From The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Samuel P. Huntington, 1996) p318-21
Some Americans have promoted multiculturalism at home; some have promoted universalism abroad; and some have done both. Multiculturalism at home threatens the United States and the West; universalism abroad threatens the West and the world. Both deny the uniqueness of Western culture. The global monoculturalists want to make the world like America. The domestic multiculturalists want to make America like the world. A multicultural America is impossible because a non-Western America is not American. A multi-cultural world is unavoidable because global empire is impossible. The preservation of the United States and the West requires the renewal of Western identity. The security of the world requires acceptance of global multiculturality.
Does the vacuousness of Western universalism and the reality of global cultural diversity lead inevitably and irrevocably to moral and cultural relativism? If universalism legitimates imperialism, does relativism legitimate repression? Once again, the answer to these questions is yes and no. Cultures are relative; morality is absolute. Cultures, as Michael Walzer has argued, are “thick”; they prescribe institutions and behavior patterns to guide humans in the paths which are right in a particular society. Above, beyond, and growing out of this maximalist morality, however, is a “thin” minimalist morality that embodies “reiterated features of particular thick or maximal moralities.” Minimal moral concepts of truth and justice are found in all thick moralities and cannot be divorced from them. There are also minimal moral “negative injunctions, most likely, rules against murder, deceit, torture, oppression, and tyranny.” What people have in common is “more the sense of a common enemy [or evil] than the commitment to a common culture.” Human society is “universal because it is human, particular because it is a society.” At times we march with others; mostly we march alone. Yet a “thin” minimal morality does derive from the common human condition, and “universal dispositions” are found in all cultures. Instead of promoting the supposedly universal features of one civilization, the requisites for cultural coexistence demand a search for what is common to most civilizations. In a multicivilizational world, the constructive course is to renounce universalism, accept diversity, and seek commonalities.
A relevant effort to identify such commonalities in a very small place occurred in Singapore in the early 1990s. The people of Singapore are roughly 76 percent Chinese, 15 percent Malay and Muslim, and 6 percent Indian Hindu and Sikh. In the past the government has attempted to promote “Confucian values” among its people but it has also insisted on everyone being educated in and becoming fluent in English. In January 1989 President Wee Kim Wee in his address opening Parliament pointed to the extensive exposure of the 2,7 million Singaporeans to outside cultural influences from the West which had “put them in close touch with new ideas and technologies from abroad” but had “also exposed” them “to alien lifestyles and values.” “Traditional Asian ideas of morality, duty and society which have sustained us in the past,” he warned, “are giving way to a more Westemized, individualistic, and selfcentered outlook on life.” It is necessary, he argued, to identify the core values which Singapore’s different ethnic and religious communities had in common and “which capture the essence of being a Singaporean.”
President Wee suggested four such values: “placing society above self, upholding the family as the basic building block of society, resolving major issues through consensus instead of contention, and stressing racial and religious tolerance and harmony.” His speech led to extensive discussion of Singaporean values and two years later a White Paper setting forth the government’s position. The White Paper endorsed all four of the president’s suggested values but added a fifth on support of the individual, largely because of the need to emphasize the priority of individual merit in Singaporean society as against Confucian values of hierarchy and family, which could lead to nepotism. The White Paper defined the “Shared Values” of Singaporeans as:
Nation before [ethnic] community and society above self;
Family as the basic unit of society;
Regard and community support for the individual;
Consensus instead of contention;
Racial and religious harmony.
While citing Singapore’s commitment to parliamentary democracy and excellence in government, the statement of Shared Values explicitly excluded political values from its purview. The government emphasized that Singapore was “in crucial respects an Asian society” and must remain one. “Singaporeans are not Americans or Anglo-Saxons, though we may speak English and wear Western dress. If over the longer term Singaporeans became indistinguishable from Americans, British or Australians, or worse became a poor imitation of them [i.e., a torn country], we will lose our edge over these Western societies which enables us to hold our own internationally.”
The Singapore project was an ambitious and enlightened effort to define a Singaporean cultural identity which was shared by its ethnic and religious communities and which distinguished it from the West. Certainly a statement of Western and particularly American values would give far more weight to the rights of the individual as against those of the community, to freedom of expression and truth emerging out of the contest of ideas, to political participation and competition, and to the rule of law as against the rule of expert, wise, and responsible governors, Yet even so, while they might supplement the Singaporean values and give some lower priority, few Westerners would reject those values as unworthy. At least at a basic “thin” morality level, some commonalities exist between Asia and the West. In addition, as many have pointed out, whatever the degree to which they divided humankind, the world’s major religions – Western Christianity, Orthodoxy, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism – also share key values in common. If humans are ever to develop a universal civilization, it will emerge gradually through the exploration and expansion of these commonalities. Thus, in addition to the abstention rule and the joint mediation rule, the third rule for peace in a multicivilizational world is the commonalities rule: peoples in all civilizations should search for and attempt to expand the values, institutions, and practices they have in common with peoples of other civilizations.
