On topic: Clash of civilizations or not?

[luvdovz]

Interesting overview of the issue of the clash of civilizations that many have been talking about in recent times. It also mentions Huntington's concept of the "swing civilizations": essentially fault lines between core civilizations which are doomed to remain conflict points for a long time. He speaks of "bloody borders", where blood will spill

Comments

[johnny9fingers]

Anyone who references Amartya Sen must expect most people to not get it. Really great thinkers, like Sen, often get sidelined and left in their ivory towers. Governments, when enlightened enough, or pushed by an enlightened civil service, occasionally listen to such genius, but the public...nah. Sen and his ilk are too clever by half.

Me, I'd make him Prime Minister, even at eighty-four. But he wouldn't take the job. Along with Tagore, and the various members of the extended Chandra Bose clan, he is the embodiment of the Bengali renaissance.

Of course I agree with your thesis: these things are too complicated to be reduced to such overly simplistic ideas. However, as you note, it isn't just us, in the West, who simplify. At the risk of seeming elitist, simple folk, who are a majority, require simple answers to simplified and reductive questions: whether the simple folk be guided by a religion, or antagonistic to it. Sen manages to get across difficult ideas in ordinary language, but even then, most folk aren't prepared to strain their brains to assimilate and understand his message. For that matter, few educated people have the time never mind the inclination to take these ideas on board: my Cambridge-educated lawyer wife being one. (However, she wasn't at Trinity, where Sen became Master.)

So, do we allow experts to run things because we are, collectively speaking, in a capitalist democracy, too simple or too time-constrained to understand the problems in the required depth?