clash of civilizations?

So for those of you who wonder what it is that I'm doing with myself when I'm not researching Mongolian death worms (see previous post), I thought I'd write a bit about the academic stuff I'm working on at the moment...

I'm writing three papers this semester that have to do (to one degree or another) with a popular political argument that you've all heard in one form or another - the "clash of civilizations," particularly the purported clash between the Secular/Christian West and the Muslim Middle East (both problematic terms but used for lack of much better ones). Samuel Huntington, an Important And Brilliant Scholar From Harvard, wrote some articles and a book in the 1990's about the "clash of civilizations." He broke up the world into eight major civilizations, mostly organized around religions, and argued that the next era of violent conflicts in the world are going to be between groups of people in different civilizations. Instead of fighting about nationalism, ideology, or other stuff that people used to fight about, Huntington says that we'll be fighting and making alliances based on cultural differences. He's particularly concerned about the Islamic civilization, which he says has "bloody borders."

His argument's pretty convincing. He IS a Harvard professor, after all. And in the last several years this clash-of-civilizations argument has been the stuff of seemingly constant headlines. But is it true...?

Based on the evidence I've been reading, it's not. Several scholars - from Yale to UCLA - have been testing Huntington's hypotheses with big data sets that have recorded violent conflicts within and between countries. None of them have been able to find evidence of increasing conflicts between groups or countries from different civilizations. If anything, they've decreased since the end of the Cold War.

So why do so many Americans and others believe that this clash-of-civilizations thing is where it's at? I guess because that's what we're told. And more ominously, is it going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy?