Re-clash of civilizations

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. --In our time, few formulations have sparked more controversy than Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis. In the Harvard political scientist's view, laid out in a 1993 Foreign Affairs essay and expanded into a book three years later, the conflicts of the post-Cold War era will arise not from ideological or economic differences but from cultural divisions.

To his admirers, Huntington is a prophet who foresaw the current confrontation with radical Islam. To his critics, he's a dangerous over-simplifier who, in the words of the late Edward Said, passes off a farrago of "vague and manipulable abstractions" as historical insight.

Last weekend, prominent thinkers gathered at a Skidmore College conference to debate the implications of Huntington's ideas -- and much else besides. The three-day event, "Jihad, McWorld, Modernity: Public Intellectuals Debate the `Clash of Civilizations,"' turned out to be a wide-ranging conversation that hopscotched from geopolitics to the military action in Iraq to Janet Jackson's right breast and beyond.

Participating was a virtual Who's Who of left-liberal academics and public intellectuals: philosophers Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum; social critics Benjamin Barber, Orlando Patterson, and James Miller; and South African writer and activist Breyten Breytenbach, among others. (Two participants sympathetic to the Bush administration's foreign policy, journalist Christopher Hitchens and ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain, cancelled at the last minute.)

As for Huntington, the panelists were nearly unanimous in their outright rejection of a "clash of civilizations." In his opening remarks, Barber rearticulated the charge, lobbed in a 2001 introduction to his 1995 book "Jihad vs. McWorld," that Huntington is a "hyperbolic commentator," whose theories, as he put it on Friday, are "redolent of 18th-century imperialism." To explain our moment, Barber instead urged the audience to examine the conflict, cutting across all civilizations, between capitalism and cosmopolitanism on the one hand and the forces of tribal reaction on the other. As conference co-organizer Robert Boyers, a Skidmore English professor and editor of the journal Salmagundi, put it, "There is a clash going on in Islam for the soul of Islam, and a clash going on in the West."

More than a reconsideration of Huntington, the event doubled as a high-powered bull session on the preoccupations of contemporary liberalism: What are America's obligations to the world? Can there be such a thing as a just war? How is democracy best promoted abroad? How can the secular be reconciled to the sacred? How do universal rights mesh with indigenous traditions?

There was no shortage of big, serious ideas. Nussbaum used the occasion to promote a "core group of basic human entitlements" and a global policy of minimal human justice that would be universalist in scope, yet flexible enough to accommodate cultural and religious differences. Singer, who has drawn fire for his defenses of euthanasia and animal rights, called for radical expansion in US foreign aid programs and other schemes to redistribute wealth to poor countries.

There were also skirmishes over apparently less weighty matters. When it came to the recent "wardrobe malfunction" witnessed by some 1 billion Super Bowl viewers worldwide, Barber was downright apocalyptic. Americans "appear as an aggressive monoculture in whose names Western ideas are advanced," he thundered in his opening remarks. Instead of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, he complained, we export the extravagant vulgarity of the Super Bowl halftime show. Rather than focusing on the problems of Islam, we should "look into ourselves."

"I'm about to defend Janet Jackson," panelist James Miller quipped in response. "The real issue is economic and political," he said. After all, he pointed out, a conquering American soldier has far more power than an MTV video. Later, Orlando Patterson also questioned Barber's vision of an American-dominated McWorld, extolling the virtues of creolization -- not to mention the jerk-pork burger on sale at Jamaica's McDonald's franchises.

The Bush administration, unsurprisingly, came in for some harsh criticism. "The Austro-Hungarian empire was more respectful of diplomatic niceties than Bush," claimed Singer. Breytenbach, whose tight-fitting black working-man's jacket complete with red star added a touch of 1970s Marxist glamour to the proceedings, drew murmurs (and a flat rejection from Barber) when he declared George Bush more of a danger to the world than Osama bin Laden. "America is a very dangerous beast, and we don't want to antagonize it," he said.

The last-minute cancellations of Hitchens and Elshtain certainly left the administration with few defenders. Still, Vladimir Tismaneanu, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, cautioned against the wholesale dismissal of the US occupation of Iraq, asserting, "We are there and have to do the best job possible." And Patterson, while coy about his own position on the war, asked why those who supported the opposition to Jim Crow would not extend the same sympathies to struggles against tyranny abroad. "I have no problem invading Haiti," he declared.

But others were more cautious about waging war to establish democracy. Though she supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Guity Nashat, a professor of history at the University of Illinois (and Baghdad native), questioned the US imposition of democracy from the outside. "The Iraqis have to be allowed to make mistakes," she said. Barber noted that Great Britain did not invade the United States to put an end to slavery. Instead, the problem had to work itself out internally through a civil war. "War cannot create democracy," he said. "It can only overthrow despotism."

For all of the gloominess about the present state of America, there was a good deal of talk about hopeful possibilities within the Islamic world. "Why is it that West African Islam is so gentle, so easygoing?" asked Breytenbach, who spends part of each year in Senegal. He urged the audience not to "underestimate the moves and countermoves within Islam."

Nashat pointed frequently to the example of Iran, which she sees undergoing a complex process of transformation that may ultimately lead to a democracy which incorporates Islamic law. Many of the panelists stressed that terrorism is hardly endemic to Islam. Indeed Nashat said the Al Qaeda is better explained by the principles of Christian liberation theology and Marxism, while Tismaneanu placed it in a broader history of Western nihilism.

Still, Columbia University philosopher Akeel Bilgrami found himself somewhat exasperated by his colleagues tenderness toward Islam. " `Many Islams' is said like `Many mantras,"' he chided. "It's a conversation stopper."

Though he disagrees with Huntington's ideas, Bilgrami said, "Conflict can be healthy, even clashes between civilizations." But Bilgrami stressed that we ought not to confuse conflict with conquest. Instead, we should focus on why the moderate Muslim majority doesn't speak out against the extremists in their midst: "That's the question we must be asking," he said.

Matthew Price lives in Brooklyn and is a regular contributor to the Globe.