The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West
by Lee Harris (New York: Basic Books, 2007)

JAMES KALB is a lawyer and independent scholar who lives in Brooklyn, New York. His book The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command was published by ISI Books.

What do we make of radical Islam?
Of Islam in general? Of the present
state of the West? It is easier not to
deal with such large questions, but events
force them on us. Lee Harris wants us to
take them very seriously indeed, since he
believes that weaknesses of the liberal West
make radical Islam a threat to its very survival.
To avoid disaster, he believes, we
need to abandon a great deal of fuzziness,
insist on the unique value and fragility of
liberal society, attend to considerations
drawn from sociobiology and social Darwinism,
and moderate the liberalism we
want to preserve.

At bottom, his argument is quite simple.
American and Western society has a
particular way of doing things, which the
author calls “reason,” that is based on the
rational pursuit of individual interest. We
are very much attached to that way of
doing things, and it has great advantages.
Other peoples have very different ways,
to which they are also attached, that also
have great advantages. In particular, Islam
has achieved great and enduring success
by slighting the rational pursuit of individual
interest in favor of group solidar
ity and expansion. The consequence is that
Muslims act aggressively to extend the
dominion of Islam. To preserve our way
of life in the face of such a challenge we
in the West need to restrain our one-sided
emphasis on individual interest and our
tendency to assume that other people do
not differ from us in any way that matters.

His discussion claims to be coldly analytical
but is evidently designed to provoke.
The reasons for his approach are apparent.
He notes that a preference for consensual
solutions makes Westerners reluctant to
accept conflict as a basic human reality. We
are universalists, and find it hard to view
liberalism as an outlook that some people
reject. Since dramatization is needed to get
our attention, his presentation insists on
exaggerated polar oppositions between the
West and the rest, in particular the West
and the Islamic world.

The author spends much of the book
developing and applying a simple analytical
scheme in what he claims is a valuefree
way. The scheme is far from rigorous
and mixes together things that have little
to do with each other. It lumps together
alpha males gone wild with unquestioning
acceptance of social authority, and altruistic
self-sacrifice with the reign of brute force.
What unites such disparate tendencies is
simply that they involve rejection of “reason”—
of rational self-interest as the highest
standard of action. That makes them all the
same from the author’s perspective.

His categories of analysis, or rather dramatization,
include:

  • The law of the jungle—the reign of
    brute force, which apparently includes
    everything outside liberal modernity.
    In particular, he associates the law of
    the jungle with what he calls “tribalism”
    and “fanaticism.”
  • Tribalism—acting by reference to
    the group. Since doing so involves
    thinking with the mind of the group,
    while he views reason as an essentially
    individual activity, it is directly
    opposed to reason.
  • Fanaticism—willingness to sacrifice oneself for something greater. He
    suggests that resentment is its “root
    cause,” but in general makes it equivalent
    to tribalism.

To all these things he opposes “reason,”
which primarily means enlightened individual
self-interest. It is not altogether clear
what he means by “enlightened,” although
at one point he suggests it just means
“good manners.” In general, though, reason
implies an emphasis on law, contract, representative
government, and other institutions
and habits that accept self-interest as a general
principle of conduct but try to pursue
it through discussion and agreement rather
than force.

At bottom, “reason” for Harris means
the outlook that seems sensible to most
present-day Westerners. The reasonable man,
by and large, is the economists’ “rational
actor”—the shrewd, skeptical, arm’s-length
businessman, always striving to advance his
own interests within the limits of an overall
orderly scheme designed to facilitate that
quest for everyone. For the author, Marx was
right: liberal society, the society of reason, is
simply an expression of the hegemony of
the bourgeoisie.

The author is able to identify the bourgeois
order with reason because it is calculating
and orderly and tries to make itself
universal—it works better if everyone
accepts the rules of the game. It therefore
has at least some of the attributes of reason
as traditionally understood. He also identifies the two because “reason” is an honorific. The author favors his own society and
can imagine no better one, so he praises
its standards and presents those who reject
them as crazed barbarians.

Although he uses honorifics and evidently
means them, the author’s view of
reason is even more reductive than Marx’s.
His view is genealogical. If reason is not
based on universal law or human nature,
it must be established ab initio as a scheme
of attitude and conduct. But how can that
be done? Natural man, the author believes,
is a being motivated purely by self-interest.
Hobbesian fear of violent death is not
enough to restrain him because some men—
jihadists and warrior aristocrats—value
some things more than life. The only thing
that reliably restrains self-seeking individuals
is social shaming. Shame, however, is
fundamentally physiological, a Pavlovian
response to childhood conditioning. Reason,
then, is the effect of a shaming code, a
result of early childhood conditioning into
visceral aversion to whatever is rejected
by the local society—in this case, Western
society.

