Quote Originally Posted by 120mm View Post
I guess I like the "inevitable clash of cultures" argument, best. Most objections I've seen to that argument tend to go the "but it's more 'complex' than that" flavor, but I offer this question; What about a titanic, inevitable clash of cultures strikes you as "simple?" Of course it's complex. That's what very large conflicts are.
Quote Originally Posted by Mark O'Neill View Post
I go back to my previous point - what "culture(s)" are you referring to? we have several 'Islamic' cultures in the part of the world that I live in, and they are all quite different.
Honestly, I have never liked Huntington's argument. His basic unit of analysis is a "civilization", often expressed as "Arabs", "Chinese", "Westerners", etc. As an analytic device, this is reminiscent of de Gobineau's The Inequalities of the Human Races (1853-1856). It is also fatally flawed in its understanding of how humans form cultures and "civilizations" since it is based on a confusion between phenotype and genotype - i.e. he assumes that a group of people who form a phenotypicaly recognizable group are inherently different from other groups.

Marc