Against The Clash Of Civilizations Thesis
A revenant is an animate corpse. These ghouls are multifarious, but their most common forms in folklore and popular fiction are zombies and vampires. There exists an overwhelming range of interpretations of the ghoul, but certain features are universal. The revenant has the same body as a human being who once lived, and perhaps their memories and/or trace elements of their personalities, but it is essentially a different entity. That person’s fundamental personality, their soul, has departed. They are dead. Only their body continues to roam the earth. The soulless yet living cadaver is driven by the need to reproduce itself by infecting living humans, usually through a bite. These humans then die and are resurrected, but as something inhuman. They retain the superficial appearance of the humans they once were to the point where the still living may mistake them for being those humans. This manifests as a couple of different tropes in revenant fiction. In films regarding the zombie variant, the human characters may show dangerous reluctance to dispatch the revenant who once was their loved one, and needs to be driven to action by someone more clear sighted. Example here. In the case of the nosferatu, they may actively capitalize on their having been someone’s loved one to gain access to them. Once a person is turned, however, they are — for all their appearances — no longer an individual but part of a horde of ghouls. From the perspective of living humans, all that is of value has left the revenant and they are essentially indistinguishable from the other blood hungry corpses.
Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis was first published as an article in Foreign Affairs in 1993 and expanded three years later into a book. It was originally intended as a reply to his former student Francis Fukuyama’s End of History. Popular (and to an extent scholarly) consensus in the intervening decades has deemed Huntington the victor in that debate. His thesis has become increasingly popular in recent times as many of his predictions appear to have come to fulfilment. His prediction that Islamic civilization was particularly prone to conflict with other civilizations generally and with the West in particular was apparently dramatically vindicated on September 11th, 2001. More recent vindications for Huntington came in the form of the war in Ukraine. In Huntington’s schema, Ukraine was a “cleft country” — a state divided between two civilizations (the West and the Orthodox)[1] — and thus a site primed for civilizational conflict. The (so far) cold conflict between ascendant China and the West was also predicted by Huntington’s model, as was China’s alignment with Iran and Russia to overcome Western hegemony. Indeed, although Huntington does not mention it, that one of the primary sites of conflict with expanding China would be with the Philippines is entirely congruent with his theory. The Huntingtonian narrative is not only popular in the West, but also in the civilizationalist discourse of Chinese, Russian and Indian ideologues. It is then perhaps unsurprising that the feared coming war between the West and a Russo-Chinese axis is framed as a “war of civilizations”.
I am against the clash of civilizations thesis. There is no clash of civilizations, nor can there be. The clash of civilizations is impossible, because there are no civilizations to clash. What do I mean by this?
To answer this question entails answering another, namely — what is a civilization? Much of the criticism of Huntington comes from the Saidian charge that Huntington “essentializes” cultures. This amounts to the claim that Huntington presents cultures, which are ultimately human constructs and so ultimately constantly in flux, as having a fixed essence. Related to this critique is the idea that he is arbitrary and simplistic in his assigning nations to civilizations.
Bearing these critiques in mind I would, drawing on Oswald Spengler, offer a distinction between ‘cultures’ and ‘civilizations’. In his book, Huntington depicts the foundations of civilizations as essentially religious — although he never spells out his reasons for doing so. It is curious that Huntington should do this, since he nowhere displays a sensitivity to metaphysical truth. Nonetheless, he is quite right to do so, as it gives the concept of civilization a firm foundation. Culture, as Huntington’s critics are justified in observing, is an aggregation of human beliefs and practices. Culture is not ontological — it does not, of itself, stand outside of conditioned reality. Culture is subject to the signature observation of the Buddha, as is everything within time — it is empty, impermanent, devoid of an abiding essence. In a word, it belongs to becoming.
Revelation by contrast, is ontological. Revelation is a self-disclosure of being within becoming. Revelation is not a human construct, but a self-articulation of the Absolute. We may say that civilization is that complex of human culture that is constructed on the basis of a Revelation. Culture is constantly in flux, belonging as it does to conditioned reality. It is much like the human body, which replaces all of its cells every seven years. The essence, the fixed point which is not subject to this flux, is Revelation. If culture is the body, then Revelation is the soul. It is the soul that elevates the body from mere matter. To quote Oldmeadow: “Traditional civilizations are essentially religious: culture is the outward expression of religion and its application in all aspects of life.” (2004, p. 18).
