Rating: 
Summary: Pulling Punches
Review: For those who believe it imperative to deal with the threat that became apparent after 9/11, this book is worthwhile. Mr. Harris makes some telling points, namely ÒIt is the enemy who defines us as his enemyÉwe are the enemy of those who murdered us on 9/11Éif you are the enemy, then you have an enemy. When you have it, this fact must change everything about the way you see the worldÉto insist on maintaining utopian values when your society is facing an enemy who wishes only to annihilate you is to invite annihilation.Ó
Yet he pulls his punches when he says we have become forgetful because the threats against civilization have become Òtoo distantÓ. (It is hard for some to forget the horrors of fascism and communism.) Moreover, when discussing how fantasy permeates the enemyÕs world view, he deemphasizes the context within which it arises, denying that there is Òsome inherent flaw in Islam, either as a culture or a religion, or in ArabsÓ. Consequently, he cannot counter the threat by providing disincentives to the Muslim and Arab movements by making them pay a price for their attacks.
Mr. Harris writes that Òthe various things that must be done to protect societyÉare at odds with those values that express the highest that civilized life has to offerÑtolerance, individual liberty, government by consensusÓ as though our response requires a rejection of civilization. Yet perhaps the highest value of civilization is justice, which is the very thing needed for our protection. Mr. Harris notes that the Arabs did not develop their economic resources, nor create their own wealth, but have benefited from the West. Consequently, their advantages appear to stem from magic, rather than from dealing with reality. Surely they have gained from our trusting negotiations and agreements, while benefiting from Western protectionism. Yet most of their advantage has derived from exploiting the flaws in Western beliefs, which they have mastered with great clarity. Here, it is we who have been blind to political and economic realities. Thus whereas Mr. Harris has properly addressed the material and military realm, he has overlooked the primary source of enemy power, which is political and ideological.
I concur with his view that ÒThe civilization that the US is now called on to defend is not AmericaÕs or even the WestÕsÓ but civilization itself. I further agree with his requirement to review the positions of our utopian intelligentsia. However, it is unfortunate that Mr. Harris has not gotten to the source of the bloc to destroy us.
Rating:
Summary: Civilization and Its Enemies : The Next Stage of History
Review: Harris must be very popular with those in the Bush administration. From the publication of his first political essay in Policy Review, "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology," through this new book-length polemic, he makes a stark and simple argument: we have a ruthless enemy and we need to annihilate him, so get used to it. Although drawing upon the lessons of history and the writings of philosophers, Harris maintains his focus on the dangerous post-9/11 world. In his view, 9/11 marked the beginning of an "ideological epidemic" that has fundamentally changed how we now must approach the world. He expounds upon the nature of the "enemy," the need for ruthlessness in world affairs, and patriotism. He is highly critical of liberal apologists for internationalism and cosmopolitanism, both of which he regards as na‹ve and ineffectual in the battle to preserve civilization. This provocative and controversial view will appeal primarily to political conservatives. Although Harris is being compared with Francis Fukuyama, his book may not achieve the fame of The End of History and the Last Man. Nevertheless, it deserves a place on library shelves
Rating:
Summary: Civilization and Its Enemies : The Next Stage of History
Review: Harris must be very popular with those in the Bush administration. From the publication of his first political essay in Policy Review, "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology," through this new book-length polemic, he makes a stark and simple argument: we have a ruthless enemy and we need to annihilate him, so get used to it. Although drawing upon the lessons of history and the writings of philosophers, Harris maintains his focus on the dangerous post-9/11 world. In his view, 9/11 marked the beginning of an "ideological epidemic" that has fundamentally changed how we now must approach the world. He expounds upon the nature of the "enemy," the need for ruthlessness in world affairs, and patriotism. He is highly critical of liberal apologists for internationalism and cosmopolitanism, both of which he regards as na‹ve and ineffectual in the battle to preserve civilization. This provocative and controversial view will appeal primarily to political conservatives. Although Harris is being compared with Francis Fukuyama, his book may not achieve the fame of The End of History and the Last Man. Nevertheless, it deserves a place on library shelves
Rating: 
Summary: Misguided Nonsense
Review: History is replete with empires who thought that they had all the answers, that their view of the world is the only one that mattered, that their narrative was the only one to which all of "civilization" should subscribe. In trying to impose their "truths" on everybody else, all they succeeded in doing was causing death and suffering for many. And their view was eventually defeated and gave way to another myth. Those who believe in the end of history are as stark raving mad as all the misguided fools who led their empires to ruin. The tragedy now is that modern technology has made weapons so destructive that the coming battles that will inevitably be fought if we go down the insane path heralded by Harris will cause suffering and death on a scale heretofore unseen, and the possible extinction of mankind from the planet. The book that needs to be written is "Homo Sapiens and its Enemies." Harris and and his fool ideas could be a prime exhibit.
