The Suicide of Reason by Lee Harris
I. The Alien Space Ship
It seemed like such a nice day when you and me and Scott and the rest of the SSC readership were kidnapped by alien slavers. En route to its destination, the space ship suffers a catastrophic fault and crashes, stranding us on an alien and hostile world. Some bright spark points out that we should unite for mutual protection. We agree that this is in our best interests, at least right now. But what if something fanged and hungry leaps onto Scott? Suddenly, it’s in his best interest that we all defend him, but it’s in our best interest to run like hell. We know this, so how can we have an agreement that’s more than mere words?
It’s worse than that. We don’t need to worry about external predators, we can be just as dangerous to each other. Right now, when we’re all equally broke, we can agree to respect each other’s rights, but when one of us manage to catch some food and the rest of us don’t, we have a rational incentive to steal it from him. How do we stop ourselves going all Lord of the Flies on each other?
Fortunately, something else survived the crash: a crate full of collars the slavers use to keep their cargo in line. The collars can be programmed to inflict pain on their wearers when they do some things, and make them feel good when they do others. What it is that makes the wearer feel good or bad is up to the programmer.
So here’s our solution. We seal our compact by putting on the collars and programming the collars to make us feel absolutely wretched if we do certain things, like running away when there’s danger to the group. Then we break the keys and smash the programming terminals so no one can take their collar off or quietly reprogram them. We don’t need to rely on people’s words; we know that their actions are constrained by the collars. The chance of us sticking together in the face of danger just went way up.
This is the core idea of Lee Harris extremely interesting and incredibly disturbing book, The Suicide of Reason. He argues that we have indeed been dropped on a hostile planet by an alien spaceship and left with programmable shock-collars. The hostile planet is called Earth, the space ship is called Evolution, and the collars are called Shame. Social cooperating is founded on shame; we don’t stick by our social compacts because we’ve carefully thought it through, decided it’s right and committed to sticking to it, we stick to it because we’re inhibited by the pain that shame inflicts if we don’t.
“In a strong group, when an individual is given a chance to desert his fellows in order to save his own skin, he will be inhibited from this act of selfish betrayal by an unbearable visceral shame. What will keep him loyal to the group is not his higher faculties of reflection and cognition - all of which may be screaming to him, ‘Run for your life, you fool!’ Rather, it is the physiological reactions that have been programmed into him from an early age through the process of shaming.”
Shame is powerful - so powerful that people kill themselves rather than endure the pain shame inflicts. According to Psychology Today, 30,000 Japanese people kill themselves yearly, mainly out of shame.1 A quick search for “shame + suicide” finds countless more examples. This makes sense; if the point of shame is to hold control our behaviour, even in the face of death, then it can only work if it is something we naturally fear more than death.
Harris credits this idea to the essay Evolution and Ethics, by T.H. Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog”. Huxley begins by describing what he calls the Cosmic Process. The Cosmic Process is the indifferent laws of nature going about their business. The process isn’t cruel or evil; it just doesn’t care. If a baby falls to his death, that isn’t because the baby deserved to die, it’s just how gravity works.
The part of the Cosmic Process that particularly concerns Huxley and Harris is Darwin’s struggle for existence. The same indifference applies - if a badger eats a litter of cute kittens, it’s not because they deserve to be eaten, it’s just the way things are. Losers die, winners survive a little longer, and that’s all there’s to it.
For most of our species’ history, human beings have been just as much subject to the Cosmic Process as anyone else. Tribes wipe each other out, within a tribe stronger members prey on the weaker, all sorts of horrible things are done in the name of survival, and that’s all there is to it. This leaves us with a legacy.
“[W]ith all their enormous differences in natural endowment, men agree on one thing, and that is their desire … to do nothing but that which pleases them to do, without the least reference to the welfare of the society in which they are born. That is their inheritance (the reality at the bottom of the doctrine of original sin) from the long series of ancestors, human and semi-human and brutal, in whom the strength of this innate tendency to self-assertion was the condition of victory in the struggle for existence.”
Harris comments:
“Today, many quite intelligent men believe that the doctrine of original sin is sheer nonsense. But what arguments could any modern skeptic use against Huxley’s version of original sin, which, unlike Augustine’s, does not require us to believe in a fable about talking serpents and forbidden fruit, but simply the matter-of-fact acceptance of the law of natural selection?”
