Thursday, November 02, 2006

Civilization and its Enemies

Recently I read Civilization and its Enemies, by Lee Harris. It is compulsory reading for anyone in the Alliance!

Since the very beginning Harris says

"Civilized people forget that in order to produce a civilization there must be what the German sociologist Norbert Elias has called "the civilizing process," and that this process, if it is to be successful, must begin virtually at our birth, and hence many long years before the child can have any say about the training he would have preferred. They forget that the civilizing process we undergo must duplicate that of our neighbors, if we are to understand each other in our day-to-day intercourse."

This points two things that, as Harris says, people easily forget when living in high civilization. Many people (especially intellectuals) nowadays seem to think that civilization is something that springs naturally and spontaneously without any human effort. The "All men are created equal and they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" (paraphrased), requires that first there be a civilization in order for that to be true. In the state of nature there is no such thing as human rights or any rights whatsoever. In the state of nature there is only force. Rights can only exist within a civilization that treats those rights as a given, and which is willing and capable of upholding those rights, by force when necessary.

This is something that so many people forget today.

"Civilized people forget how much work it is not to kill one's neighbors, simply because this work was all done by our ancestors so that it could be willed to us as an heirloom. 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 that to fight an enemy it is necessary to have a leader whom you trust, and how, at such times, this trust is a civic duty and not evidence of one's credulity. 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.

[...] 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. He does not hate us for our faults any more than for our virtues. He sees a different world from ours, and in the world he sees, we are his enemy.

[....]

That is why those who uphold the values of the Enlightenment so often refuse to recognize that those who are trying to kill them are their enemy. They hope that by pretending that the enemy is simply misguided, or misunderstood, or politically immature, he will cease to be an enemy. This is an illusion. To see the enemy as someone who is merely an awkward negotiator or sadly lacking in savoir faire and diplomatic aplomb is perverse. It shows contempt for the depth and sincerity of his convictions, a terrible mistake to make when you are dealing with someone who wants you dead.

We are the enemy of those who murdered us on 9/11. And if you are the enemy, then you have an enemy [....]

Once someone else sees you as the enemy, then you must yourself deal with this category of human experience, which is why societies that have enemies are radically different from societies that do not. A society that lacks an enemy does not need to worry about how to defend itself against him. It does not need to teach any of its children how to fight and how not to run when they are being attacked by men who want to kill them. It 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 societies with enemies must do all of these things. and do them very well, or else they perish.


[....]

The first duty of all civilization is to create pockets of peacebleness in which violence is not used as a means of obtaining one's objective; the second duty is to defend these pockets against those who try to disrupt their peace, either from within or from without. Yet the values that bring peace are the opposite values from those that promote military prowess, and this poses a riddle that very few societies have been able to solve and then only fitfully. If you have managed to create your own pocket of peace -and its inseparable companion, prosperity- how will you keep those who envy you your prosperity from destroying your peace?

There is only one way: you must fight back; if your enemy insists on a war to the finish, then you have no choice but to fight such a war. It is your enemy, and not you, who decides what is a matter of life and death."

This book is REALLY good.

1 comment:

Demosthenes said...

I read this book a year ago and quite enjoyed. It was just refreshing to have some talk about what it is to have an enemy. It shouldn't be that rare of an experience. We need to understand what an enemy is if we want to tackle real evils. It doesn't seem like it should be that hard to understand the concept of enemy. Many people have experienced bullying at school. If not, they could read history and imagine themselves as the victims as victim of many evil social practices or many evils plans implemented by political leaders. Either way, the concept of enemy should be easy to understand, but our society has become dysfunctionally anti-paranoid, where the process of recognizing of an enemy is morally condemned and psychologized as a paranoia. Yes paranoia is a great evil that has caused much evil, but the opposite error of anti-paranoia leads to evil also. Rather than paranoia at all costs, we should view paranoia and anti-paranoia as being a basic problem of life. Recognizing an enemy has always a costly but necessary activity since life emerged. Allergies are a form of paranoia and AIDS a form of anti-paranoia. An organism suffers and can die from both.

Part of the reason we recognize an evil is because of our conversations about morality and evil are often silly. People hear morality and they think about sex. Morality should be first about treating people decently. Instead morality plays out in our society more like the following example. Consider two women. One woman's husband treats her wonderfully and provides her with almost as much sex as she wants, but because he is having an affair, he can't always satisfy her. Their children are happy. The other woman's husband has never cheated and the sex is excellent, but he is abusive to her and their children. Too often it is the adulterer that will be the one condemned, even if the abusive husband is known to be abusive. People will excuse him as "hot-headed". (I can’t help but note how Islam encourages such moral disarrangements.) Most of morality is not about sex. We need to ground morality first in treating each decently, second in thinking about how deal with those who won’t treat other’s decently & get around to thinking about sex much later. Thinking more about the ethics of having an enemy who is evil would help us not only face the threat of Islam, but help also help us deal with liberal judges being lenient while at the same time providing an argument against excessive conservative punitiveness.

I seem to recall that there is what I would label an outright error in the philosophy of Civilization and its Enemies. It's been some time so I may not get this quite right. I recall something like he basically wanted to imagine the start of society as arising from outdated 18th century social contract-like ideas, but it makes more sense to view the start of society as an emergent property. I'll look at the book tomorrow if anyone is interested in discussing it further.