Lee Harris's book
As promised to mollpeartree a while ago, my thoughts on Lee Harris' Civilization and Its Enemies. This is less a review than a litany of complaints, I admit. Consider this a measure of my disappointment in the book.
The first chapter is the high point, and the reason for my high expectations: the essay originally titled "Al-Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology" which brought Lee Harris widespread attention. (The reprint here alters the ending significantly, softening Harris' original.) It must be admitted that recent events have cast some doubt upon this interpretation: the 3-11 Madrid bombings appear strategic and not theatrical. Nevertheless, it is still the most persuasive explanation I have seen of what al-Qaeda thought they were doing on 9-11, and everyone should read it.
The vast bulk of the book is a mix of history, anthropology, and straight philosophy. Alas, far too much of this analysis ranges from dubious to frankly untenable -- and even some of the better elements of it are of questionable utility. Following the argument through the book would be more prolonged an exercise than I care to take. (It would also jump between topics a lot: Harris is much better at organizing his thoughts on the scale of an essay than the scale of a book.) Instead, I simply list some criticisms under a few obvious headings:
Civilization
Harris' basic definition of civilization is a large society whose members don't use violence among themselves. His other themes orbit around this one: tolerance, loyalty, cooperation, shame, and I'm probably missing a few. So far, so good: not a bad starting place.
1. Harris proposes that the two natural forms of loyalty are the family and the boys' gang. This may very well be true. I'm not sure how important it is in the modern context, since the known existence of other forms of organization means that no one is in the true "state of nature" any more, no matter how badly things break down, but this is a minor point.
2. He connects this thesis to the origin of civilization, by an extended consideration of Sparta as a society which institutionalized the boys' gang in such a way as to suppress the family. This allowed non-familial modes of organization to appear -- compelled them, in fact, because Sparta's methods made it militarily more formidable than earlier societies. Historical problems with this include:
a. The obvious one that civilization (by his own definition) is a lot older than Sparta. Whatever its origins are, they aren't here.
b. Since this comes just after he defined civilization in terms of sheer size, it's not consistent for him to now turn and redefine the subject in some other terms. Nevertheless, I think that's what he's doing: he really means to say that Sparta was the first appearance of a more effective form of society -- one he later puts in the middle stage between "Oriental despotisms" and modern societies. In order to keep up the sequence, he has to say that Sparta's example gave rise to the Greek city-state and thence to the Roman model which went beyond the Greek in significant ways. Sparta didn't try to conquer their neighbors (being satiated after the one), but they did sometimes interfere. Tracing the emergence of the Greek city-state to their example and influence is doubtful. Tracing the line of descent to Rome just doesn't work: Rome had a solid institutional foundation before they had sufficient contact with the Greeks.
c. The existence of other streams of civilization also damages Harris' proposal. It might be saved by positing cultural borrowing of institutions on a larger scale than he proposes, but he doesn't have any mechanism to explain how such borrowing might happen over the distances involved. This again calls into question the importance of the boys'-gang element in general, and Sparta in particular.
d. Nor is it clear that the boys'-gang element is necessary for competition between societies to select more effective forms of organization in the first place.
3. Harris presents a sequence of community types from Oriental despotism through classical team-spirit to "the well-ordered trust systems that were associated with the Protestant religion." (Hegel's three stages of freedom, one of several places where that name crops up.) In terms of actual history, the third stage fares no better than the second. Identifying it with Protestantism is just silly. The institutional basis is a creation of high medieval times. The "conscience" as Harris defines it goes back to antiquity -- Augustine would recognize it; and, for that matter, so would Socrates and the Stoics.
4. The successes of other civilizations make it clear that reality stretches beyond Harris' categories. He tries to divide societies between kinship-based and team-based systems. Chinese successes may well mean that kinship-based systems (or mixed forms, really) can go a lot further than he thinks they can. It's not clear how to fit Islamic civilization into his boxes either: they handled things a lot more personally than the corporate system but aren't clearly based on kinship.
