There is No Race but the Human Race!

The work of man is only just beginning and it remains to conquer all the violence entrenched in the recesses of our passion and no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force, and there’s a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.

Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

In his lecture The Myth of “The Clash of Civilizations” at the University of Massachusetts, Edward Said vehemently speaks against Samuel Huntington’s notion of cultural divisions and “rips” his thesis to shreds.

Samuel Huntington’s essay The Clash of Civilizations was published in the summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs. His states:

[…] 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.

Huntington defines civilization as a “cultural entity” and divides the world into eight main civilizations: Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Western, Latin American and African. He argues that the principal clash of civilizations in the post-Cold War world politics will be between “the West and the rest” – and in order to win this clash, Western civilization must strengthen its unity and promote cooperation with nation-states that endorse Western values, and in the mean time, keep its opponents weak and divided by exploiting their differences. It is astonishing how explicit Huntington is while talking about forming alliances to sustain and expand Western power, and make all the civilizations more Western. The post-war imperialism attitudes and aggression are seeping out of every word!

Said refutes Huntington’s notion that civilizations are homogeneous entities that are separated from each other, and that differences among civilizations are fundamental and transcend time. He contends that “no culture or society is purely one thing”. There have always being communications and exchange among cultures, and migration has made today’s world a cultural compound in which no cultures or civilizations are insulated or stand-alone. Emphasizing cultural differences and pursuing dominance of one civilization over all the others, Said suggests, will not resolve conflicts among peoples – but intensify them; what we really need is a “new global mentality or consciousness that sees the dangers we face from the standpoint of the whole human race”, and to reconcile conflicts with “a sense of community, understanding, sympathy, and hope” instead of a sense of clash.

When Said is taking questions from the audience at the end of this lecture, someone asks, “What are the commonalities that can unite us?” Said responds that there are many commonalities among us, but we first have to “recognize them as actually having taken place.” He points out that education in most countries is nationalistic and has a great emphasis on learning “our tradition”, “our culture”, and “our language”. Said stresses the need to de-nationalize education so that people have the opportunities to learn about diverse cultures and realize that we live in a world of mixture in which cultures and civilizations cannot be simply separated from each other, and that certain ideas such as Apartheid and ethnic cleansing are wasteful and hopeless.

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