With this understanding, discussions of civilizations of the sort that Huntington engages in are easily defended against charges of reification or essentialization. It should be born in mind that while civilizations have Revelation as their foundation, they are not to be treated as synonymous with Revelation. A single Revelation may, depending on the structure of said Revelation, serve as the foundation of multiple civilizations. All religions have an exoteric and esoteric dimension in the sense of having an outer set of moral, ritual and dogmatic forms and an inner mystical core. As was described by Schuon, however, certain religions — pre-eminently Christianity and Buddhism — are “esoteric in origin and structure” (2007, p. 64). This means that these Revelations “strictly speaking have no “outward law” as such” (2007, p. 64). Among the consequences of this, such as a more developed liturgy and the absence of named and clearly demarcated esoteric Traditions (a partial exception for this could be observed perhaps in Tendai Buddhism), is that these religions allow for authentic synthesis (as opposed to syncretism) with other Traditions so as to imbue them with an outward law. For this reason, there are multiple Christian and Buddhist civilizations, but only singular Jewish, Islamic and Hindu civilizations.
Providence has seen fit that different sectarian orientations within Christianity and Buddhism have synthesized with different pre-existing civilizations to produce a plurality of Christian and Buddhist civilizations. Huntington correctly acknowledges that Western Christendom and Eastern Orthodoxy constitute two separate civilizations. The West came into being through the synthesis of Catholicism with some of the exoteric elements of the foregoing civilization (the form of the western Roman empire and Roman law). The East was distinguished by a different form of Christianity but also a different act of synthesis. Huntington also acknowledges that Ethiopia constitutes a civilization in its own right. He comes close to truth here, but falls short. Ethiopia is at the core of the third Christian civilization, that of the Oriental Orthodox Church. Buddhism has also produced three separate civilizations; a Theravadin civilization in south and southeast Asia that takes its outer law principally from Hinduism, and two separate Mahayana civilizations. To the west, a predominantly Tantric Mahayana produced one civilization, while in the east Mahayana entered into a complex synthesis with Ruism, Daoism and Shenism. Huntington calls this latter “Sinic” civilization, which is an unobjectionable term[2].
The term civilization, as politically incorrect as it has become to acknowledge, has a strongly normative dimension. To be uncivilized is to be unworthy of respect and in need of civilizing. The cruelties of Western colonialism, which deemed many of its subjects uncivilized, has led to this sense of the term being placed in the backseat (there is a great irony in this which we will address presently). Nonetheless, the term retains its normative connotations. Calling someone uncultured isn’t as strong a condemnation as calling them uncivilized. Using the definition of civilization offered here rescues the normative implication. All normative value is derived from ultimate Reality. In Platonic terms, good things are good by virtue of and to the degree that they participate in the Good. To be civilized, to have a civilization, is to found one’s culture on Revelation — on the Absolute as it discloses itself. This is what imbues a culture with value.
I wrote earlier that I was borrowing the distinction between culture and civilization from Spengler. The reader familiar with Spengler will have noted that the way the two terms were distinguished is very different from how Spengler does so. For Spengler, culture refers to the early, vital phase of a civilization, while civilization proper refers to its later, sclerotic phase. Spengler clearly values culture over civilization, while in the framework offered here civilization is valued over mere culture. What I have done here in redefining these terms thus is what I have called elsewhere a ‘normative inversion’. This is to say, I have adopted a conceptual framework but reversed the polarity of the normative evaluations in the original articulation of that framework. Throughout my writing I do this often in adopting concepts and ideas from modern thinkers, particularly counter-Traditional thinkers like Spengler. Counter-Tradition can be largely characterized as a mirror-image perversion of Tradition, and so what is useful in counter-Traditional ideas are often only salvageable if a normative inversion is performed.
Having established what a civilization is, we are now in a position to appreciate why there can be no clash of civilizations. Civilizations no longer exist because they have had their metaphysical foundations dynamited. Modernity, by definition, is the destruction of civilization — all that is left is uncivilized culture. All that is left is bodies without souls. All that is left is revenants. What we call ‘the West’, or ‘Hindu civilization’, or ‘Sinic civilization’ today are not civilizations at all, but ghouls — walking corpses divested of that which gave them value and personality. The first such nosferatu was the West which consequently felt compelled through its colonial enterprise to infect all other still living civilizations. Once turned, these other zombie civilizations were compelled to pass on the plague — see for example Russia’s aggressive exportation of Marxist revolution. Perhaps the last civilization was infected in 1950 when revenant China inflicted its condition upon Tibet.
Some civilizations or parts of civilizations have preserved more of Tradition than others — one thinks of places like Oman, Bhutan or rural Africa. But this can be likened to how, in the zombie horde, some zombies are in a more advanced stage of decay than others. This zombie is only pallid with sunken eyes, while that zombie is little more than a skeleton dripping fetid flesh, but they are all zombies. We can identify who a reanimated corpse was in life, just so today’s societies bear superficial resemblances to the civilizations they once were. The vampire sometimes uses its appearance and memories of their previous living existence to [draw in victims]. Just so, the undead civilization on occasion masquerades as its former self, but in reality it is naught but a parody, a counter-Traditional counterfeit. This is what should be thought of every time the Chinese Communist Party depicts itself as a continuation of “Traditional” or “Confucian” civilization, or whenever an American politician invokes “Judeo-Christian values”.
