World Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington is Misleading in Intention

 

People often cite the above map from Samuel P. Huntington books as an explanation of differences between different parts of the world. It's simple, easy to understand and fundamentally wrong. 

It's not that these divisions are completely wrong, but they are superficial at best and lump together places that are vastly different from each other. Indonesia is very different from Iran or Morocco even if they are both Muslims.

I criticised a few issues with this map in the past. For example, there is a religious division between Orthodox and Western civilizations, yet there is no such division between say Catholic or Protestants. Sure, east west, schism happened earlier, but ground for the split was much more serious in Catholic vs Protestant split. Sure, there are many visual differences between Orthodox and Western churches,, but Western churches also differ from each other. That is far to arbitrary to just select out Orthodox but lump the rest together.

That also overlooks the elephant in the room, the fact that Islam branched out from Christianity. Christians deny is as fervently as Muslims deny that Bahaullah is the new prophet or how Judaists deny that Jesus was the Messiah their religion have promised them. Inglehard-Welzel cultural values, place Muslims close to Indians, Latin Americans and Catholic Europeans.

On the other hand, there is a division between Latin and Anglophone Americas. This cultural values chart for example places the US a lot closer to their Latin American neighbors, than to certain Europeans. Catholic Europeans are very close in values to Latin America; they are former Spanish and Portuguese colonies after all.

If you take into account time or history, you will get a different picture. Turns out that these civilizations are not distinct entities with completely different origins but branches that ultimately came from a single past. It might be possible to connect Asians and Africans to this too, if we dig further into history, but that far documented records are scarce.

If they came from a common past, then why are they different now? Simple evolution, basic principle of live. The same reason why cells divide or we evolved from chimpanzees. Just as tree branches into different directions as it grows so are human societies occasionally split into different groups. When old ways stop working, a certain group decides it's time for a change and splits up.

It's not just these groups, but countries within these groups split from a common whole precisely because common leadership stopped working for them and they needed autonomy. East West Christian split was ostensively about theology, but in reality, it was about power. Pope of Rome grew powerful enough and no longer wished to share equal status with eastern patriarchs who lost their people to Islam and now were but a token authority backed by nothing more than past status.

Thus, Huntington map represents not the future or even current times, but the past, times where these entities were still connected as well as features that they still share in common.

Future will not revolve around these civilizations; it will revolve around entities like European Union who can invent solutions for the problems of the future and create opportunities for prosperity and growth. Democracies vs Autocracies, EU vs the US, Japan and maritime Asia vs China and the inland. There are the battlelines of the future.