From Dialectics to Dialogue: Reflections on Intercivilisational Relations

Hossein Bashiriyeh is a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Tehran. His publications include The State and Revolution in Iran, 1962–1982 (St Martin’s Press, 1984) and Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Nay Press, 1996).

I hope I may be forgiven for opening my discussion with a lengthy quotation. The passage, from a book by Ralph Linton, eloquently and amusingly indicates the sheer extent of cultural cross-fertilisation characteristic of modern civilisation—a point that is a key contention of my essay.

 

Our solid American citizen awakens in a bed built on a pattern which originated in the Near East but which was modified in Northern Europe … He throws back covers made from cotton, domesticated in India, … or silk, the use of which was discovered in China … He slips into his moccasins, invented by the Indians of the Eastern woodlands … He takes off his pyjamas, a garment invented in India, and washes with soap invented by the ancient Gauls. He then shaves, a masochistic rite which seems to have been derived from either Sumer or ancient Egypt.

Returning to the bedroom … he puts on garments whose form originally derived from the skin clothing of the nomads of the Asiatic steppes, puts on shoes made from skins tanned by a process invented in ancient Egypt ... and ties around his neck a strip of bright-colored cloth which is a vestigial survival of the shoulder shawls worn by seventeenth-century Croatians … He glances through the window made of glass invented in Egypt … and takes an umbrella invented in southeastern Asia … On his way to breakfast, he stops to buy a paper, paying for it with coins, an ancient Lydian invention.

At the restaurant … his plate is made of a form of pottery invented in China … his fork a medieval Italian invention, and his spoon a derivative of a Roman original … He has coffee, an Abyssinian plant with sugar … first made in India … When our friend has finished eating he settles back to smoke, an American Indian habit … While smoking he reads the news of the day imprinted in characters invented by the ancient Semites … by a process invented in Germany. As he absorbs the accounts of foreign troubles, he will, if he is a good conservative citizen, thank a Hebrew deity in an Indo-European language that he is a 100 percent American.¹

 

*

 

The thriving business of theorising about the nature of modern civilisation and the challenges it faces from various quarters has led to the crystallisation of a number of theoretical approaches. Defenders of Western modernity portray modern civilisation as the sole dynamic and productive civilisation, one that is replacing a host of deceased or dying civilisations. Contrariwise, critics of Western modernity, both traditionalist and post-modern, view modern civilisation as a bounded historical experience facing a plurality of competing traditions and heritages. Many such critics describe any possible dialogue as inevitably intra-civilisational. For them, dialogue needs a common language and this language is provided only by modern Western civilisation.

 

There have emerged three major theoretical standpoints concerning the unity or diversity of civilisations and the possibility of dialogue among them: the modernist, the traditionalist and the post-modernist. The modernist approach holds that modern civilisation, as a rational–scientific civilisation, is unified and homogeneous. It is the sole living civilisation, challenged only by the occasional apparition of dying cultures. Diverse forms of traditionalism, however, claim that the modern world cannot be reduced to one, i.e., to Western civilisation, and that a plurality of other cultures and civilisations exist as distinct and, for some, conflicting worlds characterised by diverse religious and traditional traits. Finally, some post-modern critics say the incommensurable nature of diverse cultures and civilisations removes any possibility of intersubjective relations and a common language.

 

I shall argue that all three approaches to the subject are equally misplaced, though for quite different reasons. To explain this more clearly, the discussion will have to be raised to a different theoretical level. This higher plane is found in historical dialectics, the main point being that the theme of dialogue among civilisations is to be properly located within such a historical–dialectical perspective. Dialogue takes place on a conscious level and requires a common language, whereas dialectics occurs on an unconscious plane, that is, in “the unconscious of history”.

 

In the following pages I shall first describe the three major existing approaches in more detail and then present my own interpretation of both the dialectics of civilisations and of dialogue among them.

