It has always baffled me why those most interested in understanding and changing the barbaric domination that characterizes our modernity often—not always—withhold from the very people they are most concerned with the right to complex personhood. — Avery Gordon1
In the summer of 1993, Foreign Affairs published an article by American political scientist and academic Samuel P. Huntington titled “Clash of Civilizations?” Thought by some to be prophetic, the author claimed to foretell a new phase of history, one in which civilizations opposed to one another in ways of life and viewpoints on the world—especially Islamic civilizations and “the West”—would clash, likely violently, in a bid for dominance over one another and over the world. Huntington goes on to prescribe a series of belligerent actions and attitudes to take towards the “non-Wests,” at times preemptively.2 His essay is replete with us-versus-them language that obscures shared histories, collapses diverse cultures, and engages a social Darwinistic rhetoric of competition for survival, all of which offer a prime example of the way imperialism haunts the present. The specter of empire is ever-present in Huntington’s essay, as nearly every sentence is brimming with emphasis on inherent difference, arbitrary yet staunchly upheld boundaries, impulses to classify “other” peoples, and presumed epistemic authority over the ordering of the world.
Haunting as a historical and sociological idea has a long career that traces back to Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx and is subsequently taken up by a number of scholars, including Ann Laura Stoler and Sara Salem. However, it is haunting as put forward by sociologist Avery Gordon that is richest, most compelling, and very useful when analyzing Huntington’s essay. A project both “very treacherous” and “very fragile,” searching for ghosts — those forces that remain obscured today because they are relegated to the past — has crucial applications to the understanding of imperialism as an ever-pressing part of the present and the future.3 Haunting throws into question the very distinctions between past, present, and future as well as false divisions between individual and society, nation-state and globe, and even “history and a biography.”4 Haunting speaks to the ways power disguises itself and yet simultaneously demands attention. Gordon puts this simply: “To be haunted is to be tied to historical and social effects.”5
Thus, an analytical approach that questions the very boundaries that are taken for granted, especially those that oppose a world of “us” against a world “over there” can be especially useful. Such imagined boundaries are precisely the premise of the clash-of-civilizations narrative that Huntington offers. Borrowing the term “clash of civilizations” from Bernard Lewis’s Orientalist essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage”, Huntington expands upon Lewis’s thesis to describe what he claims will be the new fault lines of the future.6 The irony is, of course, that just as Huntington paints other groups of people as violently tribalistic, intolerant, and unwilling to engage with those who are different from them, his entire essay is a treatise on irreconcilable differences. He writes, “As people define their identity in ethnic and religious terms, they are likely to see an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ relation existing between themselves and people of different ethnicity or religion.”7 Such paranoia about and projection of anxieties upon other cultures and the simultaneous disavowal of cultural complexities are reminiscent of imperial tendencies of the 19th century.8 Using terminology such as “alien civilizations,” deemed so in his estimation by virtue of his own invented nomenclatures,9 Huntington explicitly states that they share no “broader cultural entity” beyond being a part of the human species.10 This nod to the only similarity being one of biology is paradoxically dehumanizing, as all other complex qualities that characterize humans are withheld from people who belong to “non-Western civilizations.” Not only does Huntington then attempt to legitimize this divide by repeatedly referring to it as “real,” but he also writes, “these divisions are deep and increasing in importance.”11
Huntington portrays these opposing and soon-to-be warring civilizations not only as profoundly different from one another, but as occupying different places on a hierarchy, with one civilized and the others primitive. In many instances throughout the essay, Huntington stresses the inevitable belligerence of especially those people in “Muslim countries.” He presents a selective history and writes, “the oil-rich Muslim countries became money-rich and, when they wished to, weapons-rich.”12 Huntington then spins a tale of American heroism in the face of violent Arab in-fighting.13 Most blatantly, Huntington writes, “Violence occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders.”14 This is a clarion attempt at portraying Muslim peoples as inherently violent, no matter the context — an inescapable consequence of their most “basic” nature.15 As Edward Said observed, Huntington chooses to “emphasize the latent bellicosity” of the other.16
