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Our task, to respond to Samuel Huntington's work on the impending "clash of civilizations," has proven to be an unexpected challenge. To begin with, I do not believe Huntington's work is scholarship. His utter disregard for the rules of evidence and logic makes the attempt to formulate a thoughtful response a singularly frustrating exercise. Here, for instance, is a brief example from his list of the distinguishing characteristics of what he calls "Western civilization":

Only one sentence intervenes between the first assertion that "the West" and "Hindu civilization" share an equally clear separation of church and state and the second assertion that such separation has occurred in no civilization but "the West." The two statements obviously contradict each other. In the one sentence that separates them Huntington either loses his train of thought or he loses his mind.

Huntington continues to frustrate his readers. In his text we find the next characteristic of "Western civilization":

These two successive paragraphs pose an interesting dilemma for me as I consider Huntington's facile, reductive, and contradictory definition of civilization. I might object to his characterization of the history of the separation of church and state in "the West" by pointing out the many examples of European states that have always been and are still affiliated with churches. The British state, for example, is affiliated with the Church of England. The Church still appoints the Prime Minister and has never appointed one not of its fold. Even Disraeli was a convert to Anglicanism. The legislative or popular victory of a non-Anglican candidate could very well lead to a constitutional crisis. On behalf of its state church the British government practices censorship, guards against blasphemy, mandates the teaching of Anglicanism in schools and codifies the Church's moral standards as law. These practices effectively create classes of citizenship on the basis of religion. Similar situations are found throughout Europe.

But to this objection Huntington would reply that Britain is secular in spirit and in practice. The Prime Minister is not a puppet controlled by the Archbishop of Canterbury; that latter personage's presence at state functions is symbolic. And religious observance in Britain is far lower than it is in the United States, a nation that has legal separation of church and state. But for a few anomalies, spiritual and temporal authorities occupy separate spheres in Britain and throughout "the West." Practice and spirit are emphasized in the first of the two paragraphs I quoted.

I might accept this argument, although I would point out that the existence of separate classes of citizenship and the resulting differential treatment of national members is no minor anomaly. But even if I were to overlook that stumbling block, I would come to Huntington's description of the rule of law as a further distinguishing characteristic of the history of "the West." Here he anticipates my objection when he admits that at times "the rule of law was observed more in the breach than in practice." But breaches are hardly confined to "the phase of absolutism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries" that Huntington allows. In the United States, for example, the state historically has not remained neutral with regard to religion, and it continues to show preferences for the one or the other religion to this day. The Supreme Court, that watchdog of the spirit of the law, did not declare Christian prayer in public schools unconstitutional until 1962. And widespread popular support for the reinstitution of that practice suggests that the spirit of this legal principle that Huntington identifies as the foundation of our freedom neither arises from any national consensus nor has permeated deeply into our collective values. Indeed, regular populist demands that the courts desist from overruling the will of the people on this and other issues suggest that most Americans have not understood the protection against the tyranny of the majority that makes their nation a republic. But anticipating breaches of the law, Huntington argues that practice and spirit do not matter, formal legal principles do. The law can be almost universally disregarded and have no firm foundation in popular or legal practice, but at least in "the West" it exists.

We can see the problem: if "the West" is characterized by its practices, then the failure of its formal ideals does not matter; if it is characterized by its ideals, then its failures of practice can be overlooked. The difficulty Huntington encounters in his attempt to maintain faith in a historically and spatially continuous culture suggests to me that his "West" and perhaps civilizations in general are neither as unified nor as cleanly separable from each other as Huntington believes. But he can meet any objection to his characterization of "the West" simply by reversing his position. Self-contradiction, from the level of the minute to the grand, apparently does not disturb him. Any attempt to engage his assertions by thinking through his historical evidence is thus bound to fail. But that does not matter either because Huntington himself assures us that serious engagement with historical evidence is unnecessary. Indeed, he argues that detailed historical knowledge is folly for the scholar, for it interferes with the simplified models necessary to expose the big picture. Hence he can describe what seem to me to be irregular patterns of constant change as negligible superstructural phenomena determined by an unchanging cultural base. And if I were to provide endless historical evidence for my contention that each of his distinguishing characteristics of "the West" and indeed the idea of culture itself constitute the imposition of coherence upon contingent and contradictory relations, Huntington could dismiss it all as unnecessary details and retreat to assertions without evidence.

