"If your thesis doesn't hold up to obvious criticisms, there's a chance that your thesis sucks."
Thanks to Paul Musgrave and Alex Cruikshanks for helping us fact-check this episode!
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"If your thesis doesn't hold up to obvious criticisms, there's a chance that your thesis sucks."
Thanks to Paul Musgrave and Alex Cruikshanks for helping us fact-check this episode!
Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod
Where to find us:
Links!
Michael: Peter.
Peter: Michael.
Michael: Have you ever heard of a book called Clash of Civilizations?
Peter: I have heard of it. Clash of Civilizations, one of my favorite videogames. Excited to find out that they made a book.
Michael: [laughs]
[If Books Could Kill theme]
Michael: Tell me about your relationship with this book. What do you know about it?
Peter: I actually do know a little bit about it. If you were a professor of international affairs when the Cold War ended, you were contractually obligated to write an entire book explaining why you think you should still be employed. This is Samuel Huntington's attempt.
Michael: You never had to read it in school?
Peter: There's a huge difference between me being told I should read something or have to read something and actually reading it. [Michael laughs] So, it's quite possible.
Michael: The reason that I ask is that one of the first things that I learned while I was researching this is that Clash of Civilizations is one of the 10 most assigned books at US colleges.
Peter: Wow.
Michael: Among top colleges, among Ivy League colleges, it's number four. It's just below Plato, but it's above Aristotle and Democracy in America by de Tocqueville.
Peter: I'm upset and disappointed to hear that international affairs and political science academics are not seriously pursuing truth and are instead championing the hack work of their colleagues, mentors, and friends. Is this shocking?
Michael: So, what do you know about Huntington himself?
Peter: Now, this is all from memory. So, give me a little rope here. But I believe that he was a big-time international affairs academic, also a statesman. One of those guys who went to Harvard or Yale back in 1918. And then, that's enough to just be in government or a near government for the rest of your life.
Michael: Yeah. He goes to the University of Chicago. He gets his PhD from Harvard in 1951. And then, there's a little tiny interregnum period. But then, he becomes a Harvard professor and he stays there for 58 years. He's like a walking who's who of every single intellectual movement of the 20th century. He's friends with Francis Fukuyama, he's friends with [unintelligible [00:02:13] Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger. He founded Foreign Policy magazine. He worked for LBJ.
Peter: Oh.
Michael: According to one thing that I read, he is the most cited political scientist in America for many, many years.
Peter: That makes sense to me. And again, I'm someone who didn't try very hard in school and I still remember his name. So, I think that says a lot.
Michael: Yeah. The book itself comes out in 1996. The background to the book is this period that we touched on briefly with Fukuyama and The End of History. Basically, from the mid-1980s until the early 2000s, everybody was coming out with their "what happens after the Cold War?" book. I think it was just a very fertile time for takes that we have all forgotten about because most of these predictions did not come true. Apparently, there was a famous book about how the post-Cold War world was going to be defined by America versus drug cartels, that organized [Peter laughs] crime is going to be like the next Cold War. There was a lot of this weird cockamamie shit bouncing around at the time.
Peter: I would have read that book, honestly.
Michael: So, the book itself, first, it started as a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, obviously. Just like Fukuyama, it began as an article with a question mark. So, it started as the Clash of Civilizations. And then [Peter laughs] in 1996, when he expands into a book, it's the Clash of Civilizations. So, are you aware of the core thesis of the book?
Peter: I know a couple of things about it. One is I think that he was saying that the future conflicts, the next big conflicts will be between cultures, not nations. The part of the book that's discussed the most is that he talks about Islam, that the Western values v. Islam is the next big thing.
Michael: Yes. Most of the book is him laying out this idea that now that the Cold War is over, we can finally reckon with the rise of identities. He explicitly describes a much more violent, much more conflictual world in the future.
Peter: Does he have a basis for saying that we are diverging, that our identities in these certain areas are getting stronger? Or is it just that he's just like spit balling?
Michael: Peter, thank you. This transition's perfectly into the quote that I was going to send you.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: I'm sending you the first four paragraphs of the first chapter.
Peter: All right. "The years after the Cold War witnessed the beginnings of dramatic changes in peoples' identities and the symbols of those identities. Global politics began to be reconfigured along cultural lines. On April 18th, 1994, two thousand people rallied in Sarajevo waving the flags of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. By flying those banners, instead of UN, NATO, or American flags, these Sarajevans identified themselves with their fellow Muslims and told the world who were their real and not-so-real friends.
On October 16th, 1994 in Los Angeles, 70,000 people marched beneath "a sea of Mexican flags" protesting Proposition 187, a referendum which would deny many state benefits to illegal immigrants and their children. "Why are they walking down the street with a Mexican flag and demanding that this country give them a free education?" Observers asked. "They should be waving the American flag."
Michael: Ooh, yeah.
Peter: "These flag displays ensured victory for Proposition 187, which was approved by 59 percent of California voters. In the post-Cold War world flags count and so do other symbols of cultural identity, including crosses, crescents, and even head coverings, because culture counts, and cultural identity is what is most meaningful to most people."
Michael: Other than the sparkling prose, what do you think?
Peter: I would love to do an entire podcast about that prose, which really stuck with my brain [Michael laughs] in a way I'm not accustomed to. So, I'm noticing some little anecdotes being spun into symbols of world historical importance. Another thing that jumps out to me is what seems to be a pretty casual xenophobia.
Michael: What, the thing about how it's Mexica's fault that California voters took their rights away?
Peter: Blaming Mexicans for having their rights taken away, because they were protesting too mean.
Michael: Not great.
Peter: Saying that Muslims were announcing who their real and not so real friends were based on whose flags they were waving seems like a dramatic inference to make.
Michael: I know.
