Lee Harris is among the cream of the crop of essayists who has emerged in the wake of 9-11. Writing mainly in Policy Review and Tech Central Station, he has produced a steady stream of thought-provoking pieces that summon us to face precisely what the Islamicist challenge to the West means and what we must do to prevail in this conflict. One of them, Our World Historical Gamble may well be the best single essay that anyone has written on the current crisis. A distinguishing feature of his work is the forthrightness with which he warns that the dangers we face are not just external--not simply a matter of Islamicists who want to destroy us--but internal as well--a function of the kind of multicultural political correctness that would vitiate our defenses from within. In Civilization and its Enemies, Mr. Harris draws together several of those essays and expands upon them considerably to give us a book that succeeds to some considerable extent in its surpassing ambition to remind us of how civilization originated, how it is maintained, and why it may perish.

Mr. Harris begins with a simple statement of purpose: "The subject of this book is forgetfulness." By forgetfulness he means, in the first instance, that we have forgotten just how unlikely it is that modern civilization arose at all, that we broke out of what Walter Bagehot called the cake of custom:

Man, being the strongest of all animals, differs from the rest; he was obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself. And the way in which it happened was, that the most obedient, the tamest tribes are, at the first stage in the real struggle of life, the strongest and the conquerors. All are very wild then; the animal vigour, the savage virtue of the race has died out in none, and all have enough of it. But what makes one tribe--one incipient tribe, one bit of a tribe--to differ from another is their relative faculty of coherence. The slightest symptom of legal development, the least indication of a military bond, is then enough to turn the scale. The compact tribes win, and the compact tribes are the tamest. Civilisation begins, because the beginning of civilisation is a military advantage. Probably if we had historic records of the ante- historic ages--if some superhuman power had set down the thoughts and actions of men ages before they could set them down for themselves--we should know that this first step in civilisation was the hardest step. But when we come to history as it is, we are more struck with the difficulty of the next step. All the absolutely incoherent men--all the `Cyclopes`--have been cleared away long before there was an authentic account of them. And the least coherent only remain in the `protected` parts of the world, as we may call them. Ordinary civilisation begins near the Mediterranean Sea; the best, doubtless, of the ante-historic civilisations were not far off. From this centre the conquering SWARM--for such it is-- has grown and grown; has widened its subject territories steadily, though not equably, age by age. But geography long defied it. An Atlantic Ocean, a Pacific Ocean, an Australian Ocean, an unapproachable interior Africa, an inaccessible and undesirable hill India, were beyond its range. In such remote places there was no real competition, and on them inferior, half-combined men continued to exist. But in the regions of rivalry--the regions where the better man pressed upon the worse man--such half-made associations could not last. They died out and history did not begin till after they were gone. The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step. What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion I phrased it) a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better.

This is the precise case with the whole family of arrested civilisations. A large part, a very large part, of the world seems to be ready to advance to something good--to have prepared all the means to advance to something good,--and then to have stopped, and not advanced. India, Japan, China, almost every sort of Oriental civilisation, though differing in nearly all other things, are in this alike. They look as if they had paused when there was no reason for pausing--when a mere observer from without would say they were likely not to pause.

By rational freedom Hegel meant nothing remotely metaphysical. Free here simply refers back to the kind of practical and everyday autonomy that was so highly valued by both Jefferson and Rousseau--the ability of the average man to take care of his own needs, to exercise mature self-control over his impulses, to look after both himself and his family, and to stay out of other people's hair.

This kind of freedom is clearly different from the freedom of following one's own bliss that is represented by the principle of liberal autonomy, for it is a freedom that can only be actualized in precisely the kind of community that is created through the constructive illusion of conscience. That is to say, it can only occur in a society where all the members trust each other to exhibit mastery, not over others, or over the fear of death, but mastery over something even harder to achieve--one's own impulses and fantasies and wayward desires...

Such world-historical events, according to Hegel, are inherently sui generis - they break the mold and shatter tradition.

"The war with Iraq will constitute one of those momentous turning points of history."But this is precisely the problem with trying to grasp such events - they are utterly without precedent, and this means that it is impossible to evaluate them prior to their actual accomplishment in historical actuality. Or, more precisely, it is impossible to evaluate them adequately, because the proper concepts for even describing the new situation have yet to be constructed. Such world-historical innovations transcend the conceptual categories of the old world, call into existence an entirely novel set of categories.

