"Civilization and Its Enemies" by Lee Harris

In a brilliant response to the quandaries of 9/11, a ferociously independent thinker argues that only the United States has the moral credibility to lead.

By Ann Marlowe

Feb 25, 2004 | When I am exasperated by some stupidity or cupidity in the Third World, I sometimes find myself thinking how much simpler it would be if we just gave them all statehood. Yes, just invite them into the United States -- the annoying countries with oil, the annoying countries without oil, the ones where Christians and animists are killing each other, the ones where Muslims and Christians are killing each other, the ones where Muslims and animists are killing each other, and even the small charming countries that do not exasperate -- if they want to join.

Half their people want to come here anyway; instead of worrying about visas and quotas and green cards and policing our borders, we could make there become a lot more like here, with decent-paying jobs and free public education and the rule of law and freedom of speech and the newspapers to prove it, with driver's licenses and auto insurance and real roads and building permits and trash pickup and all of the rest of it. Farewell to child labor, honor killings, female infanticide, illiteracy, casual bribery. Liberals will have to stop whining about wars for oil, because the oil will be ours, and conservatives will have to stop whining about foreign aid, which won't be foreign anymore. European intellectuals will have to stop comparing Ariel Sharon to Hitler, because the Palestinians will have a state, and it will be one of ours.

This modest proposal is only slightly more outrageous than the imaginative leap Lee Harris advocates in his startlingly original and visionary work "Civilization and Its Enemies," which aims at nothing less than providing the vocabulary and theory for political thinking post-al-Qaida. Harris thinks that the world is at the brink of something he calls American "neo-sovereignty," which means that America is recognized globally as having not only the power but also the moral credibility to lead. When a country is unable to restrain ruthless gangs operating within it, Harris argues, it must be the U.S. "who decides what is to be done" because "the United States represents the ultimate source of legitimacy in the world." The U.S. also has the characteristics to serve as a template for remaking the world: "a practical design for the next stage of human history: a utopia that works."

Our diversity, Harris says plausibly enough, is "a historically unprecedented microcosm of the rest of the world." He asserts that Americans have created and mastered a social technique that can solve many of the outstanding human and humanitarian problems facing the world today. "We have figured out a way of living together, and others can learn it from us, if they are willing." This sanguine assessment appears at odds with European public opinion and media, not to mention a generation or two of academic America-bashing, but Harris has an answer:

"There are many Americans who did not like Clinton as president, and many who do not like Bush, but only a handful disliked them so much that they would have preferred to see them removed from office at the cost of a civil war. This is how much of the world feels about the United States today. They bash us, and yet they recognize our legitimate authority ... Indeed, the world is beginning to show toward us that cynical disrespect for authority that has always been one of the hallmarks of our national character ... But this is fine, so long as the world is also displaying the other great hallmark of our national political character, which is to accept the legitimate authority even of men we can't stand."

Note the repetition of the word "authority." Although he does not quite say so, Harris seems to envision a gradual drift toward American rule, where countries obey even where they do not love. As he has said earlier, "by agreeing to act like Americans [people] became Americans." Acting like Americans means following the "code of honor" of what Harris calls, with an unfortunate disregard for euphony, "team cosmopolitanism," which combines respect for the individual conscience and the rule of law, for office and for fairness.

To Harris' great credit, he has not written yet another screed defending the West against the Others, or "traditional values" against "multiculturalism." Diversity is one of the core values he envisions in the future of American neo-sovereignty. Harris, who is gay, invokes San Francisco's Castro District as well as Detroit's Muslim neighborhoods as examples of the America he envisions the rest of the world resembling and learning from.

Harris' most controversial remarks are probably those defining what constitutes a state. He is caustic on the new "honorific concept of sovereignty" in which "the state is no longer restricted to a political entity that can in fact defend itself against all comers ... it is now ... an entity called into being by the formal recognition of the international community." Thus he takes no prisoners on the subject of the "Palestinian state": "If the Palestinian people were indeed a genuine state fighting a genuine war, they would have long since been annihilated root and branch or else forced to make a realistic accommodation with the state of Israel ... That [Palestinian] state will exist as a viable entity only by virtue of the liberal conscience -- and seemingly inexhaustible forbearance -- of the Israeli people."

Such outspokenness and common sense are not often met with in the pundit class, and Harris is an interesting character. A longtime resident of Stone Mountain, Ga., he was a divinity student, a mystery writer and a glazier before taking on the mantle of "reigning philosopher of 9/11," in the words of Daniel Pipes' jacket blurb. Only in America, as my people say. And perhaps Harris' lack of the usual antecedents accounts for the absence of reviews. There is nothing worse than not knowing in advance what one is supposed to think of a book. (I should note that I know Harris slightly by e-mail; in the fall of 2002 I exchanged a few e-mails with him after his article "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology" appeared in Policy Review, a publication of Stanford University's Hoover Institute.)

"Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology," which is incorporated in this book, made the point that the 9/11 hijackers didn't have a rational program, or a larger plan. Indeed, they didn't even announce who they were or what their goals were or how the attacks were supposed to further them. Their suicide-murders were nothing but symbolic drama. They were not Clausewitzian war. The hijackers professed what Harris terms a "fantasy ideology," in which suicide was "not a means to an end but an end in itself."

Next Page: Harris says what most conservatives are too chicken to admit: American values are by and large anti-family

• View blog reactions