Peter: Saying something like, "Cultural identity is what is most meaningful to most people," that feels like a quantifiable statement of some kind, and yet, I do not see it being quantified.
Michael: Yes. You touched on one of the main hallmarks of the book, which is that he makes a series of sweeping statements and then he gives as evidence like, "Here's these two random things that [Peter laughs] have nothing to do with each other."
Peter: Are you sure that people not waving the UN flag is not a super important development that we should be digging into? Usually, you go to a protest and there's UN flags everyone's waving.
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: This is a little example of the way that he uses evidence in this book. But to try to take his argument seriously, his claim is that the fault lines of conflict are going to be, "civilizations." If this is your argument, obviously, the first thing you have to do is define a civilization.
Peter: Uh-huh.
Michael: The definition that he gives is, it's the biggest "we" that every person has. So, you are from New York. So, you have some sort of New York identity. You probably have some New York State identity. You feel more tied to people that live in Buffalo than who live in Albuquerque, probably. You probably have some East Coast pride, like West Coasters are weird Marianne Williamson people, and you're more down-to-earth tell-it-like-it-is guy. There's probably some sort of identity in there, right?
Peter: Yeah, I'm an Eric Adams guy.
Michael: Yeah. [laughs] I say that about you all the time. And then zooming out one more level, you probably have some American shit. You could also say at the most zoomed out level, you also probably consider yourself a citizen of the West, whatever that means. The war in Ukraine is probably more likely to hit you in the fields than the bombing in Yemen or something.
Peter: Sure.
Michael: That's really what he means by civilization, is that everybody has all of these overlapping identities. And basically, when you take them up to their highest level of abstraction, that's where you find a small number of civilizations globally that essentially everybody falls under one of these categories.
Peter: Okay. Okay.
Michael: You don't sound convinced.
Peter: Well, that's one of those things that is not objectionable in the general sense, but also too abstract to build a really coherent thesis around.
Michael: It's one of those things where it's like, "Yeah, you know, that probably exists as a concept."
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: We all contain probably, I don't know, 7, 12 identities. Those identities can be activated when certain things happen in the world or tell us to support certain political candidates for whatever reason, etc. The fact that those things exist, I think, is actually fairly unobjectionable.
Peter: This is the problem that all of these grand historical narrative attempts have in common. They're just trying to split these probably real, but still complex, overlapping people, and things into clean and distinct categories. And it's not something you can readily do.
Michael: Right. He's also making it the most important driver and the most important explanation for all world conflicts.
Peter: Right. [laughs]
Michael: So, okay, I'm going to send you actual map. The actual civilizations.
Peter: Oh. Wow, there's some real outliers here. Okay.
Michael: Mm-hmm.
Peter: So, this is the world divided by color, color coded into what I believe are civilizations. You have Western, which is Western Europe, US, and Canada. You have Latin American, which is almost everything below that. You have Islamic, which is just a broad paintbrush across North Africa and the Middle East. And then, you have East Asia divvied up into a bunch of different cultures. Sinic, Buddhist, Hindu. And then in the Russian sphere, the former Soviet Union is labeled "orthodox." And finally, you have Japan, which is its own civilization.
[laughter]
Michael: This is where I lost my fucking mind. [laughs]
Peter: Oh, my God. That's so fucking funny.
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: China and Japan are just their own civilizations. He's like, "I'm not going to try to figure this one out."
Michael: I have no evidence for this. I imagine that his thought process is something like, "Well, you can't put Japan with China, because these are very distinct cultures."
Peter: They were at war.
Michael: He's like, "Okay. So, we're going to carve off Japan." But then in the Chinese civilization, which he calls Sinic, he throws in North Korea.
Peter: Oh, yeah. And it looks like Vietnam too.
Michael: As soon as he carves off Japan, I'm like, "You should carve off all the countries."
Peter: The giant Latin American lump. And then, the fact that West African countries and Iran are in the same civilization, according to this, just because they're Muslim.
Michael: No differences.
Peter: You got to be fucking kidding me with this.
Michael: This is another thing that I also don't think gets enough attention is the fact that a lot of these civilizations are described in different ways. So, there's Buddhist, Hindu, orthodox. Those are religious distinctions. But then, he's got Africa, which is a geographic distinction, and then he's got the West. There's a very good critique of him that talks about his conception of the West that most of the things that he talks about as defining the West, like rule of law, and free rights, and all this kind of stuff. That's a lot of countries. But the things that he says are unique about the West, a huge number of other countries should then fall into the West. South Korea should absolutely be in the West by that definition.
One of the other things that I noticed while I was zooming in on various parts of this is that there's 14 different countries where he's split them in the middle and he's said that like, "Sudan is part Islamic and part African." But if what he's trying to explain is foreign policy, like the way [Peter laughs] that countries act on the world stage, you can't just say that one country is two. Because then by that definition, then most countries would be two or three or four or five depending on various immigrant groups that they have histories.
Peter: Right. As soon as you start chopping up the identities in any given country, all of a sudden, you have to concede that identities don't really map onto borders perfectly and perhaps, you should be using another framework entirely.
Michael: Right. Every country is a bunch of squabbling interest groups.
Peter: Yeah. It should be fairly intuitive that that's a stupid way to do this.
Michael: Yes. [laughs] He doesn't say this in the book, but I think as a result of getting all of these critiques of the original article, he comes up with a bunch of subgroups of civilizations. In each civilization, there are member states, core states, lone countries, cleft countries, and torn countries. The core countries is really self-explanatory. It's like the main country. So, China is the main country of the Sinic civilization. He's then got this thing of the cleft country. So, something like Ukraine is a cleft country. It's halfway in between the West and the orthodox civilization.
A torn country is something like Turkey. It has one foot in the Islamic world, but then there are large political movements trying to transform it into something that is more Western. Then, there's lone countries where he says, like Haiti is a lone country where Africa doesn't really want it and South America doesn't really want it either. It doesn't fit easily into either one of those categories, and it's its own thing.