I should say, however, that Harris is correct in seeing the Roman office concept, and the "corporate principle" which it led into as a superior form of organization. Much of the superiority of Western civilization is built on this principle, which I don't think was fully developed until the middle ages.
5. Perhaps the most fundamental criticism is that Harris' categories do not end up being helpful for the project at hand. Al-Qaeda seems in fact a rather good example of what Harris means by a Team -- it's too large to be a mere gang. Harris seems to think that this form of organization grows out of a civilized environment: he sees fantasy ideologies as growing out of the French Revolution; thus, a modern phenomenon. That being so, it is not clear how all his material on origins would be helpful to the stated project of the book, even if it were all true.
6. While on the subject, it may be worth while to point out that fantasy ideologies don't seem as modern as all that when compared to millenarian religious movements. There have been a lot of those, at all sorts of stages of development.
7. Although it hadn't occurred to me until I typed the above, the absence of religion is also a problem with Harris' picture of the origin of civilization -- religion was certainly one of the main elements in the breakthrough to civilization in Sumer. I'll concede that its importance becomes less clear if you go back to the first neolithic towns, though.
The Enemy
In the preface Harris offers the definition: an enemy is someone willing to die in order to kill you. In practice, he relaxes this definition to just someone who wants to kill or harm you. I have no objection: that works better in most situations anyway. The problems arise elsewhere:
1. Why would someone want to kill you? Harris offers three possibilities: 1) they want stuff you have; 2) they want you to recognize them as an equal; 3) they want you to recognize them as a superior. I am not sure that this is the best way to think about envy and power-lust. But more to the point, he seems to think this list is complete, when it obviously is not. After the 20th century, there is really no excuse for missing 4) they don't really care if you live or die, but you're in their way, and the closely-related 5) they categorize you as someone who shouldn't exist, a type of being who prevents the world from being what it should be. It is hard to escape the thought that these latter may be closer to the view of Islamists toward the West than any of the first three.
2. Harris generally identifies the critical offense which make an enemy as ruthlessness, simply being willing to disregard the rules of civilization and resort to violence. This is an even less helpful formulation than "the War on Terror," since ruthlessness is broader than terrorism.
3. The chapter titled "The Origin of the Enemy" not only draws on Hegel but invokes Rousseau, thus combining the two intellectuals whom I usually blame for most of the bad thought of the last 200 years. There's nothing here to dissuade me from this prejudice. Harris' revival of "state of nature" narrative is no more persuasive than its 18th-century versions. Less, perhaps, since the sequence he proposes makes no sense even its own terms: his "bluffer's world" is literally impossible since it involves making threats which (by hypothesis) do not yet have any referents. Pointing out that civilization does not in fact arise in the way described here is superfluous; based on the rest of the book, Harris himself doesn't think that it does.
4. Harris starts off using "the gang" to mean the only natural form of human organization apart from the family; that is, a type of group that arises naturally in a situation of social chaos. He is quite possibly correct about this. On the other hand, at other places in the book he uses the word for any form of organization that uses violence in violation of the rules of civilization. This seems to conflate two different meanings of the word: matters of scale and organization make it dubious whether the Communist International, for instance, can usefully be described as a gang. This is not just a theoretical objection: dealing with the international terrorist network seems to me a problem of a different order than suppressing a street gang.
What is to be done?
The final subheading of the first chapter is "How do we fight an ideological epidemic?" This is the big question (of the book, and of our current situation). The book does not actually reach the point of attempting to answer it. The closest he comes is to consider barriers to self-defense within our civilization; mostly two of them. Fair enough: if you don't know what exactly we should do, it's certainly a contribution to clear away the obstacles which could prevent us from doing anything.
1. The primary problem Harris sees, if his preface is to be trusted, is "forgetfulness": the habits of civilization have blinded too many of our people to important features of the social world, most importantly the very existence of the enemy. His implicit answer to this problem is the book itself: a reminder of realities that some would prefer to forget. I am not myself persuaded that "forgetfulness" is a complete explanation for the sorts of thought seen in the antiwar movement, but I don't know that the question is of any practical importance.