This oversimplifying rhetoric is more subtly apparent in Huntington’s linguistic choices. He describes, for example, a “return to the roots phenomenon” among “non-Western civilizations” that not only is empirically unsupported, historically inaccurate, and therefore entirely contrived, but also, through language, he evokes imagery of a de-evolution, regression, or unsophistication, as though occupying lower places on the imperial family tree of mankind.17 He continues to evoke imagery of un-developed peoples, especially those inhabiting the deserts of North Africa when writing that “civilizations disappear and are buried in the sands of time.”18 Although Huntington is reductive of both “the West” and “the rest,” he is especially so towards the latter. He employs the plural to describe Western “values,” “ideas,” and “attitudes,” and yet he writes, “the populace in non-Western countries often remained deeply imbued with the indigenous culture,” rendering both “populace” and “indigenous culture” as singular and definitive, of only one kind.19 Such reductive perspectives are yet again evidence of the specter of imperialism inhabiting both past and present.20
In order to present such a singular view of diverse cultures and support their atavistic features, as though suspended in prehistoric time, Huntington sheds any dynamism from his descriptions of “non-Western” cultures. He writes, “cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones.”21 This supports Huntington’s rendering of “other” peoples as hardy, recalcitrant folk who present obstacles to modernity by virtue of their cultures, which are seen as unchanging. The representation of these cultures as static and simultaneously discrete from other systems is a prominent and recurring theme in his essay. In addition, Huntington further simplifies culture by obscuring the connections between the political, economic, and cultural, as though culture and civilization exist inherently in people regardless of time and place. Existing in a vacuum outside other systems, it is almost implied that culture is biologically or divinely endowed—immutable, everlasting, “sempiternal.”22
An examination of the structure and content of Huntington’s essay reveals tendencies to pedantically pontificate or demonstrate the imperial impulse to order the world. He offers explanations in arbitrary groupings of three: “To redefine its civilization identity, a torn country must meet three requirements,”23 and, “Those responses generally take one or a combination of three forms,”24 he writes about non-Western tendencies in response to Western dominance. Not only does he center the so-called West as the most pivotal aspect of the world, around which “the rest” orbit, but he also professes to predict how all peoples will respond to this centripetal Western force. His tendency to rewrite history and categorize others in relation to his own social location is very reminiscent of the ordering impulses by empire, the need to employ taxonomies and structures in order to “make sense of” alien peoples and cultures. Thus, just as Huntington writes that non-Western civilizations are no longer “objects of history” that are acted upon and have now joined “the West as movers and shapers of history,” he exhibits the colonial tendency to order the natives, acting upon them as objects.25 Simultaneously, by using the language of “no longer,” Huntington sweeps colonialism into the past, thus obscuring the ways it still haunts, moves, and shapes the present. Gordon refers to this as the “over-and-done-with” rhetoric, and yet that which is over and done with necessarily “comes alive” through the specters it raises.26
Perhaps a note should be added for all that is rendered invisible in Huntington’s essay—the silences that also haunt. Readers gain a sense early on that Huntington tends to obscure many histories. His ability to recount the past is limited to the actions of princes and armies and to conflicts that were often violent. This captivates Huntington’s attention more often than, say, histories of trade and cross-cultural exchange, miscegenation and the transfer of cultural heritage to children of mixed descent, or migratory patterns and increasingly multicultural communities that blur national boundaries and identities. Huntington also renders invisible the unilaterally advantageous relationships between “the West” and seemingly hostile civilizations. When he writes, “Over the centuries, however, differences among civilizations have generated the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts,”27 he presents these differing civilizations as equals rather than revealing the power differential between rapacious empires and assaulted peoples across the globe.
Huntington also neglects to examine the strategic, opportunistic, and enabling role of the US and Britain in many of the conflicts within other countries, such as the US’s investment in Islamic fundamentalism in the fight against communism, or the deliberate strategies employed to dismantle secularism and nationalisms.28 In fact, he even goes so far as to say that “conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, ‘Western civil wars,’ as William Lind has labeled them.” Thus, he erases histories of proxy wars, for example, fought for the US, that devastated nation-states for decades to come. People still living in the aftermaths of these wars are currently blamed by Huntington for “returning to their roots.” Manchanda and Salem capture this point exactly when discussing Afghanistan’s depiction as “the graveyard of empires.” They explain that “portrayals of the country as retrogressive elide the colonial violence that has ensured the very backwardness that is now considered Afghanistan’s enduring characteristic.”29 Therefore, in upholding superficial boundaries while dismissing overlapping cultures and histories, Huntington attempts to lay blame upon other civilizations for their lack of modernity and remains silent on histories of imperialism that have created the present.
