The Current Clash of Civilizations Is About More Than Territory.

 I have written about a useful framework of analysis for moral and political philosophy that considers the assumptions about and perspectives of the individual, society, the natural world, and metaphysics. Metaphysics relates to our capacity for language and narrative and our need to understand or create a coherent self and world that can be secular and humanistic, religious and sacred, or both.  

A naturalized basis for this multidimensional understanding of human nature has been related to the development of our mental capacities in evolution and a similar pattern seen in the development of these capacities by experience in childhood.  We are thus the product of both nature and nurture.  This, however, includes the “strange loop” of cultural evolution and our interaction with the world in which we live.  We are biologically not indifferent to generational survival and our well-being.

Because the pattern of this four-part framework of analysis has a naturalized basis it can be seen across a wide variety of our experiences and academic disciplines.  I have described it as related to folk psychology, for example, which just through introspection considers there to be physical, social, rational, and spiritual dimensions of our being.  The framework has been described as related to the works of Aristotle, the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Leslie Stephenson, medical ethics in moral philosophy,  U.S Constitutional democracy and legal theory in political philosophy, and many of the themes in literature. 

In my last substack column about the issues of our times, I wrote that “Today's global conflicts are not only territorial — they are civilizational, and they are as much about abstract ideas and visions of history as they are about land.”   Russia, China, Iran, for example, have profoundly different ideologies that in the described framework of analysis represent different social, rational, and metaphysical perspectives:

• Russia – Russia has an ideology that is based on a social Orthodox-Slavic nationalism with a  history of defeating Napoleon and also Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War. The Putin government, however, is a kleptocracy which uses coercion and the elimination of opposition as a means of staying in power. 

• China –     China’s government is based on an “intellectual”  secular Marxist interpretation of history known to a vanguard in the Communists party which represents only 6% of the population. China also embraces the long history of Chinese civilization and a Han nationalism which is xenophobic and intolerant of other cultures and ideologies. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), deprives citizens of their rights on a sweeping scale with a social credit scale and systematically curtails freedoms as a way to retain power.

• Iran –  Iran is a theocracy which use the death penalty and other means of coercion as a tools of political repression against protestors, dissidents, heretics, and ethnic minorities

This framework indicates that the countries in this axis of autocracies have vastly different and conflicting ideologies and almost nothing in common except their use of coercion as a means of staying in power.

• The United States and Western Civilization – The United States, on the other hand, is based on “the free and equal individual with moral responsibility as the basis of communal solidarity.”  

The clash of civilizations in current international relations is thus about more than territory and “real estate.  It is about a world order based on the Western liberal tradition and a moral vision for mankind that is universal and respects individual personal dignity and our common humanity being challenged by an axis of autocracies which have almost nothing in common but their use of coercion to stay in power and the desire to create a new world order.