In the end, there isn't much `there, there'...at all.

November 26, 2019 12:39 PM

I did it -- I taught "Clash of Civilizations" to my "Intro to IR" students.

A single Twitter thread by Paul Poast on teaching Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations.

Originally published in 1993 in Foreign Affairs, The Clash of Civilizations was an attempt to try and explain a post-Cold War world and the challenges it may face. In Huntington's view:

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. 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. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

Needless to say this view evoked fierce criticism, by e.g. Edward Said:

In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make "civilizations" and "identities" into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing. This far less visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and constricted warfare that "the clash of civilizations" argues is the reality.

In the Twitter thread, University of Chicago professor of international relations Paul Poast lays out step by step how he taught this somewhat controversial idea, starting with whether it should be taught at all:

In short, I said, "Maybe this is a dangerous idea. But it's sufficiently prominent that you are likely to hear it at some point. Plus, at @UChicago we don't shy away from an idea, even if it's dangerous. We engage it and see if there is any `there, there'".

posted by MartinWisse (30 comments total)

That comment at the end is rank "intellectual" bullshit of the highest order. The reason the "clash of civilizations" idea is dangerous is because it's racist bullshit, and that's a perfectly reasonable stance for not engaging with it.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:50 PM on November 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

If something being racist bullshit was a reason not to engage with it then Edward Said wouldn't have gotten far.
posted by theodolite at 12:57 PM on November 26, 2019 [15 favorites]

So is your position that we should not teach critically about, say, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax? Or Great Replacement or whatever? Thereby virtually ensuring that the first time young adults hear about it is from an un-critical proselytizing perspective?
posted by tobascodagama at 1:06 PM on November 26, 2019 [12 favorites]

Depends on context, doesn't it?

In an IR course it makes perfect sense to teach it and teach it skeptically because you cannot deny the influence it has had the past three decades and how it is still shaping US foreign policy today.

Outside of it, I'd agree that it is indeed perfectly reasonable to not engage with it.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:10 PM on November 26, 2019 [13 favorites]

this is very interesting but I don't know what IR stands for in this context?
posted by supermedusa at 1:12 PM on November 26, 2019 [5 favorites]

International Relations.

From their course catalog:

PLSC 29000. Introduction to International Relations. 100 Units.
Humans face many challenges today. These range from wars and nuclear proliferation, to economic crises and the collapse of global order. International Relations—the study of global anarchy and the commitment problems it creates between sovereign governments—offers analytical tools for understanding the causes and consequences of these challenges. This course introduces students to the scientific study of world politics, focusing on the areas of security, economic cooperation, and international law.

posted by zenon at 1:16 PM on November 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

No, my position is that you don't start from the position of "well, let's see if maybe there's a corn kernel of a reasonable position in this pile of racist shit," but that you lead off with how this is racist shit. In the context of the Protocols, you start by explaining how they were written by Tsarist secret police to serve as "justification" for their pogroms, and you don't spend any time treating the text as legitimate (or as the author of the thread put it, "seeing if there's any 'there' there.")

One of the reasons that we keep seeing racist cranks like Charles Murray given space is because we keep refusing to say that bigotry is outright unacceptable in academia. It's time we treated bigots as cranks.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:16 PM on November 26, 2019 [9 favorites]

There's a limited amount of time, that's the thing. "Clash of civilizations" nonsense does in fact underpin a lot of received wisdom about US foreign policy, so, depending on course goals and the students you have, it might make sense to engage with it.

I'm not totally sure that every class should be designed around "let's see what the worst take in the field is is and then debunk it", though.
posted by Frowner at 1:21 PM on November 26, 2019 [8 favorites]

My GWB-era undergrad poli sci program let me fulfill my international relations requirement with a class called U.S. Defense Strategy, this shit was absolutely rampant.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 1:23 PM on November 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

Just saw the map of the various civilisations. The stupid: it burns.

It's like some Victorian-era crank text about “the Four Races of Man” or something.
posted by acb at 1:24 PM on November 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

So is your position that we should not teach critically about, say, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax? Or Great Replacement or whatever? Thereby virtually ensuring that the first time young adults hear about it is from an un-critical proselytizing perspective?

It may be different now, but when I was an undergrad (at the University of Chicago, in the years immediately after 9/11), I had most certainly heard of the Clash of Civilizations theory in the pop IR context where it doesn't get a ton of pushback like it does academically. It would have greatly accelerated the speed at which I figured out it was bullshit to be taught it.

I also think the comparison to the Protocols of Elders of Zion is a little off because Serious People do take Huntington seriously, so treating him seriously, but in a way designed to expose the problems (both factual and, you know, the racism), is an approach that makes more sense, to me at least. It's an idea you find in the real world, and I'd rather people be exposed to it in a classroom where it'll be challenged than in the OpEd pages where it isn't. I'd also note that the result here seems to be exactly what I would want: the student realized his theory is wrong, got exposed to the arguments that its racist, and picked up the tools to analyze a theory like that. That outcome looks right to me.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 1:25 PM on November 26, 2019 [7 favorites]

This shit is still taught, often uncritically, within the two prominent DC IR schools. As is Frank Fukuyama's "End of History" blather.*

"This is racist bullshit" is a hard thing to start with if you want students to think critically about something your colleagues are actively pushing.

