Is the World Coming Together or Falling Apart?

A few years ago many Western ideologues were ready to celebrate their ultimate victory. They argued that, with the overthrow of communism, liberal democracy would quickly establish itself as the highest embodiment of historical truth on Earth, and there would essentially be no further development. A best-selling book,"The End of History and the Last Man" by the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama, spelled out this naive view.


Since then, however, events have destroyed this idyllic vision. In the summer of 1993, the journal Foreign Affairs published an article by Harvard University professor Samuel P. Huntington entitled "The Clash of Civilizations?" which also provoked a strong reaction. Now Huntington has developed this article into a new book, and he will be appearing in Moscow in January to present his ideas.


Huntington's view of the future is diametrically opposed to Fukuyama's. He argues that with the collapse of the bipolar world, humanity will face growing fundamentalism, or "the revenge of God." The sharp conflicts between the world's seven or eight regional civilizations will divide the world into warring groups, each of which is united by the religious ideals that separate it from the rest.


Huntington sees this intensification of conflict as the only realistic possibility for the future. Russian social scientists, though, have been researching a variety of historical analogues to the present global crisis and have noted several factors that seem to argue that world civilization is moving more toward integration than disintegration.


One such factor is the observation that, generally speaking, as a society's technological potential increases, its survival demands increasingly well-developed means of restraining aggression. Whenever the balance of power and wisdom is disturbed, society enters into a phase of crises. Through such dramatic collisions, humanity moves into new epochs, time and again adapting its consciousness to match its might. Civilization has survived because people, as they have grown more powerful, have also been able to find ever more artful forms of compromise, both with nature and with one another.


Today world civilization has entered a new crisis which in many ways reflects this paradigm. People are capable of doing more than they can conceive of, and this disproportion is fraught with global disaster. Humanity's unprecedented powers of creation and destruction now pose enormous problems that have never before been faced and which, therefore, no traditional culture is capable of resolving.


Before now, it has never been necessary to completely eliminate violent means from the political arena. On the contrary, historically speaking such conflicts not only have not threatened the existence of society, they usually played an important role in its development.


Consequently, societies have always faced the important, but comparatively simple problem of regulating violence, usually by counterbalancing one group of forces against another. This has been the focus of cultural and religious ideologies from time immemorial. People have been divided into believers and non-believers, and internal cohesion has been achieved by transferring aggression onto outsiders. Over time, however, the borders of group solidarity have steadily widened and, what is more important, eroded.


At the beginning of the century, H.G. Wells sarcastically remarked that the only thing that could end the animosity between England and France would be an invasion from Mars. In 1986 Ronald Reagan repeated this bitter joke with regard to Soviet-American relations. Mikhail Gorbachev responded that we do not need Martians since we already have enough common enemies, including nuclear destruction and environmental devastation.


Russian social scientists have noted another pattern of history that seems to indicate that the future of civilization may not be as gloomy as Huntington predicts. Any complex system in nature -- be it physical, biological or social -- continues to develop only to the extent that variation at its upper levels is secured by limitations to variation at its lower levels. Otherwise, it degrades. Imagine, for instance, what would happen to a transportation network if drivers refused to abide by the same traffic rules. Or what would become of language if there were no limits to the ways letters or sounds could be combined. This law dictates that the development of cultural variation in this extremely interconnected world presupposes the assimilation of regional civilizations on the basis of fundamental principles of conduct and values.


No matter how contradictory the tendencies of the modern world may appear, it is possible to find in their interweaving signs that this demand of history is being fulfilled. The clearest example is the fact that, despite seemingly irreconcilable ideological and cultural differences, the world has agreed over the last 50 years to let its most destructive weapons sit idle, actually preventing the leading military powers from engaging one another in direct battle: There is no historical precedent for this.


It should be noted that Western culture -- the source of the technology that presents such a threat -- has also provided the clearest recognition of that threat. It has also already begun to work out the mechanisms of non-confrontational solidarity -- "us" without "them" -- and to cultivate a level of tolerance and a willingness to understand other values and interests that is unthinkable from the point of view of religious fundamentalism.


Huntington argues that the influence of Western values is only superficial. However, when considering which of these two competing tendencies -- fundamentalist fragmentation or global integration -- will become the organizing principle of the future, it is important to consider the influence of technology.


The computer revolution has compressed physical space and made it possible to penetrate any artificial boundaries. Moreover, it has cultivated a certain type of multidimensional thinking that has overshadowed the linear, authority-centered thinking of "book" culture. It is conceivable by the middle of the next century, the world community will not be organized by territory, religion or ethnicity, but by the "network" principle -- that is, by professional activity and personal tastes and interests.


Of course, periods of global crisis such as the present do not facilitate unambiguous forecasting. If Huntington had taken a more complete account of the complexity of the present, the picture of the future presented in his article would have been cast in the form of a warning, rather than a prophecy. There are indeed other future scenarios available that are no less likely than the one he depicts. It is for this generation and the next to decide how or whether world civilization will continue to develop.





Akop Nazaretyan is editor of Social Science Today. A longer version of this article appeared in the most recent issue (#6). He contributed this article to The Moscow Times.