Conflict-from the Latin conflictus, a striking together, and confligere to strike together, to the Middle English: contest, collision, fight, war, disagreement, quarrel, contradiction, variance, opposition, confrontation, clash, battle, struggle, disharmony contention, strife, discord, antagonism, opposition, difference, incompatibility, resistance.
That extraordinary wise man, Fouad Ajami, wrote a memorial recently to another, Samuel Huntington. It occurred to me that within this simple statement of appreciation were most of the disagreements of modern American and world politics. I suspect that if I am able to pursue the project of this web site for long, I will be addressing this confrontation of ideas again and again. It might be worthwhile to establish a template at the start so that my purpose cannot be misunderstood. A context is the matter most often lacking to any essay. Assumptions are made. Prejudices are hidden or revealed with and without reason.
For instance, those of you who have read much of Mr. Ajami’s work may leap to rash conclusions at the mere mention of his name–both good and bad. His more famous mentor, Bernard Lewis, has been a lightening conductor throughout the last thirty years. And because Huntington had the academic misfortune to author a bestseller, The Clash of Civilizations, many more will have preconceived notions concerning my attributing wisdom to this long established and eminent scholar. In the context of having no such academic standing what-so-ever, my opinion of either man will likely be irrelevant to all but a very few of those whose lives are geared not to the season’s but to the semester.
But I persist.
It has been Mr. Ajami’s thesis that the great contest of the ages is between Muslim and Christian cultures and that, in Huntington’s words “The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflicted relation between Islam and Christianity.”
This then is the crux of my own disagreement with these wise men, and with the troubles their conclusions visit upon an already riven world.
The conflict of the ages is, and always has been, the natural antagonism which is born within the smallest social group, the family, and magnified again and again through the tribe, the nation, the religion, to ethnic identity–between the individual and the society into which they are born.
Hindu culture is patchwork of prohibition, stop-gap, and admonition to the individual. So are the religions of the Dakota Sioux and the ancient Jew. From the first of our humanity, we have thrived on this struggle. No other beast on Earth has the benefit of such testing. If you are religious, you may take this disharmony as being at the heart of belief, as both Christians and Muslims do. If you are a libertarian humanist like myself, you see this conflict as the essence of philosophy.
In any case, this quarrel between the ‘I and the we’ is more crucial than the argument between Muslim and Christian. It has always been. And within either culture, the generational resolution of this difference will have more to say about the future of all humanity than any other.
Will our historic approach to a open society of ever increasing liberty and freedom for the individual be halted by the rise of an oil-empowered Muslim culture, or by the bureaucracy of the socialist welfare state?
Mr. Ajami accurately affirms “Political science, the field Huntington devoted his working life to, has been in the main commandeered by a new generation. They are ‘rational choice’ people who work with models and numbers and write arid, impenetrable jargon.” It’s a revealing description.
The academic, of whom Mr. Ajami is an atypical example, often finds safety in words. They are both the tool and the bete noire of the intellectual. Hiding places abound within obscure phrasing. The inclusion of a single word without modifier can damn the user. And the ‘rational choice’ people are often guilty of such usage to protect themselves from the pigeon-holing which relegates a promising career to the second rate college.
But to argue against rational choice itself is to argue against reason and thence, against any intellectual discourse at all. I shouldn’t think this was the purpose of Mr. Ajami’s remark. I see it more likely as directed at myself, as a non-religious antagonist in the war.
Marxism has long since become a religion in it’s own right, discarding any pretense of rational argument. But the politics of socialism is now the secular manifestation of one half of this ancient discord. I stake my place in the other half. I take the side of the individual. I see those of a religious persuasion who are committed to an open society as my allies, whether they be Muslim or Christian or Martian.
And the contest abides.
Link: Samuel Huntington’s Warning – WSJ.com
Photo by: Peter Lauth
