no author
November 30, 2001

David Palumbo-Liu's comments on Edward Said's "Clash of Ignorance"

Professor of Comparative Literature
Director, Program in Modern Thought & Literature
Stanford University

Dear Editor:

Let me add a footnote to Edward Said's excellent article, "The Clash of Ignorance" [October 22]. While Said is certainly correct in his description of Huntington's "civilizational" argument against Islam, the remedy Huntington seeks for the US targets another large group internally - not only ethnic and diasporic groups, but a number of political protesters as well. Indeed, in The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington finds that "the central issue for the West is whether, quite apart from any external challenges, it is capable of stopping and reversing the internal processes of decay" [emphasis added]. He names the causes of this "decay":

"Western culture is challenged by groups within Western culture. One such challenge comes from immigrants from other civilizations who reject assimilation and continue to adhere to and propagate the values, customs, and cultures of their home societies.... In the late twentieth century [...] American identity [has] 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 the United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings...."

Huntington does not mince words:

"Rejection of the [American] Creed and of Western civilization means the end of the United States of America as we have known it. It also means effectively the end of Western civilization."

Two years after the "Civilization" book was published, Huntington drew the connection between immigrants and progressive academics in an essay for Foreign Affairs: "The growing role of ethnic groups in shaping American foreign policy is reinforced by the waves of recent immigration and by the arguments for diversity and multiculturalism." But it is crucial to note that this 1995 piece merely develops a line of reasoning Huntington began two decades earlier, in his work for the Trilateral Commission. In the 1975 publication of the Commission, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Huntington remarks:

"The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private... People no longer felt the same obligation to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves.... Each group claimed its right to participate equally--in the decision which affected itself."

In short, while lauding the active participation of more and more diverse populations on the one hand, on the other hand Huntington is concerned that there may be too much of a good thing:

"The vitality of democracy in the 1960s raised questions about the governability of democracy in the 1970s.... In the United States, the strength of democracy poses a problem for the governability of democracy.... We have come to recognize that there are potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy."

Thus, with the growing calls to re-examine domestic civil liberties, it is useful to see how a "civilizational" conflict abroad ties into one at home, with specific ramifications for immigrants, ethnic Americans, and certain progressive points of view.

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David Palumbo-Liu
Professor of Comparative Literature
Building 260 Room 229
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2031
Director, Program in Modern Thought & Literature
webpage: www.stanford.edu/~palboliu/