The world according to Huntington… and the world we want to build!
A few years ago, Samuel Huntington wrote a highly successful book The Clash of Civilizations. This success redoubled post-9/11 (2001) by popularizing the presumed conflict between the Muslim and the Western world.
Huntington explains in his book that the world is divided into major distinctive civilizations and some of them think it is their vocation to fight with each other. So he gives us a map of these civilizations:
The world according to Samuel Huntington
I think this well-demarcated world with clearly defined boundaries no longer exists. This map has become an illusion and is but an after-image of a world that is no more. Today, the other, the foreigner, can be one’s neighbor or one’s colleague at work. I have more in common with my friend Jawhara from Cairo, with my friend Kai from China, my friend Danya from New York and with so many others geographically far removed from me than I have with some of my neighbors.
War can be at our doorstep as some events remind us. But peace is also at our doorsteps (if not within ourselves…)
A new fractal world
Everywhere in the real world, different communities are developing locally and perhaps even more locally in the virtual one. I think the civilizational map today looks more like this fractal image:
The world according to… me!
A new world emerging?
I believe that it is no more time for war between civilizations but the time for war in favor of civilization.
Let Huntington be unhappy but it is not a time for the clash of civilizations but the time of clash for a civilization. And what we see as chaos actually may be the emergence of a new world.
