by Michael Liss

On September 19, 1796, less than two months prior to the meeting of the Electors to choose the next President of the United States, George Washington stunned the country by publishing “The Address of General Washington To The People of The United States on his declining of the Presidency of the United States”—what came to be known as Washington’s Farewell Address.

Washington was tired. The office had made him old before his time—compare the ubiquitous Gilbert Stuart “dollar-bill” paintings done in his second term to the immensely vigorous figure you see in Charles Willson Peale’s full length portrait after the Battle of Trenton. Still, the Presidency would have been his to keep, probably for life, if he had wanted. His prestige was immense, his character considered unimpeachable, and his words carried enormous weight.

“Weight” also described the text. In an era where there were no page limits, The Farewell Address just keeps on going—32 densely-handwritten pages and well over 6000 words when set in type. And as to the prose, there is just no lift, no color, no poetry. People think they remember “beware of foreign entanglements,” but even that is incorrect–the exact quote is “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

Therein lies the paradox–the famous speech that no one can accurately recall because no one can get through it. My daughter gave me a collection of 40 great American speeches. The Farewell Address is included, but with at least 80% of it “abridged.” Seems as if the editor couldn’t get through it either.

There is something oddly appropriate about this. Washington wasn’t eloquent. Monuments rarely are. At times, it seems he was barely human—he was Flexner’s Indispensable Man, transitioning from warrior-chief to an immovable stone obelisk to which the ship of state could be lashed in any storm. What people get out of the Farewell, after wading through the prolixity, is his strength and steadfastness—his primary bequest to the country. Here, he voluntarily gives up power; there, he reassures that great things have been accomplished by forming a Union; and, finally, he warns of dangers and advises on how to reduce them.

Can we stop with that—is that enough? Do we really need more from Washington, beyond seeing him as a colossus?

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by Paul North

F. Undine in his Brooklyn studio, June 2016

In the third installment of “Current Genres of Fate” I want to think about a mode of fate that has been all the rage for the last 20 years or so. Let's call it “the persistence of the past.” For some time before that, as is well known, it was the rage to remark on the speed with which we were leaving the past behind. Rages come and go. It was oddly pleasurable to discover, in the midst of our progress, that the past had kept right up with us. Now we happily talk about how little has changed. But however cutting edge it has recently seemed, the idea that the past persists within or behind the newness of things is at least as old as our ideas of progress. Darwin tells about a species driven toward innovation that at the same time keeps intimate ties with the deep past. Freud says a new psychic attachment is a guise for a primal ur-attachment.

You will never be rid of the past. This is surely a fateful way of understanding the past's persistence. But this fate does not have to be bad. Just because we are shadowed by the old does not mean we are its puppets or have no freedom at all. What's more, the idea that the past persists can have a salutary effect. It may soften our fetish for change, turn our fever for forward movement to reticence, relax the continual, tortured desire to “move on.” On the other hand, if we admit that the past persists, it does seem unlikely that we will ever achieve total freedom. Accepting this mode of fate ruins the fantasy that we could have no constraints whatever.

An artist named Friese Undine has made it his responsibility to cast shadows on the idea of progress in life as well as in art. Undine proposes to stain putatively current images with blotches of the past. In art this is particularly hard to do, since art, visual art—‘contemporary' art—seems over the last 150 years or so to have signed a pact with progress-lovers in other walks of life, like politics and economics. Art wants to consign the past to the past just like they do. We associate this gesture with “modernism”—waving away tradition, refusing conventional subjects and traditional techniques. With its dismissive wave, modern art kept up with capitalism. “Make it new” was the aesthetic rallying cry of a century, until, at a certain point, the sheen on the plastic packing rubbed off. Newness got old. The only novelty left to plunder was the past. Yet even the return to past forms—in order to quote styles, ridicule out of date wishes, to consciously recycle images or to debase conventions, and all the rest—even this way of doing art that saw the past as a storehouse of gestures to be repurposed, also denied that the past simply persists. Artists could not proceed plundering the past if it were not dead. They could not innovate and renovate and at the same time admit that the past had never actually passed.