2. On the level of institutions rather than mentalities, the main barrier that Harris identifies is the system of "classical sovereignty" (dominant since the Peace of Westphalia, though I'm not sure he ever pins it down so precisely). He's probably right about this, and also about the failure of the main alternative in the form of the United Nations and contemporary "international law." My only caveat is the intellectual one that he draws too firm a distinction between classical sovereignty, dependent on having power to back up your claims, and what he calls "honorific" modern sovereignty. There was always a healthy dose of pretense in the system.
3. His proposed solution is that the United States should assert the right to determine which states will be considered sovereign and which will not. Such a declaration could only be made, let alone accepted, in a context of desperate emergency, which does not at present obtain. Critics who would call this imperialism would be, in such a case, basically correct.
4. An extension of that point is his contention that the U.S. "represents the ultimate source of legitimacy in the world," on the grounds that American power is the only real support of the current international system. This is a startling misunderstanding of what legitimacy actually is, the more so because he defines it correctly later on the same page: "that those in authority are accepted by the overwhelming majority of citizens as being, more or less, those who should be in authority." To say that the U.S. is the font of legitimacy in the world is so obviously mistaken that it is not worth while to argue the point.
Or at least I wouldn't have thought so, but since Harris argues otherwise I suppose I'd better. The only source of evidence he has is the results of a global survey revealing that large majorities in most countries believe that the world would be more dangerous if there were a rival to the American superpower. Doesn't that show that American unipolarity has some level of legitimacy in the world, even if it's just "oh well, it could be worse"? I suppose one could make such an argument, but you'd need to make a better case than his. And even then, it's a long way from "the international system, in which America has predominant power, is basically seen as legitimate" to "America is the source of legitimacy and can determine which governments are legitimate." It does not help anything to confuse the two.
5. Harris also spends quite a bit of time arguing against Platonic abstraction in intellectual life. This is a sufficiently quixotic endeavor that I don't see much point to discussing it, but I can't resist saying that switching from Platonic abstractions to Hegelian abstractions does not really strike me as much of an improvement.
The first chapter is the high point, and the reason for my high expectations: the essay originally titled "Al-Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology" which brought Lee Harris widespread attention. (The reprint here alters the ending significantly, softening Harris' original.) It must be admitted that recent events have cast some doubt upon this interpretation: the 3-11 Madrid bombings appear strategic and not theatrical. Nevertheless, it is still the most persuasive explanation I have seen of what al-Qaeda thought they were doing on 9-11, and everyone should read it.
The vast bulk of the book is a mix of history, anthropology, and straight philosophy. Alas, far too much of this analysis ranges from dubious to frankly untenable -- and even some of the better elements of it are of questionable utility. Following the argument through the book would be more prolonged an exercise than I care to take. (It would also jump between topics a lot: Harris is much better at organizing his thoughts on the scale of an essay than the scale of a book.) Instead, I simply list some criticisms under a few obvious headings:
Civilization
Harris' basic definition of civilization is a large society whose members don't use violence among themselves. His other themes orbit around this one: tolerance, loyalty, cooperation, shame, and I'm probably missing a few. So far, so good: not a bad starting place.
1. Harris proposes that the two natural forms of loyalty are the family and the boys' gang. This may very well be true. I'm not sure how important it is in the modern context, since the known existence of other forms of organization means that no one is in the true "state of nature" any more, no matter how badly things break down, but this is a minor point.
