Civilization and Its Enemies Quotes

“Indeed, today there is an enormous danger that the Left has lost the ability to offer a genuinely useful critique of America’s emerging role and has degenerated into what is dangerously close to a full-fledged fantasy ideology. The danger here is the danger that arises with any criticism that has become too obviously tendentious or even merely spiteful: it stops being listened to. Under the present circumstances, this is a risk that the Left has been running more and more, both in America and in the world community, with the result that the culture war threatens to position the American academic Left not as a constructive critic, or even as a usefully carping one, but rather as an outright enemy. This was apparent both before, during, and after the Iraq war, so strikingly that it even led one liberal Left critic to write an astonishing article, in which he confessed to the Schadenfreude he felt at each apparent hint of a prospective disaster for the forces of his own country, made up of his fellow citizens. The problem with this reaction is that it represents a radical imbalance in our civic ecology: if criticism is to push in the right direction, it must not seem to be coming from those who have absolutely nothing in common with us. When the Left-wing intellectual seems to have contempt for everything that the average American holds dear, how seriously do you think his advice will be taken? That is why the intellectual, conservative, liberal, or radical, must submit his own “natural” point of view to the same kind of critique that Marxists have traditionally applied to all other forms of ideological distortion and disguise. For it is not only our economic class that colors how we see the world, but our particular vocation within that class.”
― Lee Harris, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History

“This is how mankind has always thought of the enemy — as the one who, if you do not kill him first, will sooner or later kill you.”
― Lee Harris, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History

“Our first task therefore is to try to grasp what the concept of the enemy really means. The enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the enemy always hates us for a reason, it is his reason and not ours. He does not hate us for our faults any more than for our virtues. He sees a different world from ours, and in the world he sees, we are his enemy. This is hard for us to comprehend, but we must if we are to grasp what the concept of the enemy means.”
― Lee Harris, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History