There's, of course, intercivilizational conflicts, like civilizations fighting with each other, but there's also intracivilizational conflicts where countries are fighting over who is going to be the core country. Basically, he's done the responsible scholar thing where he's acknowledged all of these caveats. He said that like, "Yeah, civilizations can change over time and they have blurry borders. There's all these subgroups within them, and not every conflict is between civilizations."
Peter: Obviously, I'm oversimplifying an unreal amount to the point, where "Anything I say from here on in is completely useless.
Michael: Exactly.
Peter: But let's plow forward."
Michael: So, you're like 300 pages into this book and you're like, "What is the point of this book then?" If China goes to war with Iran, it's like, "Oh, it's like the Sinic civilization versus the Muslim civilization. Ooh, he's right." But then if China goes to war with Vietnam, a neighboring country, it's like, "Oh, it's an intra civilizational fight." What is an event on the world stage that this wouldn't explain?
Peter: Right. So, he puts out an essay that's basically like, "Oh, there are these different civilizations." And then a bunch of people are like, "Well, what about intra civilizational conflicts?" And so, he's like, "Oh, good point. I'll just put a chapter on that in my book."
Michael: Right.
Peter: So, every possible caveat has an avenue.
Michael: Yes.
Peter: Your thesis is, again, so abstract and so riddled with caveats that it just doesn't fucking mean anything. Why not drill down to the individual level at this point, right? Fuck it.
Michael: This is another thing is that, by the time he's come up with these categories of cleft country, lone country, core country, it's like, well, then you were just back to countries. The civilization framework is supposed to be an alternative to talking about countries acting in their national interest. Paraguay does stuff because of specific things happening in Paraguay. And then, this guy comes along and he's like, "No, no, no. Paraguay does things, because it's Latin American." But then, he breaks up Latin America into all of these subgroups where it's like, "Actually, Paraguay is a cleft country." It's like, "Yeah, that's what I said in the first place. Paraguay is doing Paraguay stuff."
Peter: It should be transparently obvious to anyone just glancing at this that someone who's writing a 400-page book and just going region by region, country by country, and giving descriptions of them is not an expert in any given thing that he talks about.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Peter: Instead, they're just crafting a language that allows them to talk about this stuff as if they are experts. "Oh, you're talking about Ukraine. That's a cleft country." It's like talking points for different countries when you're at the big international affairs meeting in Washington, D.C.
Michael: Exactly. Another thing that I came across in one of the critiques of him that I think is actually really insightful is also that he points out, I think correctly, that all of us have all of these overlapping identities. But the core of his thesis is that the identity at the highest level of abstraction is the strongest. If you want to understand Africans, their African identity is much more powerful to them than any sub-identities. But when you think about actual world conflicts and the way that most of world history has happened, it's exactly the opposite. If it comes down to one of my more proximate identities and this super abstract highest order identity, I'm going to pick the proximate identity every time.
Peter: Am I overthinking this or isn't the highest order identity just being a citizen of the earth?
Michael: He has a sentence on that. He says it's like, "Civilizations are the highest order of identification before human beings."
Peter: Okay.
Michael: But that's also a good point, because if we're talking about the highest order of abstraction, the highest order of abstraction is human being.
Peter: Right.
Michael: Even though Syria is not necessarily in "the West," and maybe I have closer ties mentally to Ukraine than to Syria, it's not that all of a sudden, my allegiance to the Ukraine is really, really strong, and then my allegiance to Syria is nonexistent.
Peter: Right. There's something in this thesis that is actually a question of psychology. In what circumstances is a given identity triggered and prioritized in a person's mind. There's research on this and it's a little bit weird to talk about it as a completely abstract thing. It's clearly more complicated than that. Not just that, but you're going to need data. You're going to need data if you want to make these claims.
Michael: But, Peter, some Mexicans were marching with a flag.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: Didn't you read the paragraph about the Mexicans?
Peter: Sorry, I forgot about all the data I've been given already.
Michael: So, after he defines all of these civilizations, he then gets into his vision of the future.
Peter: Okay.
Michael: So, first of all, the West is fading.
Peter: Okay.
Michael: Even though the Cold War is over and we won, all these other countries have developed. He specifically talks about indigenization, where basically, all of these countries, after they've thrown off the shackles of colonialism are getting a lot more confident. China is becoming this big economic powerhouse. There's African countries that are taking on a more African identity and forming trade relationships within themselves. I think this is true that post-colonialism, a lot of countries started to have national pride in a way that was literally illegal in a lot of places before that, right?
Peter: There's a weird dynamic that I saw in Fukuyama's book too. These guys came up during an era where international affairs from the United States' perspective was just bullying everyone.
Michael: Yes.
Peter: Then, we're entering this period where that's a little bit harder to do. Smaller countries are accruing political and economic power. These guys, the Huntingtons of the world, are gazing out upon all of us and thinking like, "Yeah, this is fucking annoying," right?
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: I want the US to be able to do whatever it wants. That's how we've been going about our shit. And now, we can't. And it's fucking annoying and no one's saying thank you.
Michael: I want to do the bad stuff, and yet, here you are telling me it's bad.
Peter: Right. [laughs]
Michael: This is the part of the book where he completely abandons his civilizational framework.
Peter: Mm-hmm. Okay.
Michael: So, he does all of this groundwork to talk about the Latin American civilization, the Buddhist civilization. And then he never talks about them again, because once he's established all of these civilizations, he says the real threat comes from two places, Asia and the Middle East.
Peter: What about cartels?
