[Colin Glassey] Lee Harris Asks some Really Big Questions
This essay by Lee Harris called Our World Historical Gamble is one of the most brilliant essay's I have read in the last six months. Mr. Harris is on quite a roll because his previous essays have been brilliant also.
The new essay is quite long but it pulls together some of the ideas from his previous writing and makes a more coherent whole out of them. I'm still digesting it but here are some choice quotes.
When people are forced to create their own material world through their own labor, they are certainly not setting out to achieve a greater insight into the nature of reality - they are merely trying to feed themselves, and to provide their children with clothing and a roof over their heads. And yet, whether they will or no, they are also, at every step of the way, acquiring a keener grasp of the objective nature of world. A man who wishes to build his own home with his own hands must come to grips with the recalcitrant properties of wood and gravity: he must learn to discipline his own activities so that he is in fact able to achieve his end. He will come to see that certain things work and that others don't. He will realize that in order to have A, you must first make sure of B. He will be forced to develop a sense of the realistic - and this, once again, is a cultural constant, measured entirely by the ability of each particular culture to cope successfully with the specific challenge posed by the world it inhabits.
But all of this is lost on the man who simply pays another man to build his home for him. He is free to imagine his dream house, and to indulge in every kind of fantasy. The proper nature of the material need not concern him - gravity doesn't interest him. He makes the plans out of his head and expects them to be fulfilled at his whim.
If we look at the source of the Arab wealth we find it is nothing they created for themselves. It has come to them by magic, much like a story of the Arabian nights, and it allows them to live in a feudal fantasyland.
What Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have in common is that they became rich because the West paid them for natural resources that the West could simply have taken from them at will, and without so much as a Thank You, if the West had been inclined to do so. They were, by one of the bitter paradoxes of history, the pre-eminent beneficiaries of the Western liberalism that they have pledged themselves to destroy. Their power derives entirely from the fact that the West had committed itself, in the aftermath of World War II, to a policy of not robbing other societies of their natural resources simply because it possessed the military might to do so - nor does it matter whether the West followed this policy out of charitable instinct, or out of prudence, or out of a cynical awareness that it was more cost effective to do so. All that really matters is the quite unintended consequence of the West's conduct: the prodigious funding of fantasists who are thereby enabled to pursue their demented agendas unencumbered by any realistic calculation of the risks or costs of their action.
Or this section on nation-states:
There is, of course, nothing to keep one from applying the purely honorific title of "state" to the Palestinians, for example, just as the English are perfectly entitled to dub a popular singer a Knight, though it would be dangerous to rely on him to defend the realm. But merely to call the Palestinian community a "state" does not and cannot transform it into a viable subsistent entity if those who govern and decide its course are utterly lacking in a sense of what is realistically available to them. And nothing highlights this more than the official explanation, on the part of Palestinian spokesmen, for those acts of terrorism committed by the suicide-bombers, the assertion that these are acts of war. For the bitter truth is that 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 they would have been forced to make a realistic accommodation with the state of Israel, based on a just assessment of the latter's immense superiority of resources, both military and political. And the reason for this superiority, by a paradox typical of history, is not American aid or funding, but the fact that the state of Israel has been forced to struggle for every moment of its existence from the very day of its birth - and it is this struggle that has made them into what no assembly of nations can ever bestow - a viable state. And unless the Palestinians as a people can set aside their fantasies of pushing a vastly superior enemy into the sea, instead of seeking out a realistic modus vivendi with him, they may demand a state, and even be "recognized" as a state. But it will exist as a viable entity only by virtue of the liberal conscience - and seemingly inexhaustible forbearance - of the Israeli people.
This captures it exactly. The Palestinians are living in a dream world where they say they are fighting a war on Israel and so all actions are justified yet the reality is that if they were fighting a real war, they would have lost it already.
This is from the end of the essay:
At the heart of the dialectically emergent concept of neo-sovereignty is precisely the double standard that Mr. Butler denounced - a double standard imposed by the U.S. on the rest of the world, whereby the U.S. can unilaterally decide to act, if need be, to override and even to cancel the existence of any state regime that proposes to develop WMD, especially in those cases where the state regime in question has demonstrated its dangerous lack of a sense of the realistic.
What the critics of this policy fail to see is the simple and obvious fact that if any social order is to achieve stability there must be, at the heart of it, a double standard governing the use of violence and force. There must be one agent who is permitted to use force against other agents who are not permitted to use force. The implementation of the fashionable myth that all violence is equally immoral and reprehensible would inevitably result, in a typical dialectical reversal, in the Hobbesian state of universal war.
Every civilized order, precisely in so far as it is a civilized order, relies on such a double standard. The only alternative to this is the frank and candid acceptance of anarchy, the state in which all recourse to violence is equally legitimate. But what Mr. Butler and others fail to realize is that anarchy with clubs and sticks is a much preferable to anarchy with nuclear weapons.
Bottom line: if the world comprises a social order, then it needs some entity which can enforce the law. Otherwise you have anarchy not order. We are the only country which can "enforce the law". If we don't, the social order will collapse. It is as simple as that. If we don't police the world, no one else will.
11:31:52 AM 
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