Forgetfulness occurs when those who
have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time
in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity
without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious
foe....They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the enemy, they
must trust and confide in each other, or perish....They forget, in short,
that there has ever been a category of human experience called the enemy.
"That, before 9/11, was what
had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from
our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn't
done enough for yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an
oversight on our part -- something that we could correct.... "
"Our first task is therefore
to try to grasp what the concept of the enemy really means. The enemy is
someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true
that the enemy always hates us for a reason, it is his reason, and not
ours."
So begins Civilization and Its Enemies,
an extraordinary tour de force by America's "reigning philosopher of 9/11,"
Lee Harris. What Francis Fukuyama did for the end of the Cold War, Lee
Harris has now done for the next great conflict: the war between the civilized
world and the international terrorists who wish to destroy it. Each major
turning point in our history has produced one great thinker who has been
able to step back from petty disagreements and see the bigger picture --
and Lee Harris has emerged as that man for our time. He is the one who
has helped make sense of the terrorists' fantasies and who forces us most
strongly to confront the fact that our enemy -- for the first time in centuries
-- refuses to play by any of our rules, or to think in any of our categories.
We are all naturally reluctant to face
a true enemy. Most of us cannot give up the myth that tolerance is the
greatest of virtues and that we can somehow convert the enemy to our beliefs.
Yet, as Harris's brilliant tour through the stages of civilization demonstrates,
from Sparta to the French Revolution to the present, civilization depends
upon brute force, properly wielded by a sovereign. Today, only America
can play the role of sovereign on the world stage, by the use of force
when necessary. |