Michael: [laughs] He's leaving cartels on the table. Come on.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: A lot of the book actually focuses on the threat from Asia. It's just like the general fears about Japan buying up a bunch of American companies and being better at business than us. He keeps saying that Asia is going to want to impose "Asian values," which he always puts in quote marks. But then he never actually says like what those values are or why they're bad.
Peter: [laughs] Right.
Michael: Of course, the second part of that is that Islamic societies are becoming more fundamentalist.
Peter: Sure.
Michael: Muslim countries are getting more Muslim and they're super mad at us. You basically can't reason with these people, because they're bewitched by their ancient religion.
Peter: After everything we've done for them.
Michael: No. [laughs] Okay. One of my favorite things about reading these old books that have become cultural touchstones is how much random shit in them has been completely memory holed. So, he has a whole section about the greatest threat to the world is a Confucian-Islamic alliance, that the real threat isn't just the Asians and the Muslims separately. It's that the Asians and the Muslims are going to team up against us.
Peter: Okay. [laughs] Hold on. This whole theory is just like, "Well, they're both mad at us."
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: So, maybe they'll team up."
Michael: Then, he has some like-- This is one of the places where he does actually use statistics. He has stats on China selling arms to Pakistan or something. And then, actual regional experts will be like, "Dude, China's arms sales to the Middle East account for about 1% of their arms and America accounts for 33% of their arms."
Peter: Yeah, I was going to say good news. If you think that selling arms to someone makes them your ally, then we have nothing but friends all over the world.
Michael: He also has a thing where one of the reasons we can't trust Middle Eastern countries, because Islamic countries are more prone to violence than non-Muslim countries. He's like, "If you look at the statistics, Muslim countries have higher military spending for their populations."
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: Are you really going to do this?
Peter: Oh, shit.
Michael: From America, you're right. In America. Okay.
Peter: So, look, not only is America's military spending unreal large, but yeah, we've turned the Middle East into a proxy war zone for 80 years. So, yeah, some of those countries are arming up pretty reasonably.
Michael: We're only going to invade two of these countries in the next 10 years. So, come on, everybody relax.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: So, this is his vision. This is basically his core case of, this is what the next 50 years of the world is going to look like. This Islamic-Confucian uppity, Asian people and Muslims. So, of course, the question that one asks is, well, what is his evidence for this thesis? Because one of the interesting things about the book-- This is another place where he caveats himself into oblivion. He's making this bold prediction about the next 50 years. But he says that, "Anything that happened during the Cold War, it doesn't really count," because it's not really evidence for his thesis or evidence against his thesis, because it was like under the rubric of the Cold War.
He also says that anything that happened before the Cold War also doesn't really matter for his thesis, because it was before the rise of identity politics and it was before the rise of globalization. Countries weren't as connected back then. There wasn't as much travel. There wasn't as much migration. When you think of something like World War I, you can't really put that in the civilizational paradigm, because there were all these other things going on at the time that were specific to that period in history.
Peter: So, his rubric for understanding the entire world does not apply, if you go back five years, because there are other variables that his rubric does not account for.
Michael: Exactly. As I'm reading this, I'm crossing off periods of history in my head, because he's writing the book in 1996. Anything before 1989 doesn't count. So, basically, [Peter laughs] all that leaves him with is fucking 1989 until 1995, essentially, right?
Peter: Right.
Michael: Basically, the only options for things that can support his thesis, and he spends like two chapters talking about this is the Gulf War in 1991 and the Balkan War of 1993, but throughout the 1990s.
Peter: Right.
Michael: So, I'm going to send you another brick of text about the Gulf War.
Peter: Okay.
Michael: This is his case for why the Gulf War means that he is correct.
Peter: Here we go. "The Gulf War thus began as a war between Iraq and Kuwait, then became a war between Iraq and the West, then one between Islam and the West, and eventually, came to be viewed by many non-Westerners as a war of East versus West. Millions of Muslims from Morocco to China rallied behind Saddam Hussein and acclaimed him a Muslim hero. 75% of India's one hundred million Muslims blamed the United States for the war, and Indonesia's 171 million Muslims were almost universally against US military action in the Gulf." Audacity.
Michael: I know.
Peter: "Arab intellectuals lined up in similar fashion and formulated intricate rationales for overlooking Saddam's brutality and denouncing Western intervention. King Hussein of Jordan argued, "This is a war against all Arabs and all Muslims and not against Iraq alone."'
Michael: Facts.
Peter: Droppin' knowledge.
Michael: Knowledge.
Peter: I love that [laughs] the amount of people worldwide who opposed American intervention is like them taking sides for Islamic civilization or something. Is that what that is supposed to be?
Michael: Yes.
Peter: This is very interesting in part, because if you view the Gulf War as I do, and I think many people do as like a part of a chain of events that ended up with the complete destruction of Iraq, like the rise of ISIS, the war in Syria, etc., then the idea that opposing it is something irrational or something that you would only do if you were too tied to your Muslim identity. Just insanely wrong. Insanely fucking wrong.
Michael: Yes.
Peter: So reductive. Okay. All right, I'll let you go.
Michael: I'm all coiled up, waiting to debunk this.
Peter: Go ahead.
Michael: Okay. One of the best articles I read, really, really, really good article is called The Clash of Civilizations, an Islamicist Critique by a guy named Roy Mottahedeh, and he has this great section on the Gulf War, where he points out that it's true that Saddam Hussein was trying to do the like, "We're all Muslims here, guys."
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: But then as soon as he invaded Kuwait, the Arab league voted to side with the United States.
Peter: Yes.
Michael: Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, Morocco, and Bangladesh, all sent troops. Turkey closed a pipeline to fuck with Iraq.
Peter: Yeah. No, this is in like Islamic-American relations, the Gulf War is an important symbolic turning point, because it showed how many Middle Eastern actors had aligned their interests with the United States to the point where they felt obligated to participate actively in the war effort.