Rating:
Summary: Egocentric, ethnocentric propaganda
Review: I agree with some of the reviewers that this book is well written. However, the premise is about as realistic as Bush's statements after 9/11 regarding the "hatred of our country's policy of freedom and equality." It is ultimately an extremely simplistic and dangerous viewpoint. I say dangerous, because this line of thinking is what has gotten us attacked in the first place. Either this author is an overt propagandist for America's aristocracy or is simply blind. It is our self-involved, murderous, imperialistic and careless foreign policy that has earned us a terrible reputation abroad, not simply a dynamic that eternally exists between "civilized" and uncivilized. If youre going to read this anyway, make sure that you counter it with Chomsky, Blum, and Zinn.
Rating: 
Summary: Beyond 9/11
Review: I loved this book. I will leave it to the reader to get the gist of its content from the other reviews. What I found most facinating was not the author building a context around Al Qaeda and 9/11, but the more abstract question: "Is is possible to create a utopian society?" For those of you that may be put off by the belief that this book is only about current politics I would suggest you read it for its deeper questions about the context of successful civilization. I have always been troubled by the concepts of "liberal" and "conservative" or "left" and "right." I felt none of those labels applied to my particular belief structure. I came away with a different yardstick: "fantasy" vs. "reality." We all have our particular fantasy beliefs - Mr Harris helped me define for myself those I believe to be dangerous to civilization and those that just make me feel good about being right (said tongue in cheek.) I found a new context for a new century.
Rating: 
Summary: Provocative but uneven treatment of key issues
Review: In "Civilization and its Enemies," Lee Harris takes on an ambitious project: framing the issues of terrorism in the broadest historical context, then defending a "world historical" role for the United States in response that steps far beyond international norms. With so much of the coverage of world events being sound-byte shallow or spun to fit simplistic political agendas, it's encouraging to find a well-written book that probes deeply and develops fresh perspectives. The opening chapter is the book's strongest, and builds on Mr. Harris' earlier essay in "Policy Review." He makes a compelling case for seeing al Qaeda's acts -- 9/11 in particular -- as arising from a fantasy ideology rather than as a political group's rational maneuvers to gain political power. This enemy is different, not open to reason, and is intent on killing us. It would be difficult to exaggerate the historical importance Mr. Harris assigns to the 9/11 attacks. He writes, "We are the enemy of those who murdered us on 9/11. And if you are the enemy, then you have an enemy. When you recognize it, this fact must change everything about the way you see the world... With 9/11 commenced the next stage of history." Although we have had enemies, gangs and lawbreakers before, and have dealt with them largely within the constructs of national constitutions and international law, Mr. Harris sees this next stage of history as profoundly different. He believes decades of civilization have led us to forget the true nature of ruthlessness as practiced by terrorists, and that a correspondingly atavistic response is needed. A society that lacks such an enemy, he writes "does not need to appoint a single man to make instant decisions that affect the well-being of the entire community, and it does not need to train the community to respond to his commands with unthinking obedience." But he believes we do now. "The enemy necessitates the careful cultivation of such high testosterone values as brute physical courage and unthinking personal loyalty to a leader." Here, his case is not compelling. Where Harris suggests you may need to abandon critical thinking and obey your leader (George W. Bush?), I suggest you sharpen those critical thinking skills and use this book as your first subject. Harris sees no value in attempting to understand such enemy gangs as al Qaeda or in hoping to eliminate the conditions that lead to their formation. "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 will always be." But if such ruthlessness is a technique for gaining power, then it is a political power play and not simply the product of a fantasy ideology as he asserts earlier. Moreover, isn't it this trait of not attempting to understand the enemy that makes al Qaeda as ruthless as they are? Is that really where we want to go? More successfully, Harris addresses the difficulties now evident in traditional views of national sovereignty. Against the backdrop of Afghanistan and al Qaeda, he introduces the promising concept of neo-sovereignty: "If a nation contains gangs who have acted with conspicuous ruthlessness, then it is not entitled to be considered a sovereign state." But there are practical challenges here. When one considers organized crime, extremist sects and such militants as bred Timothy McVeigh, I doubt many world citizens would judge that even the US passes this test. Neverthekess, Harris sees the United States as the sole arbiter of what states are to be considered sovereign and what is to be done if a government fails. What are Harris' criteria for legitimacy? "Intellectuals instinctively believe