To see the truth of this remark, one need only reflect back to any previous world-historical transformation. How could one hope to explain nineteenth century nationalism to Voltaire? Or the French Revolution to St. Thomas Aquinas? You could try explaining by analogy, but any analogy would be apt to mislead as much, if not more, than to illuminate. But this is no less true in dealing with the world-historical changes that have not yet given birth to the new order of possibilities.

It is this fact that explains why all world-historical undertakings are inherently and irreducibly fraught with risk and uncertainty. Each one of them, by its very nature, is a crossing of the Rubicon, from which there is no turning back, but only a going forward - and a going forward into the unknown.

But it would be a terrible mistake to conclude that such gambles are reckless ventures. In fact, the whole point of a world-historical gamble is that it offers the only possible escape from the kind of historical impasse or deadlock in which the human race presently finds itself. It emerges out of a situation where mankind cannot simply stay put, where the counsels of caution and conservatism are no longer of any value, and where to do nothing at all is in fact to take an even greater risk than that contemplated by the world-historical gamble.

It is because this historical deadlock must be broken that the unavoidable conflict arises between the old order caught up in its impasse and the new order erupting through it. And, as Hegel observes, "It is precisely at this point that we encounter those great collisions between established and acknowledged duties, laws, and right, on the one hand, and new possibilities which conflict with the existing system and violate it or even destroy its very foundations and continued existence, on the other"." This fact explains why the old concepts and categories are of so little use in guiding us to an understanding of such transformative events, because the essence of the world-historical is the disclosure of new and hitherto unsuspected historical possibilities - it is their absolute novelty, their quality as epiphanies, that accounts for their inevitable collision with, and transcendence of, the old categories of understanding.

Today we are in the midst of this collision. It is the central fact of our historical epoch. It is this we must grasp. Unless we are prepared to look seriously at the true stakes involved in the Bush administration's coming world-historical gamble, we will grossly distort the significance of what is occurring by trying to make it fit into our own pre-fabricated and often grotesquely obsolete set of concepts. We will be like children trying to understand the world of adults with our own childish ideas, and we will miss the point of everything we see. This means that we must take a hard look at even our most basic vocabulary - and think twice before we rush to apply words like "empire" or "national self-interest" or "multi-lateralism" or "sovereignty" to a world in which they are no longer relevant. The only rule of thumb that can be unfailingly applied to world-historical transformations is this: None of our currently existing ideas and principles, concepts and categories, will fit the new historical state of affairs that will emerge out of the crisis. We can only be certain of our uncertainty.

[A]mericans have created and mastered a social technique that can solve many of the outstanding human and humanitarian problems facing the world today. We have produced a system of socialization as well as a system of organization that has been able to help us eliminate many of the deep-seated conflicts that haunt and divide the rest of mankind--conflicts of race and of religion, of sect and ethnicity. We have figured out a way of living together, and others can learn it from us, if they are willing.

The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom -- the freedom we prize -- is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.

The civilization that the United States is now called upon to defend is not America's or even the West's; it is the civilization created by all men and women, everywhere on the planet, who have worked to make the actual community around them less addicted to violence, more open, more tolerant, more trusting. Civilization, in this sense, is Chinese, American, African, European, and Muslim. Those who are working for this purpose are all on the same side, and we all have a common enemy. It is an enemy whose origin goes back to the dawn of history, and indeed, the enemy that began the whole bloody and relentless cycle of violence and war, the eternal gang of ruthless men.

Someone must be prepared to fight them whenever they threaten to enter history and threaten thereby to change even the very possibilities in terms of which we are, forever after, doomed to imagine the future.

Those who wish to help the Third World must see that the source of its poverty lies not in the capitalist system but in the rule of the gang that has blighted it for millennia. where the family rules, the team cannot prosper, and if the team cannot prosper, then neither can the society. It is not capitalism that creates democratic liberalism but the peculiar team sense of community that arose out of Protestant Europe, one combining team and conscience to produce individuals capable of making their own way in the world while being ever mindful of the needs of others