Our original sin is that we’re descended from a long, long line of people who managed to reproduce because they were tougher, stronger, smarter, or just plain nastier than their neighbours, and that has consequences for our behaviour.
Yet something strange has happened. Human beings, uniquely, have turned against the Cosmic Process and opposed it. In the same way that a gardener tames a stretch of ground and encourages the plants he likes and gets rid of the ones he doesn’t, we have tamed our own savage natures, encouraging those qualities we like and constraining those we don’t, a process Huxley calls the Ethical Process, and we’ve done so with a tool the Cosmic Process gave us. Evolution didn’t give us shame because it wanted us to be civilized; it did so because groups that stick together are more likely to pass on their genes and memes than those that don’t. The Better Angels of Our Nature2 are the Angels of Shame. We are not better people than our ancestors because we have rationally decided to be so, we are better people because we’ve been brought up to feel ashamed not to be so, and this training runs so deep that some kinds of behaviour are almost literally unthinkable.
At the next SSC meetup, what chance that two people accidentally insult each other and fight to the death? Or that an unaccompanied woman is raped and murdered because she’s not under anyone’s protection? Yet both behaviours are common throughout most of human history. In some parts of the world, they still are. That you are shocked and disturbed to even consider such questions is your shame at work. Thank it for its service.
Shame isn’t just irrational, it only works because it’s irrational, because reason implies choice - you choose whether or not to accept a proposition. How reassuring would it be for women for an SSC meetup to advertise with the slogan, “Don’t worry! After thoroughly Steelmanning the proposition and carefully weighing the evidence, we’ve decided that raping and murdering you is off the table!”. The whole point of shame is to deprive you of that choice, to make some things seem so obvious and natural there’s no point of even thinking about them.
Since it’s irrational, shame doesn’t need reason to inculcate it, and you can program a shaming code quite nicely without any arguments.
“The shaming code [...] does not need to be instilled in us through etiquette books or helpful advice - in fact, there is no need for words at all, since slaps and blows and angry faces are often a much more effective way of instilling the shaming code than verbal formulae”
Military bootcamps are long on training and discipline and short on explanatory lectures, and they do pretty well in changing people’s behaviour. On the other hand, how many people have had their lives completely changed by reading a self-help book (I mean really?). That looks a lot like shame: 2, reason: 0. Or to put it another way, if information was enough, we’d all be billionaires with six pack abs.
Since shame doesn’t need arguments, it’s irrational in what it reacts to. It doesn’t have to make sense. There doesn’t need to be any logical connection between the different things that trigger shame. You can be made to feel ashamed of human sacrifice, smoking, and eating meat on Fridays without ever bothering to ask, “What do these things have in common?”
In his previous book, Civilization and Its enemies, Harris made this explicit:
“Shame is utterly shameless. It is without principles. It does not begin with a set of ethical axioms from which it proceeds to deduce all the specific applications of these axioms in our daily living. On the contrary, the shame system makes up lists and inventories of forbidden conduct, like the code in Leviticus, where there often seems to be neither rhyme nor reason guiding the selection. It follows no apparent method and makes no connection: it just piles one thing on top of the other.”
Harris calls these lists of things that trigger shame the ‘shaming code’.
If Harris were just saying that this is our evolutionary inheritance that we are growing away from, there’d be little to worry about; he’d just be giving Pinker the missing mechanism, the same way Mendel gave the missing mechanism to Darwin’s theory. Yet Harris argues that it is not the case that we have all these shame-based irrational taboos on one side and progressive enlightened values based on reason on the other; it isn’t the case that the Cosmic Process relies on Shame and the Ethical Process on Reason. It’s shame all the way down.
We don’t reject racism and sexism because we’ve carefully considered the issues and come to a measured conclusion; we do it because we’ve been raised to regard such things as shameful - and by ‘we’ I mean ‘all of us’. Even people incensed about ‘political correctness’ and ‘Social Justice Warriors’ would be horrified by a shop sign saying “whites only”. Our Ethical Process has advanced to the point that we are sickened by things our ancestors wouldn’t have glanced twice at.