that for legitimacy to be valid it must be based on a reason." But "all legitimacy means or can mean [is] that those in authority are accepted by the overwhelming majority of citizens as being, more or less, those who should be in authority." But, it's clear the overwhelming majority of world citizens do not believe the US should have that authority. So, we're left with the US simply asserting that authority. In a real sense, the current US National Security Strategy with its platforms of preemption, unilateralism and hegemony has already adopted Harris' assertive approach. It's already clear from the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that the US can too easily make decisions grounded more in ideology than sound intelligence. The policy is already in trouble. Perhaps it's Harris' ambitious goals with this book that lead him to some too-sweeping conclusions. He writes, "When an old legitimacy collapses, or is pushed over the cliff, what takes its place is always the ruthless, for they are the ones capable of fighting their way into the apparatus of power from which the old legitimacies have been expelled, precisely as the Nazis did." Using this criteria, the American revolution and its founding fathers would also be judged a ruthless gang. While there are good points here as well, I'd say these issues are better treated in Robert Kagan's "Of Power and Paradise." While I don't agree with most conclusions this book reaches, I nevertheless recommend it for a critical read. I found Harris' strongly felt and provocative arguments forced me to think more deeply about the unarguably important issues he addresses.
Rating:
Summary: A Well-Timed Warning
Review: It would be a shame if Lee Harris' Civilization and Its Enemies is dismissed as a partisan attempt to rationalize the War on Terror or if it gets lost among the masses of books that try to explain how 9/11 changed the world. Civilization and Its Enemies is a Physics and Politics for the 21st Century. Like Walter Bagehot, Harris makes the argument that civilization's success can set it up for downfall. Sustained peace and prosperity leads to complacency, and the members of a successful civilization are apt to forget that the natural state of people in the world is neither peaceful nor prosperous. Harris does for politics what Frederick Turner, in works such as Beauty: The Value of Values and The Culture of Hope, did for aesthetics. Like Turner, Harris argues for the importance and necessity of shame in shaping our cultural values. Like Turner, Harris creates a kind of counter-myth to challenge the classical, non-partisan liberal ideology that has dominated the West since the triumph of the Enlightenment. Harris deals with the origins of leadership, the importance of team spirit, the evolution of tolerance, along with many other forces that have shaped our current liberal democratic societies. Harris interprets and synthesizes the work of a wide range of political philosophers, but the heart of the book focuses on a handful of Hegel's observations on the origins of civilization. Now, I've always found Hegel to be obscure and convoulted, so I can't speak to the accuracy of Harris' interpretation, but it seemed to me that, through Hegel, Harris gets to the unpleasant truth about our civilization. As members in good standing of enlightened societies, we repress the fact that our liberal democracies (and civilization in general) were formed through illiberal methods. Harris faces up to a truth that most civilized people try to ignore, namely that they may have enemies who, for no reason that would motivate one of Adam Smith's rational actors, want to kill them. Ignoring the enemy won't make them go away, Harris argues, but neither will pretending that they really aren't enemies. There are some conflicts in this world that cannot be "worked out," no matter what we'd like to think. Throughout the book Harris makes the case for accepting and encouraging the genuine good that can come out of a messy reality, rather than trying to force reality to conform to transcendent ideals. We in the West often forget, Harris argues, that our society is better--that is more just and more moral--than any that has ever existed in human history. It is ridiculous, Harris suggests, to judge a country like America harshly because it doesn't live up to the unachievable criteria of idealists. Overall, Harris makes a strong argument that civilization is a fragile and precious thing, not to be taken for granted, or damned because it is, like all things of the Earth, imperfect. The book is clear and well-written--he even makes Hegel understandable. I'd recommend this book not only to those interested in getting a better handle on current events, but also to anyone who has an interest in political philosophy. As for partisanship, Harris makes a number of arguments that go against the assumptions of leftists, rightists, and centrists, libertarians and statists. Harris hasn't let a political agenda warp his argument.
Rating:
Summary: The Global Picture
Review: Mr. Harris writes: "It is a common human weakness to wish to make more of our contribution to the world than the world is prepared to acknowledge; it is our fantasy world that allows us to fill this gap. Normally, for most of us at least, this fantasy world of ours stays relatively hidden, and indeed a common criterion of our mental health is the extent to which we are able to keep our fantasies firmly under our watchful control.
