Democracy & its limits.

An essay in the summer issue of Foreign Affairs (excerpted in the New York Times, June 6) suggests that the fundamental sources of conflict during our time will not involve political ideology or economics, but culture. The author, Samuel P. Huntington, argues that interactions between the "seven or eight major civilizations" will shape the future, now that the world has moved beyond the old cold-war categories. Huntington identifies these as "Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African civilizations." He says that the differences among them are basic and centuries old; that as the world becomes smaller and interactions among people increase, the awareness of these differences will intensify; that local identities erode because of economic and social change, and religion moves in to fill the void.

Some of this can be questioned: self-consciousness about civilization and culture itself is a relatively modern phenomenon. for instance, at least where it takes a nationalist form. And it could also be argued that the argument was, in some sense. about culture all along--the culture of the post-Enlightenment West with its doctrine of romantic nationalism and secularism versus earlier imperial Western. Islamic, and Orthodox cultures. But this doesn't really change the central thesis, which is probably correct. It is certainly tempting to look at something like the bombing of the World Trade Towers and the more recent foiled attempt to bomb a number of other New York City targets--products of what is becoming known, too simply, as "Islamic fundamentalism"--and see confirmation of the idea that the basic differences do exist at this level.

Huntington makes a number of suggestions: the West should see to its own interests by "promoting greater cooperation and unity in its own civilization, particularly between its European and North American components," bringing into its orbit those Eastern European and Latin American cultures whose values are close to the West, encouraging international institutions that "reflect and legitimate Western interests and values," limiting the military expansion of "Confucian and Islamic civilizations," while exploiting the differences and conflicts between them.

Some of this could be seriously disputed, but not here. What concerns me is Huntington's belief that the West "will have to accommodate to these non-Western modern civilizations, whose power approaches that of the West but whose values and interests differ significantly from those of the West. This will require the West to develop a much more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations and the ways in which people in those civilizations see their interests. It will require an effort to identify elements of commonality among Western and other civilizations."

If this is what we need, we are in trouble. There is, first of all, the astonishing religious illiteracy of the West--an illiteracy that is almost as ignorant of Christianity (certainly in its historical dimension) as it is of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism. The inability of the New York Times's editorialists to understand religious objections to euthanasia or abortion (objections with which they are not required to agree--they should be expected only not to distort or caricature them) does not offer us reason to be confident that we will see any sensitivity to Islamic or Orthodox or Hindu concerns, or any real understanding of them.

In the July 15 New York Review of Books, William Pfaff writes of "a fundamental inability of governments responsive to popular opinion to deal with problems whose consequences lie in the future." This has been demonstrated, he says, in Yugoslavia, where action to halt aggression would be risky, dangerous, and would therefore be unpopular. The sad fact is that governments which are most effective at mobilizing their people are those headed by people like Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Hitler. Through the invocation of national myths, past grievances, and the hope of future glory they stir up support, with the help of censorship, the suppression of dissent, and other nondemocratic (but very effective) means.

Here Pfaff says something crucial, and so obvious that we ignore it constantly, the way people in damaged families change the subject when the horrid father comes up: "There are certain complacencies by which the democracies justify their aversion to sacrifice. We say that because the democracies are virtuous they will always win out in the end; the cold war has proved it. We say that awkward as the system may seem it is still better than all the rest. We say that democracies never fight other democracies, and the world is getting more democratic. We say the people always know best.

"The fact is that democracies compete badly with despotisms. Democracies don't like sacrifices, or the politicians who demand them. Democracies are no good at looking after their security interests when a gun is not pointed at their heads. Democracies don't like to listen to bad news. Democracies don't want to think about bad possibilities in the future. Democracies don't want their comfort or profits interfered with. Democracies may not win out in the long term. It is entirely possible that until now they have merely been lucky."

Christina Stead wrote a chilling novel, The Man Who Loved Children, about a determinedly optimistic father who is in fact monstrous. There is a facet of democracy which reminds me of that man, and Pfaff hints at it. From the start, the Enlightenment ignored so much of what being human is about, and the heirs of the Enlightenment carry on as if all of those dark and difficult things could still be ignored or dealt with as if they were peripheral to what really matters--the marketplace of acceptable ideas, the seeking out of the least difficult way to proceed, the willingness to put aside anything that could possibly disrupt the orderly conduct of business, the pursuit of happiness (not clarity or truth). One of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s objections to Solzhenitsyn's address at Harvard was that Solzhenitsyn spoke as if he knew the Truth. (The capitalization of the word was a sign of Schlesinger's scorn.)

To speak, as Huntington does, of "the West" usually means to speak of the secular, post-Enlightenment, democratic assumptions of most educated people in industrial societies. There is a lot of what we assume in common that I love and would not want to lose. But for those of us whose values are essentially religious, much of what matters to us lies beyond what we assume in common with our fellow citizens, and we are not willing to assume that because we do not share those religious values, it doesn't matter, or matters less than what we do share. We will begin to be a little closer to collective health when we begin to see that democracy, like indoor plumbing or vaccination, is wonderful; but, like indoor plumbing or vaccination, it is not close to being an adequate guide for understanding life.