One of America’s great public intellectuals died on Christmas Eve 美国伟大的公共知识分子–塞缪尔.亨廷顿于圣诞前夜与世长辞
Illustration by KAL IN THE early 1990s America’s opinion-makers competed to outdo each other in triumphalism. Economists argued that the “Washington consensus” would spread peace and prosperity around the world. Politicians debated whether the “peace dividend” should be used to create universal health care or be allowed to fructify in the pockets of the people or quite possibly both. Francis Fukuyama took the optimists’ garland by declaring, in 1992, “the end of history” and the universal triumph of Western liberalism.
上世纪九十年代初，美国的舆论制造者们对”必胜主义”的鼓吹甚嚣尘上，经济学家们主张”华盛顿共识”[1]必将在全世界播撒和平和繁荣，政治家们则 就”和平红利”[2]的用处争论不休–是建立全民医疗体系还是充实百姓荷包？或者两者兼顾也完全有可能？1992年，弗朗西斯•福山（Francis Fukuyama）高呼”历史的终结”（”the end of history”）和西方自由主义的绝对胜利，并因此赢得了乐观者的花环。
Samuel Huntington thought that all this was bunk. In “The Clash of Civilisations?” he presented a darker view. He argued that the old ideological divisions of the Cold War would be replaced not by universal harmony but by even older cultural divisions. The world was deeply divided between different civilisations. And far from being drawn together by globalisation, these different cultures were being drawn into conflict.
Huntington added another barb to his argument by suggesting that Western civilisation was in relative decline: the American power-mongers who thought that they were the architects of a new world order were more likely to find themselves the victims of cultural forces that they did not even know existed. The future was being forged in the mosques of Tehran and the planning commissions of Beijing rather than the cafés of Harvard Square. His original 1993 article, in Foreign Affairs, was translated into 26 languages and expanded into a best-selling book.
The “Clash of Civilisations?” was only the most famous of numerous exercises in goring sacred cows. In “The Third Wave: Democratisation in the Late 20th Century” (1991), he argued that democratisation might have more to do with the Second Vatican Council, which had unleashed a wave of democratisation across the Catholic world, than with the spread of free-markets. In “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity” (2004) he challenged the reigning orthodoxy of multiculturalism, pointing out that American civilisation is the product of Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, and warning that the huge influx of Latinos threatened to unmoor it from its roots.
最知名的《文明的冲突》仅是亨廷顿无数如椽巨著中的惊鸿一瞥。在《第三波-20世纪后期的民主化浪潮》（The Third Wave: Democratisation in the Late 20th Century）（1991）中，他认为第二次梵蒂冈大公会议在天主教世界掀起了民主化的浪潮，它之于全球民主化浪潮的作用更甚于自由市场的蔓延。在之后 的《我们是谁：美国国家特性面临的挑战》（Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity）（2004）中，他对主流的多元文化主义（multiculturalism）正统观念提出质疑，指出美国文化是盎格鲁-撒克逊新教文 化的产物，并警告说拉丁裔新移民的大量涌入会将美国文化连根拔起，直至消亡。
Huntington’s last book earned him a reputation as a crusty old reactionary. He certainly became a hate figure to the left and a hero to many conservatives. But his politics were altogether more complicated. He was a lifelong Democrat, a representative of that dying breed, the hard-headed cold war liberal. He wrote speeches for Adlai Stevenson and acted as a foreign-policy adviser to Hubert Humphrey. He briefly served in the Johnson and Carter administrations (he was a particularly close friend of Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of Barack Obama’s early backers). He was a fierce opponent of the neoconservatives who thought they could transplant American values into Mesopotamia.
But he believed that it was vital to mix liberal idealism with a pessimism rooted in a conservative reading of history. He rejected the economic reductionism that drove the Washington consensus, and insisted instead on seeing people as products of culture rather than as profit-and-loss calculating machines. He also rejected the beguiling idea (some say it has beguiled The Economist) that all good things tend to go together-that free markets go hand in hand with pluralism, democracy and the American way. He felt that America was a living paradox: America’s culture turned it into a universal civilisation but those values were in fact rooted in a unique set of circumstances.
For all his long career and prodigious energy-Huntington was on the Harvard faculty for 54 years and wrote 17 books on a wide variety of subjects-he will always be associated with the phrase “the clash of civilisations”. How well does his argument hold up 15 years after he first penned it?
Both well and badly. Huntington came as close as anybody to predicting September 11th and the “war on terror” with his strictures about Islam’s “bloody borders”. He also came as close as anybody to predicting America’s agonies in Iraq by pointing out that democracy is the product of very specific cultural processes. His argument that modernisation does not necessarily entail Westernisation also looks prescient: why should the Chinese embrace the American economic model when it seems to produce such economic havoc? And why should authoritarian regimes in the Middle East embrace democratisation when it might mean handing power to Islamists? The master emerges better than his pupil, Mr Fukuyama.
可以说是对错参半。亨廷顿指责伊斯兰拥有”血腥边界”[3]，几近精准地预测了美国911恐怖袭击和”反恐战争”（war on terror）；他指出民主是非常特定的文化进程之产物，从而又同样精准地预测了美国的伊拉克之痛。而其”现代化”不必牵涉”西化”的观点也颇具远见：既 然美国经济模式可能导致这样一场经济浩劫，中国人又为何非得走美国的老路呢？既然民主化可能意味着权力会落入伊斯兰主义者手中，中东的独裁政权又为何非要 奉行民主化呢？作为福山先生的导师，亨廷顿确实要比他的学生高明。
Right up to a point 质疑亨廷顿
But the corrective itself has needed correcting. Huntington defended his taste for the broadest of brushes on the grounds that, without one, you are left with what William James called “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion”. But his pronouncements often distorted reality rather than imposed order on it. He skated over the fact that many of the nastiest clashes take place within civilisations rather than between them: more Muslims die at the hands of their fellow Muslims than die at the hands of “Jews or Crusaders”; and Europeans fought the 20th century’s bloodiest conflicts among themselves. He also downplayed the extent to which the American model attracts people the world over: the Chinese business elite are much more interested in Silicon Valley than in their Confucian past. His arguments can produce policies that are just as naive as those he excoriated: policies that drive Muslims together into a single angry mass, rather than prising them apart, for example, and policies that encourage Western self-doubt just as surely as do the hand-wringing of the multiculturalists.
Huntington was a remarkable figure for all sorts of reasons, but most importantly because he was willing to question the excessive liberal optimism of the 1990s. Perhaps the best tribute that can be paid to him now is to question the excessive Huntingtonian pessimism that is now threatening to replace it.
Outils 
