Thinking about the subtitle of Tony Blankley’s book, “The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?” -- and the call this week with Blankley (the principal bloggers’ posts are nicely summarized here) -- caused me to re-read portions of Lee Harris’s landmark 2004 book: “Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History.”
Harris’s remarkably prescient book begins as follows:
Prior to 9/11, all the experts and all their paradigms had assured us that the enemy had been defeated. All the bad ideologies of the twentieth century had been discredited; therefore, it was impossible for people to commit themselves to any more such nonsense.
Capitalism or liberal democracy or both would make sure that the world would never need to resort to life-and-death struggles over anything of importance, since everything of importance would be forthcoming from the automatic expansion of Western values through the process of globalization. . . .
The enemy was not supposed to exist according to any of the major geopolitical paradigms that were current prior to 9/11. The one point which all of these paradigms agreed was this: there was no longer any underlying necessity for two different groups of humanity to be enemies to each other, since it was now possible, at least in principle, for men to work out their differences. . . .
Harris noted that this theory of history was not new. In 1814, the French novelist and political thinker Benjamin Constant published “The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and Their Relation to European Civilization,” which asserted that:
“We have finally reached the age of commerce, an age which must necessarily replace that of war, as the age of war was bound to precede it. War and commerce are only two different means to achieve the same end, that of possessing what is desired. . . . [Commerce] is experience, by proving to [man] that war, that is, the use of his strength against the strength of others, is open to a variety of obstacles and defeats that leads him to resort to commerce, that is, to milder and surer means of getting the interest of others to agree with his own.”
This was followed, in history, by World War I and World War II. And World War I, like 9/11, was unexpected, completely unpredictable under the ruling paradigms, but nevertheless changed everything. As Harris noted:
No one, of course, had meant the Great War to be the Great War. As is well known, almost all the belligerents in World War I expected the time frame of this war to be similar to that of the Franco-Prussian War -- measurable in weeks and months, not years. Indeed, this schedule had been built into the German war plan.
No one, in his worst nightmares, expected World War I to develop into the ghastly system of trench warfare, in which battles, like
Verdun and theSomme , could last months and consume casualties reckoned in the millions. The horror of the war had been, prior to the event, simply unthinkable. . . .
Similarly today, in the post-9/11 world, we know now that catastrophic terror is a possibility, and this knowledge can never be eluded. It changes the way in which we imagine our future, just as it changed the way those who had lived through the Great War were condemned to imagine theirs.
For Harris, the post-9/11 world was not unexpected but entirely predictable. It was the return of the scourge of history -- the ruthless man, the man willing to take violence to a new level, the man that always appeared when the rest of society, or the world, let down its guard, believing that such a man was a thing of the past:
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. The same logic applies to whole societies.
The result is an unsettling paradox: the more the spirit of commerce triumphs, the closer mankind comes to dispensing with war, the nearer we approach the end of history, the greater are the rewards to those who decide to return to the path of war, and the easier it will be for them to conquer. . . .
Forgetfulness overcomes every successful civilization. Its transformation of men into peaceful, commercially minded, liberal cosmopolitans is a large-scare version of the trustful community that leaves its doors unlocked. . . .
And so, what happened after Benjamin Constant declared an end to history in 1814 then happened again, after the catastrophic experience of World War I had convinced everyone that another great war was unthinkable, and after reasonable, peaceful people had gone so far as to outlaw war: ruthless man returned:
The ideologies that came to dominate
Europe after the Great War were precisely the ones that preached the doctrine of ruthlessness most effectively, in each case justifying the doctrine by an appeal to a different myth. Each myth justified the use of ruthlessness by a certain select group of human beings. In Italian fascism, it was those who were naturally heroic and daring. In Nazism, it was the master race. In Communism, it was the Vanguard of the Proletariat. Each of these groups was entitled to behave ruthlessly and to scoff and make fun of the hypocrisy and cant of middle-class values, of the corruption and lack of direction of parliamentary democracy, of the selfishness and money grubbing of the self-satisfied bourgeoisie. And who could blame them. . . .
As we witness today the return of ruthlessness, as violence and murder threaten authors who write novels, people who make a film, newspapers that publish cartoons, popes that give lectures, persons who put on a play -- as people are bombed in discotheques, restaurants, buses, resorts, theaters, hotels, in at least 15 major cities, on every continent -- Harris’s words (written by him in mid-2003, before most of the things in this sentence occurred) come back with special force:
Before the break point, the civil party thinks that the ruthless party can be accommodated to civilized standards by means of patience and forbearance, much in the same way that we might try to domesticate a feral animal. We are convinced that we will bring him around. We attribute his ruthlessness to some defect in his psychology. Perhaps he has an inferiority complex and is acting out with us. Perhaps we are an authority figure, and he is rebelling against us. . . . 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.
Harris’s book concluded with a ringing evocation of the crisis and the responsibility facing the
The civilization that the United States is now called upon to defend is not America’s or even the West’s; it is the civilization created by all men and women, everywhere on the planet, who have worked to make the actual community around them less addicted to violence, more open, more tolerant, more trusting. Civilization, in this sense is Chinese, American, African, European, and Muslim. Those who are working for this purpose are all on the same side, and we all have a common enemy. It is an enemy whose origin goes back to the dawn of history, and indeed, the enemy that began the whole bloody and relentless cycle of violence and war: the eternal gang of ruthless men. . . .
All this is by way of introduction to the extraordinary (I need a stronger word) article that Lee Harris has published in the current issue of the Weekly Standard: “Socrates or Muhammad? Joseph Ratzinger on the Destiny of Reason.”
The article is dedicated to the memory of Oriana Fallaci. It is far and away the best essay written to date about the Pope’s speech -- which Harris terms “moving and heroic” -- putting it in the context of broader historical, religious and philosophical themes that have not generally been understood. It would be a disservice to attempt to summarize or excerpt it.
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