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by Humera Afridi

I want to hear her: bold; questioning; insistent, refusing to compromise her ideals. I want to understand; to see, her: this woman of deep faith, with a distinctive laugh, who “had no equal among either the women or the men of her century.” Possessed of a brilliant mind and exceptional memory, she was controversial—beloved, reviled, envied, not averse to taking risks in the service of truth and justice. Falsely accused of adultery, she was publicly defended by her husband, Seal of the Prophets and a political leader, who took to the minbar and challenged the men bent on sullying her name and that of his household. At 42, she led an army against the fourth Caliph—the infamous Battle of the Camel in the mid-seventh century—in which she suffered devastating losses. Mother of the Believers, yet herself childless. Youngest wife of Prophet Muhammad. Transmitter of two thirds of his sayings, the Hadith or traditions, that are treasured keys to a deeper understanding of the Quran and the commentaries written on its divinely revealed verses.

But: where is Aisha today?

When we speak of Muslim women, or the status of women in Islam, harking back always to that distant past—seventh century Arabia—which through a prismatic lens continues to determine our present, why are the Mothers of the Believers silent, invisible, absent? Asked whom he loved the most, Prophet Muhammad, magnificent warrior against misogyny in egregiously patriarchal Arabia, unhesitatingly declared, “Aisha!” Aisha in whose lap he breathed his last breath before he passed into the Realm of Beauty.

All this to say, Aisha was far from flat. She was refreshingly complex, multi-dimensional, a “round character”—to borrow a literary term from E. M. Forster—filled with the breath of God. And she wasn't the only one. Well before her, there was Khadijah, the Prophet's first wife—with whom he had monogamous relationship for twenty-five years until her death—savvy business woman, older than him by over a decade, a former widow, who on discerning his gentle and upright character, qualities she deemed attractive in a man, proposed marriage to him when he was a lad of 25 and in her employ.

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by Dave Maier

As someone who lived through the surreal drug-war dystopia of the 1980s, I have always assumed that the collected forces behind it (right-wing authoritarianism, progressive nanny-statism, the law enforcement, private-prison, and Big Pharma lobbies, general aversion to other races and/or dirty f’ing hippies, inertia and lack of imagination, etc.) would render it a permanent fixture of our political landscape, at least in the USA. So even after two states re-legalized marijuana in 2012 (and two more since), I didn’t pay much attention. It simply remained inconceivable to me that it would go beyond that.

Nowadays, however, one hears frequently that re-legalization of marijuana and perhaps even all “illicit” drugs is inevitable and in fact will happen sooner rather than later. The thought is that young people (i.e. new voters) are strongly in favor of re-legalization and only older people (i.e. those preparing to shuffle off this mortal coil and thus off the voting rolls) are strongly against – and even the latter are discovering, perhaps to their surprise, the apparently wondrous utility (if anecdote be any guide) of medical cannabis. The latest nationwide polls on the issue show Americans favoring the end of marijuana prohibition by wide margins (58-39, 56-36, numbers like that), suggesting a cultural shift as momentous and sudden (at least to those not paying attention, such as myself) as that which has led to today’s widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage.

So I thought I better get up to speed and hit the books. I don’t have a tightly argued, persuasive essay for you, and I am still only halfway through a fairly tall stack of relevant literature, but I can at least pass on some recommendations and share some speculation over the next couple of columns.

I'd start with Dan Baum’s authoritative study Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (1996). This will fire your outrage and keep you going through some of the more pedestrian public-policy issues, as well as dauntingly complex psychopharmacology, on offer later on. Baum insists that the book is not a manifesto for legalization, but rather an examination of the genesis of the war, which he traces to the election of 1968, and its escalation into “a policy as expensive, ineffective, delusional, and destructive as government gets.”

A recurrent theme in Baum’s story, as he notes in his introduction, is that “[t]he War on Drugs is about a lot of things, but only rarely is it really about drugs.” Notoriously high on President Nixon’s paranoid list of enemies were “the blacks” and “the hippies”, and by fomenting drug war he saw a way to attack both at once. When his hand-picked Presidential Commission on Marijuana (a.k.a. the Shafer Commission) failed to provide the desired denunciations of drug use (Nixon had demanded “a goddamn strong statement about marijuana … one that just tears the ass out of them”), Nixon simply ignored it. In any case Congress had already passed the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which still determines government policy in this area to this day. The drug war – or at least its modern phase – had begun.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

When it comes to private art collections, not many places have the richness and diversity of Italy. Of course, Italy also has a few great national museums too. But that is not where one usually heads to find the cream of the crop of the country's fine art. For in Italy, the famed pictures and sculptures are mainly to be seen in the once legendary private collections of long-dead dukes and princes; as well as in those of Renaissance mercenaries and bankers –not to mention the art still found miraculously in the the churches for which they were originally created. Beautiful gems, these private collections are in part why going to Italy to see art somehow feels more an act of pilgrimage than of travel.

