How to Think About Civilizations - The Watson Institute for ...

Process-ontology
Kurth
Lawrence
Scholarly specification
Kang
I place Kurth’s chapter in this volume in the upper-left-hand portion of the
quadrant because his position on Western Civilization, while certainly more accepting
of historical change than Huntington, is still concerned with roughly the same things
that Huntington is concerned with: identifying the essential principles of Western
Civilization for the purpose of identifying its core interests. But because Kurth is first
located in the “structural context” quadrant of the original matrix, his work plays out
differently than Huntington’s does, even though it is relatively essentialist when
contrasted to Kang’s discussion of elites attempting to impose “Chinese” solutions on
their populations (an attempt that triggers some dynamics best located in the realm of
identity, as they involve the implications of self-conceptions) or Lawrence’s analysis of
how Islamicate civilization is fundamentally shaped by its geographical context. But
despite these differences, all three authors are more processual and less attributeoriented
in comparison with Huntington. Such fine-grained distinctions help us to get a
firmer grasp on precisely where people stand relative to one another in this debate. 8
8 Of course, there is no need to stop with one level of self-similar replication of the original matrix. There is no logical
reason why the matrix couldn’t replicate a second time, within each of the 16 cells of the fractalized matrix; that would
give us 16 x 4 = 64 possible scholarly positions. But the practical utility of such a 64-cell matrix as a way of locating
scholars and scholarship would depend, in turn, on whether scholars were in fact occupying most of the logically
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 30