The last orientalist

Samuel P. Huntington is dead.

The clash of civilizations, mostly irrelevant in the 1990s, took on woeful importance after 9/11, when Americans took Al-Qaeda's babble seriously--but worse, as indicative of wider Islam--no, more than that, as some kind of monolithic Islamic civilization.

Such a thing does not exist. But thanks to this crazy old man, Academia lent credence to our darkest ideas, most notably that we, in the West, though we are the best, we cannot spread our superiority to the rest of the world, which is doomed to find its own miserable path. But he left so many caveats in his theory--as any good political scientist does--to make it impregnable.

But also useless.