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by Evan Edwards

Last month was the 197th anniversary of the birth of American poet, Walt Whitman. While one hundred and ninety-seven isn’t as clean as a good, solid, two hundred years of the grandfather of free verse, I reckon we’ll just have to make do with it until 2019. Still, it has been a very good year for Whitman, and for those impassioned by his work. In February, one of the hundreds if not thousands of letters that he wrote for dying soldiers during the Civil War turned up in a Washington archive. But even more significantly, last summer, a 13-part column series on “manly health,” written by Whitman, was discovered, verified, and then published in April of this year. Since Whitman was a prolific writer, newly discovered texts of his crop up every year or so; but this series of columns is another beast entirely. Weighing in at over one hundred and twenty pages, the text’s discovery was not just the addition of a small fragment or marginalia to the oeuvre, not even just a new article written during his years as a journalist, but an entirely new text.

When Leaves of Grass was first published in 1855, the book of untitled, authorless, largely unorganized verse was just ninety pages. Over the course of the next thirty one years, he would add, organize, reorganize, subtract, and alter the poems, so that the text ended up being around four hundred leaves or so. This is only important to note when we consider that the columns on health were written in the years just after the publication of the first edition. Just like a series of lectures that were written around and after the first edition, lectures which were supposed to eventually replace the original introductory essay, this series on manly health seems to be conceived as a sibling project to the poems.

The essay that precedes the first edition, written in the days just preceding its publication, as well as the lectures written to replace that essay, and the columns on manly health that sought to replace those lectures, all of these share a common theme: they are Whitman’s admitted attempts to “explain” or “fulfill” the poetry for which he was so famous.

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by Bill Benzon

The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

—Yeats

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

—Kafka

I woke up at 1:17 AM a couple nights ago, a dream on my mind. Which is unusual, because I generally do not remember dreams.

It was night and I was walking along the street outside an aged building where I occupied an apartment on the first floor. To my surprise and dismay the external wall along one side of my apartment was completely gone. It had been in bad shape and needed repair, but why hadn’t my landlord given me notice about the repairs? I’d been thinking of inviting my father to visit me, but I couldn’t do that now. And how could I protect my things from thieves? So I went to the rear of the building, clambered up an external wall and over the roof of a rear-facing porch and through a window into a second floor apartment. I looked around, went past the occupants, who were sitting on mattresses on the floor and paid me no mind, and entered the front apartment on the second floor where I did the same thing. So did they. I walked down the stairs to the first floor where I entered my apartment through the door. Now I was in my apartment and looking into the street through the wall that was no longer there.

That’s when I awoke. There was of course more to the dream than that, But I don’t recall it very well and, in any event, dreams and prose are such very different things that any account I give will be as much invention as recollection. So it is with that first paragraph.

The thing is, I recognized that apartment. It seemed that I’d been there in other dreams, dreams years ago. But that apartment also seemed like a diffuse and distracted amalgam of apartments I’d occupied in Baltimore, Buffalo, Troy NY, and even Jersey City.

I remembered that before I’d fallen asleep I’d been thinking of writing this piece. Not so much about Brexit as about a diffuse wandering state of mind. Start with Brexit and see where it takes me.

For you see, I’m not expert in any of the various things that would allow me to lay claim to serious insight into the referendum that just took place in Britain. It’s just one of the things that flows through my mind these days, along with Trump, Sanders, and Hillary; territorial disputes in the South China Sea; drone warfare; and just when are we going to see self-driving vehicles on the open road? I claim no particular expertise in these matters either, but they enter my mind where I entertain them. In the one case I’m going to have to vote.

