Page 157 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JAMES LULL

Where Huntington’s analysis helps us most, I believe, is in the way he describes
cultural developments on a global scale, and in the reasonableness of his claim
that civilizations compose ‘the broadest cultural entities’ (Huntington 1996:
128). Huntington argues that the tendency for world populations to divide up
according to civilizational differences has been particularly evident since the
Cold War ended. Now, he says, ‘the most important distinctions among peoples
are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural’ (Huntington
1996: 21).
Civilizations are made up of countries which group together according to
common ancestry, religion, history, values, and customs. The civilizations
derive from one of three historical criteria. Some civilizations take form
according to a common world view based in religion (Islamic, Buddhist,
Hindu, Orthodox, Sinic). Two more civilizations were created by colonial
expansionism (Western civilization and Latin America), and two others
developed primarily because of geographic circumstances (Japan and Africa).
People have extensive access to various features of their respective civiliza-
tions and draw liberally and creatively from those civilizational resources to
fashion their supercultures. Civilizational ideas and materials represent distinct
and coherent ways of thinking and feeling, and are expressed in verbal and
non-verbal ways that are already familiar. People often feel more safe and com-
fortable sampling and using ideas and materials from their own civilizations
than they do from other civilizations.
Strong economic and cultural ties between nations of any civilization
encourage exposure to and involvement with the cultural features of that civil-
ization, a trend which is given tremendous momentum by the dynamic pro-
cesses of economic and cultural globalization. The nations which invest the
most money in the United States, for instance, are Britain, Germany, France,
Canada, the Netherlands, and Australia, while the United States invests most in
Britain, the Netherlands, Canada, France, and Australia. In Huntington’s world
map, all these countries belong to the Western civilization. Such cultural
alliances show up in virtually all aspects of everyday life. When people from the
Nordic countries watch North American television, for instance, they can
realistically imagine themselves in a North American cultural context because
they are all part of the same civilization; in fact, centuries ago Nordic immi-
grants to the United States helped build what is now the United States of
America and Canada.
Recent trends in intracivilizational economic activity in Latin America
exhibit the same tendencies we see in nations that compose Western civiliza-
tion. Development of the Mercosur Union (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay,
Uruguay) and the Andean Pact (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia),
for instance, demonstrates how culturally harmonious nations can forge political
alliances to solve social and economic problems. The international flow of
money and other resources is based in cultural trust and comfort facilitated by
common values, traditions, and languages. Most experts in these countries

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