Finally, in reflecting on the implications of haunting on our ability to imagine alternative futures, Lisa Lowe offers guiding words. She writes:
Our contemporary moment is so replete with assumptions that freedom is made universal through liberal political enfranchisement and the globalization of capitalism that it has become difficult to write or imagine alternative knowledges, to act on behalf of alternative projects or communities. Within this context, it is necessary to act within but to think beyond our received humanist tradition and, all the while, to imagine a much more complicated set of stories about the emergence of the now, in which what is foreclosed as unknowable is forever saturating the “what-can-be-known.” We are left with the project of visualizing, mourning, and thinking ‘other humanities’ within the received genealogy of “the human.”30
Lowe’s call is one to recognize the ghosts in our present, to observe the complexities of today as being reflections of all that has been taken to be irrevocably buried in the past. Huntington’s essay attempts to continue these foreclosures and yet his silences and efforts at invisibilizing vast histories are so palpable so as to profoundly “saturate” the contents of his essay. Perhaps, as Manchanda and Salem suggest, it is not only the absences that are worth seeking out, but also the politics of erasure. Acts by empire to elide nuances of other peoples in the process of writing history are alive and well in the present, and they attempt to further divide the truly complex web of relations between all peoples across the globe. From shared histories of imperialism to the necessary joint stewardship of the planet in the face of the catastrophic climate crisis, it is precisely towards the overlapping nature of our pasts, presents, and futures, unfortunately suppressed yet haunting, that our imaginings must turn in envisioning alternative futures.
Notes
1. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 4.
3. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 6.
7. Huntington, 29.
8. Such projections are also evident in, for example, Huntington’s tendency to ascribe “kin-country syndrome” to “non-Western” countries and not to the US or Europe. The imperial impulse to identify itself almost as a medical expert diagnosing the ills of lesser societies cannot be missed here.
9. Huntington, 25. Another invented term is “civilization identity.”
10. Huntington, 24.
13. Huntington writes, “the United States sent a massive army to the Persian Gulf to defend some Arab countries against aggression by another,” 31.
14. Huntington, 35. What makes this statement particularly egregious is the silence on the fact that Muslims had been brutally victimized by dominant majorities in every single one of these contexts.
15. Huntington, 25. He writes, “First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic.”
16. Edward Said, “Myth of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’,” Media Education Foundation, accessed August 7, 2020, https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Edward-Said-The-Myth-of-Clash-Civilizations-Transcript.pdf, 3.
17. Huntington, “Clash of Civilizations,” 26.
18. Huntington, 24.
20. It should also be noted that Huntington explicitly praises colonialism while implicitly pining after it throughout his essay. For example, he claims that democracy in non-Western countries is an import of colonialism: “Modern democratic government originated in the West. When it has developed in non-Western societies it has usually been the product of Western colonialism or imposition,” 41. He laments the end to colonial education, expressing a nostalgia for imperial pasts: “In the past, the elites of non-Western societies were usually the people who were most involved with the West, had been educated at Oxford, the Sorbonne or Sandhurst, and had absorbed Western attitudes and values,” 26-27. This longing is not only for times gone, but for imperial subjects imagined to be compliant and empty, tabula rasas that could be imbued with colonial understandings of the world.
21. Huntington, 27.
22. Nivi Manchanda and Sara Salem, "Empire’s H(a)unting Grounds: Theorising Violence and Resistance in Egypt and Afghanistan." Current Sociology 68, no. 2 (2020), 247.
25. Huntington, 23.
27. Huntington, “Clash of Civilizations,” 25.
28. Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2006).
29. Manchanda and Salem, “Empire’s H(a)unting Grounds,” 242.
Bibliography
Dreyfuss, Robert. Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2006.
Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Huntington, Samuel P. "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22-49.
Lowe, Lisa. “The Intimacies of Four Continents.” In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, edited by Ann Laura Stoler, 191-212. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Manchanda, Nivi, and Sara Salem. "Empire’s H(a)unting Grounds: Theorising Violence and Resistance in Egypt and Afghanistan." Current Sociology 68, no. 2 (2020): 241-262.
Said, Edward. “Myth of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’.” Media Education Foundation. Accessed August 7, 2020. https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Edward-Said-The-Myth-of-Clash-Civilizations-Transcript.pdf.
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