Democracy for the Middle East
August 10, 2004Protecting The Core
Samuel P. Huntington rails against the rise of multiculturalism in America without examining the reasons for the decline of its venerable predecessor - The American Way. While the Harvard don is correct in observing that the public school system once had the key role in assimilating new arrivals to a singular, Anglo-Protestant national culture, he fails to discuss how mass media usurped this function and then degraded it. The managers of Viacom Corporation may be effective [update: or not] in generating shareholder value, but what emigree mother would prefer to see her own (non-American) heritage replaced by MTV's version of the American Way? And what patriotic American would wish her to do so? Huntington's observations about the replacement of The American Way by multiculturalism would be more credible had he taken stock of the former's wholesale degradation. Absent that, he is asking our emigrees to assimilate the worldview of Jefferson by watching American Idol.
We also question Huntington's purist position on the Anglo-Protestant core of normative American culture. According to Sutcliffe (Judaism and Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 2003), the Puritans viewed themselves as a "Second Israel" and looked beyond the European church to the "Hebrew Republic" for their own core culture and future civilization in the New World. Following Huntington, this would suggest that America is a fundamentally Jewish nation. Clearly, the recipe of our culture is more complex than he suggests.
Taking the Hebrew contribution as a case in point, the God-kissed, Bible-toting ancestors of Anglo-Protestantism are barely visible in Huntington's, similarly reductionist Foreign Affairs treatise, "The Clash of Civilizations." To be fair, Huntington's concern in "The Clash.." isn't American culture but rather the growing friction between a half dozen or so, previously insulated, "major civilizations." Is the short shrift given to the Hebrews (less than a dozen index citations) simply the result of their failure, in his eyes, to qualify as a major civilization? Illustrating why the term political science is considered by many to be oxymoronic, Huntington's rationale for marginalizing the Hebrews is nothing more than scholarly precedent, i.e. that his predecessors (most of them presumably Christian and supersessionist) did not confer that status upon the Jews and Huntington sees no reason to depart from this convention.
In distilling his own criteria for civilizational status, Huntington not only overlooks the importance of Biblical Israel to the birth of Western civilization (e.g. he incorrectly attributes the origins of the rule of law to Rome, and dispenses altogether with monotheism, sanctity, or the revelation of Freedom as a God given right as Western hallmarks) but on the infrequent occasions that he allows the West's ur-nation to surface, he suggests that nationhood was not central to Jewish belief (Huntington refers to Zionism as "political Judaism" citing a marginal "reconstructionist" text as his source.) Notwithstanding the virtuosity and prescience displayed in "The Clash..", this is akin to claiming that Babe Ruth didn't hit home runs. The apparent difficulty of Western secular intellectuals in lending credence to a political entity, such as the Solomonic Kingdom, in which church and state are fully integrated bodes ill for our ability to contend with today's Islam. But make no mistake, the original nation under God, was formulated in precisely this way.
So how did the Hebrews fall off the edge of Huntington's world? Is Huntington really a Christian supersessionist at heart, or is his decidely secular perspective on a subject saturated with religion and religious meaning the essence of the problem? Today's American Protestants clearly feel more civilizational kinship with Israel than with secular Europe. Huntington's Puritans trumpeted their Hebrew heritage as much as they swerved it. So why is this modern day champion of Anglo-Protestant Americanism repressing the notion of a Hebrew Civilization subsuming both Europe and America? Resolving his "anxiety of influence" in this way leads Huntington to misread the ultimate relevance of the Middle East to the clash of civilizations. Notwithstanding the metrics of size, military power and GDP, or Europe's frustration with its own belatedness, the West's core state is Israel. This is the essence of the clash.
Home . Posted by Editor at August 10, 2004 10:55 AM . DFME's new internet address is www.dfme.org