Weekend Roundup: The Orlando Shooting Reveals the Clash of Civilizations Within

It is de rigueur among tolerant liberals who don't want to divide society further in our unsettling times to dismiss Samuel Huntington's thesis of a "clash of civilizations." But Huntington was right -- though perhaps in a way he didn't grasp. The clash between the personal freedom of liberal modernity and traditional communitarian or tribal values doesn't just, or even primarily, take place at the geopolitical level between the West and Islamic cultures, as Huntington saw it (He also a envisioned a clash with Hindu and Confucian-rooted Asian societies). It plays out within civilizations undergoing transition and in the very intimate interstices of the personal life of individuals. As globalization and the post-traumatic stress of military intervention bring immigrants to the West, and as Western mass culture spreads to all corners of the planet, the conflict between tradition and modernity seeps not only into each other's territory but into the formation of personal identity itself. As the child of immigrants, Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter, embodied this struggle as he straddled what were seemingly two conflicting worlds. It appears that either his conservative Afghan family ethos fostered an obsession with homosexuality as a reprehensible sin, or perhaps he lashed out in hate against what he apparently perceived as the impurity of those in whom he saw himself. Though he pledged allegiance to the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, in the moments before his horrific act...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news