The Rise of Modernity

The modernist conception of history, originating in the Age of Enlightenment, holds that Western modernity will emerge as the sole, homogenous, rational civilisation, and that it will overcome the vestiges of older civilisations. Arnold Toynbee once said:

 

This is a message of encouragement for us children of the Western civilization as we drift today alone, with none but stricken civilizations around us … [T]he dead civilizations are not dead by fate or in “the course of nature”, and therefore our living civilization is not doomed inexorably in advance to “join the majority” of its species. Though sixteen civilizations may have perished already to our knowledge, and nine others may be now at the point of death, we—the twenty-sixth—are not compelled to submit the riddle of our fate to the blind arbitrament of statistics.²

 

All the great Western philosophers of history, from Voltaire to Marx, have in different ways spoken of the rise of a single, universal, rationally based and industrial civilisation that is bound to replace all the religiously based civilisations of the old world. Individuality, universality, humanism, rationalism, progress, equality and liberty are counted among the major characteristics of this newly rising civilisation. Voltaire, in his Discourse on the Manners and Morals of Nations (1756), described the historical process as one passing inevitably from the age of superstition and darkness to the era of reason and enlightenment. Likewise, Herbert Spencer in his Principles of Sociology (1876) applied the “general law of evolution” to the process of history and described it “as a process of passing from simple homogeneity to complex heterogeneity”. In a similar vein, August Comte presented “a general law” of human reason, knowledge and history by which human societies pass through three successive phases: religious, philosophical and positive–scientific. The religious phase is interpreted as the childhood of humanity, the philosophical phase as its adolescence and the scientific phase as its age of maturity and development.

 

Immanuel Kant in his Idea of a Universal History (1784) depicted the essential features of the morally based modern civilisation. On his interpretation, history is the scene of a continuous evolution of various types of order required for the moral progress of humankind. The first phase of historical development was completed with the end of the Hobbesian war of “all against all” and the creation of nation-states. Kant believed the second phase would lead to the establishment of an international order and of peace among nation-states. The new order would take the form of a confederation of nations. Consequently, a new, rational, moral and universal civilisation would pervade the world.

 

Finally, Hegel in his work on the philosophy of history interpreted the historical process as that of an evolving Reason or Idea which proceeds dialectically and leads to human freedom and self-consciousness as the main features of the modern, rational civilisation. In Hegel’s view, earlier civilisations had a smaller share of reason and rationality, whereas modern civilisation is a fuller manifestation of the realisation of the Absolute in historical time.

 

Essentially, the modernist philosophers of history saw history as culminating in the rise of a universally dominant rational civilisation destroying all vestiges of traditional ways of life.

Modernity in Crisis

If the nineteenth century was the heyday of modernist philosophy of history, the twentieth century saw the rise of a grand critique of Western modernity and modernism. Philosophers of all hues spoke of “the crisis of modernity and modern rationality”. Cultural and political resistance to modern, liberal society led to the rise of counter-modernist, traditionalist, religious and fascist movements. Counter-modernism has had various intellectual roots and diverse representatives. An early version is Nietzsche’s critique of all “vertical”, hierarchical thinking—thinking which is the foundation of the rationalist philosophy and thought underlying modernity and modern civilisation. Henri Bergson and Georges Sorel presented similar romantic views on the nature of modern reason and science. According to Sorel, history has no essence and is formed and determined by dominant “myths”.

 

Of more relevance to the present subject is Oswald Spengler’s critique of Western civilisation. In his view, liberal democracy, fascism and communism were clear signs of the decline of the West and its civilisation. Modern rationality was a product of mob mentality in the age of mass democracy. Spengler regarded democracy, especially in its American form, as the best example of modern anarchy. He considered “racial revolution” against Western civilisation a real possibility: Asians, Muslims, Indians, Russians and blacks posed a serious threat to “white” civilisation and would reassert their cultures and civilisations against the West.³

 