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by Matt McKenna

More than the thousands of articles laboriously describing the apocalyptic state of American politics in 2016, the low-brow Kevin Hart comedy Central Intelligence is the most efficient and accurate portrayal of the circus we’ve created out of our Presidential election process. In hindsight, it seems odd to expect long-read think-pieces in periodicals like the New Yorker to shed light on what is less of a democratic election and more of a reality show called “Who Wants to be the President”. Indeed, a run-of-the-mill summer comedy with the crass tagline “Saving the world takes a little Hart and a big Johnson” seems the more appropriate medium to comment on our equally crass election. So perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that director Rawson Thurber’s Central Intelligence isn’t just reasonably funny, but it also provides a legitimate critique of American politics.

Central Intelligence co-stars Kevin Hart and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Hart plays Calvin Joyner, an accountant who is bummed out because he used to be cool in high school, but now he’s boring. Johnson plays Bob Stone, a CIA operative who was bullied mercilessly in high school, but now he’s super jacked. Because Calvin was nice one time to Bob in high school, Bob recruits Calvin to help him on some cockamamie save-the-world mission involving satellites, access codes, and Aaron Paul implausibly portraying a CIA agent. The story, of course, doesn’t make sense, nor was it designed to make sense, which is the first clue the film is actually commenting on American politics.

The humor in Central Intelligence stems from the conflict between the diminutive Calvin and the gargantuan Bob. Calvin is a stuck-up white-collar jerk, and Bob is an naive violence-loving semi-idiot. The film has therefore patterned its leads after the stereotypes of the two major political parties in America; Calvin represents Democrats with their politically correct, holier-than-thou elitism, and Bob represents Republicans with their inability to solve problems in a way that doesn’t involve applying violence to something. Neither party gets a pass in the film–Calvin is frequently the butt of the joke as he sheepishly runs from conflict and is unable to take care of himself. And though he is able to beat people up, the motivation for Bob to develop his physically dominating stature is his feeling emasculated as an adolescent.

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by Kelly James Clark

Maarten Boudry has argued here at 3 Quarks Daily that religion and religion alone motivates ISIS and ISIS-like extremists to violence. He claims (without citation) that other factors, “socio-economic disenfranchisement, unemployment, troubled family backgrounds, discrimination and racism,” have been “repeatedly refuted.” Thinking that religion plays any lesser motivational role is, he claims, “a dramatic failure of imagination.”

Since the claim that religion plays a lesser motivational role in extremist violence is empirically well-supported, I think Boudry’s claim is “a dramatic failure of imagination.” Moreover, I think it’s dangerously uninformed.

Let’s start with uninformed.

It’s easy to think that the troubles in Ireland were religious because, you know, Protestant vs. Catholic. But giving the sides religious names hides the real sources of conflict–discrimination, poverty, imperialism, autonomy, nationalism and shame; no one in Ireland was fighting over theological doctrines such as transubstantiation or justification (they probably couldn’t explain their theological differences). It’s easy to think that the Bosnian genocide of 40,000 Muslims was motivated by Christian commitment (the Muslim victims were killed by Christian Serbs). But these convenient monikers ignore (a) how shallow post-Communist religious belief was and, more importantly, (b) such complex causes as class, land, ethnic identity, economic disenfranchisement, and nationalism.

It’s also easy to think that members of ISIS and al-Qaeda are motivated by religious belief, but…

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by Ahmed Humayun

“Mr. Obama's refusal to speak of “radical Islam” also betrays his failure to understand the sources of Islamic State's legitimacy and thus its allure to young Muslim men….Mr. Obama's refusal to acknowledge the real nature of the Islamist threat creates an opening for Mr. Trump's immigration ban. It suggests to Americans that the President is so hostage to political correctness that he might not be doing all he can to combat the threat.” Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2016.

If you follow the debate about terrorism, Islam, and anti-Muslim bigotry in America today, you will observe a small but strident faction fixated on American officials and leaders who do not use the phrase ‘radical Islam' to describe terrorist groups like ISIL, Al Qaeda, and others. This faction maintains that if you do not talk about terrorism through the prism of Islam, you are soft on terror, you lack moral clarity, and you are paralyzed by political correctness.

This is a heavy burden for one phrase to bear. The good news is that there is no evidence that American security and law enforcement agencies have been 'soft' on terror. Under the current administration, numerous operations have been conducted around the world to disrupt the operations of terrorist groups, even resulting in the capture of Bin Laden, the perpetrator of the September 11 attacks. The lack of use of the phrase ‘radical Islam' by our leaders has not prevented these operations from occurring or succeeding.

