Westernization Victorious

Louis Menand, in the May 17, 2004 New Yorker, wrote a thoughtful critique of Samuel P. Huntington’s recent book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. Huntington, a Harvard political science professor, is a Big Thinker whose 1993 Foreign Affairs article on “The Clash of Civilizations” correctly predicted that the next major conflict would divide the world along cultural lines—such as Muslim v. The West.

Key points from Menand’s critique of Huntington:

Huntington’s name for ideology is “culture.” . .Culture, ultimately, is everything that is not nature. American culture includes American appetites and American dress, American work etiquette and American entertainment, American piety and American promiscuity—all the things that Americans recognize, by their absence, as American when they visit other countries. . . “America’s core culture” . . . includes, he says, “the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music,” plus “the American Creed with its principles of liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property.” . .

[Huntington] thinks that the erosion or diffusion of any cluster of collective ideals, whatever those ideals may be, leads to weakness and vulnerability. . . The defeat of Communism did not mean that everyone had become a liberal. A civilization’s belief that its values have become universal, he warned, has been, historically, the sign that it is on the brink of decline. [Huntington] therefore appealed . . . to people outside the West who wanted to believe that modernization and Westernization are neither necessary nor inevitable.

The bad guys in Huntington’s scenario [are] intellectuals, people who preach dissent from the values of the “core culture.” . . bilingualism, affirmative action, cosmopolitanism . . . pluralism . . .and multiculturalism . . .

Huntington [is also worried about] globalists [including] transnational businessmen. These are, in effect, people without national loyalties at all, not even dual ones, since they identify with their corporations, and their corporations have offices, plants, workers, suppliers, and consumers all over the world. It is no longer in Ford’s interest to be thought of as an American company. Ford’s market is global, and it conceives of itself as a global entity. These new businessmen “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function now is to facilitate the elite’s global operations,” Huntington says.

Huntington’s understanding of American culture would be less rigid if he paid more attention to the actual value of his core values. One of the virtues of a liberal democracy is that it is designed to accommodate social and cultural change. Democracy is not a dogma; it is an experiment. That is what Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address—and . . .Multiculturalism, in the form associated with people like Clinton and Gore, is part of the democratic experiment.

The people who determine international relations are the political, business, and opinion élites, not the populace. It is overwhelmingly in the interest of those élites today to adapt to an internationalist environment, and they exert a virtually monopolistic control over information, surveillance, and the means of force. People talk about . . . terrorist groups as representatives of a civilization opposed to the West, but most terrorists are dissidents from the civilization they pretend to be fighting for. . .[revealing] the nonexistence of any genuine alternative to modernization and Westernization. . . There are no aboriginal civilizations to return to. You can regret the mess, but it’s too late to put the colors back in their jars.