Civilization and Its Enemies

January 26, 2004
Harris seems to have burst on the scene with a series of articles in the Hoover Institution's Policy Review
. These articles, according to the publisher, created a tremendous buzz, and they form the basis of this book, arguing that in the aftermath of September 11, America must regard itself as the legitimate defender of world civilization. Because Americans are so highly civilized, Harris maintains, they "forget" the realpolitik truths of enmity and barbarianism, and he has come to sound the alarm. Western "liberal left" intellectuals mislead, Harris says, by mistakenly dignifying al-Qaeda as political activists instead of dismissing them as a gang of ruthless "fantasists" who don't share any of our assumptions about how the world should work. Generally ignoring the lessons of other countries' experiences of terrorism, Harris dwells instead on the failures of WWI-era liberal internationalism and on the fantasist ideologies of Hitler and Mussolini. Seeking throughout to boost the notion of American cultural superiority, he turgidly presents Greek and Roman models of social stability that he claims inform the civilizing "team player" patriotism of Americans, as opposed to the weaker structures of tribal loyalty of the "old world." Stale assertions apart, Harris is suspiciously defensive when deriding a nebulously drawn figure of the contemporary Western intellectual, whom he sees as sustained by dreamy cosmopolitan utopianism. Choosing not to engage much with such thinkers, Harris instead tries to hoist them by their own postmodern petard. His reasonable-sounding dismissal of the [pst-Enlightenment reign of reason and his assumption that his reader, an American, can be rallied through a potted education in civilization prevent this deeply rhetorical extended essay from accomplishing much true intellectual work. (Feb.)

Correction:
The publisher of
Afternoons with Mr. Hogan by Jody Vasquez (Forecasts, Jan. 5) is Gotham Books.