One of the stranger things about Samuel Huntington’s book

The Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of World Order was the debt it owed to anthropology.
Throughout much of the past hundred years, anthropologists had
been talking about clashes or conflicts among cultures, and at
first glance Huntington’s formulations seemed like an attempt to
raise this mundane phenomenon to the more grandiose level of
international affairs.

Numerous critics have identified the political issues at stake.
They point out how foolish it is to imagine that men are mere
prisoners of their cultures; how blind it is not to see that
states with widely varying peoples and traditions, but also with
the benefit of democracy, free markets, and the rule of law,
peacefully cooperate all over the globe; and how perverse it is
to pretend that well established procedures for conflict
management have not given the modern world an unprecedented
stability.

These arguments all seem to me convincing.
But what chiefly concerns me is Huntington’s
use of the term “civilizations.”
For behind the claim that the modern world consists of
“civilizations” (plural), and not just “civilization” (singular),
a lot of linguistic mischief is afoot.
By degrading
the concept of universal “civilization” and elevating a
multiplicity of “civilizations” in its stead, Huntington
mimics
an already well-established and disastrous precedent—the
transformation of “culture” (singular) into a
multiplicity of uncultures, noncultures, and unmistakable
anticultures.

More than fifty years have passed since Orwell wrote of “the need
to recognize that