2. He connects this thesis to the origin of civilization, by an extended consideration of Sparta as a society which institutionalized the boys' gang in such a way as to suppress the family. This allowed non-familial modes of organization to appear -- compelled them, in fact, because Sparta's methods made it militarily more formidable than earlier societies. Historical problems with this include:
a. The obvious one that civilization (by his own definition) is a lot older than Sparta. Whatever its origins are, they aren't here.
b. Since this comes just after he defined civilization in terms of sheer size, it's not consistent for him to now turn and redefine the subject in some other terms. Nevertheless, I think that's what he's doing: he really means to say that Sparta was the first appearance of a more effective form of society -- one he later puts in the middle stage between "Oriental despotisms" and modern societies. In order to keep up the sequence, he has to say that Sparta's example gave rise to the Greek city-state and thence to the Roman model which went beyond the Greek in significant ways. Sparta didn't try to conquer their neighbors (being satiated after the one), but they did sometimes interfere. Tracing the emergence of the Greek city-state to their example and influence is doubtful. Tracing the line of descent to Rome just doesn't work: Rome had a solid institutional foundation before they had sufficient contact with the Greeks.
c. The existence of other streams of civilization also damages Harris' proposal. It might be saved by positing cultural borrowing of institutions on a larger scale than he proposes, but he doesn't have any mechanism to explain how such borrowing might happen over the distances involved. This again calls into question the importance of the boys'-gang element in general, and Sparta in particular.
d. Nor is it clear that the boys'-gang element is necessary for competition between societies to select more effective forms of organization in the first place.
3. Harris presents a sequence of community types from Oriental despotism through classical team-spirit to "the well-ordered trust systems that were associated with the Protestant religion." (Hegel's three stages of freedom, one of several places where that name crops up.) In terms of actual history, the third stage fares no better than the second. Identifying it with Protestantism is just silly. The institutional basis is a creation of high medieval times. The "conscience" as Harris defines it goes back to antiquity -- Augustine would recognize it; and, for that matter, so would Socrates and the Stoics.
4. The successes of other civilizations make it clear that reality stretches beyond Harris' categories. He tries to divide societies between kinship-based and team-based systems. Chinese successes may well mean that kinship-based systems (or mixed forms, really) can go a lot further than he thinks they can. It's not clear how to fit Islamic civilization into his boxes either: they handled things a lot more personally than the corporate system but aren't clearly based on kinship.
I should say, however, that Harris is correct in seeing the Roman office concept, and the "corporate principle" which it led into as a superior form of organization. Much of the superiority of Western civilization is built on this principle, which I don't think was fully developed until the middle ages.
5. Perhaps the most fundamental criticism is that Harris' categories do not end up being helpful for the project at hand. Al-Qaeda seems in fact a rather good example of what Harris means by a Team -- it's too large to be a mere gang. Harris seems to think that this form of organization grows out of a civilized environment: he sees fantasy ideologies as growing out of the French Revolution; thus, a modern phenomenon. That being so, it is not clear how all his material on origins would be helpful to the stated project of the book, even if it were all true.
6. While on the subject, it may be worth while to point out that fantasy ideologies don't seem as modern as all that when compared to millenarian religious movements. There have been a lot of those, at all sorts of stages of development.
7. Although it hadn't occurred to me until I typed the above, the absence of religion is also a problem with Harris' picture of the origin of civilization -- religion was certainly one of the main elements in the breakthrough to civilization in Sumer. I'll concede that its importance becomes less clear if you go back to the first neolithic towns, though.
The Enemy
In the preface Harris offers the definition: an enemy is someone willing to die in order to kill you. In practice, he relaxes this definition to just someone who wants to kill or harm you. I have no objection: that works better in most situations anyway. The problems arise elsewhere:
1. Why would someone want to kill you? Harris offers three possibilities: 1) they want stuff you have; 2) they want you to recognize them as an equal; 3) they want you to recognize them as a superior. I am not sure that this is the best way to think about envy and power-lust. But more to the point, he seems to think this list is complete, when it obviously is not. After the 20th century, there is really no excuse for missing 4) they don't really care if you live or die, but you're in their way, and the closely-related 5) they categorize you as someone who shouldn't exist, a type of being who prevents the world from being what it should be. It is hard to escape the thought that these latter may be closer to the view of Islamists toward the West than any of the first three.
2. Harris generally identifies the critical offense which make an enemy as ruthlessness, simply being willing to disregard the rules of civilization and resort to violence. This is an even less helpful formulation than "the War on Terror," since ruthlessness is broader than terrorism.
