Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History

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Today, only America can play the role of sovereign on the world stage, by the use of force when necessary.

CIVILIZATION AND ITS ENEMIES: The Next Stage of History

Lee Harris's articles have been hailed by thinkers from across the spectrum. His message is an enduring one that will change the way readers think -- about the war with Iraq, about terrorism, and about our future. Ruthlessness and the Origin of Civilization. How Reason Goes Wrong.

The Origin of the Enemy. The Rare Virtues of the West. After years spent pursuing diverse interests, including a stint at divinity school, several years writing mystery novels, and a career as a glazier, he began writing philosophical articles that captured the imagination of readers all over the world. The author of three of the most controversial and widely shared pieces in the history of Policy Review, Harris has emerged as one of the most talked-about writers of recent times.

He lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia. In doing this, he sets up a straw man, and neglects to look at the actual beliefs both good and bad of the vast majority of inhabitants of the Muslim world. Sep 14, Paul rated it liked it. It would be a pity if this book were ignored. It runs the risk of being ignored because its author thinks for himself, and deeply. Moreover, he is not afraid to follow his thought to its logical conclusions and in the process say things that will win him few enthusiastic allies.

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His objectivity—an almost clinical detachment at times—can be frankly appalling. The book also runs the parallel risk of not being attended with the seriousness it deserves because many of its components, whether contain It would be a pity if this book were ignored. The book also runs the parallel risk of not being attended with the seriousness it deserves because many of its components, whether contained in whole chapters or in extended digressions within chapters, lend themselves to a kind of intellectual surgery: Some readers and critics will like certain chapters, but recoil, instinctively as it were, from the broader argument; to solve this dilemma, they may simply pretend the broader argument does not exist.

Also, it ran 9 hours, 35 minutes; he could have gotten his point across in 35 minutes or less. I tend to agree with his thesis, that the USA is the next stage of civilization because it's a multicultural society that is able to get along without the traditional violence or without a tyrant in charge. Read the first chapter and throw away the rest. Nov 04, Barry Belmont rated it liked it. Probably the most convincing piece of conservative literature I've ever read. Harris puts his subjects in ways I've never thought to think of them.

However, the whole thing seems to veer off on a tangent or two while also become a little repetitive after awhile. Not the book I was expecting, but a good book all the same. Jan 10, Reader rated it really liked it Shelves: This is a very interesting book.

It's pretty philosophical, though. And the author assumes that the reader has read up on all their philosophers, which led to me muddling through large sections. It's definitely a thinking book.

May 15, Jim Johnson rated it did not like it. The author attempts to justify outright bigotry and racism by glorifying American military imperialism and labeling every Muslim on the planet as our "enemy". This book was incredibly disappointing. Jan 23, Michael Nicholas rated it it was amazing. One of the few books that provided me a whole new perspective on international relations. Mar 01, Eric rated it really liked it. Harris claims we are forgetting our cultural heritage at our peril. The gang makeup of Sparta is to be our fate if we do not acknowledge that there even IS an enemy.

Nov 21, Scarlet rated it did not like it. Why did it feel like extreme ranting, pro-war propaganda?

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John Wright rated it it was amazing Aug 04, Gordon rated it it was amazing Dec 17, Cpdulis rated it liked it Sep 21, Sam Motes rated it liked it Sep 22, Tropean rated it really liked it Dec 28, Blair rated it really liked it Nov 06, Eric Sondermann rated it it was amazing Jul 31, Gene Bathurst rated it really liked it Dec 19, Bob rated it it was amazing Feb 24, Seth Coplan rated it it was amazing Dec 08, Dave Zielinski rated it it was amazing Oct 06, Jeff rated it it was amazing Jul 22, Tobias rated it liked it Apr 14, Alex Ilushik rated it really liked it Mar 08, Paul Varnadore rated it liked it Nov 30, Byron rated it it was amazing Mar 15, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

A pseudonym used by Syrell Leahy. What such a community produces is a relative uniformity of behavior and "rational freedom--the freedom that arises out of self-mastery. By rational freedom Hegel meant nothing remotely metaphysical. Free here simply refers back to the kind of practical and everyday autonomy that was so highly valued by both Jefferson and Rousseau--the ability of the average man to take care of his own needs, to exercise mature self-control over his impulses, to look after both himself and his family, and to stay out of other people's hair.

This kind of freedom is clearly different from the freedom of following one's own bliss that is represented by the principle of liberal autonomy, for it is a freedom that can only be actualized in precisely the kind of community that is created through the constructive illusion of conscience. That is to say, it can only occur in a society where all the members trust each other to exhibit mastery, not over others, or over the fear of death, but mastery over something even harder to achieve--one's own impulses and fantasies and wayward desires Setting aside the question of whether this is necessarily a construct and an illusion, we can see why it would be so problematic in the long run, both at home and abroad.

Domestically, the problem is that over time we have forgotten that this kind of true social freedom requires us to exercise an extraordinary level of personal restraint. Soon enough we are all clamoring for all of the license with none of the control and trust must become impossible. So do those modern champions of human liberation end up destroying the foundations of freedom, having entirely forgotten what freedom was based on in the first place.

