Huntington's assumption that his perspective, which is
to survey the entire world from a perch outside all ordinary
attachments and hidden loyalties, is the correct one, as if everyone
else were scurrying around looking for the answers that he has
already found. In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who
wants to make "civilizations" and "identities" into what they are
not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the
myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and
that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only
to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one
of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing.
