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CIVILIZATION AND ITS ENEMIES
The Next Stage of History

Lee Harris Free Press, 2004, 232 pp. ISBN 0-7432-5749-0

Lee Harris is a philosopher. The title is an obvious wordplay on The End of
History, by Francis Fukuyama. The primary thesis is that you can't prevent
someone from being your enemy. Much of the book was out of my depth. He
rambles into long peculiar philosophical digressions on the development of
civilization, ignoring religion and focusing on what he calls the rise of
teams and the dethroning of family (tribe). He's openly scornful of
liberals and intellectuals. The thinking seemed pretty muddy after about
the first 70 pages.

The following two paragraphs in a review by W. J. Rayment give an overview:

"He begins by proposing that all of the new wave historians proposing an end
to history, based on an end of the need for war are either sadly mistaken or
at least premature in their analysis. His premise is that the rise of
civilized and tolerant people ultimately rewards the ruthlessness of other
groups. We can see this play out throughout history in the way the Greeks
allowed the Macedonians to run roughshod over them; how the Romans, softened
by civilization eventually succumbed to Barbarian invasion, and even the way
1930s Europe allowed the Nazis and the Communists to aggrandize to the point
of over-reaching.

It seems "civilized" society becomes so fond of the idea of tolerance, which
works so well with other cultures not violently opposed to them, that they
believe they can even befriend those who are determined to be their enemy.
Unfortunately, the "enemy" always sees this tolerance as weakness and
attempts to exploit it. This is why the policy of appeasement was such a
disaster for Great Britain under Chamberlain in the late 1930s." W.J.
Rayment / Conservative Bookstore
http://www.conservativemonitor.com/books03/31.shtml accessed Dec 31, 2004

My notes: "If 9/11 was not an act of war, then what was it? ...9/11 was the
enactment of a fantasy...." His point is that ruthless gangs develop an
ideology based on the world as they see it in their minds, a fantasy world,
thus a fantasy ideology.

"This theme of reviving ancient glory is an important key to understanding
fantasy ideologies. It suggests that fantasy ideologies tend to be the
domain of those groups that history has passed by or rejected-groups that
feel that they are under attack from forces that, while more powerful
perhaps than they are, are nonetheless inferior to them in terms of true
virtue; they themselves stand for what is pure." (8)

"The terror attack of 9/11 was not designed to make us alter our policy but
was crafted for its effect on the terrorists themselves and on those who
share the same fantasy ideology; it was a spectacular piece of theater." "A
mere handful of Muslims, men whose will was absolutely pure, as was proven
by their martyrdom, brought down the haughty towers erected by the Great
Satan. What better proof could there possibly be that God was on the side
of radical Islam and that the end of the reign of the Great Satan was near
at hand." (12) "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." (15)

"...there is absolutely no political policy that we could adopt that would
in any way change the attitude of our enemies." (16)

"What matters is that God will bring them victory." "The genuine cause of
all events occurring...is God-God and nothing else. If this is so, then the
'real' world that we take for granted simply vanishes, and all becomes
determined by the will of God. Thus the line between realist and magical
thinking dissolves." (17)

"How, in short, do we deter those who, driven by a fantasy ideology, are
prepared to pointlessly sacrifice themselves to murder us? This in turn
raises the most important question: How do we defeat such ruthlessness? And
can we defeat it without becoming ruthless ourselves?" (19)

We face a crisis of the collapse of the liberal world system that allows us
to know for a near certainty what the other players will not even conceive
of doing. (24)

"If Muslim extremists continue to use terror against the West, their very
success will destroy them. If they succeed in terrorizing the West, they
will discover that they have in fact only ended by brutalizing it. And if
subjected to enough stress, the liberal system will be set aside and the
Hobbesian world will return, and with its return, the Islamic world will be
crushed. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. The only way to
avoid this horrendous end is to bring the Islamic world back to sanity
sooner rather than later." (31)

"The greatest threat facing us-and one of the greatest ever to threaten
mankind-is the collision of this collective fantasy world of Islam with the
horrendous reality of weapons of mass destruction...." (31) "We now live in
a world in which a state so marginal that it would be utterly incapable of
mounting any kind of credible conventional threat to its neighbors or to
anyone else...could still make a devastating use of a nuclear weapon that
literally chanced to come into its hands." "In this case, the act of
violence need possess only a magical or fantasy significance to the
perpetrator in order to motivate him to perform it. It need not bring him
any other goal than the sense of achievement in having brought it off." (32)

"...if a nuclear device were to be detonated in downtown Chicago tomorrow,
from an unknown source, could we really count on being able to find its
'return address'?" (33)

Three theories of "the enemy:" Greedy - a rational actor seeking his
economic advantage and willing to fight for it Oppressed - someone
struggling for the recognition of his equal Overbearing - someone who seeks
to force us to recognize his superior status. (38) Harris says there is a
fourth category. See below.