3. The chapter titled "The Origin of the Enemy" not only draws on Hegel but invokes Rousseau, thus combining the two intellectuals whom I usually blame for most of the bad thought of the last 200 years. There's nothing here to dissuade me from this prejudice. Harris' revival of "state of nature" narrative is no more persuasive than its 18th-century versions. Less, perhaps, since the sequence he proposes makes no sense even its own terms: his "bluffer's world" is literally impossible since it involves making threats which (by hypothesis) do not yet have any referents. Pointing out that civilization does not in fact arise in the way described here is superfluous; based on the rest of the book, Harris himself doesn't think that it does.
4. Harris starts off using "the gang" to mean the only natural form of human organization apart from the family; that is, a type of group that arises naturally in a situation of social chaos. He is quite possibly correct about this. On the other hand, at other places in the book he uses the word for any form of organization that uses violence in violation of the rules of civilization. This seems to conflate two different meanings of the word: matters of scale and organization make it dubious whether the Communist International, for instance, can usefully be described as a gang. This is not just a theoretical objection: dealing with the international terrorist network seems to me a problem of a different order than suppressing a street gang.
What is to be done?
The final subheading of the first chapter is "How do we fight an ideological epidemic?" This is the big question (of the book, and of our current situation). The book does not actually reach the point of attempting to answer it. The closest he comes is to consider barriers to self-defense within our civilization; mostly two of them. Fair enough: if you don't know what exactly we should do, it's certainly a contribution to clear away the obstacles which could prevent us from doing anything.
1. The primary problem Harris sees, if his preface is to be trusted, is "forgetfulness": the habits of civilization have blinded too many of our people to important features of the social world, most importantly the very existence of the enemy. His implicit answer to this problem is the book itself: a reminder of realities that some would prefer to forget. I am not myself persuaded that "forgetfulness" is a complete explanation for the sorts of thought seen in the antiwar movement, but I don't know that the question is of any practical importance.
2. On the level of institutions rather than mentalities, the main barrier that Harris identifies is the system of "classical sovereignty" (dominant since the Peace of Westphalia, though I'm not sure he ever pins it down so precisely). He's probably right about this, and also about the failure of the main alternative in the form of the United Nations and contemporary "international law." My only caveat is the intellectual one that he draws too firm a distinction between classical sovereignty, dependent on having power to back up your claims, and what he calls "honorific" modern sovereignty. There was always a healthy dose of pretense in the system.
3. His proposed solution is that the United States should assert the right to determine which states will be considered sovereign and which will not. Such a declaration could only be made, let alone accepted, in a context of desperate emergency, which does not at present obtain. Critics who would call this imperialism would be, in such a case, basically correct.
4. An extension of that point is his contention that the U.S. "represents the ultimate source of legitimacy in the world," on the grounds that American power is the only real support of the current international system. This is a startling misunderstanding of what legitimacy actually is, the more so because he defines it correctly later on the same page: "that those in authority are accepted by the overwhelming majority of citizens as being, more or less, those who should be in authority." To say that the U.S. is the font of legitimacy in the world is so obviously mistaken that it is not worth while to argue the point.
Or at least I wouldn't have thought so, but since Harris argues otherwise I suppose I'd better. The only source of evidence he has is the results of a global survey revealing that large majorities in most countries believe that the world would be more dangerous if there were a rival to the American superpower. Doesn't that show that American unipolarity has some level of legitimacy in the world, even if it's just "oh well, it could be worse"? I suppose one could make such an argument, but you'd need to make a better case than his. And even then, it's a long way from "the international system, in which America has predominant power, is basically seen as legitimate" to "America is the source of legitimacy and can determine which governments are legitimate." It does not help anything to confuse the two.
5. Harris also spends quite a bit of time arguing against Platonic abstraction in intellectual life. This is a sufficiently quixotic endeavor that I don't see much point to discussing it, but I can't resist saying that switching from Platonic abstractions to Hegelian abstractions does not really strike me as much of an improvement.