More philosophical counter-modernism is found in recent hermeneutically oriented, post-modern approaches to rationality, modernity and tradition. Their central point is that Western social scientists have been fundamentally mistaken in their understanding of other cultures and civilisations because they assume a transcendental reality as the criterion of truth and interpret peripheral cultures on the basis of such a central truth. But for these approaches truth itself is linguistic or discursive. Reality does not give meaning to discourse and language; it is discourse and language which give meaning and determination to reality. Hence, criteria of truth are embedded in every culture and way of life and are therefore incommensurate. Such a “radical critique” of modern reason has given rise to the idea of the plurality of life, cultures and civilisations. Concepts such as difference, diversity, incomparability and plurality have replaced the modernist ones of universality, equality, rationality and unity.⁴

Co-existence versus Conflict

The counter-modernist view of history has recently taken two different political forms, one tending towards peaceful plurality, the other towards antagonism among civilisations. As an example of the first, Stuart Hirschberg has challenged the essential superiority of Western civilisation. Instead, he contends that various cultures and civilisations are still alive and can co-exist peacefully.⁵

 

Other recent works view existing civilisations and cultures as quite distinct, incommensurate experiences and worlds. According to them, civilisations have culturally different fates and lead to different types of “modernities”. In other words, various combinations of tradition and modernity are possible. Since (on the famous Weberian account) modern Western civilisation itself has been the product of the modernisation of the Western religious tradition, other types of modernity are likely to emerge out of various historical traditions.⁶

 

Whereas the first version is optimistic about cultural pluralism and its consequences, the second is more pessimistic and finds the possibility of clashes among civilisations to be quite real. The major exponent of this view is Samuel Huntington, who has spoken of the emergence of several major civilisations: Western, Sinic (Chinese), Hindu, Japanese, Orthodox, Latin American, Islamic and (possibly) African.⁷ He contends that religiously based civilisations are re-emerging as the major global antagonists. In his view, these civilisations are intrinsically distinct in terms of language, culture, tradition and especially religious consciousness, which reawoke in the last two decades of the twentieth century. As a result, national–ideological cleavages are giving way to religious cleavages and conflicts.

 

Huntington argues that, contrary to the modernist contention that the major principles of the “universal” Western civilisation have permeated the world, those principles—individualism, freedom, constitutionalism, democracy, secularism and humanism—are alien to Islamic, Chinese and other civilisations. In Huntington’s view, there is no possibility of a universal civilisation arising in the near future; instead there will be a multiverse of mutually exclusive and potentially antagonistic civilisations.

Civilisation as Synthesis

Of the two major theoretical approaches outlined above, the first puts emphasis on the unity, universality and homogeneity of modern Western civilisation, and the second on the multiplicity, intrinsic exclusiveness and heterogeneity of civilisations. But from a historical–dialectical standpoint neither approach can account for the concrete and multi-dimensional nature of civilisations, which, like other social phenomena, are synthetic, evolving and always unfinished. In other words, no civilisation is a homogeneous entity closed in itself; every civilisation is a combination of elements from other civilisations and as such is an “open system”. It is only through combination and admixture that some elements of them are preserved.

 

No civilisation persists or perishes as a unified and homogeneous totality. For instance, important elements of Christian civilisation have persisted in modern Western civilisation. Civilisations have matured and developed only through their inevitable combinations; and this is what constitutes their “essence”. The most successful civilisations are those that combine a greater number of elements from other and previous civilisations. In this sense, the later civilisations are the older ones combining elements from earlier cultures. From a dialectical point of view, any civilisation is at once a continuation of, and a break with, previous cultures and civilisations. This dialectical quality is captured by the Hegelian concept Aufhebung (sublation), a simultaneous overcoming and preserving whereby later civilisations contain elements from earlier ones but accommodate them in a new constellation. Hence, synthesis and combination are the fundamental principles governing relations among societies, cultures, civilisations and religions. Thus, it is historically unrealistic to conceive of civilisations as homogeneous, autonomous, pure and unified entities. It is equally unrealistic to view them as unique, distinct and mutually exclusive, unable to combine with and include one another.