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It is true, there has been a distribution of power away from (what was) the West to other parts of the world, which has led to the rise of powers outside the former confines of the West — like Russia and China. Within the civilizationalist discourse, this is depicted as the advent of “modernization without Westernisation” or “alternative modernization”. A representative example of an advocate of these sorts of ideas is Martin Jacques. However, this is more accurately described as the descent of the world beyond the West into modernity rather than the rise of other civilizations. China may have become more materially powerful, but at the price of what it meant to be China, much as the vampire gains physical powers at the cost of his soul. The authorities in Beijing may find it convenient to invoke Ruist values like collectivism as justification for their political model, but this fails to convince. Collectivism, at least of a purely quantitative variety, is not foreign to illiberal forms of modernity like communism and fascism (two maggots that both wriggled out of the cadaver of the West). A far more central Ruist value, but one that cuts against the centralizing impulse of the CCP — that of filial piety — is rarely invoked by that regime. Claims that China’s political forms and its values are drawn from Chinese Tradition are rather tortured, when they bear a far greater resemblance to the illiberal regimes of the modern West. Modern China has more in common with the German Democratic Republic or the Third Reich than any Chinese dynasty. Schopenhaur once wrote that the concept of a republic was incomprehensible to the Chinese (On Human Nature). At the time of his writing, when China was still civilized, he was quite right — but today we have not one but two Chinese republics!
Precious few people in China, or anywhere in East Asia, have any familiarity Ruist texts or doctrines, or practice Ruist rituals. As contemporary Ruist Fan Ruiping has observed, Ruist moral concepts may persist among the Chinese but Ruist metaphysics are gone (2021, p. 102). Without the metaphysical basis and rationale for the ethics, the latter will eventually wither. The ethical conceptions that persist, such as they do, only do so as a kind of holdover, a fruit that has fallen from the branch that sustained it but has not yet started to rot. We have already seen this process play out in the West. With the loss of Christianity’s metaphysical grounding, it was reduced to mere moralism. When this moral code came under attack, it could not sustain itself without a robust metaphysic to support it. Nietzche was the famous Western foe of Christianity, already almost a century and a half ago, but he never even took Christian metaphysics into consideration. His attacks on Christianity focused solely on its morality. It has been said that the West is either Catholic or it is nothing. Mutatis mutandis, we can say that it is not Catholic, and so it is nothing.
All the other supposed civilizations on earth today, whether in Huntington’s schema, or some other like Dugin’s or Spengler’s, are ultimately nothing. We no longer have civilizations, but only cultures — mere human constructs. Trying to grasp the essence of these is much like trying to grasp sand or water. They are unsubstantial, they are nothing. Without a mooring in Heaven, culture becomes totally the product of man and so without any fixity. Without being anchored in the Good, it also without worth.
These uncivilized cultures, like revenants, having disposed of all the ensouled beings, may claw and tear at each other, but we cannot call this a clash of ‘civilizations’ nor can we see why those with souls should pick a side. To quote a very different work of horror fiction, and one that is appropriately soulless, “whoever wins, we lose”.
Citations
Fan, R. (2021). A Confucian conception of public reason and bioethics. In H.-L. Li & M.
Campbell (Eds.), Public Reason and Bioethics: Three Perspectives (pp. 93–134). Palgrave Macmillan.
Fukuyama, F. (1992). The End of History and The Last Man. Free Press.
Huntington, S. P. (1993). The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 22–49.
Huntington, S. P. (1996). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon & Schuster.
Oldmeadow, H. (2004). Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religious Traditions. World Wisdom.
Schopenhauer, A. (2017). The Essays of Schopenhauer: On Human Nature (T. B. Saunders, Trans.). Independently published. (Original work published 1897)
Schuon, F. (2007). Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts: A New Translation with Selected Letters (J. Cutsinger, Ed.). World Wisdom.
[1] This is a curious observation of Huntington’s as ethnic Ukrainians in Western Ukraine are still overwhelmingly Orthodox, not Catholic, which undermines his thesis somewhat.
[2] Huntington in his original article included Japan as part of Sinic civilization, but in his book considers it a civilization of its own. This is rather baffling. The Ruist-Mahayana synthesis was imported wholesale from China and Korea. The indigenous Shinto element has its analogues in China and Korea, and does not give Japan a separate metaphysical foundation from the rest of East Asia, much as modern Japanese nationalist fantasists would like this to be the case.
