The Charlie Hebdo attack and its aftermath in the streets and in the press tempt one to dust off Samuel Huntington's 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
Despite the criticisms he provoked with that book and his earlier 1993
article in Foreign Affairs, recent events would seem to be proving him
prescient.
Or was he?
While I am not about to deny the importance of religion and culture
as drivers of geopolitical dynamics, I will argue that, more important
than the clashes among the great civilizations, there is a clash within
each of the great civilizations. This is the clash between those who
have "made it" (in a sense yet to be defined) and those who have been
"left behind" — a phrase that is rich with ironic resonance.
Before I make my argument, I warn that the point I'm trying to make
is fairly subtle. So, in the interest of clarity, let me lay out what
I'm not saying before I make that point. I am not saying that Islam as a
whole is somehow retrograde. I am not agreeing with author Sam Harris'
October 2014 remark on "Real Time with Bill Maher" that "Islam is the
mother lode of bad ideas." Nor am I saying that all religions are
somehow equal, or that culture is unimportant. The essays in the book Culture Matters,
which Huntington helped edit, argue that different cultures have
different comparative advantages when it comes to economic
competitiveness. These essays build on the foundation laid down by Max
Weber's 1905 work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It is only the "sulfuric odor of race," as Harvard historian David Landes writes on the first page of the first essay in Culture Matters, that has kept scholars from exploring the under-researched linkages between culture and economic performance.
Making It in the Modern World
The issue of the comparative advantages or disadvantages of different
cultures is complicated and getting more so because with modernity and
globalization, our lives are getting more complicated. We are all in
each other's faces today in a way that was simply not the case in
earlier centuries. Whether through travel or telecommunications or
increasingly ubiquitous and inexpensive media, each and every one of us
is more aware of the cultural other than in times past. This is obvious.
What is not so obvious are the social and psychological consequences of
the inevitable comparisons this awareness invites us to make: How are
we measuring up, as individuals and as civilizations?...
In the modern world, the development of the individual human, which
is tied in part to culture, has become more and more important. If you
think of a single human life as a kind of footrace — as if the
developmental path from infancy to maturity were spanning a certain
distance — then progress over the last several millennia has moved out
the goal posts of maturity. It simply takes longer to learn the skills
it takes to "make it" as an adult. Surely there were skills our Stone
Age ancestors had to acquire that we moderns lack, but they did not have
to file income taxes or shop for insurance. Postmodern thinkers have
critiqued the idea of progress and perhaps we do need a concept that is
forgivingly pluralistic. Still, there have been indisputable
improvements in many basic measures of human progress. This is borne out
by improved demographic statistics such as birth weight, height and
longevity, as well as declining poverty and illiteracy. To put it very
simply, we humans have come a long way.
But these historic achievements have come at a price. It is not
simple for individuals to master this elaborate structure we call modern
civilization with its buildings and institutions and culture and
history and science and law. A child can't do it. Babies born into this
world are biologically very similar to babies born 10,000 years ago;
biological evolution is simply too slow and cannot equip us to manage
this structure. And childhood has gotten ever longer. "Neoteny" is the
technical term for the prolongation of the period during which an
offspring remains dependent on its parent. In some species, such as fish
or spiders, newborns can fend for themselves immediately. In other
species — ducks, deer, dogs and cats — the young remain dependent on
their mothers for a period of weeks. In humans, the period of dependency
extends for years. And as the generations and centuries pass,
especially recently, that period of dependency keeps getting longer.
As French historian Philippe Aries informed us in Centuries of Childhood,
"in medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist." Prior to
modernity, young people were adults in miniature, trying to fit in
wherever they could. But then childhood got invented. Child labor laws
kept children out of the factories and truancy laws kept them in public
schools. For a recent example of the statutory extension of childhood
known as neoteny, consider U.S. President Barack Obama's announcement
that he intends to make community college available for free to any high
school graduate, thus extending studenthood by two years.
The care and feeding and training of your average human cub have
become far greater than the single season that bear cubs require. And it
seems to be getting ever longer as more 20-somethings and even
30-somethings find it cheaper to live with mom and dad, whether or not
they are enrolled in school or college. The curriculum required to
flourish as an adult seems to be getting ever longer, the goal posts of
meaningful maturity ever further away from the "starting line," which
has not moved. Our biology has not changed at anywhere near the rate of
our history. And this growing gap between infancy and modern maturity is
true for every civilization, not just Islamic civilization.