The Unconscious of History

The dialectics of civilisations as briefly outlined above are conceptualised at a level different from that of the dominant and current discourse concerning relations among civilisations. To comprehend fully this level of analysis it is useful to employ as an analogy the Freudian concepts of consciousness and the unconscious. Thus, we may distinguish between history at a conscious level and the “unconscious” of history. Historical consciousness, so to speak, is the level at which war and peace, cultural and political relations, international trade and communications take place—where national wills and interests are manifested. Both dialogue among civilisations and clashes of civilisations occur on this level.

 

By contrast, the “unconscious of history” is the level on which the dialectics of civilisations occur; they occur, as it were, behind the back of conscious cultural, political and commercial relations among nations. Modern civilisation is itself a testimony to the continuous and ongoing dialectics of civilisations. Yet this very fundamental fact is distorted and hidden by “false consciousness” emanating from false claims about cultural, national and religious purism and exclusive identities. From this point of view, all purist and exclusivist claims to identity, whether modernist or traditionalist, religious or nationalist, are various manifestations of false consciousness hiding and distorting the unconscious dialectics of civilisations. Therefore, “civilisationalism”, or a belief in pure civilisational identity, is as false a consciousness as racism or any other claim to a pure and exclusive identity. Civilisational purity is as mythical as racial purity. Modern civilisation is more advanced in certain respects than earlier civilisations precisely because it is heterogeneous, that is, multi-civilisational in nature. Similarly, modern man is more civilised in certain respects than his forebears precisely because he is a multi-civilisational being.

A Moral ‘Myth’

Having delineated the theme of dialogue among civilisations, we now come to an analysis of its theoretical status and genealogy.

 

Dialogue among civilisations as a project is not an explanatory theory, as some writers have mistakenly conceived and analysed it to be. Thus it is not a social scientific theory describing or explaining past or future intercivilisational relations. It is rather a moral concept seeking to reshape and redirect the dialectics of civilisation at a conscious level, putting emphasis on the more peaceful aspects of that process. Whereas social science theories, in a positivistic manner, conceive of the given historical world as external, structured and predetermined, and seek to discover rules governing so-called external reality, moral conceptions and movements determine and give shape to the in fact undetermined mass of reality. Hence, moral movements are part and parcel of the very essence of history itself, whereas social science theories, as “second order” knowledge, seek to explain the consequences of those movements.

 

Sorel’s concept of “the myth” is here pertinent to elucidating the theoretical nature of dialogue among civilisations as a project. For Sorel, myths are moral movements giving meaning and shape to human life and practices. In his view, the real world of history and society is not structured and predetermined as positivist social scientific theories conceive it to be; social and historical reality is no more than a dynamic confusion with several possibilities of determination. Only myths give order and meaning to that confusion and create determined practices and identities. History itself is a sequence and collection of such myths. In Sorel’s terms, forms of life are products of the violence applied by the myths to the world of confusion and indeterminacy. The concept of myth in Sorel’s thought has certain, definite similarities with the concept of discourse in Michel Foucault’s genealogical works, and with that of the meta-narrative in the works of Jean-Francois Lyotard.

 

The project of dialogue among civilisations is a myth, discourse or narrative in the above senses and may give rise to a new form of life on the international level, given the powers and forces necessary for its implementation. To paraphrase Karl Marx: “Various theories have so far explained the dialectics of civilisation; the point, however, is to transform them into a dialogue of civilisations.”

 

The twentieth century was witness to the rise of several “myths”. For quite a long time, socialism as a narrative and a myth gave meaning and shape to social and political practices, creating new frameworks for self-identity and social action. Likewise, fascism as a myth sought to create new identities, practices and social formations. From such a non-essentialist point of view, social and political life does not follow pre-given inescapable rules and laws; on the contrary, rules and laws emerge in the shadow of myths and discourses. History is, so to speak, a blank table engraved by myths. It has no essential tendency within itself; what tendencies it has are imposed by dominant myths, giving meaning and identity to a whole period of historical life.

