citizens, have no more than a weak claim to their loyalties when international issues of the environment, economics, or war and peace are at stake. The former means that all peoples have a right to their own cultures, to their own ways of life, indeed, to their own languages in so far as these can be preserved.
They want to live in a world in which old and new cultures exist side by side, without either the old or the new threatening the other. In this world, cultures will develop and expand vertically as well as horizontally, so that persons with particular interests in forms of art, music, or ways of life, will be able to band together with those with like interests and desires wherever they are. Given the ease of communication and travel, such vertical groupings will develop alternative life styles or ways of living within and across more encompassing communities - reminding the future perhaps of the monastic orders of another age. Communities of musicians, software engineers, hunters and fishermen, will develop and transmit across generations their own standards, moralities, and traditions, providing new reference points for lives that might otherwise be lost in the geographical and civilizational boundlessness of the 21st century.
At the same time as community values come to be expressed in new ways, the new generation will also find new meaning in the continual reassertion of individuality, as it will be convinced of the absolute value of individuals. In the hunting and gathering societies that many of us still cling to in our psychological hearts, survival required that individuals be brought up to put the worth of the group ahead of that of the individual. This required the suppression of individual desires. For many, this inexorably led to death in battle for the good of the community -- originally extended family or clan; later, by extension, "nation". In the 21st century world, with small, disconnected biological families, if they exist at all, and in which traditional families are no longer necessary to bear or rear children, individuals may come to maturity in a manner that allows them to finally transcend the demands of the primeval band. Some will still accept risk in service to society, for some people enjoy risk, but nationalist loyalties will no longer be a basis on which societies can create the massive armed forces that terrorized the 20th century. The extension of human rights to all peoples will at last be liberated from the argument that such rights may legitimately be curtailed for the good of a community or society.
These changes in attitudes, values, and experiences will lead to a general restructuring of the institutional and social units that have framed life in the 20th century. Politico-economic units will become both smaller and larger, and they will have more specialized functions. The nation state, too often built on intense loyalty within and antipathy without, will become progressively less important as international and regional institutions, on the one hand, and subnational institutions, on the other, play larger and larger roles in serving human interests. As the need to defend, and the impossibility of defending, national units lessens, and as the global economy becomes more reality than theory, the key politico-economic units may become trading centers and their hinterlands. Seattle will deal directly with Singapore; Hong Kong with Buenos Aires.
The World Civilization of the 21st century can be an impenetrable umbrella under which humanity can progressively evolve within the envelopes of many cultures, inherited and newly minted. We can either grasp and nurture this potentiality, or let it slip through our hands. The values and institutions it prefigures will be no more than inchoate possibilities unless they are brought together by the humanists of the next century, creating and communicating through their teachings a coherent but open-ended and ever-evolving universalist ideology strong enough to resist the ever-present danger of retreat to the divisive compartmentalization of the past. Then it may at last be possible for all peoples to live up to the standard in Sa'di's lines:
Adam's children are the limbs of each other, Descended from the same seed. When one limb aches, The whole body aches. You who are not troubled by the troubles of others, Should not be called the children of Adam.
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations", Foreign Affairs, 72, 3 (Summer 1993), pages 22-49.
Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, pages 126, 162.
Ibid, page 310.
The New York Times, Book Review section, October 6, 1996.
Jack Donnelly, "Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights", Human Rights Quarterly, 6, 4 (November, 1984), pages 400-419.
Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, pages 162-163.
For an exhaustive discussion of the meanings of these terms, see A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952).
Emil W. Haury, editor, "Southwest Issue", American Anthropologist, 56, 4 (1), August, 1954.
Carleton Coon, Caravan: The Story of the Middle East, revised edition (New York: Holt, 1958).
Compare, for example, the contrasts between Greek and Roman cultures, especially in regard to the role of individualism, described by Jacob Burkhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization (New York: St. Martins, 1998), pages 242-3, and Theodor Mommsen, Rome from earliest Times to 44 B.C. (New York, Colliers, 1928), pages 5-6.
Raymond D. Gastil, "Culture and Civilization: In Man and Out There", Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers.
Pitirim A. Sorokin, Social Philosophies of an Age of Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950).
Yi-Fu Tuan, The Good Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), page 160.
George Huppert, After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
Some of the following points are based on Sandra Mackey, The Iranians: Persia, Islam, and the Soul of a Nation (New York: Plume, 1996).
See, for example, The New York Times, 1/28/96, (Arts) 9,21; 11/15/21, (Arts) 13,24.
Sa'adi Shirazi, selection from his Golestan (ca. 1258):
