《文明的冲突?》再反思——一种客观预测还是一种主观倡导?

The Clash of Civilizations? Reconsidered: An Objective Prediction or a Subjective Support?

美国学者亨廷顿于1993年发表的《文明的冲突?》曾经在国际学术界引起轩然大波,许多华人学者也对亨氏的观点进行了回应。但由于人们在讨论这个问题时未能明确亨氏的所谓“文明冲突论”究竟是一种客观预测,还是一种主观倡导,因此导致了一些理论混乱。十多年后,随着世界局势的变化和文化保守主义潮流的兴起,亨廷顿关于文明冲突的客观预测重新引起了我们的反思。事实上,只有对文明冲突的可能性保持一种清醒的认识,才能够有效地限制和防止文明冲突的发生。

The Clash of Civilizations？ published by Samuel P. Huntington in 1993 caused quite a stir in the international academic community. Many Chinese scholars responded to Huntington＇s viewpoints. However, due to failure to clarify whether his theory is an objective prediction or a subjective support, those responses brought about some theoretical confusion. With the change of the world pattern and the rise of cultural conservatism during the past 13 years, the objective prediction made by Huntington deserves further reflection. It is maintained in this article that only when we are fully aware of the possible clash of civilizations can we restrict and prevent it effectively. From a historical perspective, not until the Islamic civilization appeared in the 7th century did there coexist four systematic civilizations in Eurasia, namely, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism-Hinduism and Confucianism, each with its own consistent religious-ethical value system. Due to such obvious cultural differences hard to get over, it became more and more difficult for distinctive systems to get into an ideal state of enculturation and they tended to collide in the forms of political and economical interests, while learning from each other. In the past one thousand years, both violent conflicts and peaceful exchanges took place between the competing cultures. And after the 15th and 16th centuries when the modern Western industrial civilization rose, a global colonization from the West to the East and from the North to the South startled the rest of the world of agriculture. In this context, therefore, we took the cultural differences of the past thousand years as merely a difference between Western and non-Western cultures only for the last several hundred years. Realistically, after the 1980s when colonization ended and the political and ideological blocks disappeared, a cultural conservative trend appeared in each of the major civilizations, which enhanced a sense of religious and cultural identification with a civilization, while making the cultural differences and psychological block more explicit. In this sense, cultural conservatism is highly prone to cause conflicts between civilizations. It is believed that in the years to come, cultural identification would become more and more a spiritual cord that binds each other, traditional culture would revive to a certain degree, and political and ideological conflicts in the cold war would be replaced by the differences between civilizations. With this sense of the differences in mind, it would be the only rational way out for us to respect each other and hold peaceful talks between each other in order to avoid or limit the impact of conflicting civilizations.