The Undivided Past (41 page)

Not surprisingly, then, the Bush-Blair view of the world, in
which “the battle lines are drawn” in a “simple binary struggle” between “good and evil,” has been very publicly rejected by their successors.
¹¹⁴
Determined to “seek a new beginning” in the relations between the West and Islam, President
Barack Obama discarded the “clash of civilizations” as an explanation of the woes of the world, and urged the merits—and the precedents—of conversation and conciliation. He made this plain in Turkey in 2009, when he told his audience that their country “is not where East and West divide: this is where they come together,” and he
developed his argument in a later speech at Cairo University.
¹¹⁵
He noted that “the relationship between Islam and the West” had sometimes been characterized by “conflict and religious wars,” but that there had also been “centuries of coexistence and cooperation.” On balance, he was convinced that “the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart,” and he called for a dialogue between Christianity and Islam based on “a sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another, and to seek common ground.” He spoke of Islam’s great achievements in mathematics, medicine, architecture, poetry, and music, to which the West was indebted. He urged Americans and Muslims to abandon their crude
stereotypes of each other, to focus on “finding the things we share” rather than on “seeing what is different,” and to “recognize our common humanity.”
¹¹⁶

Ever since the late eighteenth century, the notion that civilizations (and, sometimes,
barbarians) constitute the ultimate, most capacious, and most significant form of collective human
identity has been an arresting and appealing one, because it offers the most comprehensive yet also the most simplified account of the diversity and complexity of the peopled past. Such a view of human identity was shared in the nineteenth century by the British philosopher
John Stuart Mill and the French statesman and historian François
Guizot, and since then it has been especially arresting and appealing to pundits, policymakers, and political leaders seeking to mobilize popular support for a particular international cause
or overseas venture: in defense of
civilization against barbarism, or in defense of one version of civilization against another.
¹¹⁷
But across the last two hundred years, the evidence is clear that when political leaders derive their aggregated categories from authors such as those discussed here, they invariably compound the original literary licenses and scholarly liberties that had been taken by adding further simplifications of their own. The resulting collective identities are almost invariably misleading to the point where they may, as in the case of the so-called clash of civilizations, be simultaneously convincing to some while wholly unconvincing to others, and the accumulated evidence strongly suggests that the skeptics are more correct than the believers.
¹¹⁸

To be sure, the notion that civilizations and barbarisms, or civilizations and civilizations, are predestined to confront each other and go to war with each other, as the ultimate manifestation of competing
human identities, consciousnesses, and agencies, is one that can be easily articulated, both rhetorically and cartographically. The
Manichean simplicities of “us” versus “them,” and of “good” versus “bad,” can be inflated to a global scale by messianic wordsmiths, and they look good on paper, as depicted on visually persuasive maps of the world. Yet if there are such entities as civilizations, this is not, pace
Gibbon,
Toynbee, and
Huntington, how they function and interact with each other in the long run. And even if such entities as civilizations actually do exist, there is little evidence that they are, pace Gibbon, Toynbee, and Huntington, self-confined or prone to clash in the long run. As
Felipe Fernández-Armesto writes in his own study of the subject, “Even when locked in what appears to be mutual hostility—like Ancient Rome and Persia, or medieval Christendom and
Islam—civilizations tend to develop relationships which are mutually acknowledging and sometimes mutually sustaining.… Though there are occasional exceptions,” he concludes, “it seems to be hard for any civilization to survive at a high level of material achievement, except in contact with others.”
¹¹⁹
With civilizations, as with
religions, nations, classes, genders, and races, we neglect at our peril the conversations that go on across what some mistakenly think to be impermeable boundaries.

Indeed, in recent years the
United Nations has deliberately
sought, in the name of promoting a global sense of common humanity, to encourage such transcivilizational dialogues and encounters, an endeavor that culminated in November 2006 in the publication of a report entitled
The Alliance of Civilizations.
The history of relations between cultures, it concluded, was not only characterized by “wars and confrontation”; it was also a “history of mutual borrowing and constant cross-fertilization,” since
civilizations “overlap, interact and evolve in relationship with one another.” In its humane internationalism and its well-intentioned
liberalism, such a document seems light-years away from the belligerent unilateralists who appropriated—and corrupted—
Huntington’s “
clash of civilizations” thesis.
¹²⁰
Yet in one significant sense, made plain in its very title, the UN document shared the presumptions of Huntington and those who had invoked his work to justify the “war on terror,” namely that the world
was
divided into different civilizational groups that constituted the highest form of collective human identity. While diverging from the neocons over whether civilizations clashed or conversed, they concurred with them in the belief that civilizations undoubtedly did exist.
¹²¹

But did they, and do they, exist? After making thirteen television programs on the subject, the art historian Sir
Kenneth Clark concluded that civilization was extremely difficult to define and describe.
¹²²
How right he was—and is. Despite the uncounted scholars from many disciplines who have tried their hand at the question, there is no agreement as to how many civilizations there have been in the past, or how many exist today. Just as it is clearly inadequate to define an individual on the basis of only one criterion, such as
religion, so, too, do civilizations defy such reduction; yet to define them on the basis of many criteria avails a meaningless category for the very opposite reason. Still, despite its deep flaws as the largest and most inclusive form of collective human solidarity, civilization has continued to appeal to those who wish to sort reality into the simplest possible categories and identities—categories and identities that retain their currency so long as their incoherence and contradictions are not betrayed by practical experience. It would be flying in the face of the evidence to hope that a word in such ready common usage for two hundred
years might now be given up. But future world leaders who invoke “civilization” ought to be more circumspect about doing so than many who have recently and irresponsibly been bandying it around to such baleful effect. Of all collective forms of human identity, civilization is the most nebulous, and it is this very vagueness that makes it at once so appealing and so dangerous. As
Dr. Johnson realized, it is a word, a concept, a category, and a version of human aggregation and conflict we would be much better off without.
¹²³

