LM#81--Sept 11th--25 years later: A Western Civilization Defense

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A Prediction History Refused

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Those are the drums of liberty. In 1996, a Harvard professor made a prediction almost nobody wanted to hear. He said the Cold War hadn't ended history. It had only cleared the stage for something older, deeper, something we thought we had outgrown. Five years later, 19 men proved him right in the worst possible way. That's a story we're telling today on this Liberty Minute.

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Welcome to the Theory to Action Podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in the less time to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now, here's your host, David Kaiser.

9/11 Anniversary And A Warning

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Hello, I'm David, and welcome back to another Liberty Minute. This will be a somber and reflective Liberty Minute, but one that is certainly worth recording. This week marks the 25th anniversary of September 11th. On the Memorial Plaza in Lower Manhattan families, we'll read aloud the names of 2,983 men, women, and children. The victims of that Tuesday morning in 2001 and of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that came before it. 25 years ago. Let that sink in. So today we're gonna go back further than the attack itself. We're gonna go back five years earlier to a book that saw it coming, or at least saw the shape of the century that was about to arrive. Our book of the day is Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order by Samuel P. Huntington. Huntington was a Harvard political scientist, a man who had already written landmark books on military and the political order in developing nations. In 1993, he published an essay in foreign affairs that made the same argument. In 1996, he expanded it into this book, Clash of Civilizations. And boy, it landed like a grenade in academic circles. Because they had just spent five years celebrating the end of history. So let's go to the I said book,

What A Civilization Really Is

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but we're going to use the article. Article from 1993. What do we mean when we talk of a civilization? Civilization is a cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogenesy. The culture of a village in southern Italy may be different from that of a village in northern Italy. But both will share a common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German villages. All right, so a village in southern Italy and a village in northern Italy can look nothing alike day to day, but they share one Italian culture underneath it all. It's a foundation. Culture separates them both from a German village, as we just learned the quote. That's Huntington's whole point. In miniature, civilization isn't your town, it isn't your tribe, it's the deepest layer underneath a whole lot of different tribes and towns, the layer that holds them all together, even when everything on the surface looks different. Now, Huntington takes one that idea and he takes it a step further because he says identity just isn't layered by geography. It's an important point. It's layered by degree, even inside a single person. Going to our next quote. People have levels of identity. A resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, as an Italian, as a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs to is the broadest level of identification which we with which he intensely identifies. People can and do redefine their identities, and as a result, the composition and the boundaries of civilizations change. All right. So that Roman and Huntington's example can be Roman. It could be Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner, all the same. All layered on top of each other like rings in a tree. Civilization is the widest of rings. The last one he'll still fight for before there's nothing else left underneath being just a human being. You see, Huntington's on to something because he also hands us something important here. Almost as an aside, those rings aren't carved in stone. People can redefine themselves. Conversion from a Christian to a Catholic. Conversion from Catholic to a Muslim. You can see where the world view definitely shifts if those things happen. Getting back to Huntington, civilizations shift their own boundaries generation to generation. That's the answer to anybody who wants to accuse Huntington of treating culture as some kind of prison sentence. He plainly says that identity moves, even while insisting it never disappears.

Identity Layers And Why They Shift

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Now, Huntington's basic claim is this it's plain and simple. During the Cold War, nations lined up behind ideas. Capitalism against communism, freedom against tyranny, Huntington said, once that fight ended, nineteen ninety one, December, something older would come roaring back to fill the space. Not economics, not ideology, civilization. And here comes our most important nugget. Huntington argued that religion, language, history, and then the inherited loyalty were never going to go away. They were just waiting under the surface of the Cold War, and the moment that ice melted, they'd resurface. And they'd resurface with a vengeance. Islamic movements, Russia versus the West, China rising, border and immigration fights tearing at national identity across Europe and America both. Did you catch that? Culture didn't disappear when the Berlin Wall came down. It just went quiet for a while. Now let's give Huntington his due. And we're going to give him a little bit of a correction too. But we're Monday morning quarterback, and he was the brilliant one who nailed it for the most part. Because we got to handle every book on this show with getting to the actual truth of the book. So he certainly was right that human beings don't live by economics alone. They live by faith, religion. They live by honor, memory, belonging. And he was right that no single liberal world order was going to sweep the globe just because communism had lost. But it also helped to give the West a complete blind spot. Now, where Huntington was wrong, or at least where he overstated a little bit, was that he treated whole civilizations as a single-minded block. You see, the Islamic world isn't one thing, and neither is the West, as we know. Europe is failing. The UK is probably almost lost for Western values. But the Islamic world is splintered up too. You could see that with the Abraham Accords. And you have China or India. Every one of those civilizations is loaded with its own internal arguments, its own internal family fights, if you will. Some of the deadliest wars of the last 30 years have happened inside a civilization, not between two of them. You could almost say Ukraine and Russia are a is a fight between that civilization internally. Ukraine being a former Russian state. But here's where I land on Huntington. He's probably the most persuasive when he said culture matters.

