Bruce Thornton reviews Lee Harris’s, The Suicide of Reason.

Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” This dictum threatens to be prophetic of the West’s war against Islamic jihad. Our failure to understand the true origins and nature of jihad is as dangerous as our blindness to our own peculiar cultural weaknesses. As Lee Harris argues in his new book, both failures of knowledge are contributing to the “crash of Western civilization.”

Harris is an independent writer whose first book, Civilization and its Enemies, unabashedly called on America to accept its role as a superior civilization threatened by barbaric fanaticism from without and self-loathing cultural relativism from within. His new book explores in more depth the peculiar weakness of the liberal West: its “exaggerated confidence in the power of reason . . . [and] profound underestimation of the forces of fanaticism.”

The persistence of fanaticism, these days in the form of Islamic jihad, challenges the West’s cherished myth of inevitable progress fueled by the increase of knowledge and the improvement of human life. Yet such progress is not guaranteed, for “the law of the jungle can never be abolished.” The utilitarian and materialist goods by which the West judges progress — the “carpe diem” principle of “maximizing the happiness and pleasures of each individual” at the expense of one’s community, the world, or the future — are not typical historically of most peoples. Indeed, the existence of “rational actors,” as Harris calls them, people who in the pursuit of “enlightened self-interest” adjudicate conflict through “rational procedures,” is an anomaly, the “historical offspring of the specific cultures that produced the first generation of rational actors.”

Contrary to the assumptions of liberal West, then, such “rational actors” are not the “natural” man towards whom all humanity is evolving. Rather, “tribal actors” are more typical of humanity, those peoples who put the survival and flourishing of tribe ahead of the individual’s happiness, who unthinkingly accept and never question the superiority of their tribe and its values, and who work for the tribe’s success at any cost, particularly at the expense of other peoples deemed inferior simply because they are not members of the same tribe. Such people are “fanatics,” willing to die and kill for the group and its values, and unwilling to trade away those values for the material goods we in the West prize.