Basically, we are not rational actors analysing the world and plotting our course by the best conclusions we can get. We’re a bunch of monkeys wearing shock-collars whose programming we don’t really understand, and most of us don’t even know exists.
This is unsettling. The trouble is that it also explains a lot.
When Scott wrote a nice review of my Anti-Racialist Q & A, he wrote:
“I think the most astounding part is that it might be one of the first things I’ve ever read to argue against racism. […] I’ve read a lot of articles condemning racism, and accusing people of racism, and being very upset about the racism inherent in society. But this might be the first one I’ve ever read to argue against it.”
This is ridiculous - we live in a society that never shuts-up about racism. Surely there must be other people out there offering rational arguments against it? Yet, by Harris’s argument, this makes sense. The people condemning and accusing and being very upset aren’t arguing because they’re not relying on reason. They’re trying to maintain the shame-based tribal taboo against racism.
In the run-up to legalizing gay marriage, some conservatives said that this would lead to bestiality and paedophilia and so on. It’s not that those arguments are offensive, but that they make no sense. How do you start by accepting gay marriage and end up hitting on the livestock? Yet the arguments do make sense from a shame-based point of view. Homosexualtiy is a taboo, paedophilia is a taboo, bestiality is a taboo. If you break one, how can we know you won’t break the others? A taboo is a taboo. Shame doesn’t have to make sense.
Why is political correctness so crazy? How can a black security guard be fired for simply telling a student not to call him the n-word?3 Because a taboo is a taboo and shame doesn’t have to make sense.
Why am I so upset by seeing cats and dogs in Chinese wet markets, and yet so indifferent when I see pigs and chickens in our factory farms, even as I can intellectually accept that they are the same thing? Well, shame doesn’t have to make sense.
Why do deliberately silly rules help people cooperate and support sensible ones?4 Shame doesn’t have to make sense.
It also explains why it is so difficult to actually change your mind5. I’ve been reading Lee Harris for about a decade, and he’s one of the hardest authors I’ve ever tackled. Reading him I found myself dawdling, procrastinating, focusing on non-essential side-points in his argument, and, why I finally forced myself to get to grips with some of his conclusions, feeling physically sick with the effort. That’s to be expected if my shaming code has set me to regard Reason as the highest possible good.
(I might be over-egging the pudding here, but I think this also supports why people who reach Enlightenment end up having sex with anything that can’t get out of their way 6. If reason isn’t enough, and you need some strong emotion to motivate action, then it makes sense that people who dissolve their shaming code default to the next strongest drive.)
This is a radical attack on liberalism, the kind of liberalism that we all accept unthinkingly, regardless of whether we call ourselves liberals, conservatives, libertarians or what have you. All of these rely on the premise that you can establish a society by reason and rational agreement. No matter how much people may have hated Bush, Obama or Trump, they determined to get rid of them by either free elections or due process of law - i.e. reasonable actions in a rational society - rather than putsch, open revolt, or the power struggle, the normal method throughout most of history. Yet if shame, not reason, is the basis of any sort of functional society, then this goes out the window.
We are not naturally reasonable, liberal people. We are not rational actors because we are inherently rational. We are rational actors because we are the inheritors of an Ethical Process that has instilled in us a shaming code that prevents us from acting unreasonably. The Ethical Process, at least in the modern West, has succeeded so well, and for so long, that we’ve forgotten the nature of the Cosmic Process or that it even exists. We’ve worn the collars so long that we’ve forgotten that they’re there, and the jungle that made them necessary.
II. So, where did the process come from?
Objection: at least in the liberal West, we have created cultures of popular reason, cultures where all people - not just a few blessed by genes, status or quirks, but all people - are encouraged to think for themselves and decide what’s best for them. Saying that we are this way because we have inherited a shaming code designed to produce rational actors just kicks the problem back a level. If we’ve inherited it unthinkingly from our parents, they must have inherited it unthinkingly from theirs, and it’s turtles all the way down.
Harris is aware of this objection, and puts a ton of historical evidence against it. He points out that during the first Enlightenment, that of ancient Greece, it was taken as read that most people weren’t fit for reason (Aristotle took this line). He notes that the original philosophes of the Enlightenment put all their hopes in ‘Enlightened Despots’ to usher in the age of reason with an iron fist. He points out that the great revolution of Reason, the French, ended in slaughter, Bonapartism, and condemning to death its principle prophet, the Marquis of Condorcet.
