C.G. Jung,S.P. Huntington and the search for civilization

The paper briefly and appreciatively presents Huntington's thesis that future wars will be fought between civilizations bonded by differing religions. It then shows an extensive initial agreement between Huntington and Carl Jung whose ideas of the participation mystique, representations collectives, the "isms" and the collective shadow jointly con-tend that civilizations are bonded by archetypal powers, the same agencies that generate religious bonding. Consequently the more archetypally based the bonding, the less conscious and so less morally sensitive are those bonded in relation to the differently bonded. But Jung goes beyond Huntington in contending that the psyche itself moves to a conscious and historical actualization of the human commonalities that Huntington acknowledges in passing as the distant solution to the clash of civilizations. By identifying these commonalities and their psychodynamics, Jung completes Huntington by envisaging a humanity cognizant that its cultural/religious differences derive from a common human source, the archetypal unconscious. This realization would relativize religious/cultural differentiation and so contribute to a global myth that would foster the embrace of differentiated cultures and negate the threat they currently pose to the continuance of the species.