The subtitle of Lee Harris's The Suicide of Reason is "Radical Islam's Threat to the West". Harris proceeds to make the argument that the outcome of the Long War will be determined not by military and economic power, but by the ability of the combatants to pursue their ideological goals unimpeded by doubt and unhindered by the inhibitory power of Reason.
His thesis is probably familiar to many readers in the Blogopshere. The West has been so successful that they now fail to realize how fragile civilization is and how easily frightened or angry people can revert to the primitive. Harris contrasts our response to 9/11 with past responses to attacks on Western homelands:
In a world governed by the law of the jungle, America would have responded to this attack with blind and immediate retaliation: They had killed thousands of our people, now we will kill hundreds of thousands of theirs--and it matters not at all which ones we kill, nor whether they were in any way responsible for the attack. This, after all, was how even the civilized English had responded to the German attacks on London--they fire-bombed Hamburg, killing sixty thousand men, women, and children over a few days, and later, and even more pointlessly, they would fire-bomb the city of Dresden, incinerating so vast a number of innocent civilians that no one even today is quite certain whether the number killed is closer to sixty thousand or a hundred and forty thousand.
This was not how the United States chose to respond to the major attacks of 9/11. No responsible leaders cried out for revenge attacks on the Muslim world. None evoked the remorseless Us versus Them logic of the tribal vendetta. (p. 40)
The West has achieved incredible power and success by virtue of the long, slow, and difficult climb toward Reason as an organizing principle of society. In fact, we have been so successful that most people literally have no clue how arduous a process it has been and how much of an anomaly a society based on the rule of Reason actually is.
Harris's strongest chapters are those that discuss the various ingredients that enabled the birth and nurturance of a new society, based on the individual's worth, dedicated toward maximizing the potential of each individual, the core of American exceptionalism. It is now our liberal democratic ideals that are being forcefully challenged and attacked by the Islamic fundamentalists and the leftist fundamentalists, (who paradoxically claim they are supporting our freedoms as they make it more difficult to exercise them. Perhaps this is akin to the American General who, upon bombing a South Vietnamese village explained they we had to destroy the village in order to save it.)
Harris's concern is that in the face of barbarism, there will come a time, if the barbarians are not stopped before hand, that our liberal society will devolve back to the law of the jungle; further, he is not certain that that will not eventually be required. (This reads like a variation on Wretcherd's three conjectures.)
Muslim fanatics believe that by destroying the Western status quo they will be ushering in a Golden age of human happiness. This illusion mirrors the neoconservative faith that destroying corrupt and despotic regimes in the Middle East will lead to the triumph of global democracy. In fact, the conflict between the two, if it continues, will not end in the victory of one side or the other; it will lead to a process of decivilizing that is already evident on both sides.
The ultimate outcome of such a process is impossible to predict. Who will emerge triumphantly out of the struggle is something none of us can foresee. All we can know with certainty is that the decivilizing process will come at a high cost: It will entail the dissolution of the established order dubbed the Pax Americana. (p. 262)
Harris closes with some remarks about Francis Fukayama's The End of History. He points out that the full title to Fukayama's book, almost never mentioned when the book is discussed, is The End of History and the Last Man. As Western man has replaced passion and testosterone with Reason and peace, we have slowly forfeited our right and ability to defend ourselves.
In the West, we are perilously getting down to our last man. Liberal democracy, among us, is achieving the goal that Fukayama predicted for it: It is eliminating the alpha males from our midst, and at a dizzyingly accelerating rate. But in Muslim societies, the alpha male is alive and well. While we in America are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin, the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive, and ruthless. We teach our boys to be good students, to aim at getting good jobs with large, safe corporations, to plan prudently for their retirement. They want their boys to become holy warriors. We are proud if our sons get into a good college; they are proud if their sons die as martyrs. (p. 272)
There are two major problems I have with harris's book. First, his tendency to hyperbole is unlikely to convince anyone not already comfortable with his thesis. As well, America remains a long distance from being a nation of defenseless Metrosexual males. (The Northeast may be farther along that path, but there remains a very strong thread of self defense and self sufficiency in our Nation, and it is not clear that the trends are away from those core values; merely consider the evolution of the debate over the 2nd amendment. Today, even the most liberal Democrat supports gun Rights, at least in word, if not in deed.) Furthermore, in a high tech culture, including a high tech military, our greater abilities in manipulating information and technology will offer us a growing advantage over the alpha males who are fueled primarily by testosterone rather than knowledge.
The second major problem I have with Harris's book may be an unfair criticism. He adequately describes the impediments our over-reliance on Reason place in front of our efforts to win the ideological war in which we are now in the early stages. However, he offers no useful prescriptions for ways to engage those of our fellow citizens who are uncertain of the dangers, unable to discern the shape of a seemingly inchoate conflict, and unpersuaded of the risk to their assumed eternal rights and freedoms. Finding ways to mobilize those Americans who believe in our exceptionalism (even if they don't recognize it overtly) while isolating that influential cohort who disdain what America stands for (ie, the far Left) will ultimately be necessary if we are to ever find common ground with those Americans who appreciate that what we have is singularly rare and worth defending.
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