THE ENEMY PROBLEM:

-INTERVIEW: Our new epoch in history: 10 minutes with philosopher/political thinker/novelist Lee Harris (Bill Steigerwald, 2/24/04, Jewish World Review)

Q: Why do you say 9/11 is such an important historic event, like World War I or the French Revolution?

A: The importance is the fact that it was something that came completely out of the blue, and for which no existing categories of analysis were adequate. It was something that most intellectuals in America rushed immediately to classify. Most of them said, "Listen, I know exactly what took place. It is the beginning of a war," or, like (Noam) Chomsky, "It's the beginning of the counter-revolution of the oppressed."

So you had all these people coming in with their own particular theories explaining it, as if it fit into things we knew and could compare with before. But the more I thought about that, it didn't make any sense. From the word go, there was something mysterious about 9/11.

One of the factors being that there was no preparation for it, there was no diplomatic exchange. There were no demands. It simply just erupted one day.

The second thing is that by that time it became obvious there was no systematic strategic follow up, it began to occur to me that what we were dealing with here was not, in fact, the beginning of some kind of well-orchestrated military operation. But, in fact, it was a violent eruption of what I called "a fantasy ideology."

That is, a group of people got together and decided they wanted to change the course of history. They wanted to do something dramatic. They wanted to do something that symbolized the purity of Islam against the corrupt satanic America. They chose this act as a symbolic representation of their superior ethos. They showed that they could put themselves above material things, above fear of death, and they could make this enormous sacrifice to show us how hollow we were. It was really an act more for their sake than our sake.

Q: Who is the enemy — and where do we find him?

A: Well, to me, the use of the word "enemy" is a problem that I had actually thought about before 9/11. For a long time, I've been very interested in the problem of liberalism — that is, how a liberal society can come into existence and how it can keep in existence. We in America tend to take it for granted that when people get together, the first thing they're going to do is construct a nice little society. Well, that simply isn't the case.

About half the country apparently grasps the fact that we face an enemy in our confrontation with Islamicism. But practically no one, with the notable exception of Mr. Harris, has begun to grapple with the idea that when a civilization ceases to instill a sense of proper behavior in its members--allowing a drift towards relativism--it may find that its most fearsome enemies are those within.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 24, 2004 10:18 AM