Culture Returns After The Cold War

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And he was at least persuasive when he made it sound like culture was the destiny of it all. That's a model that treats every cultural difference as a permanent enemy. You can talk yourself into a war that never had to happen. Now, if we take that lens and we know culture matters, but it also isn't fate, and we layer it over what actually happened five years ago, or five years after Huntington wrote this, wrote this book, 1996. That's September 11th, 2001. Al-Qaeda murders 3,000 people on American soil. It's not a crime spree. That was a political and religious declaration of war. And Huntington's framework helps explain why. It was a totalitarian and a revolutionary strain of Islamist politics. Decided that America was the enemy of everything, it believed. You hear that especially with Iran too. Death to Israel, but also death to America. Now, if you want the historical runway that leads up to that morning, Huntington actually laid it out years in advance. Let's go back to his article from 1993. After World War II, the West in turn began to retreat. The colonial empires disappeared. First, Arab nationalism and then Islamic fundamentalism manifested themselves. The West became heavily dependent on the Persian Gulf countries for its energy. The oil rich Muslim countries became money rich. And when they wished to, weapons rich. Several wars then occurred between Arabs and Israel. Remember, Israel to Muslims, they believe, was created by the West. So this theme of Islam as a rival to the West begins to take shape. So the empire collapses, Arab nationalism rises, then gives way to Islamic fundamentalism. The West goes hat in hand to the Persian Gulf for oil. The same countries that couldn't buy a rifle a generation earlier became rich enough to buy an arsenal. And then war after war breaks out with a nation that the West itself had just created. Israel. That's not a random string of headlines. That is a good long chain of connecting dot after dot after dot, link after link in that chain. And Huntington is tracing the whole thing back decades before a single hijacker ever boarded that plane. See, it's exactly how the it's exactly the however underneath everything Mandombaum told us a couple weeks ago in the four ages of American foreign policy. The hyperpower status doesn't arrive in a vacuum. It arrives in a world already loaded with grievance. And grievance doesn't wait politely for an invitation. But here's the distinction, and this has to be plain and simple. Al-Qaeda does not speak for Islam. It spoke for a fraction of it, and we're starting to understand it's a pretty big fraction now. Their own victims across Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond have overwhelmingly overwhelmingly been fellow Muslims. Now,

9/11 Through Huntington’s Lens

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how did we do 25 years on? Since we're coming up to the anniversary of 9-11, how did America do? Honestly, the record is mixed. America prevented another attack on the scale, on that scale, on our own soil, so kudos to the Bush administration for that. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq proved we could, with military power, topple regime in weeks. But those same wars prove we were far weaker at building something that could stand on its own once we left. We know for sure, with without a doubt, that we cannot build democracy in certain cultures, and we ought not to try. That book shows us what happens when that power sits on the shelf instead of being used with resolve. Huntington's book is the missing piece underneath both of them. It explains why the enemy was at the gate. And why they believed what they believed in the first place. That threat didn't vanish when we killed Bin Laden in 2011. It evolved. Jihadism, Iranian power, mass migration used as a weapon, cyber conflict, China's rise, Russia's Russia's acceleration back to a regional power. And the Western world arguing with itself about who it is, it is even what its own definition is. Western world has a huge problem right now because it cannot it has lost confidence. Let's say that it has lost confidence in itself. Now here's the fuller nugget that Huntington himself never quite gets to in the clash of civilizations. For the last 25 years, it was never one clean fight between civilizations. It was a fight over authority, over faith, over freedom, over ordered liberty, and who gets to define the future of a nation. October 7th for Israel, canary in a coal mine. But again, it's not a complete map. Now this brings us to the hardest question we can ask. The one this whole episode's build is building towards. If culture is this powerful, it's this durable, this capable of producing both towering achievements and unspeakable evil, why should the West be worth defending? So let's divine Western civilization honestly, because a confident defense starts with an honest one. It's not a bloodline, it's not a race. Western civilization is an inheritance. Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, the Reformation, Catholic universities, the Scientific Revolution, common law, constitutional government. It was built by centuries of argument, correction, and revision. It's one of the greatest civilizations to be self-aware and to self-criticize. That capacity to honestly assess itself and correct itself by way is one of its greatest strengths, not a weakness. And we should never apologize for that. Here's the affirmative case for Western civilization. The West developed the idea that every individual carries inherent dignity. It produced constitutional government. It produced legal limits on rulers. It produced freedom of conscience. It produced the rule of law. It produced ordered liberty and the good, the common good of society. It turned subjects of a king into citizens with rights that they could actually claim in a courtroom. Now, if you've been following it all on Substack, which I urge you to do, Mojo Academy at Substack.com, this connects directly to something we have covered in our last two books. Matt Goodwin's Suicide of a Nation and Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe. Goodwin and Murray both showed us what happens when a nation loses confidence in its own inheritance. When those leaders, especially European, stop believing that the culture was worth defending out loud. Huntington gives us the theory of why the civilization matters. Goodwin and Murray shows us the price a country pays when it forgets the lesson at home. Can you call the West the greatest civilization the earth has ever seen? You bet you can. But only if you're honest about what that means and what it doesn't. It means the civilization that most successfully spread liberty, science, self-government, and legal equality.

