Page 160 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

SUPERCULTURE FOR THE COMMUNIC ATION AG E

variously described as the country’s greatest strength and as its greatest weak-
ness. Such matters often take the form of debates about ‘multiculturalism’
in the United States. Those who oppose celebrating cultural difference and
diversity typically argue that such cultural dividing and decentering will lead to
the eventual destruction of the (dominant) ‘American culture’ and undermine
its political and economic stability and power. This is especially true of race and
ethnicity in the United States in the post-O.J. Simpson era. As he received the
key to the city of Compton, California, a mainly African-American com-
munity near Los Angeles in 1998, Ji Jaga, an ex-Black-Panther (formerly
known as Geronimo Pratt), told the gathering of African peoples from many
nations at the World African Unity Festival: ‘The bottom line is we are African.
African unity is the key to bringing our solutions to fruition . . . we need to
meditate on what our ancestors are telling us.’
The Islamic civilization and the Sinic civilization of Far East Asia will
become extremely powerful forces in the twenty-first century, according to
Samuel Huntington. The spread of Muslim faith and demography throughout
the world, and the extraordinary economic growth of many Asian nations
already signal world-level cultural alterations. While Western observers fre-
quently credit the economic advances in Asia to positive Western in fluence,
Huntington argues that the ‘East Asians attribute their dramatic economic
development not to the import of Western culture, but rather to their adher-
ence to their own culture. They are succeeding, they argue, because they are
different from the West’ (Huntington 1996: 93). He continues:

At the broadest level the Confucian ethos pervading many Asian soci-
eties stresses the values of authority, hierarchy, the subordination of
individual rights and interests, the importance of consensus, the avoid-
ance of confrontation, ‘saving face,’ and, in general the supremacy of the
state over society and of society over the individual. In addition, Asians
tend to think of the evolution of their societies in terms of centuries and
millennia and to give priority to maximizing long-term gains. These
attitudes contrast with the primacy in American beliefs of liberty, equal-
ity, democracy, and individualism, and the American propensity to dis-
trust government, oppose authority, promote checks and balances,
encourage competition, sanctify human rights, and to forget the past,
ignore the future, and focus on maximizing immediate gains. The
sources of conflict are in fundamental differences in society and culture.
(Huntington 1996: 225)

Sinic and Islamic civilizations differ greatly from Western civilization, but
also from each other ‘fundamentally in terms of religion, culture, social
structure, traditions, politics, and basic assumptions at the root of their way of
life’ (Huntington 1996: 185). Those foundational differences, according to
Huntington, will prevent them from forming any anti-Western coalition.

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