Prior to the Second World War. "By refusing to take seriously the
significance of the German policy of ruthlessness, liberal internationalism
overlooked the possibility that such ruthlessness could be used again...."
"For while the League of Nations might have been equipped to prevent the
accidental eruption of another great war, how could it be expected to handle
a nation that deliberately used the threat of yet another great war as a way
of obtaining its political desires?" (59)

After 9/11. We know that terrorists are capable of using catastrophic
terror, and this changes the realm of what is thinkable and what is
imaginable in our time. (60)

Nations calculate the risk before embarking on war. They avoid the risk of
total war if at all possible. "If we may be attacked at any time by enemies
who are prepared to use catastrophic terror, how is it possible to calibrate
in advance the magnitude of any threat or any risk?" "Yet this very fact is
precisely what gives an enormous advantage to any party who is willing to
risk death or, in Hitler's case, total war." "Those who are willing to act
irrationally and to take this risk will be able to force any rational player
into acceding to his will. In a world where others are willing to risk
death to get their way, you must be willing to risk death to keep them from
getting their way." (63)

"In a world where everyone else is accustomed to making rational economic
choices, the man who is prepared to fight to the death will normally be
appeased." (64)

"What Nazism, fascism, and Communism had in common was their refusal to play
by the same rules as their middle-class and liberal opponents or even to
acknowledge these rules." (64) "Each myth justified the use of ruthlessness
by a certain select group of human beings." (65)

It is the height of bad manners to tell someone he is lacking in civility.
"The ruthless party therefore knows that he will be able to push very far
before a break point is openly acknowledged. Because once the break point
is acknowledged, all bets are off and you no longer can be sure of the next
step." (66)

"We may blame ruthlessness on someone's religion or culture or economic
status. We never dream of identifying it for what it is-a strategy that
works." (66) "Ruthlessness, in short, is the fourth enemy of civilization.
Unlike the other enemies...it is not one that humankind can ever evade...."
(67)

Book thesis: "There is one way of defending against an enemy who is prepared
to use total war as a deliberate strategy of ruthlessness, and that is to
have a nation whose military strength is equal or greater that is willing to
use total war as a deliberate strategy against ruthlessness." (104)

The natural form that ruthlessness takes is the gang. (106)

"We live in a world in which ruthlessness will triumph unless there are men
who know how to deal with it effectively. Civilized life begins to exist
only when men have learned how to fight ruthlessness without succumbing to
it themselves, and it only exists for as long as they remember the trick of
how this is done. This trick has been mastered by the United States." (107)

"America, in short, must use its power, unilaterally if need be, to destroy
and remove any group of people who are deliberately and consciously
following a policy of ruthlessness, whether this group is a state against
another state, a state against its own people, or an Al-Qaeda-like
organization." "To permit any group of this nature to decide the next stage
of history is insane, and yet this is precisely what would happen if the
United States were to disengage from the world." (108)

"Ruthlessness has no root causes. It is not engendered by poverty or
illiteracy or a lack of education or the Muslim religion or the concept of
jihad. It is a technique for gaining power. That is what it started as and
what it will always be." (109)

"If a nation contains gangs who have acted with conspicuous ruthlessness,
then it is not entitled to be considered a sovereign state. For
sovereignty, let us remember, is based on the real monopoly of violence and
not merely one written into the constitution. Therefore, any nation that
can't keep a lid on such gangs has no right to be considered a sovereign
state by definition." (110)

"What is so terrible about gang rule is not just what happens while the gang
rules, but what happens after it is gone. Witness the aftermath of the
Soviet Union, and that of Iraq. Where gangs of ruthless thugs have ruled,
they have made it virtually impossible for anyone else to rule except
another gang of thugs." "This is not an American problem but a world
problem. How do you fix communities long afflicted by ruthlessness?" (111)

"We are now living in a world where decent and sincere men and women attack
the United States for removing Saddam Hussein, the archetype of the ruthless
gang leader, who brutalized twenty million human beings for three decades."
"Those who argued that the United States should not attack Saddam Hussein's
Iraq because of the sacred right of national sovereignty should perhaps
remember the reputation today of those who in the past justified the
property rights of slaveholders. What is the difference, except scale?"
(112)

"In a world full of bluffers, the ruthless will rule." (169)

"Ruthlessness is an infallible strategy to use in a world in which no one is
willing to fight to the death to defend his stake in something...." (170)

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________________________ David Mays ACMC http://www.davidmays.org