*And don't get me started on David fucking Landes or for that matter Stephen Pinker.
posted by aspersioncast at 1:51 PM on November 26, 2019 [7 favorites]

"This is racist bullshit" is a hard thing to start with if you want students to think critically about something your colleagues are actively pushing.

No, it really isn't, as the professor in the OP actually demonstrated when he compared side by side Huntington's map with Stoddard's blatantly racist "map of the races" - his students got the point immediately. "Thinking critically" does not require us to engage in Broderite equivocation - we are not obligated to see if there is any "'there' there".
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:10 PM on November 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Granted I was in a different UofC program, but we no-shit had to learn the humoral theory of medicine and basic astrology, not because it was scientifically valid, but because it had a huge impact on the things we were studying (that is, the worldview of the people who created them.)

Studying something =/= endorsing it and I would argue that it’s academic malpractice to NOT teach students about the racist and bigoted bullshit that is a part of so much Western thought and culture. Students need to know it’s there, students need to recognize when it’s being cited, alluded to, and dogwhistled, and they need to have the skills to look at it critically. I don’t think we can say it’s a waste of time, energy or focus as long as history remains full of awful shit and the present contains awful people trying to push those viewpoints.
posted by Hypatia at 2:13 PM on November 26, 2019 [18 favorites]

Yeah, academics not engaging with bullshit has worked SO well for those of us in Anthropology and Archaeology. 57% of Americans believe in ancient astronauts and Atlantis.

So yeah, go on with the "Academics shouldn't take this seriously" stuff.
posted by happyroach at 2:25 PM on November 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

So yeah, go on with the "Academics shouldn't take this seriously" stuff.

I'm not saying "don't take it seriously" - I'm saying "don't even give it the veneer of legitimacy." Charles Murray continues to be able to influence policy because academia gives him legitimacy in a quixotic attempt to disprove him.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:55 PM on November 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Oh man, those maps. They're so full of weird little decisions. Like, Greenland is marked in Our Color though it's 88% Inuit. Japan weirdly gets its own color. Argentina has apparently regressed to Not Our Color in reactionary eyes. Kazakhstan gets marked Orthodox though it's 70% Muslim. Some countries get divided, but e.g. West Papua is marked as Muslim though it's 69% Christian.

Still, it's out of date— the reactionaries have decided that Russia is Good and Western Europe is Bad.
posted by zompist at 3:00 PM on November 26, 2019 [5 favorites]

Funny, just ten minutes ago, in reading There There by Tommy Orange I read an explanation of Gertrude Stein's quote about Oakland and it is not what you'd expect at all, and not what the popular usage is, either. (Sorry, this doesn't add to the conversation at all, it is just a reference to the FPP title.)
posted by kozad at 3:03 PM on November 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

I think anytime an IR/poli sci theory hits the popular consciousness, it's baloney. Clash of Civilizations, End of History, Kennedy's Rise and Fall of Great Powers.
posted by Chrysostom at 3:40 PM on November 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

Greenland is marked in Our Color though it's 88% Inuit

We're lucky it gets any color at all. It's treated as an uninhabited non-entity, like Antarctica, far too often. Acknowledging it for what it is: the only native-majority country in North America, slowly and precariously freeing itself from colonial control, would require facing uncomfortable truths that Americans prefer to avoid.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:24 PM on November 26, 2019 [10 favorites]

IR has a hell of a lot wrong with it as a field, and not teaching Huntington seems pretty far down the list of things to fix. But okay, the premise is solid. I did something similar with Huntington and Harrison's Culture Matters as an example of how not to think about culture. If done carefully, these dangerous ideas should be engaged with and then disposed of, the same way anthropologists do with nineteenth century scientific racism in the field (which is very clearly framed as an old-and-false-but-influential idea).

But the self-congratulatory "Here @UChicago" note he closes with sounds very much of a piece with that same school's obnoxious "here at U Chicago we don't do safe spaces" guff (although of course they DO, for certain values of "space"). Maybe I'm being unfair--and overly annoyed by U Chicago smugness--and Poast actually did do a great job with this, though. I certainly hope so, especially for any Muslim or other non-Judeo-Christian-Euro-Americans (or non-white, or whatever) students in his class.
posted by col_pogo at 5:00 PM on November 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

non-Judeo-Christian-Euro-Americans

hi Jew here please leave us out of this Christian Bullshit thanx.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 5:10 PM on November 26, 2019 [5 favorites]

If political science deals in predictions about the behavior of political entities in the world, then it's necessary to know how these behaviors are driven (or inhibited, as the case may be) by ideas. I think it's difficult to understand US behavior without acknowledging the influence of Huntington. In that sense the soundness or validity of the idea is almost beside the point, since in behaving as if it is true, it acquires a terrible reality all its own.
posted by dmh at 6:15 PM on November 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

That comment at the end is rank "intellectual" bullshit of the highest order. The reason the "clash of civilizations" idea is dangerous is because it's racist bullshit, and that's a perfectly reasonable stance for not engaging with it.