Michael: Exactly. And so, it's actually true that Saddam was pretty popular throughout the Muslim world before the Iraq war. But then all of the Gulf states, 70% of the population opposed Saddam invading Kuwait, because they thought it went against Islamic law.
Peter: Uh-huh.
Michael: Egypt and Morocco, both were anti-Saddam. The only country where the majority of the population thought it was cool for Saddam to invade Kuwait was Jordan. And Jordan had some specific stuff going on, because there were all these rumors that Israel was going to invade Jordan at the time.
Peter: Yeah. First of all, Mike, you're not accounting for the fact that a lot of those countries you just described are torn countries [Michael laughs] and some of them are also cleft countries. This attempts to paint that part of the world as monolithic are never ending on the part of the American elite. To see it come from someone in this position who is at least holding himself out as an expert on international affairs generally, it really drives home, this comes down from the highest levels of academia and government, the idea that Muslims are one thing. They exist over there, and they are representing a singular set of interests.
Michael: One of the things that I think all of his thudding prose can distract you from is that if you zoom out, this is one of the only pieces of evidence for his thesis. We're going to have more clashes of civilizations. It is a case in which a Muslim country invaded another Muslim country and America intervened on behalf of the Muslim country. Some Muslim countries supported it, and some didn't. [Peter chuckles] That doesn't speak to an existential crisis in which the West and Muslims are going to be at war for the next 50 years.
Peter: Yeah, ironically, he probably would have had a stronger case in this section, if he had waited a few years and you get to build in the 9/11 narrative.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: I don't know if that's where you're going next, but I'm curious how that factors in in your mind, or if he wrote any follow-up or if anyone else analyzed it in light of post-9/11 developments, shall we say.
Michael: Well, one thing that actually bugs me about this is because, of course, I only heard of this book after 9/11. I think most of the population, it really became canonical for the population after 9/11, because it was supposed to be like, "Oh, well, this explains what's going on." He barely mentions terrorism in the book.
Peter: Oh.
Michael: It's not actually the case that 9/11 proves him right. He doesn't really mention the possibility of a terror attack in America. His core thesis is that little territorial skirmishes, things like Iraq versus Kuwait, which ultimately on the world stage don't have to become a huge deal. What's going to happen with these things is states are going to step into them on various teams and these conflicts are going to escalate. He doesn't really mention non-state actors. He also doesn't mention oil in this book. He doesn't mention other things [Peter laughs] that would cause conflict among countries.
Peter: Incredible to talk at length about the Gulf War and not mention oil.
Michael: That's the thing. Most conflicts between countries are between neighboring countries over some resource. You want more land, minerals in the ground. That's most of world history. That's what the conflicts have been between neighboring states and that's basically what fucking the Gulf War was. Saddam did it because he owed Kuwait money and he didn't want to pay them back. Kuwait was dumping a bunch of oil onto world markets and keeping prices low, and Saddam was mad because it was cutting into his profits. It's like petty dictator stuff.
Peter: Yeah. We got involved because we are looking to spread freedom and democracy all across the globe.
Michael: America, the good guys, yet again.
Peter: [chuckles]
Michael: That's the thing is this fight is actually fairly typical and he's trying to whip it up into this meringue of like it's something completely different. The best way to understand the Gulf War is to see it as a fight between civilizations. It's like, you look into the specifics and it's like, "No man, the best way to understand it is just the dynamics of these specific states."
Peter: There's something interesting about the fact that he doesn't mention terrorism, because if you start with this idea that in the post-Cold War era, we're going to see slightly more atomized identities, you would think that would lead to the idea that non-state actors are going to play a significant role. But because he's such a fucking basic bitch state department hack, [Michael laughs] even when he's saying, "Oh, the Islamic and Western worlds are going to be in conflict," he totally misses on what the nature of that conflict is going to be.
Michael: Right. Okay. It gets much worse with his second example, because the only other thing that can support his thesis that happens in the early 1990s is the Balkans.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: This actually supports his thesis slightly better in that, it's Serbs who are orthodox and Bosnians who are Muslims, and it is actually true that a lot of Muslim countries intervened on behalf of the Bosnians and went with Team Bosnia.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: Then, Serbia was pretty substantially backed by Russia. This Balkan conflict doesn't necessarily need to be a global conflict, but all of a sudden, it becomes one. So, I'm going to send you, this is his explanation for why the Balkan War broke out.
Peter: Okay. "Probably the single most important factor leading to the conflict was the demographic shift that took place in Kosovo. Kosovo was an autonomous province within Serbia. In 1961, its population was two-thirds Albanian Muslim and one-quarter Orthodox Serb. The Albanian birth rate, however, was the highest in Europe, and Kosovo became the most densely populated area of Yugoslavia. Facing those numbers, Serbs emigrated from Kosovo in pursuit of economic opportunities in Belgrade and elsewhere. As a result, in 1991, Kosovo was 90% Muslim and 10% Serb.
According to Serbs, discrimination, persecution, and violence against Serbs subsequently intensified. Numerous violent incidents took place which included property damage, loss of jobs, harassment, rapes, fights, and killings. As a result, the Serbs claimed that the threat to them was of genocidal proportions and that they could no longer tolerate it."
Michael: So, this entire sequence could have been written by Slobodan Milošević. Why are there all these tensions in the Balkans in the early 1990s? Huntington's actual explanation is that Muslims were having too many babies.
Peter: I thought that I was perhaps misunderstanding the point being made here. But this quote at the end saying that the Serbs claimed that the threat to them was of genocidal proportions, that is itself being used to defend a genocidal impulse. Am I wrong?
Michael: This is the rhetoric that starts to appear before ethnic cleansings.
Peter: Right.
