Farewell, Dr. Huntington

Samuel P. Huntington died over the Christmas holiday at the age of 81. About two years ago, I wrote a short essay (“Echoes of clashes past”) discussing some of the ideas he propounded in his most famous work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

The Clash of Civilizations was not a brilliant book necessarily, but it did serve a useful purpose when it appeared. After the Cold War was won, there formed a vacuum of public opinion and ideas concerning the future – how to think about it and what to expect from it. Dr. Huntington filled that vacuum with a modest reminder that, often, past is prologue.

Dr. Huntington’s thesis for The Clash of Civilizations was laid out in the short essay (appearing in Foreign Affairs) that preceded the book:

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.

And upon that simple premise, Dr. Huntington cobbled together an understanding of the world that gained in currency throughout the 1990s and especially so after September 11, 2001. Some claim that his thesis helped create the bunker mentality that now dominates the Western outlook. I doubt it. Dr. Huntington did not call the world into order – he merely called it as he saw it, and what he saw was how swiftly -isms change or are discarded. We might fight violently for this ideology or that (after all, how many hundreds of millions died in the 20th century over political ideologies?), but none of them are very enduring. Yet conflict endures. The Clash of Civilizations was an attempt to understand conflict in a post-ideological world and explain to old Cold Warriors how to get on with life.

I am conflicted about the merits of the book. Feel free to check out my essay from January 2007 to understand why.

Further adding to his reputation for creating the aforementioned bunker mentality was his final book, Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity, which appeared in 2004. In it, Dr. Huntington took issue with the received wisdom of unregulated Hispanic immigration into the United States. At the time, I was very hesitant to regard Dr. Huntington’s perspective as anything other than that of an aged crank. While I still feel that his sense of what is essentially American is too narrow, I have come to think that his basic premise – that the volume and proximity of Hispanic immigrants is fundamentally different than prior waves of immigration – is correct. That realization might not lead some readers to a broad re-think of immigration policy, but at least the notion that immigration represents an unalloyed social good has been dutifully questioned. Were it not so hard for Dr. Huntington to contain his Yankee exceptionalism, I suspect his final book would have had a more enduring impact on the conversation that we are now fated to have without him.