In fact, blurring the distinction between Islam and terrorism will hurt counterterrorism efforts rather than aid them. While it is true that terminology is important in this struggle, the Journal's editorial board has it exactly backwards. Consider that ISIL wants to be called the ‘Islamic State', and that it has previously threatened to cut the tongues out of people who refer to it as Da'esh. ISIL's leaders want the world to make no distinction between Islam and its brutish practices. They claim exclusive authority to speak on behalf of Islam, and they slaughter anyone else who has a different view. When we say that ISIL is Islamic, we concede their core contention at the outset. We can either deny our enemies what they want, or we can hand it to them on a silver platter.

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Eden

the 5 pm Magnolia tree
is flaunting its lemony green leaves again
lush as every rite of spring,
fresh, pregnant with light, it makes
the quaking Aspen near the hoop house tremble
its leaves aroused by breeze
as we all, in this utterly new ensemble,
excited as if on some brink, are poised,
unprepared for what comes next, but resolute,
pressed always by the force of nature
which ever sends the unforeseen
in the arms of the expected
to place it at our feet
often tangled (but replete)
to tease apart, to work it out,
to look at it from every angle
to find a way through every doubt
but canny, careful not to go for
every fruit it dangles

Jim Culleny
6/18/16
.

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

In the real world of political talk, getting the last word is often what counts most. This is especially the case where political talk is conducted in the limited space between commercial breaks. In such a forum, “getting the last word” does not mean what it means in a purely academic setting. In academic argument, one gets the last word when one articulates a decisive point, a point to which not even one's smartest and best informed opponents could object. In popular political talk, by contrast, “getting the last word” means being the last speaker to utter a coherent and self-contained thought. Statements of this self-contained variety tend to be received by one's audience as the “take away” from the exchange, and hence they are most likely to be remembered. The arena of national politics is high-stakes and highly-public; and the need to get the last word creates a strong incentive for a distinctive kind of conversational distortion, namely, that of derailing discussion. One derails a discussion when one speaks for the sake of creating a conversational disruption that substitutes the topic previously under consideration with some ambiguous and unwieldy alternative. Once derailed in this sense, conversation loses focus, and the disorientation leaves subsequent speakers unable to get the last word.

Derailing of course takes many forms. But one derailing strategy has become so prevalent in current political discourse that it is worthy of focused analysis.

The derailing strategy we have in mind may be called spitballing. At its core, spitballing works as follows: One makes multiple contributions to a discussion, often as fast as one can think them up (and certainly faster than one can think them through). Some contributions may be insightful, others less so, but all are overtly provocative. What is most important, though, is that each installment express a single, self-contained thought. Accordingly, slogans are the spitballer's dialectical currency. As the metaphor of the spitball goes, one keeps tossing until something sticks; hence it helps if one's slogans are tinged with something disagreeable or slightly beyond the pale. As the spitballer's interlocutors attempt to reply to what he has said, the spitballer resolutely continues spitballing.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

In April Donald Trump howled that the Republican delegate selection process was “rigged“. This was back when it looked like he wouldn't have a majority of the delegates going into the Republican convention. In the first round the delegates are required to vote for a particular candidate according to how they were allocated in their state's vote. If Trump didn't win a majority in the first round, then in subsequent rounds delegates would be free to vote for whomever they liked (Nixon 2016!). Now that he has a solid majority of the delegates, the fairness of the rules used in the arcane underworld of delegate selection no longer holds Trump's interest. Of course, if the “Anybody but Trump” cabal inserts a “conscience clause” in the convention rules to unbind Trump's delegates, he'll no doubt once again start screeching “rigged”. Trump's dire warnings of riots at the convention must be causing lots of sleepless nights among party bigwigs.

On the other side, the supporters of Bernie Sanders have vociferously argued that their guy is also the victim of a rigged system. For a party which claims the high ground of reason and adulthood, the Democrats have done their fair share of conspiracy theorizing: dark suggestions of voter suppression, frenzied freak-outs at the Nevada State convention, and ominous grumbles about “super delegates” subverting the process. Even now there are fantastical scenarios involving the super delegates spontaneously throwing their vote to Sanders and causing a contested Democratic convention.