Michael: If we don't do it to them, they're going to do it to us. And so, he says exactly the same thing about Bosnians. He's describing the Muslim birth rates in Bosnian, like Bosnians are having too many babies. He actually says, this is a real quote, he says, "Ethnic expansion by one group led to ethnic cleansing by the other."
Peter: Oof.
Michael: He literally quotes a Serbian fucking soldier saying, "We have to do this to them or else they're going to come to our villages and do it to us, because there's too many of them."
Peter: Oh, Jesus Christ.
Michael: He has this whole section called Islam's Bloody Borders, where he talks about-- if you basically draw a circle around the Muslim world, everywhere along that circle, everywhere the Muslim world intersects with other civilizations, you find conflicts. He's using the term "conflict" very deliberately. So, he talks about the Chechen Muslims. He talks about the fucking Uyghurs in China. And then, he has this conclusion that's like, "Well, wherever you find Muslims, you find conflict."
Peter: Yeah, that's one way to put it.
Michael: Right. Well, yeah, [Peter laughs] they're conflicts in the sense that Muslims are very obviously facing discrimination. You could easily look around the world in the late 1800s and be like, "Everywhere you find Jews, you just find debates about whether Jews are really bad for the population. I don't know."
Peter: We're building towards almost this self-fulfilling prophecy.
Michael: Right.
Peter: Here, you have this deeply influential person saying the next big conflict is between the US or the Western interests and the Islamic world. It's hard to know how much of that conflict is shaped by the fact that influential people define the conflict as us versus Islam.
Michael: This has been written up in many an academic paper is like, "Once you start believing this shit, you're going to act like it. Once you start acting like the Muslim world is this monolith, you're going to act like it's a threat." This is actually why I really object to this book still being on so many syllabi, because the average American undergrad is not going to know enough about the Gulf War or the Balkan War to know how fucking egregious these things are.
Peter: I didn't quite realize we'd get into genocide victim blaming in this book.
Michael: [chuckles] Right.
Peter: I didn't think that it got that dark.
Michael: Right.
Peter: A lot of the basic thesis is just obviously wrong. It doesn't account for various geopolitical alliances that contradict this cultural framing. The US has what is now a longstanding alliance with Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that it's a hardliner Islamic state. The whole West v. Islam framing, it feels like it's just this convenient thing to convey to the public because like, "Oh, we're actually constantly maneuvering to find geopolitical leverage and don't really have any particular set of ideals or beliefs other than our own power." That's not a mission statement that people are going to love, if you put it out there.
Michael: My other favorite thing about using this as an example, again, this is a conflict between Muslims and orthodox people in which America intervened on behalf of the Muslims.
Peter: Right. [laughs]
Michael: America teamed up with parts of the Muslim world to help out the Bosnians due to the specific circumstances going on in the Western Balkans. It makes no sense to see this as civilizational terms and it especially doesn't make sense to see it in civilizational terms in which America sided with a different civilization.
Peter: [laughs] Yeah.
Michael: There aren't really any Western versus the rest dynamics going on here.
Peter: If your thesis starts hitting this point, where it's just caveat after caveat after caveat, then maybe thesis sucks. It's so wild to see these theorists rise to prominence on the backs of oversimplification of just turning every complex situation into a little sound bite.
Michael: What's also amazing to me is that he oftentimes does actually admit the weaknesses of his arguments, but he just hand waves them away. So, in this section, he says like, "Yeah, yeah. America intervened on behalf of the Muslims. But America did not send ground troops." It's like, "Well, [Peter laughs] why is that the important distinction?"
Peter: Right. There's an idea in the law called distinctions without a difference, right?
Michael: Right.
Peter: When someone is trying to differentiate between two things, they start grabbing on to any distinction they can even if they're not meaningful distinctions. That's what he's doing here.
Michael: "Yes, yes, we intervened on behalf of the Muslims, but we didn't super-duper intervene." It's right, but your theory predicts that we would not intervene, and yet we did.
Peter: We did put boots on the ground in Kuwait. However, we did not conduct a full-scale invasion of Iraq.
Michael: So, civilizations-- [crosstalk]
Peter: There's always a line. There's always a pretend line you can draw.
Michael: Okay. So, then, the last section, the last two chapters of the book are where he gets into what he really wants to say, and it's straight up Great Replacement. It reads like a fucking mass shooter manifesto.
Peter: Hell yeah.
Michael: So, from this completely unconvincing world system of civilizations, which he then completely abandons and is like, Asia and Muslims, then he abandons the Asia part, and then he's like, "Muslims are bad," and then it's like, "What do we do about this? How do we prevent this coming wave of conflict?" He basically lands on like, "We need to preserve the values of the West."
Peter: Oh.
Michael: So, I'm going to send you another little clip from this.
Peter: Oh. This is a lot of words when you only need 14.
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: Oh, okay. "Rejection of the American crate means the end of the United States of America as we have known it. It also means, effectively, the end of Western civilization. If the United States is de-Westernized, the West is reduced to Europe and a few lightly populated overseas European settler countries. This is not just a problem of economics and demography. Far more significant are the problems of moral decline, cultural suicide, and political disunity in the West. Oft pointed to manifestations of moral decline include, one, increases in antisocial behavior such as crime, drug use, and violence generally. Two, family decay, including increased rates of divorce, illegitimacy, teenage pregnancy, and single-parent families. Three, at least in the United States, a decline in social capital, that is, membership in voluntary associations, and the interpersonal trust associated with such membership. Four, general weakening of the work ethic and rise of a cult of personal [Michael laughs] indulgence. Five, decreasing commitment to learning and intellectual activity manifested in the United States in lower levels of scholastic achievement."
Michael: Boom. How do we preserve the West? Just a bunch of deranged conservative boilerplate.
Peter: Yeah. This is Pat Buchanan shit, right?
Michael: Yes.
Peter: This is just pure conservative reactionary pearl clutching.
Michael: Moral decline.
