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Fight for our way of life must begin from within

Pro-Palestinian activists and supporters wave flags and carry placards during a National March for Palestine in central London on December 9. ‘Across the globe, our political and moral leaders have switched off from engaging with the threat posed to their way of life and do little to oppose the cultural warriors assembling at its gates.’ Picture: AFP

• By FRANK FUREDI

  CONTRIBUTOR
• 12:00AM DECEMBER 30, 2023
• 346 COMMENTS

Within hours of Hamas carrying out its atrocities on October 7, the party had started in a Greek refugee camp. Similar outbursts of joy among migrant communities throughout Europe indicated that the civilisational values of Europe were being sorely tested by people who had nothing but contempt for the West.

But that was not all. Tragically, the display of a festival of carnage by asylum-seekers ran in parallel with the celebratory tone adopted by European leftist supporters of identity politics.

They, too, had nothing but scorn for the West, a nebulous region they equate with slavery, racism and settler colonialism. At the start of 2023, who would have imagined rainbow-flag-waving activists would march side-by-side with radical Islamists in a joint protest against Western policy in the Middle East?

People protest in support of Gaza on November 4 in London. Picture: Getty Images

Yet perhaps we should not have been surprised. Long before Hamas’s attack on Israel, Islamist terrorists had espoused a particularly warped strain of identity politics, one that is equally centred on a colonial narrative.

In spirit, if not geography, the two activist groups made for potent bedfellows. More broadly, though, the sight of them parading together through New York, London, Sydney and Madrid highlighted something more profound: that, far from simply being a regional conflict, the Israeli-Hamas war is a proxy battle for the future of Western civilisation.

In this, of course, it is hardly the first of its kind. Whether in Vietnam, Iraq or, more recently, Ukraine, geopolitical wars have been framed for centuries as battles between competing civilisational values.

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This outlook was famously advocated by Samuel Huntington in his classic 1993 study, The Clash of Civilizations?, in Foreign Affairs magazine and subsequent book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), in which he predicted that the fundamental source of conflict in the future would not be primarily ideological or economic but cultural.

“Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations,” he wrote.

In the 30 years since, it has become clear that Huntington was correct in one of his assumptions but mistaken in another. He was, it seems, right to draw attention to the displacement of ideological conflict by cultural ones. He was wrong, however, to focus on the clash between civilisations rather than on the cultural conflict within them. After all, the defining feature of the contemporary world is that fundamental conflicts exist within society itself.

Though Huntington claimed that “civilization identities will replace all other identities”, he was not unaware of the fact that such identities are constantly contested within a civilisation itself.

Throughout his work, Huntington called attention to the increasing tendency within the US to question the traditional representation of the American way of life; he wrote of a movement of “intellectuals and politicians” who promoted the “ideology of “multiculturalism” and who “insist on the rewriting of American political, social, and literary history from the viewpoint of non-European groups”; he pointed to what he called the possible “de-Westernisation” of the US and asked whether this would “also mean its de-Americanisation”.

Were he alive today, Huntington would have to acknowledge that the depth of cultural divisions in his own society signalled that the main site of conflict had shifted towards the intra-civilisational.

The movement of “intellectuals and politicians” to which he referred is now far more powerful than when he wrote his essay. As we enter a new year, the cultural divisions within the West are so profound that countless young people have become so estranged from their own way of life that they embrace a world view promoted by Islamist radicals that, by its nature, seeks to replace Western civilisation with its own.

When hostility towards the legacy of Western civilisation first emerged in the Anglo-American sphere during the 1980s, it tended to be confined to university campuses. It was also mainly performative and rhetorical: students chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Western civ has got to go” merely wished to displace the Western canon with Third Worldist literature.

Demonstrators hold Palestinian flags as they march over the Brooklyn Bridge during a rally in New York City on November 7. Picture: AFP

Today, hostility towards Western civilisation has hardened and its legacy is contemptuously dismissed as a slaveowners charter. Decolonisation no longer refers to freeing of former colonies, it means racialising and disparaging virtually every dimension of the historical legacy of Western civilisation. The politics of identity has gradually mutated into a moral crusade against the civilisational norms associated with the West. This is one reason Judaism is so thoroughly despised by the pro-Palestinian protester. Judaism and Christianity constitute the moral foundation of Western culture.

Yet rather than face this historical reality, the enemies of Western civilisation prefer to rewrite the past, gaslighting members of the public for the supposed crimes their ancestors have committed. Their views are validated by institutions of culture and education, which promote the claim that the history of Western civilisation is a story of shame. In recent years this message has been zealously highlighted by the decolonisation movement. The result, as we now see over the world, is one of self-censorship, as blameless individuals opt out of the debate for fear of being labelled racist.

However, as with Huntington, another misconception suffuses this narrative. Numerous interpretations of the culture war on the past represent its agents as extreme radical leftists who are marginal to the mainstream of Western societies. Yet while the activists associated with the numerous identity movements have played an important role in this conflict, to place the sole blame on them is to erase the complicity of sections of the political and cultural establishment.

For ultimately, despite the hysterical behaviour of these activists and the inhuman, nihilistic actions of Islamist terrorists, Western civilisation is fragmenting because its political and cultural establishment has lost enthusiasm for its historical legacy. Across the globe, our political and moral leaders have switched off from engaging with the threat posed to their way of life and do little to oppose the cultural warriors assembling at its gates. On the contrary, in many institutions, those formally charged with their defence left the gates wide open.

Like those Romans who stopped believing in their way of life and lost the will to fight, the elites of Western society have done little to uphold and protect its historical legacy. Unlike the Romans, however, the elites of Western societies do not merely stop at giving up their traditional values and way of life; in many instances, they also actively seek to negate it. That is why they are often at the vanguard of an army determined to attack the cultural legacy of their society.

This year, there has been no better personification of this cultural appeasement than Anthony Albanese, an enthusiastic supporter of the voice referendum. But here also lies the silver lining: that Albanese’s goals were rejected by the people of Australia indicates that not all is lost – and that, thankfully, there is a lot to fight for in the civilisational battles that lie ahead.

Frank Furedi is executive director of the think tank MCC-Brussels. He is the author of the Substack publication Roots & Wings with Frank Furedi (frankfuredi.substack.com). His latest book is The Road to Ukraine: How the West Lost Its Way.