Edward Said's Attack on Samuel Huntington and Arguements Against Theory

An article by Edward Said, written as a refutation of Samuel Huntington’s thesis, was recently sent to me by my fellow blogger at Foreign Policy Watch. I read it and found a response to a comment quickly turning into an entirely new post. I found the article quite disappointing. This is why.

The first 3^rd of Said’s article amounts to a trash heap of fallacies in reasoning. Said dismisses the notion of civilization identity out of hand as “belligerent thinking,” while depicting the attempt to classify civilization as an impossible task, which Said argues amounts to a cartoon caricature. Next he assumes that it is illegitimate for the West to seek power, while attempting to assassinate Huntington’s character by essentially calling him a high tower “ideologist” with “hidden loyalties.” After that he goes on to call him a “clumsy writer and an inelegant thinker.” Then he mounts an attack on Huntington by pointing to the irrelevant fact that “international luminaries from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam's troubles, and in the latter's case have used Huntington's ideas to rant on about the West's superiority.”

We all know that Hitler was an avid fan of “The Prince,” but it doesn’t keep university political science departments from pointing out the value of Machiavelli’s ideas and his place in the field. Nor will the fact that other idiots use Huntington’s theses to advance their agenda’s change my mind about the arguments he makes.

Said continues his morally indignant diatribe by again attacking Huntington ad hominen. He asserts that Huntigton’s work is “plainly designed not to edify but to inflame the reader's indignant passion as a member of the "West," and what we need to do.” This is an attempt to impugn Huntington’s motives. And I shouldn’t have to point this out, but it doesn’t qualify as a real argument against his thesis.

These unsubstantiated and irrelevant attacks should be easily recognizable as Bullshit to any one who has attempted to familiarize himself with a basic logic textbook (I recommend With Good Reason by Morris Engel.) I did however continue reading the article and found one basic legitimate argument. It essentially is an argument against theory in general.

Theorists attempt to isolate key elements within a necessarily restrictive mental construct in order to establish the study of a particular subject in its own right. Theories are necessarily restrictive, and unfortunately the only way we can make sense of the world. Said points to the limitations of theory to undermine Huntington’s thesis. It’s all very postmodern. He supports his critique by asserting that the interdependence between civilizations within their historicity demonstrates they can’t be isolated.

"The West drew on the humanism, science, philosophy, sociology and historiography of Islam, which had already interposed itself between Charlemagne's world and classical antiquity. Islam is inside from the start, as even Dante, great enemy of Mohammed, had to concede when he placed the Prophet at the very heart of his Inferno.”

This may be true, however it does not demonstrate the falsity of Huntington’s theses, nor does it warrant all the attacks that Said erected his critique upon. It simply points to the limitation of theory in general. Theories are measured by their usefulness in explaining the world. If a theory can’t explain a particular aspect of the world then the theory is not falsified it simply reached a limitation.

He concludes his article by pointing out the “bewildering interdependence of our time.” And in deed it will be quite bewildering, especially for those who reject the means by which we ascertain abstract truths about the external world. But as with postmodernism, it largely rejects the concept of truth and sometimes even the existence of an external world.