Civilization and its Enemies

I recommended Lee Harris' new book Civilization and it's Enemies a couple of weeks ago I didn't really have the time to give it a full review then, and I was sure if I waited long enough someone would do the job for me.

David Warren :

Mr. Harris whose essay on "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology", two summers ago, gave the most cogent account of what had actually happened on 9/11: of an enemy in the grip of a worldview too insane for us to reckon with, and committing huge massacres from motives more aesthetic than strategic. We had to grasp that this enemy was not in any kind of dialogue with us — even as war is a form of dialogue — but instead in a conversation with himself, in which we, his victims, are merely objects, symbols….

The most fundamental insight is borrowed, jointly as it were, from both Hegel and the great Arab historian, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406). It is that a civilization evolves by overcoming huge obstacles, through brilliant creative leaps, the memory of which is implanted in the people as moral and ethical norms, which we come to "embody" through the universal social mechanisms of shame and pride. These norms must be wired into the visceral code of every generation of children, long before they reach the age of intellectual consent.

We are what we are, not as the result of some abstract reasoning, nor by an accident of nature, but from a long historical development. Yet we can only continue to be, as civilized men and women, so long as we are capable of remembering not only what we are, but why. It is when, at the highest level of society, we begin to forget what it took to make us, that our very existence is put in peril.

In particular, we have almost forgotten the ancestral category of the "enemy" — that no matter how civilized, "nice", we think we have become, there are people "out there" who would be pleased to kill us. Mr. Harris writes, tough-mindedly, of what has always been necessary for a civilization to see off such threats.

It's really a remarkable book, and though I found its density made it a slow read (it's not too long, thankfully) I'll be reading it again in not too long. Pick up a copy; it's well worth the money.

Article Author: Moe Freedman

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