“We are all [Condorcet’s] children; we all subscribe to his ideas; they live in us, and we live through them. To be a modern Westerner is to be a spiritual descendant of Condorcet and this is true no matter whether we call ourselves liberals or conservatives. Who in the leading nations of the West today is opposed to free public education for all children, both rich and poor? Who wishes to revive slavery or the slave trade? Who believes that secular education is an evil to be stamped out? Who is opposed to universal manhood suffrage or free and fair elections? Who wishes to deny women the right to vote?”
And yet he ended his life arrested by the Committee for Public Safety and was found dead in his cell. In a revolution dedicated to its name, the force of reason couldn’t spare its greatest proponent.
Okay, but what about the other revolution, the American? Harris makes a very convincing case that America created just that culture of stubborn individualists that Condorcet hoped for, but it wasn’t universal secular education that created it (Condorcet’s great hope). Instead it was the fact that America was settled by Protestant Dissenters who took it as a literal matter of faith that everyone had the duty to read the Bible for himself and make up his own mind.
“Protestant Dissenters encouraged everyone in the community to be stubborn individualists. By dissenting from the opinion of those in established authority, they cultivated and passed on a visceral aptitude for intellectual independence. Dissent was in their blood, and the courage to dissent was part of their character.”
The extent to which the Dissenters resisted any sort of authority can seem extreme even by the standards of modern libertarians. They would randomly dismiss their preachers, not because the preachers did anything wrong, but because they did not want to risk any individual becoming a leader. This resistance to authority, even voluntary authority, animated their hatred of Mormonism. They were afraid of any man who could proclaim himself a prophet and gather an army of followers.
This isn’t the usual “Yay, Pioneer Spirit!” stuff. The Dissenters were lucky to find themselves in a place where this sort of stubborn individualism was possible, because Native Americans were stuck at the level of warring tribes and were dying from smallpox and other European diseases. That meant that the American settlers could rely on voluntary militias that would never have stood a chance against Cossacks, Janissaries, or the armies of countries like Sweden or France. Indeed, the reason the Protestants ended up in the New World is precisely because they fled the cultural predators of the Old.
Americans, in particular American conservatives, look down on Europeans as being more collectivist and statist. What they ignore is that, in a world where you are surrounded by powerful nations and empires, stubborn individualism is a prescription for social suicide. Americans became a people of stubborn individualists because they were lucky enough to do so, and they created a shaming code that exalted this character above all else.
(This also explains the paradox at the heart of the American experiment - how a country dedicated to liberty could tolerate racism and the oppression of its black minority for so long. All together now: Shame doesn’t have to make sense!)
So the culture of liberty we enjoy today isn’t the result of the force of reason, or an inevitable historical progress. It’s a lucky accident. That’s an unpleasant conclusion, but it also explains a lot. It explains why European libertarians, who usually admire America and its founders, have found it next to impossible to make any headway in their native countries. The cultural preconditions are missing.
Lee Harris is reviving an intellectual tradition that went out of style with the fall of the Berlin Wall, namely Hegelian Materialism. The core of this is that having good ideas isn’t enough – “Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.” You can talk all day long about tolerance and individualism, and how great they are, but all you’ll ever achieve is fantasy unless certain material preconditions are in place. If you want women to get the vote, you need those arguments in place, and also a giant world war that means you rely on their labour. If you want to end slavery, you need the arguments in place, and also the violent dissatisfaction of working people forced to compete with slave labour. If you want women’s emancipation, you need the arguments in place, and also contraception, machine production and modern medicine. If you want tolerance, you need the arguments in place, and also the practical demonstration of why Intolerance Is Bad in the form of religious wars that killed half a continent. You forget this at your peril. Writing, arguing and hoping for reason and tolerance and progress without the material preconditions that makes them possible is likely to end as well for us as it did for Condorcet.
III. The Other Gods
In Lovecraft’s story The Other Gods, Barzai the Wise has learned so much and so long that he thinks he’s the equal - no, the superior - of the Gods of the Earth, and doesn’t need to heed their taboos. So he decides to sneak into one of their forbidden celebrations on top of a mountain and discovers, too late and to his horror, that there are Other Gods, the Gods of the Cosmic Process, “the Gods of the Outer Hells that guard the weak and feeble gods of the Earth”. He comes to a grisly end.