Hence I could review here the enormous body of scholarship that establishes the history, contingency and ephemerality of the relations which we call "culture" and which we experience as stable. There is Amitav Ghosh's work on the geniza world that shows us how recent is our current understanding of religion, particularly Islam, as traditional or stable. There is Edward Said's magisterial work on the equally recent development of the idea of "the West" as a distinct entity and Segal and Handler's parallel argument regarding the idea of Europe itself. There is the obvious fact, exhaustively documented, of the economic presence of the rest in "the West": the enormous transfer of wealth, raw materials and labor effected by colonial enterprises; the economic benefits of vast migrations out of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and the recruitment of migrant labor to do the work of Europe in the twentieth. There is Ashis Nandy's provocative argument that while the colonial encounter touched some residents of the Indian subcontinent, it completely revised the identity of every resident of the British isles and nationalized the disparate populations of England into one people. There is Toni Morrison's similar argument regarding the African presence and the formation of whiteness in the United States. There is the endless production of expressive, aesthetic culture that suggests that the world has never been a simple place in which people come pre-packaged in distinct, coherent cultural bundles, and where once there was a place for everyone and everyone stayed in his or her place. Finally there is Austria's own remarkably complicated history as a meeting place and site of transformation for Druid, Celtic, Roman (and with the Roman would have come Africans and Arabs, and with Arabs would have come Asians), Semitic, Slavic, Germanic, French, Italian and Turkish peoples. Even this list is partial, not taking into account the twentieth century. Only deliberate blindness to or inexcusable ignorance of history can allow us to believe in the dubious enterprise called, variously, culture, race, nation, or civilization. Moreover, the obvious interest of those who wish to enforce segregation and cultural authenticity, generally by mapping economic and political ambitions onto gender regulations and phenotypical characteristics, ought to warn us against appeals to such abstract entities. But what is the point of all my evidence if Huntington can excise all complexity in order to produce his impossibly pure historical continuities? As Fouad Ajami puts it, "Huntington has found his civilizations whole and intact, watertight under an eternal sky. Buried alive, as it were, during the years of the Cold War, these civilizations (Islamic, Slavic Orthodox, Western Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, etc.) rose as soon as the stone was rolled off, dusted themselves off, and proceeded to claim the loyalty of their adherents."

A work that suspends all rules of evidence and logic, even argues against such rules, and that unselfconsciously exhibits extravagant contradictions, such a work is not scholarship by any standards that I recognize. Rather than continue to engage it as such, then, I will read it more generously than it deserves and engage the import of Huntington's concerns. His shortcomings aside, Huntington wants to protect a society organized around the kind of individual liberties generated by the separation of church and state, the rule of law, social pluralism, and civil society. His concerns, although not his communitarian solutions, are shared by many far to his left, from the neo-liberal Habermas to the post-Marxist theorists of radical democracy, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. I, too, agree that pluralism, guaranteed by the separation of church and state, leads to the key freedoms that characterize our political formation. It is, therefore, the necessary precondition and continuing basis for democracy. Presumably these are the values Huntington wishes to preserve.

But what does he mean by pluralism? Huntington does not discuss what the term might mean in the present. Historically he identifies only early "monasteries, monastic orders, and guilds" which later expanded into "a variety of other associations and societies," supplemented by "class pluralism." In other words, the only specificity here is economic: professional associations and class inequity. There is a marked silence regarding any other form of pluralism. Huntington does not speak of the political and civil liberties which protect the individual determination of the good. We know he does not mean a diversity of religious affiliations: monastic organizations do not constitute religious pluralism, and Huntington argues that Christianity is "the single most important historical characteristic of Western civilization." When he goes on to warn against attempts to maintain multicultural societies, he implicitly argues against religious diversity, and hence against religious freedom.

His position is made clear with Islam: he considers Muslims to be Europe's greatest threat. Since Muslims are spread across all the world's continents and nations, the immigration restrictions Huntington might favor would have to be targeted against religion alone. Not only would such religious discrimination violate the European Convention of Human Rights and the constitution of the United States, but it would mean the end of the separation of church and state. In "the West" the state would have to declare itself for Catholicism and Protestantism — the two forms which Huntington calls "Western Christianity" — and against Islam. We would have to understand that the state, our mechanism for political representation and governance, is also the manifestation of a religious organization. With the end of state neutrality would come the end of religious freedom, for it is not possible to exclude dissent at the borders without also policing dissent within. In the U.S. all that would stand in the way of prayer and the teaching of religion in publicly funded schools, or in the way of the state acting as defender of the faith in a myriad of other ways, is popular sentiment. That means the tyranny of the majority, and the end of the U.S. as a republic.