Analyzing reason in such a way might
debunk it in the eyes of those who want to
base social obligation on a higher standard,
but that is not a problem for the author and
it enables him to present reason as an historic
fluke. Most of the world, he says, has
always been ruled by tribalism, fanaticism,
and the law of the jungle. It was the oddity
of the American situation that led to
the ultimate triumph of liberal capitalist
democracy—and thus reason—in America
and the West. His American exceptionalism
thus heightens his ability to present
our kind of society as something fragile
that will be lost unless we are careful to
guard it.

The point of all the foregoing for the
author is that Islam is a sort of artificial
tribe based on the cultivation of tribal
thinking supported by alpha male aggressiveness
and fanatical self-sacrifice. Left
to itself, Western reason demolishes the
not-altogether-reasonable—that is, not altogether
individualistic and self-interested—
habits and attitudes it needs to survive in
the face of such a force. It leads to a hedonistic
individualism that neglects duties,
a multiculturalism that accepts tribalism,
and a tolerance that protects fanaticism.
It thereby commits suicide. To maintain
itself the West is going to have to limit
such tendencies. Reason must be mitigated
by realism.

So what to do? Reason cannot exist in
perfection in any event. Young people have
to be trained into it, even though training
involves imposition of a shaming code that
is at odds with liberal autonomy and often
makes liberal education better at inculcating
PC platitudes than critical thinking.
We do not live in a perfect world. The
author therefore proposes two “alternative
paradigms” intended to organize our
political life in a way that maintains reason
while protecting its survivability. One
would be liberal conservatism: a sort of
artificial tribalism based on attachment
to liberal values such as reason. It would
nonetheless remain tribal and so emphasize
the survival of the tribe and its ways as an
overriding concern. The other would be
a conservative liberalism that continues to
view liberalism and reason as universally
valid principles but accepts that they can
be realized only to the extent particular
societies make them their own. It would
therefore accept the superiority of such
societies and their right and duty to do
what is needed to survive and prevail.

The problems the author sees are real.
Islam tends toward aggressiveness. Our
universalism and our success make it diffi-
cult for us to believe that others differ from
us and that the continuation of our form
of society is not a law of nature. Nonetheless,
his analysis and solutions fall short.
It seems unlikely that either of his paradigms
for future political life would hold
up. Both view the West as a society that
accepts self-interest as the highest principle
of conduct and aim at a system in which all
can pursue their interests as freely as possible.
The problem is that such a highest
principle is fundamentally opposed to virtues
like loyalty and self-sacrifice—which
the author usually refers to as “tribalism”
and “fanaticism.” The fact it would
be socially advantageous to combine the
principle and the virtues does not mean
it can be done. If loyal self-sacrifice is a
bad thing from the standpoint of the selfinterested
individual, it will be impossible
to get people to buy into it forever in a
society that insists on rationality and treats
individual self-interest as the highest goal.
The attempt to do so has been the neoconservative
strategy throughout the conflicts
known as the “culture war,” and that strategy
has always led to lost ground.

A more basic problem is that the conflict of civilizations the author describes
requires us to deal with fundamentals,
and a combination of sociobiology and
the democratic capitalist outlook is not
enough to support rational thought about
human life. To respond to Islam, an enduringly
successful religion, we need a conception
of what life is about that is more
adequate than the one Islam offers. In particular,
we need a conception of the good
life that includes reason but recognizes that
it is neither self-seeking nor all-sufficient.
Otherwise we end up in the strange position
of saying that reason is so uniquely
valuable that we should be unreasonable in
its defense. We need to recognize that reason
is not the same as self-interest, however
enlightened; that it is part but not all of the
good life; that we must count on social ties
and traditions to act reasonably and well;
and that particular loyalties are part of what
makes us what we are, and it is reasonable
to hold to them because it is reasonable to
preserve and perfect what we are. Without
such understandings— without an understanding
of the West that recognizes goods
that sometimes trump liberalism—we will
repeatedly find ourselves in the position of
asking men to sacrifice themselves for the
sake of the principle of doing what they
feel like doing. That is not a position we
can rely on.