Meanwhile, as members of this kind of liberal civilization we tend to forget that those who are external to our society, who do not accept our notions of self-mastery, may be--and when they are must be treated as--our enemies. In this discussion of the book we've reversed the order in which Mr. Harris presents his arguments, but in doing so we've arrived back at the ground he's covered in past essays. What makes them and their vile deeds so inexplicable to us is that fall completely outside the ethical community and refuse to be bound at all by the self-restraint that our civilization has accustomed us to.

They are instead in the grip of a fantasy, one in which we are just props that they utilize as they pursue what is almost an aesthetic form of violence: It was a symbolic drama, a great ritual demonstrating the power of Allah, a pageant designed to convey a message not to the American people but to the Arab world. It is, as Mr. Harris argues in the aforementioned Our World Historical Gamble , we are arrived at what he calls, again borrowing from Hegel, a "world-historical" moment.

It is a situation "of historical impasse or deadlock for the human race" as he says in the book. Or, as he puts it in the essay, in speaking of our decision to respond to by, in part, embarking on the risky course of deposing Saddam Hussein: Such world-historical events, according to Hegel, are inherently sui generis - they break the mold and shatter tradition. Or, more precisely, it is impossible to evaluate them adequately, because the proper concepts for even describing the new situation have yet to be constructed.

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Such world-historical innovations transcend the conceptual categories of the old world, call into existence an entirely novel set of categories. To see the truth of this remark, one need only reflect back to any previous world-historical transformation. How could one hope to explain nineteenth century nationalism to Voltaire? Or the French Revolution to St. You could try explaining by analogy, but any analogy would be apt to mislead as much, if not more, than to illuminate. But this is no less true in dealing with the world-historical changes that have not yet given birth to the new order of possibilities.

It is this fact that explains why all world-historical undertakings are inherently and irreducibly fraught with risk and uncertainty. Each one of them, by its very nature, is a crossing of the Rubicon, from which there is no turning back, but only a going forward - and a going forward into the unknown.

But it would be a terrible mistake to conclude that such gambles are reckless ventures. In fact, the whole point of a world-historical gamble is that it offers the only possible escape from the kind of historical impasse or deadlock in which the human race presently finds itself. It emerges out of a situation where mankind cannot simply stay put, where the counsels of caution and conservatism are no longer of any value, and where to do nothing at all is in fact to take an even greater risk than that contemplated by the world-historical gamble.

It is because this historical deadlock must be broken that the unavoidable conflict arises between the old order caught up in its impasse and the new order erupting through it. And, as Hegel observes, "It is precisely at this point that we encounter those great collisions between established and acknowledged duties, laws, and right, on the one hand, and new possibilities which conflict with the existing system and violate it or even destroy its very foundations and continued existence, on the other". Today we are in the midst of this collision. It is the central fact of our historical epoch.

It is this we must grasp. Unless we are prepared to look seriously at the true stakes involved in the Bush administration's coming world-historical gamble, we will grossly distort the significance of what is occurring by trying to make it fit into our own pre-fabricated and often grotesquely obsolete set of concepts. We will be like children trying to understand the world of adults with our own childish ideas, and we will miss the point of everything we see. This means that we must take a hard look at even our most basic vocabulary - and think twice before we rush to apply words like "empire" or "national self-interest" or "multi-lateralism" or "sovereignty" to a world in which they are no longer relevant.

The only rule of thumb that can be unfailingly applied to world-historical transformations is this: None of our currently existing ideas and principles, concepts and categories, will fit the new historical state of affairs that will emerge out of the crisis. We can only be certain of our uncertainty. But, if these are necessarily uncertain times, Mr. Harris does have a prescription for how to meet the uncertainty, and it involves one of the most interesting concepts in the book: The traditional Westphalian system of sovereignty promised states a kind of inviolability from their neighbors so long as there was a recognizable regime in control within its borders.

But such a system required us to countenance totalitarian, even genocidal, regimes, so long as they limited their evil-doing to their own citizens.

Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History

In essence, this kind of sovereignty said that a government could do any damage it wished to its nation and its people, so long as they left the rest of us alone. Harris proposes instead--and we put into effect in Iraq and Afghanistan--a different vision.

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As he describes it, the "core idea of neo-sovereignty" is that: We have produced a system of socialization as well as a system of organization that has been able to help us eliminate many of the deep-seated conflicts that haunt and divide the rest of mankind--conflicts of race and of religion, of sect and ethnicity. We have figured out a way of living together, and others can learn it from us, if they are willing.

Several years ago, Walter McDougall suggested that America's posture towards the world divides along a faultline. On one side we wish to maintain our isolation from the rest of the world, holding ourselves out as an example, a Promised Land, but avoiding potentially contaminating contact with others. On the other side we've a tendency to sally forth as a Crusader State, more than willing to intervene in the affairs of others and convert them to our ways. His advocacy of neo-sovereignty--which would allow us to ignore the "rights" of regimes which lack liberal democratic legitimacy--plunks Mr.

Harris down squarely on the side of the crusaders. It's no surprise, though he doesn't ruminate on it, that the leader of that crusade is the evangelical President, George W.

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