This is the Suicide of Reason. It happens when the Ethical Process has succeeded for so long and so well that people have forgotten the Cosmic Process even exists, when we come to assume that everyone is naturally a rational actor, and forget that for most of human history, people have been tribal actors.
“Whereas the rational actor asks himself ‘What is best for me?’, the tribal actor must ask himself, ‘What is best for us?’ What matters for the tribal actor is not the pursuit of his enlightened self-interest but rather the success of his tribe. […] The tribal actor […] cannot take a moral stance outside the perspective of his tribe. For the tribal actor, the highest ethical idea is: ‘My tribe, right or wrong.’ The mere idea that his tribe could be wrong is unthinkable for the tribal actor, since he defines as right whatever the tribe deems as right, and wrong whatever the tribe deems as wrong.”
Here comes the shaming code again:
“[W]hat limits his freedom is not so much the pressure of the tribal mind applied externally, but rather the fact that the tribal actor thinks with the tribal mind, and so cannot even imagine doing things differently from the way they are done by his tribe. For the tribal actor, departing from the ways of the tribe is simply unthinkable: He must remain true to his tribe through thick and thin.”
The ultimate incarnation of the tribal actor is the fanatic, someone willing to do anything, even die, in the service of his tribe, and ‘his tribe’ can mean an actual tribe, a nation, a political movement, a religion, a race or whatever.
It’s easy to see this as “Rational Actor: good. Tribal Fanatic: bad”, but Lee Harries tries to get us away from that, because it obscures the fact that both modes can be good or bad. Since the nature of the fanatic is that he is willing to risk his life and die for his cause, it applies equally to Joseph Goebbels, determined to kill his family and himself rather than abandon Hitler, and to John Brown, leading his insurrection against slavery. A fanatic can even be a pacifist, as were the Buddhist monks who burned themselves alive to protest the Vietnam war, as was Mohandas Gandhi, when he counselled Britons to willingly walk into the concentration camps rather than taint their souls with the evil of violence.
“The fanatic may be a saint or a terrorist, a revolutionary or a lone madman, while the rational actor may by a kind-hearted accountant, a devious business tycoon, a great scientist, a penny-wise house-wife, or an officious government bureaucrat.”
If you really want to grasp this, it’s that the tribal actor alone can be a hero. When we call people heroes, we talk about soldiers, firefighters, front-line medical workers, people who are risking themselves. We never say it about people who are just maximizing their rational self-interest, like lawyers or stockbrokers, regardless of how nice they may be. To go back to the story at the start of this review, what would you consider morally better – to act tribally and unite to defend Scott from the predator, or to pursue our rational self-interest and run like hell? Even Ayn Rand, the high priestess of rational self-interest, depicted her heroic businessmen as basically fanatics, willing to endure just about anything in service to their work, and the number one criticism thrown at Objectivists is that we are too fanatical.
The problem with rational self-interest is that it can counsel you to do a lot of things, but never to become a hero, the kind of hero Nelson Mandela was when he declared that a free, democratic society was “an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
“The rational actor is someone whose conduct is guided solely by his own enlightened self-interest, which, because it is enlightened, is willing to accept the rule of law. However, he is unwilling to die for anything, since death can never be in his self-interest, enlighten it however you please.”
It’s difficult to argue with this point; when I look inside and consider those things I’m willing to die for – my family, for example – that knowledge has a different feel from the knowledge that I will sensibly put aside money for a rainy day each month.
The problem is that the rational actor can only exist in a world where the law of the jungle has been cleared away, because in the jungle, the rational actor is lunch. When the law of the jungle returns, the rational actor’s survival relies on the tribal actor of his own tribe, even if he doesn’t much like the tribal actor, even if he spends most of his time trying to break the tribal actor down. Since the rational actor isn’t the product of reason, but the result of a shaming code that makes him ashamed to act unreasonably, he will not only oppose, but try to deny the reality of tribal fanaticism. The rational actor will oppose the tribal actor’s return at all cost, even when the tribal actor is all that’s protecting the rational actor.
