Two Models of the Future

The manner we choose to describe the war we are fighting in Afghanistan depends on which view of the future we have. If we agree with Samuel Huntington that the world is becoming more and more defined by cultural, religious and ethnic differences, we define the war as part of a conflict between the Islamic and Western civilizations.
If we agree with Francis Fukuyama that liberal democracy is turning the world into one civilization, the war is just a bump in that road. The United Nations is the totem of Fukuyama’s future, the Organization of the Islamic Conference is a symbol of Huntington’s.

People tend to choose one of those frames of reference and place inside it facts that make sense within that frame. So have I. My personal preference is to keep the present regime of nation states and cultural identities and to minimize supranational governmental authority.

In American political terms, the Right agrees with Huntington more than the Left, religious people agree with Huntington more than secular people. This separation also exists among Muslims. The leaders of the global jihad see a threat to traditional Islam from the Western led global economy because it is infused with un-Islamic values. They claim that Islamic culture is the superior model for the world. Muslims who have no desire to live under present Islamic law disagree.

Those who agree with Fukuyama see the mass emigration from the second and third world nations to the first world nations as a good thing, those who agree with Huntington’s clash of civilizations model see problems ahead for Muslims in Western countries. Attempts to create a synthesis of Islamic values and the values of liberal democracy have not shown much success. The conflicts surrounding the interpretation of free speech rights in Europe are an example of this failure.

Huntington’s model has been quite accurate since its appearance in 1993 at predicting events, Fukuyama’s is less so. While the success of Barack Obama fits Fukuyama’s predictions, larger events are overwhelming that trend. The culture-flattening effects of the global economy push us toward one civilization, but in ways that Huntington described as relevant but shallow. He agreed that the Davos Culture is important, but asked how many people share it. It is an elite culture with shallow roots--one tenth of one percent to maybe one percent of the world population outside the West.

The fact that Americans now eat falafel and Arabs drink Cokes is sometimes offered as an example of the emergence of one civilization. Huntington described this as an irrelevant and insignificant fact because it does not change any conflicting cultural values. Where conflicting religious values collide, interfaith efforts show little success.

If Huntington’s predictions continue to come true, the more extreme versions of multicultural coexistence, and especially the idea of cultural relativism, will not succeed. Nations will preserve a distinct cultural identity provided by the dominant or majority culture of each nation and some inter-civilizational conflicts will be accepted as irreconcilable.

I believe the conflict between our Western civilization and the Islamic civilization is one of these and separation is the answer. Those who prefer to live under Islamic law should live in Islamic countries because Western liberal democracies cannot accommodate them. Muslims who choose to live in the West and American citizens who choose Islam will have to accept the implications of this fact. Being Muslim in America does not include the option to bring Islamic law to America because the Constitution and Islamic law are irreconcilable.

President Obama was wrong when he said America is now an Islamic nation. It never can be.