OOo scare quotes!

Anyway. This is an IR course, so engaging with the intellectual history of the discipline is important. The purpose of being in a classroom is to teach students, make them smarter, and make them learns something. Did this exercise to it? Maybe. Would it have been better to ignore it? I dont know. But this isn't the case of someone inviting Milo or Richard Spencer to give a talk to air out their views--these are IR students engaging with an IR text. Yes its dangerous, yes its based on bullshit assumptions, but its important to understand and contextualize bad but influential ideas, precisely because they are both bad and influential. Historically IR scholarship has been very racist (go look up the original name of Foreign Affairs) and ignoring that has been very good for the racists and allowed some of those ideas to seep in under a nonracist veneer.

But the self-congratulatory "Here @UChicago" note he closes with sounds very much of a piece with that same school's obnoxious "here at U Chicago we don't do safe spaces" guff (although of course they DO, for certain values of "space").

Thats not what hes doing.

Anyway, full disclosure: I'm an IR scholar and I know Paul a little. Everyone in the discipline knows Paul, because he's generally regarded as one of the nicest people in the field. Whether this is a good or bad exercise is a pedagogical question.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:17 PM on November 26, 2019 [12 favorites]

I am very glad to hear that Poast is doing this as part of addressing racism in IR. I guess I'd rather see it done by addressing how wrongheaded and steeped in racism Huntington's conception of "culture" is (I know, scare quotes!), though, rather than by doing a back and forth on the empirical evidence for the grand thesis Huntington has spun out of it, and it looks like Poast's activity was more of the latter.

My concern for safe spaces doesn't come out of nowhere. When the "there" you are seriously considering rests on a theory of culture that posits some humans--who may well be sitting in that classroom!--as fundamentally other...well, it really needs to be handled carefully.

And that statement really does look and quack somewhere along the Campus-PC-hysteria spectrum to my eyes. Reading the whole thread does make clear that he seems to have stayed away from the worst of that, and the whole exercise sounds like it was handled well, so I'm less alarmed and less worried. But either way it's a pretty self-satisfied attitude to encourage among his students, and I'm not sure students at elite universities need more of that.
posted by col_pogo at 7:38 PM on November 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

Let's not pretend the US is the only nation out there. In China, it's the most conformist, CCP-supporting, one-party-state intellectuals who are big Huntington fans. "Clash of civilizations" helps to justify their existence.
posted by homerica at 8:03 PM on November 26, 2019 [10 favorites]

I studied Huntington in my IR and IPE classes during undergrad, and it was clear that it was a part of a survey of different ways of framing international relations, with the ideas that a) this is was important to study because it underpinned a lot of US foreign policy, and b) it was a clear justification/defense of pre-existing prejudices.
posted by sagc at 8:03 PM on November 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

TBF I've only seen Huntington show up on a reading list uncritically when coupled with a bunch of other neo-con darlings like Niall Ferguson, so at the graduate level I'd expect any student who wasn't already all-in on Western Hegemony and discrete ideas of culture to give it the side-eye from day one. I mean I guess these chucklefucks at least retain the polite veneer of pretending to be academics - for all I know down at George Mason they're teaching Dinesh D'Souza and Newton Leroy fucking Gingrich.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:52 AM on November 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

I generally support engaging with ideas and the overall idea of liberal education but I think it is very important to remember that the vast majority of students fail to learn what they are supposed to learn from lessons no matter how good the teaching or material is. It's mostly hidden by grade inflation these days but learning and retention are fantastically lossy processes. So when you teach a controversy you are probably unwittingly (hopefully unwittingly!) teaching somewhere around half or more students the completely wrong conclusion.

However, the macho bullshit posturing of U of C putting scare quotes around safe spaces 'which they don't do' is particularly rich since the university itself is in a massively police secured enclave on the south side of Chicago. I saw more cops in one day of wandering around Hyde Park than I have seen in the rest of the city in seven years. It's a literal safe space.
posted by srboisvert at 10:14 AM on November 27, 2019 [4 favorites]

srboisvert: Yes! I meant to make a similar point about the danger of accidentally reinforcing an argument you mean to critique. I saw this multiple times when I TAd for a prof who tried to pack way too much into lectures on sex and gender. We'd see many students cite something from professor's slides in an exam to make a completely wrong (and deeply sexist or otherwise troubling) argument. What happened was, the prof had been listing a false claim on the slide and then debunking it later on (sometimes not on the slide), and a number of students completely missed the point, choosing to go with their preconceived notions about sexuality or gender roles.

But that was very poor pedagogy on the prof's part, and whatever my other worries, Poast does seem to have been much, much more thoughtful about how he engaged with Huntington's dangerous idea.
posted by col_pogo at 2:29 PM on November 27, 2019 [1 favorite]