Clash of Civilizations

So I finished The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, by Samuel P. Huntington, and I'm not very impressed for "one of the most influential books of the new wartime era," as the Globe calls it. There's a serious lack of rigor, and carelessness about how his arguments are arrayed, to justify conclusions that he wanted to get to anyway. Most of the big conclusions I agree with ("we're moving towards a multipolar, rather than a bi- or uni- polar world;" "China is the up-and-coming power to watch."), but don't think are particularly profound. The small conclusions I'm unconvinced by ("Greece is more like Russia than Western Europe, and will drift away from Nato towards a position as a Russian satellite state;" "South Africa will abandon the West and build a new African civilization with itself at the head.") - to be fair, he's less definitive about these conclusions, but since they're the ones that are predicted by his theory and not by zillions of other people as well, they're the ones that test his theory. And he frequently seems to contradict things he says other places, when the previous statement is inconvenient for the current arguement - he goes back and forth on whether to count Indonesia as Muslim (which it is when talking about the military threat from Islam) or Chinese/Sinic (which it counts as when talking about the economic Chinese threat), for instance. Overall, it feels like a bunch of pieces of idea strung together to justify a conclusion he wants to reach (that the U.S. should "return to its Western roots, not try to incorporate other cultural elements, and make (trust) alliances only with Europe"), rather than an unbiased analysis of the state of the world.

He also focuses a *lot* on the key importance of religion in defining a civilization. (Except when it isn't - Latin America, although predominantly Catholic, isn't part of "Western Christianity," and Sub-Saharan Africa, divided more-or-less evenly between native religions, Christianity, and Islam, gets to be a civilization all its own.) While this is likely to be good for ironrat's thesis, I think it misleads him into treating all of Islam as effectively Arabic culture, when in fact it seems to me that the differences between Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia are at least as big as the differences between Australia and South Africa, Spain and Argentina, or Greece and Italy. Admittedly, I'm a biased secular Westerner, and may be undervaluing religion, but he's a biased Christian Westerner. The most telling pair of sentences in the whole book to me are: "Having experienced the good and the bad of the West in Christianity and apartheid, South Africa is peculiarly qualified to lead Africa. Having experienced the bad and the good of the West in secularism and democracy, Turkey may be equally qualified to lead Islam." The equation of secular with bad is a bias that seems to bleed through the book in a lot of places, and makes it hard for me to give his analysis much weight. Overall, lives five days of game, before getting gunned down in the crossfire between Muslim and Chinese terrorists.