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Doesn't mean Western people are somehow better than anyone

The Case For Defending The West

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else. Doesn't erase imperialism.

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Doesn't release our doesn't doesn't erase our own religious persecution of each other. Reference the Hundred Years' War.

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Catholics and Protestants killing each other. That's on the record.

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But the West owned ideals. The very best ideals are exactly what let us name those crimes as crimes in the first place. That's why it's the best civilization. That's why it's worth defending. That's our nugget for today. Civilization worth defending is one that can tell the truth about its own failures and still choose freely to defend what it got right.

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Not to worship it, but gratitude, honesty, courage, renewal.

What Defense Looks Like Daily

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So what does defending Western civilization actually look like and we need to start doing it? It's not complicated. You know what it is.

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It doesn't require hating anybody. They will call you perhaps an Islamophobe. They will most likely call you racist if you do this.

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But we will continue to defend free speech, including the speech that we don't like. We will teach history as an inheritance, not a slogan. We will keep serious education and literature and philosophy and science and civics alive. We just celebrated our 250th anniversary. We will secure our border. And we can do that while treating individuals humanely. We do not have to let in people who want to sabotage our country. We will support families, churches, and everybody else who believes in the Judeo-Christian ethic. We will support those local institutions that hold our communities together. So twenty-five years ago, nineteen men tried to answer the question of who we were by burning down our buildings. This week families will stand on a plaza in Lower Manhattan and read two thousand nine hundred and eighty-three names.

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They will stand in a field in Pennsylvania and do the same. They will be at the Pentagon and do the same. Perhaps we should look at all three of these as the first battle in the clash of civilizations that Huntington got right.

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The families they will answer it a different way. Now, before

Huntington’s Rival Prediction Revisited

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we go in this Liberty Minute, we owe Huntington one more piece of intellectual courage because he made a specific prediction, not just the general theory, and the specific prediction is where he got hit the hardest. Huntington didn't just say civilization would matter again. He said the West's most serious rival after the Cold War would come out of the Islamic world specifically. He pointed to a fault line running back centuries, the old boundary between Western Christianity, Orthodox Christianity, and Islam. Once patrolled by the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires, he lined up the evidence, the crusades, the centuries of Muslim rule in Spain, Algiers, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel and her neighbors, the 1991 Gulf War. He warned it all that the hostility to Western intervention could someday pull the Islamic world and Confucian China into the same camp against us. 9 11 made that warning look like a prophecy to a lot of readers.

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At the time, I didn't believe him.

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I had to study this foreign policy essay in college. But I was naive, I was young. We were all young and dumb once. But here's the correction, it's a fair one. Critics say that Huntington treated the Islamic world as far more unified than it actually is. We talked about that. My professor explained that. He underplayed the specific political grievances behind specific wars. He gave short shrift to centuries of trade and scholarship and neighborly cooperation between Muslim and Western societies that never made his book. My professors continued to point that out. Pigeonholed him.

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I believe my professors. I was wrong. Cause here's what he got right.

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Huntington got right that the deepest insight still stands that religion and cultural identity did not retire when the Cold War ended. They are still shaping the fights we are having right now. His real weakness was making that conflict sound more inevitable, more uniform, and more permanent, like it was written in the stars than actually the history supports, but he was right. Samuel Huntington was right that we are not just voters or consumers, we are heirs. The only question left, the one this episode has been circling, is whether we still know what we inherited in the West, and whether we're still willing to hand it on and to add on to Huntington, whether we're still willing to fight for it and defend it. That's the question. The 911 families gave their all in answering that question affirmatively. Yes, Western civilization, our liberty, our values, our culture is worth defending.

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Our country is worth defending.

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I agree with them. So in today's Liberty Minute, twenty-five years later, after the 9-11 attacks, let us learn about our Western civilization.

What We Inherit And Pass On

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We can do a lot of self-study, even though it's not taught in universities anymore. There's a lot of good places, digital platforms where you can learn about Western civilization and why it's important. Let us also keep our Judeo-Christian ethic in the West. Let us protect it, let us cherish it. And let us most importantly pass this inheritance on to our children. Undiminished, unashamed, and worth every bit of the fight it took to keep. As always. Let's keep fighting. A good fight.

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Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this weird action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at TeamMojoAcademy.com, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.