D
ESPITE THEIR UNDENIABLE DIFFERENCES
and variations, the collective identities investigated in this book share significant characteristics. A first is that each is invoked and deployed to promote particular group interests: religions compete in their claims to uniquely privileged access to their respective deities; every nation stresses its special characteristics and admirable virtues vis-à-vis any or all others; classes go to war to decide which of them should enjoy the greater share of the profits of the means of production; women do battle with men to undo centuries of exploitation and discrimination; whites enforce their supremacy over blacks, and blacks fight to free themselves from it; and civilizations clash on the basis of differing perceptions as to which are good and evil. A second is that many leaders and writers have claimed that one of these six solidarities is both more homogeneous and more important than any other
form of
human aggregation, thereby resembling a winning squash or a victorious turnip or a triumphant pumpkin in a horticultural competition, being bigger, better, and more important than any of its rivals. A third is that these identities are presented as being so innate, intrinsic, adversarial, and confrontational that the world must properly be understood in Manichean terms, as a cosmic battleground between religions or nations or classes or genders or races or civilizations.
A fourth shared characteristic is that these battling solidarities are sustained by affirming memories, reinforcing stories, and
historical accounts that reject any greater sense of common humanity.

As the foregoing pages often concede, tensions and conflicts have indeed arisen across the centuries between different groups that have sought to define themselves, or else have been defined in relation to, one of the six categories of identity explored here.
¹
Battles have been fought and conflicts have been waged to protect or promote religions or nations or civilizations, and class, gender, and race have given rise to a host of social and
political upheavals, from civil disobedience to civil wars. But it is also the case that these aggregations, constructed and pitted against one another, and often accompanied by extravagant claims as to their primacy and significance, need to be treated with healthier skepticism than they all too often receive. To begin with, they are rarely as homogeneous,
monolithic, or all-encompassing, or as naturally belligerent and as adversarially entrenched, as their leaders and apologists, propagandists and historians like to claim: how often, it behooves us to ask, have (for example) most Christians, most Germans, most workers, most women, most blacks, or most inhabitants of the West felt a common identity against most pagans, most Frenchmen, most employees, most men, most whites, or most barbarians? Claims made for the homogeneity, the unanimity, and the innate bellicosity of such groupings invariably break down under scrutiny, into myriad fragments, significant exceptions, and many alternative competing identities. The combative mobilization of such collective categories has always depended on making totalizing claims to uniformity and all-inclusiveness that are never actually true, and these identities belong to those “fictions” that seem regrettably inseparable from the processes of politics and realities of government.
²

As for the claims made by figures ranging from Marx and
Engels, via
Robert Knox, to
Germaine Greer and
George W. Bush, to the effect that one of these six identities is paramount, trumping and incorporating the others as
the
explanation of human behavior, past, present, and future: it follows, self-evidently, that these claims cannot
all
be true. Conceivably, one of them is right, and the other five are wrong, but to judge by the ample evidence
against each of them, it seems more plausible to conclude, in the spirit of
W. S. Gilbert’s aphorism, “When everyone is somebody, then no-one’s anybody,” that
no
exclusive and hegemonic assertion made on behalf of
any
of these six aggregations is
ever
true. Both individually and collectively, we are all creatures of multiple rather than single identities, we inhabit many different and diverse groupings at the same time, and they vary in their significance, and in their claims on our attention, depending on particular contexts and specific circumstances. As
Amartya Sen has rightly observed, it is an “odd presumption” that “people of the world can be uniquely categorized according to some singular and overarching system of partitioning,” and this misguidedly “solitarist” approach to the many identities we all simultaneously possess is not only intrinsically wrong and empirically incorrect, but it also disregards and undermines the broader and more encompassing collective category of our “shared
humanity.”
³

Such claims also mistakenly assume that the world is divided and polarized between single, all-encompassing collectivities. Yet it cannot be too often repeated that while conflicts between those whom
Matthew Arnold famously described as “ignorant armies” clashing by night “on a darkling plain” are undeniably a significant part of the story of
humanity, the
Manichean view of the world frequently deployed to proclaim, ignite, and promote confrontations between “us” and “them,” between the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” and between the forces of light and those of darkness, fails to recognize or describe the messy, complex, contingent, multifaceted, interconnected, joined-up reality of human relations.
⁴
As these pages have shown time and again, conversations across these allegedly unbridgeable divides—between (for example)
Christians and pagans, or Germans and Frenchmen, or workers and
capitalists, or women and men, or
blacks and whites, or the West and the rest—make up a substantial, perhaps even preponderant, part of the whole human experience. Whether envisaged individually or collectively, the reality of the human past has always been informed by dialogue, interaction, connection, borrowing, blending, and assimilation, at least as much as it has been by disagreement, hostility, belligerence, conflict, separation, or unlikeness. That our sense of the past, and of the present,
has been too often dominated by an exaggerated insistence on the importance of confrontation and difference is not only a disservice to the cause of knowledge but also misrepresents the nature of the human condition, and misidentifies the best paths by which that condition has been improved—and may be further improved.