 

Genealogically, myths are heterogeneous and complex phenomena. They are, in fact, historical events arising from various known and unknown intellectual practices and sources. Marxism as a revolutionary myth brought together diverse intellectual strands, including German idealism, French socialism, English political economy, Christian eschatology and the personal idiosyncrasies of Karl Marx. Fascism as a myth was composed of romanticism, conservatism, traditionalism, social Darwinism, philosophical idealism, and so on. Thus, myths and discourses are mosaics composed of heterogeneous and dispersed elements. There is no deep meaning, no original source and no fundamental sense involved; they are only events and accidents, a confluence of many currents coming together at a certain point in history. Likewise, the project of dialogue among civilisations is composed of heterogeneous elements ranging from the Western rational philosophy of the Enlightenment to Buddha, Christ, Gandhi and Tolstoy.

Globalised Modernity

To conclude, I shall try to accommodate the concept of a globalised modernity or “globalisation” in our central notion, namely, the historical dialectics of civilisations considered as multidimensional and synthetic entities. The major point is that in the age of globalised modernity, more than in any other previous age, no civilisation can remain a homogeneous entity closed in itself. The view that every civilisation as an open system is a combination of elements from other civilisations is further demonstrated by the multicultural tendencies paradoxically enhanced by the various processes of globalisation.

 

In general, globalisation refers to various complex processes leading to increasing interconnectedness among nation-states and the increasing interpenetration of cultures and civilisations. Globalisation as the latest phase in the development of a world market and world system is creating novel opportunities for intercivilisational communication. The growth of cultural communications is already weakening existing political–ideological and social borders, which hitherto have been major obstacles to relations between nations. To the extent that globalisation enhances the possibilities for communicative action, it will increase the opportunities for intercivilisational relations.

 

Globalisation contains contradictory processes and tendencies. While there is an obvious tendency towards homogenisation at a global level, there are also clear signs of a counter-tendency, a reaction or resistance to the dominant trend, leading to various forms of localism, multiculturalism and cultural nationalism. In other words, there are centrifugal and centripetal tendencies at work in the age of globalised modernity.

 

At the same time, globalisation has increased the dialectical synthesis of cultures and civilisations, which is to be observed in all walks of modern life. Thus, Los Angeles is considered to be the “central base” of gurume, the Japanese restaurants whose main dish, the gurume chicken, is served with Italian sauce, Texan fried bread and Japanese salad. The Americans export their food to Japan; the French import Mexican food; and the number of various types of Oriental restaurant in the United States is increasing by 10 per cent a year. McDonald’s fast-food outlets are to be found in more than fifty countries, while Americans have developed a taste for a plethora of non-Western cuisines, including Mexican, Chinese, Afghan, Ethiopian, Korean, Indian and Salvadorean.⁸

 

“The electronic village” of the globalised phase of modernity has become a melting pot of diverse cultures and civilisations. The Information Revolution has left no corner of the world untouched, opening up hitherto obscure ways of life and thought, and giving rise to a world consciousness in an unprecedented way. The compression of time and space under globalisation invariably furthers the dialectical synthesis of cultures and civilisations.

Endnotes

1. Ralph Linton, The Study of Man (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1964), pp. 326–7.

 

2. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, abridged by D. C. Somervell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946).

 

3. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (London: Alfred Knopf, 1926).

 

4. Michael Gibbons, ed., Interpreting Politics (London: Basil Blackwell, 1987), introduction.

 

5. Stuart Hirschberg and Terry Hirschberg, eds., One World, Many Cultures, 4th ed. (Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon, 2000).

 

6. See Vicky Randall and Robin Theobald, Political Change and Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1985), chapter 2.

 

7. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), pp. 45–7.

 

8. See John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene, Megatrends 2000: Ten New Directions for the 1990s (New York: Avon Books, 1991), chapter 4.