Does Huntington really mean that we should betray our history and our most deeply held values and ideals in order to protect them? And if he is willing to suspend individual freedoms in order to protect the idea of freedom, does he really mean that the only freedom worth protecting is the freedom to produce economic disparities? Unfortunately, this is precisely what he means: in his 1975 report to the Trilateral Commission, Huntington argued that the struggles in the United States in the 1960s for greater equality and participation had provoked a "democratic surge" which had made society "ungovernable." He concluded that "the strength of the democratic ideal poses a problem for the governability of democracy." How far could we go to ensure "the governability of democracy?" Might democratic ideals, institutions, and practices have to be sacrificed in order to be saved? They might, for if economic differentiation is the only value worth preserving, then anyone who criticizes a system that produces disparities, that is, any critic of capitalism, can be silenced in the name of freedom. Certainly such policing would produce greater governability but, in order to preserve who we are, we would have to risk totalitarianism.

That is the wrong risk to take. Let me suggest an alternative, also involving risk, but possibly resulting in a more effective preservation of our political culture. Pluralism is indeed the necessary precondition of the democratic freedoms and institutions we value; therefore, we cannot endanger it. Instead, we must protect the existence and even the expansion of plural ways of thinking and living. Hence we must encourage diversity, dissent, and even conflicts, for it is our differences that require us to create the laws and institutions that protect our liberties. The separation of church and state in the U.S., for example, did not come about as an expression of the values of the majority, despite the symbolic significance of religious persecution in its own history. It came about because in 1787 the Mikveh Israel Congregation petitioned the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the Constitutional Convention then in session to remove extant religious restrictions on holding political office. It is because of this group of American Jews, not Christians, that the U.S. constitution bans religious tests and its First Amendment forbids the establishment of religion. We have to thank them for the recognition of pluralism that is the basis of the individual and collective freedoms which we believe distinguish our political culture.

Majorities generally benefit from undemocratic practices. We rely on the dissent of minorities to expand democracy; therefore we must encourage it. The dissent of minorities produced the liberty of conscience, which is the foundation of freedom itself, even in Huntington’s "West." And although it took two centuries in the United States, it is the dissent of minorities that has made that ideal as much of a reality as it is today and that will force us to live up to our democratic promises. We cannot foreclose or place limits upon dissent, diversity or conflicts. Like it or not, the only way to protect who we are is to embrace change and risk who we are.

By now it should be clear that my presuppositions position me at a starting point that is quite opposed to Huntington's starting point. I do not believe that cultures exist as ahistorical, coherent entities; instead, every practice or institution currently taken as a sign of similitude or difference is a moment in a history of flux, contests, alliances, and influences. Certainly there has never been homogeneity or consensus within what counts as a culture, let alone necessary correspondences that can provide the basis for future borders. Finally, the only way to defend the characteristics that distinguish what Huntington believes is our culture is not by enforcing homogeneity and excluding difference but by attending to the internal heterogeneity that has always characterized who we are. It is not his evil "multiculturalists" who are advocating change by introducing unwelcome differences into an otherwise placid similitude. Rather, they advocate an accurate historical memory. It is Huntington and his ilk who wish to purge history of its messy heterogeneity and impose upon it a radically new, dangerous, and, frankly speaking, boring apartheid.

Obviously these presuppositions reveal my intellectual formation within post-structuralism and post-Marxism, and equally as obviously this is not a formation that Huntington shares. Nevertheless, I persist in believing that scholars can converse across profound differences if they are aware of the conditions of their own intelligibility — that is, if they are aware of their own presuppositions — and if they share at least a few goals. Earlier in this essay I noted Huntington's unfortunate lack of awareness of the conditions of his own intelligibility, and his willingness to take intellectual shortcuts in order to deflect any examination of his argument. The second half of my investigation suggests that despite our shared language of freedom, we have no common goals. Given that Huntington's position is what passes for common sense among many people, it is crucial to open the dialogues and build the bridges that might persuade others to recognize in my position an adequate response to their own anxieties and ideals. But I confess that faced with a Huntingtonian obduracy that seeks to foreclose rather than further conversation, I grow pessimistic.