Posted on 08/25/2002 3:24:49 PM PDT by Noumenon
From Chapter 12, The West, Civilization and Civilizations - The Clash of Civilizations
Marxist Multiculturalism and the Fall of Western Civilization
Samuel P. Huntington
From Chapter 12, The West, Civilization and Civilizations - The Clash of Civilizations
Far more significant than economics and demography are problems of moral decline, cultural suicide, and political disunity in the West. Oft-pointed-to manifestations of moral decline include:
increases in antisocial behavior, such as crime, drug use, and violence generally;
family decay, including increased rates of divorce, illegitimacy, teen-age pregnancy, and single-parent families;
at least in the United States, a decline in "social capital," that is, membership in voluntary associations and the interpersonal trust associated with such membership;
general weakening of the "work ethic," and the rise of a cult of personal indulgence;
decreasing commitment to learning and intellectual activity, manifested in the United States in lower levels of scholastic achievement.
The future health of the West and its influence on other societies depends in considerable measure on its success in coping with those trends, which, of course, give rise to the assertions of moral superiority by Muslims and Asians.
Western Culture is challenged by groups within Western societies. One such challenge comes from immigrants from other civilizations who reject assimilation and continue to adhere to and to propagate the values, customs, and culture of their home societies. This phenomenon is most notable among Muslims in Europe, who are, however, small minority. It is also manifest, in lesser degree, among Hispanics in the United States, who area large minority. If assimilation fails in this case, the United States will become a cleft country with all the potential for strife and disunion that entails. In Europe, Western civilization could also be undermined by a weakening of its central component, Christianity. Declining proportions of Europeans profess religious beliefs, observe religious practices, and participate in religious activities. This trend reflects not so much hostility to to religion as indifference to it. Christian concepts, values and practice nonetheless pervade European civilization. "Swedes are probably the most unreligious people in Europe," one of them commented, "but you cannot understand this country at all unless you realize that our institutions, social practice, families, politics, and way of life are fundamentally shaped by our Lutheran heritage." Americans, in contrast to Europeans, overwhelmingly believe in God, think themselves to be religious people, and attend church in large numbers. While evidence of a resurgence in religion in America was lacking as of he mid-1980s the following decade seemed to witness intensified religious activity. The erosion of Christianity among Westerners is likely to be at worst only a very long term threat to the health of Western civilization.
A more immediate and dangerous challenge exists in the United States. Historically American national identity has defined culturally by the heritage of Western civilization and politically by by the principles of the American Creed on which Americans overwhelmingly agree: liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the law, constitutionalism, private property. In the late 20th century, both components of American identity have come under concentrated and sustained onslaught from a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists. In the name of multiculturalism, they have attacked the identification of he United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings. They have denounced, in the words of one of their reports, "systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives," in education and "the dominance of the European-American monocultural perspective." The multiculturalists are, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has said, "very often ethnocentric separatists who see little in Western heritage other than Western crimes." Their "mood is one of divesting Americans of the sinful European inheritance and seeking redemptive infusions from non-Western cultures."
The multicultural trend was also manifested in a variety of legislation that followed the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s, and in the 1990s, the Clinton administration made the encouragement of diversity one its major goals. The contrast wit the past is striking. The Founding Fathers saw diversity as a reality and as a problem: hence the national motto: e pluribus unum, chosen by a committee of he Continental Congress consisting of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Later political leaders who also were fearful of the dangers of racial, sectional, economic, and cultural diversity (which indeed, produced the largest war of the century between 1815 and 1914), responded to the call of "bring us together," and made the promotion of national unity their central responsibility. "The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of of its continuing as a nation at all," warned Theodore Roosevelt, "would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities." In the 1990s, however, leaders of he United States have not only permitted that but assiduously promoted the diversity rather than the unity of the people they govern.
The leaders of their countries have, as we have seen, at times attempted to disavow their cultural heritage and shift the identity of their country from one civilization to another. In no case to date have they succeeded and they have instead created schizophrenic torn countries. The American multiculturalists similarly reject their country's cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to identify the united States with an other civilization, however, they wish to create a country of may civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society. A multicivilizational United states will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations.
The multiculturalists also challenged a central element of the American Creed, by substituting for he rights of individuals the rights groups, defined largely in terms of race, ethnicity, sex and sexual preference. The Creed, as Gunnar Myrdal said in the 1940s, reinforcing the comments of foreign observers dating from Hector St. John de Crevecoeur and Alexis de Tocqueville, has been, "the cement in the structure of this great and disparate nation." Richard Hofstader agreed," not to have ideologies but to be one." What happens then to the United States if hat ideology is disavowed by a significant portion of its citizens? The fate of he Soviet Union, the other major country whose unity, even more than that of the United States, was defined in ideological terms is a sobering example for Americans. "The total failure of Marxism... and the dramatic breakup of the Soviet Union," the Japanese philosopher Takeshi Umehara has suggested, "are only the precursors to the collapse of Western liberalism, the main current of modernity. Far from being the alternative to Marxism and the reigning ideology at the end of history, liberalism will be the next domino to fall." In an era in which peoples everywhere define themselves in cultural terms what place is there for a society without a cultural core and defined only by a political creed? Political principles are a fickle base on which to build a lasting community. In a multicivilizational world where culture counts, the United States could simply be the last anomalous holdover fro ma fading Western world where ideology counted.
Rejection of the Creed and of Western civilization means the end of the United States as we have known it. It also means effectively the end of Western Civilization. If he United States is de-Westernized, the West is reduced to Europe and a few lightly populated overseas European settler countries. Without the United States the West becomes a minuscule and declining part of the world's population on a small and inconsequential peninsula at the extremity of he Eurasian land mass.
The clash between the multiculturalists and the defenders of Western civilization and the American Creed is, in James Kurth's phrase, "the real clash" within the American segment of Western civilization. Americans cannot avoid the issue: Are we a Western people or are we something else? The futures of the United States and of the West depend upon Americans reaffirming their commitment to Western civilization. Domestically this means rejecting the divisive siren calls of multiculturalism. Internationally it means rejecting the elusive and illusory calls to identify the United States with Asia. Whatever economic connections may exist between them, the fundamental cultural gap between Asian societies and American societies precludes their joining together in a common home. Americans are culturally part of the Western family; multiculturalists may damage or even destroy that relationship, but they cannot replace it.
The clash between the multiculturalists and the defenders of Western civilization and the American Creed is, in James Kurth's phrase, "the real clash" within the American segment of Western civilization.
Wow. Please back this statement up.
But Huntington doesn't have in mind only Left and Right dihotomy. As it always was in history, it's also East and West. Your screen name is a good example, Khan Tokhtamish.
My biggest concern is that the American culture that's been dominating the world isn't Traditional American Culture at all, but American Pop Culture: Mickey Mouse, Big Macs, Madonna, Hollywood films, etc.
Traditional American Culture is an entirely different thing: Liberty, property, Puritan work ethic, rule of law, rugged individualism, personal responsibility, etc. Not only do I not see us largely exporting these things, but I see us discarding them ourselves.
I'm only in my mid-30s, but I remember a different America in my youth. No one locked their doors, a man's word was his bond, schools actually taught and disciplined students, etc.
Our national character has changed. The character of our immigrants has changed. They don't respect us or their new homeland, and one reason I think they don't is because we don't stand for the same principals we used to.
"The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within."
--Will Durant, The Story of Civilization
It's worth stating again that the barbarians are already inside the gate - they're the heirs and disciples of Antonio Gramsci, and they dominate the educational and cultural scene. With everything that implies.
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