"Yet clearly there are individuals for whom this control is, at best, intermittent; its failure results in behavior that ranges from the merely obnoxious to the clinically psychotic. The man who insists on being taken more seriously than his advantages warrant falls into the former category; the maniac who murders an utter stranger because God -- or his neighbor's dog -- commanded him to do so belongs to the latter.
"What is common in such interactions is that the fantasist inevitably treats other people merely as props: there is absolutely no interest in, or even awareness of, others as having wills or minds of their own. The man who bores us with stories designed to impress us with his importance or his intellect or his bank account cares nothing for us as individuals, for he has already cast us in the role that he wishes us to play: we are there to be impressed by him. Indeed, it is an error even to suggest that he is trying to impress us, for this would assume that he is willing to learn enough about us to discover how best we might be impressed. Nothing of the kind occurs. And why should it? After all, the fantasist has already projected onto us the role which we are to play in his fantasy. And no matter what we may be thinking of his recital, it never crosses his mind that we may be utterly failing to play the part expected of us; indeed, it is sometimes astonishing to see how much exertion is required of us in order to bring our own profound lack of interest to the fantasist's attention." Mr. Harris uses this logic to point out the psychological aberration of the "enemies of civilization," when we frame them in the narrow mindset of "our rules," as he accurately describes them.
It does not take a giant intellectual leap to switch the roles. When we see the many, many lives Westerner leaders have recently, mindlessly, and arrogantly taken in the name of our God, civilization, who we believe calls us to impose this higher good on all humanity, the same logical argument frames us as the ideological fantasist. Hoist by our own petard, we fail to see the victims and, turning Mr. Harris' own logic toward the West, "it never crosses... (the) mind (of Western leaders) that (the majority of the world's nations and peoples) may be utterly failing to play the part expected of (them); indeed, it is sometimes astonishing to see how much exertion is required of (the world) in order to bring (its) own profound lack of interest to the fantasist's attention."
The time has come to open our minds to see ourselves with the same glasses we use to paint our "enemies."
Rating:
Summary: The Global Picture
Review: Mr. Harris writes: "It is a common human weakness to wish to make more of our contribution to the world than the world is prepared to acknowledge; it is our fantasy world that allows us to fill this gap. Normally, for most of us at least, this fantasy world of ours stays relatively hidden, and indeed a common criterion of our mental health is the extent to which we are able to keep our fantasies firmly under our watchful control.
"Yet clearly there are individuals for whom this control is, at best, intermittent; its failure results in behavior that ranges from the merely obnoxious to the clinically psychotic. The man who insists on being taken more seriously than his advantages warrant falls into the former category; the maniac who murders an utter stranger because God -- or his neighbor's dog -- commanded him to do so belongs to the latter.
"What is common in such interactions is that the fantasist inevitably treats other people merely as props: there is absolutely no interest in, or even awareness of, others as having wills or minds of their own. The man who bores us with stories designed to impress us with his importance or his intellect or his bank account cares nothing for us as individuals, for he has already cast us in the role that he wishes us to play: we are there to be impressed by him. Indeed, it is an error even to suggest that he is trying to impress us, for this would assume that he is willing to learn enough about us to discover how best we might be impressed. Nothing of the kind occurs. And why should it? After all, the fantasist has already projected onto us the role which we are to play in his fantasy. And no matter what we may be thinking of his recital, it never crosses his mind that we may be utterly failing to play the part expected of us; indeed, it is sometimes astonishing to see how much exertion is required of us in order to bring our own profound lack of interest to the fantasist's attention." Mr. Harris uses this logic to point out the psychological aberration of the "enemies of civilization," when we frame them in the narrow mindset of "our rules," as he accurately describes them.
It does not take a giant intellectual leap to switch the roles. When we see the many, many lives Westerner leaders have recently, mindlessly, and arrogantly taken in the name of our God, civilization, who we believe calls us to impose this higher good on all humanity, the same logical argument frames us as the ideological fantasist. Hoist by our own petard, we fail to see the victims and, turning Mr. Harris' own logic toward the West, "it never crosses... (the) mind (of Western leaders) that (the majority of the world's nations and peoples) may be utterly failing to play the part expected of (them); indeed, it is sometimes astonishing to see how much exertion is required of (the world) in order to bring (its) own profound lack of interest to the fantasist's attention."
The time has come to open our minds to see ourselves with the same glasses we use to paint our "enemies."
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