It turns out democracy can be wickedly unfair.

The bizarreness of this election year aside, surely democracy will tick along and ensure the will of the people comes out on election day. After all, on November 8th the votes will be counted and the numbers won't lie [1]. Right?

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by Tamuira Reid

According to an article written by Therese J. Bouchard for the site, World of Psychology, there are “8 Ways to Help Your Bipolar Loved One Cope”.

1. Educate yourself. “Education is always the starting point. Because until a spouse or daughter or friend of a manic-depressive understands the illness, it is impossible to say and do the right thing.” -TB

I try to imagine your rage as something beautiful. Lightning raging across the sky. Wind raging across a thirsty desert. But all I see is you, Giant Man. Trapped in a body with a broken mind. What does it feel like? I don't recognize you in these moments, not even in the eyes. They go grey, flat. Like still water or trapped rain.

2. Learn how to talk to your loved one. “[He] doesn't say much when I'm clutching tissue paper, crying my eyes out. And he's hesitant to speak when I'm manic. When I don't want to get out of bed in the morning, he reminds me why I need to.” – TB

I feel like I've lost my mind, T.

Then let's find it.

It's not funny.

I'm not laughing.

Go fuck yourself.

3. Make some rules. “All those times the school administrators rehearsed what, exactly, would happen in the case of an emergency? Families of bipolar persons need them as well: a plan of action for those times when the bipolar person is sick.” – TB

You cut the deck and wait and cut it again. We open our Pepsi's and sit on the floor in our underwear.

We learned to play cards like this in rehab. To kill the boredom. To pass time thinking about anything other than how much we wanted to use.

When I went into treatment for my drinking problem, everyone warned me not to fall in love. Rehab booty is bad booty. Ridiculous, I thought. Who the hell finds love in a place like this?

It was my 25^th day. Morning meeting. Bunch of newly sober drones reading from the Big Book. I was knitting a scarf for Linda, because she finally kicked dope and was leaving and had no chance in the world really but we all liked to pretend she did. A scarf with blue and black squiggly lines. That's when I heard it. Your voice. It cut through the room on some silvery thread. I looked up and saw you, Giant Man, with a stream of light pouring down on you from a hole in the cabin ceiling. Perfectly illuminated. It was so cheesy and over-the-top but there you have it. Fuck, I remember thinking. Oh fuck.

If I could go back to that morning and change it all. Stay in my room instead of going to morning meeting. If I'd gone to the center by the beach instead of the rehab on the mountain.

Go fish, you say and smile.

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by Jalees Rehman

“The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics.”

—Samuel P. Huntington (1972-2008) “The Clash of Civilizations“

In 1993, the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington published his now infamous paper The Clash of Civilizations in the journal Foreign Affairs. Huntington hypothesized that conflicts in the post-Cold War era would occur between civilizations or cultures and not between ideologies. He divided the world into eight key civilizations which reflected common cultural and religious heritages: Western, Confucian (also referred to as “Sinic”), Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin-American and African. In his subsequent book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order“, which presented a more detailed account of his ideas and how these divisions would fuel future conflicts, Huntington also included the Buddhist civilization as an additional entity. Huntington's idea of grouping the world in civilizational blocs has been heavily criticized for being overly simplistic and ignoring the diversity that exists within each “civilization”. For example, the countries of Western Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia were all grouped together under “Western Civilization” whereas Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Gulf states were all grouped as “Islamic Civilization” despite the fact that the member countries within these civilizations exhibited profound differences in terms of their cultures, languages, social structures and political systems. On the other hand, China's emergence as a world power that will likely challenge the economic dominance of Western Europe and the United States, lends credence to a looming economic and political clash between the “Western” and “Confucian” civilizations. The Afghanistan war and the Iraq war between military coalitions from the “Western Civilization” and nations ascribed to the “Islamic Civilization” both occurred long after Huntington's predictions were made and are used by some as examples of the hypothesized clash of civilizations.

It is difficult to assess the validity of Huntington's ideas because they refer to abstract notions of cultural and civilizational identities of nations and societies without providing any clear evidence on the individual level. Do political and economic treaties between the governments of countries – such as the European Union – mean that individuals in these countries share a common cultural identity?

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