Peter: Moral decline. Well, how do you measure a moral decline? Well, let me just point to several things, some of which exist, some of which don't, lump it all together.
Michael: I know. [laughs]
Peter: You have increases in antisocial behavior such as crime, drug use, and violence generally, all of which were plummeting at the time he wrote this and continued to plummet for decades. Decline in social capital, that's so abstract, I'm not even going to fucking bother. Weakening of work ethic, this is just fucking old guy complaint that old guys have been saying forever. It's like, "The lazy kids don't work like we used to." I knew Huntington was a conservative, but I didn't think that he was just like your based grandpa Facebook level conservative.
Michael: I feel like an underrated critique of this book is that its conclusions do not follow from its premises at all. So, basically, his diagnosis of the world is that we're all splitting into these civilizations along cultural lines. But then, his prescription is to emphasize what makes us different, and in his mind, what makes us better than the other civilizations. He talks in this passage about being de-Westernized, and he's essentially saying like, "Oh, we need to re-Westernize." But why? [laughs]
Peter: Right. The future of the world is identity politics, so we need to pick ours and I choose white. [laughs]
Michael: Right. If you think about the European example, where for hundreds of years, people in France and Germany would have said, "We're a totally different civilization from them," they're constantly at war with each other, constantly skirmishing over various resources and territory, etc. And then, what you have in a fairly short period over the last 50 years, you have all of this economic integration, free movement, exchange programs, where they're studying in each other's country and they're learning each other's language. And now, for basically anybody under 50 years old, the idea of France and Germany going to war with each other is this like comical, sci-fi notion. It makes no sense. Looking back, it's like, "Oh, what seemed to be a civilizational conflict turns out to be ultimately pretty superficial."
Rather than include any historical context or any mature conflict management strategies, he's basically looking around the world and he's like, "The problem today is that everyone thinks that their own culture is superior and they're willing to go to war for it, but it turns out that our culture is superior, and we need to demonstrate that."
Peter: [laughs] That's what's interesting about this is a lot of these complaints are symptoms of a liberalizing culture, things like divorce rates. If you're Samuel Huntington and that's your concern, then perhaps check out divorce rates in the Muslim world.
Michael: Right. [laughs]
Peter: The bottom line is that a lot of the complaints about the Islamic world are complaints about these particularly conservative elements of the Islamic world. And to see conservatives make them one hand and then also make the case for the rise of those conservative elements in our own society, it's transparent. I would think that someone like Huntington would be very slightly above that, but I suppose not, and that's what I get for giving a Harvard guy credit.
Michael: This is one of the bullets in my notes. He says very explicitly throughout the book that like one of the reasons you can tell that Muslims are less civilized, one of the pieces of evidence he gives for that is he's like, "Look at the way that they treat women and minorities. You wouldn't want to be a Christian minority in a Muslim state, right, guys?" But then, we get to this chapter and it's like, "What if our immigrants are uniquely bad?" It's like, shouldn't you be admiring them for cracking down on their minorities? Maybe their minorities are going to destroy their civilization too. This is Islamicist rhetoric.
Peter: Right. What happened to that complaint about Mexicans who were too angry at us for our anti-immigration laws?
Michael: Also, do you want to know what he says about Mexicans?
Peter: Uhh, do I?
Michael: Because I was wondering. I was like, "Is he going to return to this?"
Peter: Sure.
Michael: He says, "While Muslims pose the immediate problem to Europe," he's talking about Muslim immigrants, "Mexicans pose the problem for the United States. The central issue will remain the degree to which Hispanics are assimilated into American society as previous immigrant groups have been. Second- and third-generation Hispanics face a wide array of incentives and pressures to do so. Mexican immigration, on the other hand, differs in potentially important ways from other immigrations." This is my favorite fucking argument when it's like, in one breath you admit you're like, "Well, every previous immigrant group has eventually within one generation assimilated into American society. But these new immigrants, [Peter laughs] they're not going to assimilate." Well, this is the same thing they said about Italians, Russians, Poles. And then, he has this whole fucking thing of like, "Mexicans can't assimilate because other immigrants crossed an ocean to get to America, but Mexicans crossed the land."
Peter: Europeans were coming west. Mexicans are going north. They are not going against the wind. I love this, "They crossed an ocean" thing. You have Guatemalans fleeing a civil war around the time that this is being written, walking all the way up through Mexico into the United States, and his position is like, "Well, that's too easy." [laughs]
Michael: They haven't experienced hardship, you know?
Peter: Get the fuck out.
Michael: So, he ends the book. This is the closing paragraph. He says, "The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power."
Peter: Well, I'm glad that we are not from a culture that is convinced of its own superiority. Could you imagine what that would be like?
Michael: I know. People who are anxious about losing their relative position in society and who think their culture is best.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: Huh, no, don't see anybody like that around.
Peter: We're only a couple books in on this podcast when it comes to these types of weird "theory of everything" books.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: One day, we will have a comprehensive theory of these dudes.
Michael: Right.
Peter: There's something so unique going on in their brain where they believe that they are capable of capturing these complex phenomena, boiling them down to something simple, and then throwing them out in a quick book that, frankly, should be a lengthy essay at most.
Michael: Yeah, a magazine article.
Peter: Right. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but I fucking will. I swear. [laughs]
Michael: This leads us into the epilogue of the episode about the book's legacy and debunking.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: One of the essays about the book and about Huntington specifically that I found really interesting was by Edward Said, and what he pointed out is that most Americans don't know very much about different countries. The population, to understand world events, relies on narratives. We need a story to slot world events into. And oftentimes, those narratives are supplied by elites. The Cold War was, in some way, a narrative that was constructed by people like Samuel Huntington. Said has speeches by Huntington in the 1970s and 1980s, where he just openly talks about, he's like, "Well, to do the things that we wanted to do with American military power, we had to cast every single thing that happened on the world stage as part of the Cold War." That was partly a social construction. It was partly real too, but it was a very deliberate effort to create that kind of narrative for people.
