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The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West | 
 enlarge | Author: Lee Harris
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 112347
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 312
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0465010229
Dewey Decimal Number: 297
EAN: 9780465010226
ASIN: 0465010229
Publication Date: July 21, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New. Unread. Clean, but cover was slightly bent in original shipping.
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Product Description
Whether by choice or not, the West finds itself in a low-grade yet bitter war with Islamic fanaticism. It is a war the West is singularly ill-equipped to fight. The foe is resistant to any of the normal methods of conflict resolution such as negotiation, economic sanctions, or conventional armed confrontation. Since the Enlightenment, the West has forgotten how to oppose fanaticism, and it is Lee Harris’s goal to remind us what we are up against. In The Suicide of Reason, he explains the logic of fanatical movements from the Crusades through Nazism to radical Islam; describes how the Enlightenment overcame fanatical thinking in the West; shows why most Western attempts to address the problem are doomed to fail; and offers strategies by which liberal internationalism can defend itself without becoming a mirror of the tribal forces it is trying to defeat.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 tribal fanaticism will win unless we change October 3, 2008
The beginning of this book is excellent explaining why the societies of reason will loose in this battle with tribalism. I understand a lot more now. The middle of the book was way too bogged down for me with a history lesson about the Frence Revolution etc etc. I thought it was very boring. The last of the book was interesting but frankly he states we have lost in Iraq which may have been true when the book was written but if indeed the surge keeps working, it seems to undermine many of his main 'assertions'.
An interesting read at least at the beginning.
 Guaranteed to put you to sleep August 14, 2008
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
A real bore. This guy quotes so many people from the beginning of time to the present, that you wonder if he's at all original. In fact, if you took away all his quotable quotes, this book would only be half as long a bore as it is.
The usual drivel about Islamic fanaticism vs. Western thought and the [our] "way of life." This hack takes us back for a history lesson and calls us "actors;" in which will soon grate on your nerves when he does that one too many times. Of course we "Westerners" are just a bunch of ignorant, materialistic "actors" who will never understand what makes the fanatic tick. Like he's the only "enlightened one." Run-of-the-mill "know-it-all" that may put you to sleep just by reading the Preface. I did....fall asleep, that is. Don't waste your time or money on this one.
 "Believe what I believe or die!" June 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
An important book changes your view of your world. Harris' "The Suicide of Reason" succeeds in doing this and points out serious threats to the survival of Western Civilization from the inside and the outside. Harris shows that the most important message that America's leaders have failed to grasp is that not everybody sees the world the same way. Harris' "rational actors" act to change their culture out of enlightened self interest whereas his "tribal actors" act to preserve their culture. Nominally the conflict is presented as fanatical Islam's tribal actors versus the West's rational actors, but his paradigm applies to groups within the West as well. As you read this book you will recognize "tribal" views in many rabid Democratic Party supporters, Chicago Bear's fans and Intelligent Design advocates, among others. These people have ceased listening to any counter-positions.
The "tribal mind" dominated Earth until The Enlightenment. How did this revolutionary change come to occur? Harris invokes Hobbes, Spinoza, Condorset, Locke, Marx, Huxley, Voltaire and others to show how it took root in the time of the French Revolution and came to fruition in America.
Is it inevitable that the rational actors' democratic ideal will come to dominate the world? It looks like it will be unlikely to survive without a prompt change of direction by the West. Recent western generations have ceased acting in ways to protect their hard won culture. They are now dissipating this monumental asset in the name of political correctness. "Right thinking has replaced real thinking."
Harris' rephrased titular question, "Does reason commit suicide when it blinds itself to the reality and the power of the irrational?", presents the West's primary problem: its leaders live under the delusion that everybody looks at the world the same way. They must consider that different groups have very different perceptions of the world. All problems can't be resolved by win-win positive thinking; inevitably testosterone will enter into the equation. The most rational among us must accept that in the world of the blind the one-eyed man isn't king by divine right.
This is an exceptionally insightful book that deserves to be read by serious people seriously concerned about the survival of their political and cultural traditions into the next generation.
Nonsensical whitewash of non-Muslim religious fanaticism May 2, 2008
8 out of 18 found this review helpful
The author offers --very briefly-- a fairy-tale version of Orthodox Judaism, whitewashed by Martin Buber and explained away as totally assimilationist in America. He dares not speak the words "rabbinic fanaticism." He's never heard of the Shas party rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, who demands the annihilation of the Palestinian "Amalek" on Talmudic grounds, or of the settlers in the occupied territories motivated by religious fanaticism and hatred. He doesn't want to go there because his audience of neo-cons, who are not really interested in stemming the tide of fundamentalism and advancing reason, would drop out of his cheering section if he did. As Evelyn Kaye ("The Hole in the Sheet") and Israel Shahak ("Jewish History, Jewish Religion") have testified, the world's most ironclad dictatorship over the human mind is the rabbinic dictatorship. There is nothing reasonable about supremacist Talmudic religion, but the author will not countenance these facts. During the Enlightenment era, Judaism was classed with Islam as a black hole of tyranny. The "West" of this book is a sanitized version in which the Orthodox rabbis and Voltaire are united in defense of reason. Preposterous!
I'm not losing any sleep... April 13, 2008
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
I like this book. This is the kind of practical, popular, political philosophy that once constituted the foundation of our 'republic of letters.' The author wields the editorial flair of an autodidact and a generalist, the kind that is despised by academic philosophy. He flits from Hamas to Hegel, from Churchill to Condorcet, with directness and grace. The reader will be hard-pressed not to learn something interesting along the way.
But this is not the sort of book that will be around in 5, let alone 50 years. The overheated and fearful tone will appeal to paleoconservatives, the readers of Front Page Magazine and "Seth J. Frantzman." More sober audiences may be a bit skeptical of Harris's thesis: that Civilization is in mortal danger because it lacks the will to defend itself.
Harris is nominally in favor of Reason, the Enlightenment and Civilization, but he thinks they are kind of effeminate and ineffectual. Instead, we should look to the law of the jungle and biology. At root, Harris is a postmodernist in the mold of Carl Schmitt. For him, Reason is not a idea with any substance, it is an empty viral meme. And this meme is rapidly losing its habitat in competition with another highly contagious meme - Islam. We owe loyalty to Reason because it is 'our' meme. We owe enmity to Islam because it is 'theirs.' It is tempting to characterize this as a sort of fascism - founded on memetic, rather than genetic, community.
Harris thinks the West needs to sober up and start landing some punches because the barbarians are now at the gates. This means returning to a 'visceral code' (Harris's term) of "us-and-them," and dispensing with all the high-falutin' universalism. Harris thinks people like Noam Chomsky and Paul Wolfowitz are essentially fellow-travellers in the foolhardy attempt to engage the rest of the world as human subjects. Instead, liberals and conservatives alike must get hip to the intractable realities of global tribalism.
And here lies the contradiction: to defend liberal rationalism Harris would retreat to Nietzschean nihilism - to him this is a position of strength. I disagree. Reason is not such a withering violet. It gave us political correctness, but it also dropped the atom bomb. By contrast, 'Islam' has lost every territorial battle it has fought in the past 400 years. The 'Suicide of Reason' may make a nice headline, but it's nothing for reasonable people to lose sleep over.
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