“Those who distinguish civil from theological intolerance are, to my mind, mistaken. The two forms are inseparable. It is impossible to live at peace withthose whom we regard as damned; to love them would be to hate God who punishes them: we positively must either reclaim or torment them.” —Jean Jacques Rousseau
With Samuel Huntington’s recent passing, there has been a great deal of debate regarding the nature of his scholarly legacy. That there is any ambiguity at all on this score is a testament to the breadth and depth of his intellectual labor—he had an important impact on international relations, political theory, and civil-military studies just to name a few subdisciplines within political science. He was also one of the few high profile, mainstream political scientists candidly critical of the regnant obsession with arid, quantitative analysis that ignores the big ideas, reduces human experience to something capturable by the narrow parameters of stale predictive behavioral models, and creates a self-deluded patina of scientific exactitude.
Still, Huntington’s most lasting contributions might be to our understanding of human beings as those beings who both make and our bound by culture. In "Clash of Civilizations", Huntington argues that the march of modernization, however irrepressible, does not in itself entail a corresponding Westernization; in fact, he contended that modernization and globalization would likely exacerbate the deep ideological cleavage that separates the world’s major cultures. Of course, the sum result of his analysis was that no set of international institutions, globalized economic arrangements, or expression of multicultural rhetoric could ever reduce our profound disagreements over the nature of the good to merely cosmetic difference.
Although never fully developed by Huntington, his analysis assumes a particular conception of human beings as necessarily rooted in a culture that while particular in character aspires to transcend its own particularity in the direction of the good. As Chantal Delsol argues in greater philosophical depth, our understanding of the good is always mediated by the context of a culture though never fully content to accept its necessary partiality. While cultures are made and are certainly susceptible to revision, they can’t simply be willed into obsolescence like some outdated technology. Much of the thought at the core of the unbridled enthusiasm for globalization and multiculturalism is plagued by contradictory impulses—on the one hand we are to lionize the beauty and dignity of cultural difference but on the other hand, this lionization comes only after its considerable diminution to something epiphenomenal or antiquarian. Huntington offered a powerful defense of the value of culture and its resistance to swift transformation and therefore highlighted some of the fundamental weaknesses in our liberal understanding of tolerance and of liberalism at large.