Peter: That's why this is so disconcerting, because he's almost framing it like a prediction. But what it is, is a fucking bat signal to American elites.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: "Here's what I think should be next."
Michael: Edward Said says, "It's a brief and crudely articulated manual in the art of maintaining a wartime status in the minds of Americans." That's partly what he's doing here. I don't think Huntington has calculated-- I think he believed this stuff, frankly. But I think that the reason elites latched onto it, because as we've said, a billion of these books were published. The fact that this book became so canonical is more interesting than the book itself and people latched on to this as like, "Oh, it's the next justification for us to keep our military this big."
Peter: There really is this conservative thing where they need to seek out conflict. I think it was Corey Robin in The Reactionary Mind wrote a bunch about this. In the 1990s, when things were relatively peaceful, there was an industry by the end of the decade on the right of just think pieces about how we needed a fight. Not even saying like, "Oh, I think the Islamic world is next," or anything like that necessarily, but just saying that like, "In general, we need a fight."
Michael: One of the reasons I really liked this Edward Said essay-- I mean, he wrote a couple of them, but his overall argument is that it has a very Marge Gunderson at the end of Fargo thing. He talks about how the central tragedy of Clash of Civilizations is that it was written this time when, yes, there was a power vacuum. He has this very moving section where he talks about, humanity was facing at that time a lot of common challenges. Yes, there are civilizations and they do have differences, but there's no inherent reason why those differences have to lead to conflict. You could have looked for something that like, "Hey, we can all collaborate on building a better world together." We have this wartime nuclear bombs hanging over us curtain that has just been lifted. Instead of trying to build that world or even entertain the idea, it's like, who are we fighting next?" It's just ugly.
I like that he pointed that out that it's not just the factual errors in Huntington's book, it's also just like, "Why do this? Why are you like this?"
Peter: Yeah. And how could you not be if you're an international affairs guy, a little bit inspired by the concept that the next era might not be defined by the threat of violence coming from somewhere else and the need for us to match it with force of our own? The Soviet Union falls, and rather than looking around for who to punch next, you could be saying, "Wow, maybe I could put my guard down for a bit." Wouldn't that have been a beautiful sentiment to see coming from some of our elites at the time, perhaps?
Michael: Right, like a little Marshall Plan, like a global Marshall Plan of like, "Let's look at who we can help. Let's think about what things we can work together on." Antibacterial resistance or something. [laughs] Find something fun to do together, you know?
Peter: There's something to be said for the fact that the two books that we've read that are essentially about the same topic in some form or another come from Fukuyama and Huntington, who are both deeply connected with the state department. It says something about how our elites think. They come from this Cold War era and that's where they've succeeded in a world where the US is very invested in forcibly bullying smaller nations and asserting itself globally at all times. If you were like an international affairs expert in 1990, that's all you know. You're not an expert in peace. [laughs] You're not an expert in prosperity. You're an expert in fighting.
Michael: That speaks to the last thing I want to talk about which is like, where the book is now. Paul Musgrave, who's a political scientist has written a bunch of essays about the weird zombie longevity of this book. It's assigned in introductory classes. He acknowledges the fact that a lot of professors who assign this book would also talk about critiques of it and they're not necessarily endorsing it. That's what college is for, is to talk about paradigms that are no longer relevant. But also, this book is assigned more than Aristotle.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: Do we need this book in every introductory class? It's been totally debunked. Every time you have a book like this in a classroom, it's like there are books that are correct that you're not assigning. There's a slot on a syllabus that you're wasting on a wrong book that-- He emphasizes that no scholars take this seriously. And Samuel Huntington, his next book was called Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, and he published an excerpt of it in Foreign Policy in 2004 that was headlined The Hispanic Challenge.
Peter: Ooh. Oh, boy.
Michael: He became a total fucking crank later in his life. We know this and we're all supposed to pretend that he wrote this book based on his academic analysis of world affairs and not his ugly grandpa xenophobia.
Peter: There's only one circumstance we should be teaching this book, and it's as essentially a proof that there's no such thing as an international affairs expert.
Michael: Right. [laughs]
Peter: Don't be like Samuel Huntington. This was an embarrassing time for all of us. Let's move on to the real shit.
Michael: So, I want to end with this quote from Paul Musgrave. He says, "The longevity of Huntington’s thesis becomes more explicable when we treat it not as scholarship aimed at skeptics but as a sermon preached to the faithful. The creed that Huntington and his audience share holds that civilizations exist as unchanging cultural organisms, that the rise of other regions threatens Western civilization, and that a successful Western response requires purity at home and separation from the rest. These are not factual assertions. They are unfalsifiable axioms. Trying to “fact-check” Huntington’s more specific claims is useful but shouldn’t lead us to miss the larger point of his project.
Huntington’s myriad bigotries are not deviations from a generally sound approach. Rather, they sit at the heart of the book’s appeal. Huntington’s civilizational paradigm complements his nativism, his hostility to social change, and his profound lack of interest in economics and politics. As long as a constituency that subscribes to its axioms can be found, clash-style logic will survive, no matter how costly or dangerous its prescriptions may be."
Peter: Well, fucking owned.
Michael: Owned. [laughs] Yeah.
Peter: I do think it's notable that this is in many ways a normative text. It's prescriptive. It is not simply that he is trying to say, "Hey, this is what I think is happening in the world." He is writing a prescription for a more reactionary and isolated United States, one that's more defensive, more aggressive towards specific cultures. That's not just him saying, "Here's the world as I see it. It's here's the world as I want it to be."
Michael: You sound like somebody in the midst of a dire moral decline, Peter.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: Typical.
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