This effort would contribute not only to limiting the clash of civilizations but also to strengthening Civilization in the singular (hereafter capitalized for clarity). The singular Civilization presumably refers to a complex mix of higher levels of morality, religion, learning, art, philosophy, technology, material wellbeing, and probably other things. These obviously do not necessarily vary together. Yet scholars easily identify highpoints and lowpoints in the level of Civilization in the histories of civilizations. The question then is: How can one chart the ups and downs of humanity’s development of Civilization? Is there a general, secular trend, transcending individual civilizations, toward higher levels of Civilization? If there is such a trend, is it a product of the processes of modernization that increase the control of humans over their environment and hence generate higher and higher levels of technological sophistication and material well-being? In the contemporary era, is a higher level of modernity thus a prerequisite to a higher level of Civilization? Or does the level of Civilization primarily vary within the history of individual civilizations?
This issue is another manifestation of the debate over the linear or cyclical nature of history. Conceivably modernization and human moral development produced by greater education, awareness, and understanding of human society and its natural environment produce sustained movement toward higher and higher levels of Civilization. Alternatively, levels of Civilization may simply reflect phases in the evolution of civilizations. When civilizations first emerge, their people are usually vigorous, dynamic, brutal, mobile, and expansionist. They are relatively unCivilized. As the civilization evolves it becomes more settled and develops the techniques and skills that make it more Civilized. As the competition among its constituent elements tapers off and a universal state emerges, the civilization reaches its highest level of Civilization, its “golden age,” with a lowering of morality, art, literature, philosophy, technology, and martial, economic, and political competence. As it goes into decay as a civilization, its level of Civilization also declines until it disappears under the onslaught of a different surging civilization with a lower level of Civilization.
Modernization has generally enhanced the material level of Civilization throughout the world. But has it also enhanced the moral and cultural dimensions of Civilization? In some respects this appears to be the case. Slavery, torture, vicious abuse of individuals, have become less and less acceptable in the contemporary world. Is this, however, simply the result of the impact of Western civilization on other cultures and hence will a moral reversion occur as Western power declines? Much evidence exists in the 1990s for the relevance of the “sheer chaos” paradigm of world affairs: a global breakdown of law and order, failed states and increasing anarchy in many parts of the world, a global crime wave, transnational mafias and drug cartels, increasing drug addiction in many societies, a general weakening of the family, a decline in trust and social solidarity in many countries, ethnic, religious, and civilizational violence and rule by the gun prevalent in much of the world. In city after city – Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok, Shanghai, London, Rome, Warsaw, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Delhi, Karachi, Cairo, Bogota, Washington – crime seems to be soaring and basic elements of Civilization fading away. People speak of a global crisis in governance. The rise of transnational corporations producing economic goods is increasingly matched by the rise of transnational criminal mafias, drug cartels, and terrorist gangs violently assaulting Civilization. Law and order is the first prerequisite of Civilization and in much of the world – Africa, Latin America, the former Soviet Union, South Asia, the Middle East – it appears to be evaporating, while also under serious assault in China, Japan, and the West. On a worldwide basis Civilization seems in many respects to be yielding to barbarism, generating the image of an unprecedented phenomenon, a global Dark Ages, possibly descending on humanity.
In the 1950s Lester Pearson warned that humans were moving into “an age when different civilizations will have to learn to live side by side in peaceful interchange, learning from each other, studying each other’s history and ideals and art and culture, mutually enriching each others’ lives. The alternative, in this overcrowded little world, is misunderstanding, tension, clash, and catastrophe.” The futures of both peace and Civilization depend upon understanding and cooperation among the political, spiritual, and intellectual leaders of the world’s major civilizations. In the clash of civilizations, Europe and America will hang together or hang separately. In the greater Clash, the global “real clash,” between Civilization and barbarism, the world’s great civilizations, with their rich accomplishments in religion, art, literature, philosophy, science, technology, morality, and compassion, will also hang together or hang separately. In the emerging era, clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war.
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