This is one of those ideas, like O-ring problems or the motte-and-bailey fallacy, that once you know, you see everywhere. In 1941, with the Nazis and their allies having conquered pretty much all of continental Europe, H.G. Wells was arguing in print that the whole Nazi threat was ridiculously overblown, the ‘screaming little defective’ in Berlin couldn’t really cause any serious trouble, the Second World War was a complete over-reaction, and what people needed to do is be sensible: organize all civilised people into a big world-state that will deal with Hitler the same way any government deals with any criminal, and then we can all progress into the glorious future of free love, good hygiene and sane politics organised by reasonable men. Orwell commented as follows:
“All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr Wells says; but the sensible men have no power and, in too many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years, and then fight for two years more, whereas for the common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood. Before you can talk of world reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to eliminate Hitler, which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to ‘enlightened and hedonistic people’. […] The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions – racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war – which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.”
I had my own encounter with exactly this mindset when I wrote a post for LessWrong. I criticised Eliezer Yudkowsky’s argument that Al Qaeda couldn’t be motivated by a hatred for freedom because people do not cast themselves as villains in their own stories7. What was weird wasn’t that I ran into people denying the reality of Islamic fanaticism but ones denying the reality of Nazi fanaticism – that Hitler couldn’t really have had the extermination of all Jews as his goal because that would be economically inefficient etc. etc. This weirded me out at the time, and to be honest, it still does: you had eminently reasonable people denying the reality of the Nazi ambitions as avidly as any member of the AltRight. Yet it makes sense under this scheme: here you have people utterly, totally, almost fanatically, committed to Reason, and this blinds them to the fact that other people might not share the same commitment.
Harris argues that today this sort of LessWrong-style epistemic failure isn’t limited to obscure grey tribe internet sects, it’s the norm throughout our society, no matter what politics we subscribe to.
“A carpe diem society has emerged in the liberal West today, and like all sophisticated societies, it has produced a self-serving ideology to convince itself of its own rightness. Curiously, this ideology is shared across our so-called political spectrum. Its basic tenet is that feeling good about yourself is the highest aim in life. Born-again Christians don’t worry about original sin; they’re saved, and they love Jesus because he makes them feel good about themselves. Liberal educators teach children that the highest virtue is self-esteem: thinking that you’re okay just the way you are. Many leftists today fashion their politics on the basis of what makes them feel good about themselves – they adopt causes that make them feel virtuous, enlightened, and superior, engaging in what Marx correctly derided as ‘utopian socialism’. Libertarians argue that the highest good is to follow your bliss, as Joseph Campbell put it. In many ways the maxim of all carpe diem societies is best expressed by the popular song: ‘Don’t worry. Be happy.”
All of which brings us to the main point of the book, where it stops being generally and historically depressing and alarming and becomes specifically and contemporaneously depressing and alarming, the subtitle: “Radical Islam’s threat to the West”.
IV. The Crash of Civilization
Harris starts with 9/11. American reactions to 9/11 were unlike any reaction in history – the first thing did George W. Bush did was to visit a mosque and proclaim that Islam was a religion of peace. The wars that followed, in Afghanistan and Iraq, were not punitive expeditions aimed at punishing an enemy, the way that the British air force flattened German cities in retaliation to the bombardment of their own; they were an attempt to solve the problem of Islamic fanaticism by bringing democracy to the Middle East – i.e. by bringing in the politics and culture of the rational actor.
Harris notes that there was no disagreement across the political spectrum that Islamic fanaticism could only be explained by root causes. Noam Chomsky and the left said the root cause was American foreign policy; Paul Wolfowitz and the neoconservatives said the root cause were the corrupt and dictatorial regimes of the Middle East. The neoconservatives won that ‘argument’ in the sense that they directed foreign policy, but the fundamental assumption, that fanaticism could only be caused by bad root causes and not be a power in itself, was never challenged.
This isn’t often admitted because Bush’s embrace of neoconservatism placed the Left in a quandary. Whatever you may think about the idea of overthrowing tyrants and spreading democratic revolution, conservative isn’t it. At least in terms of foreign policy, Bush and the neocons moved so far to the left that they could be criticised by Francis Fukuyama as “Leninist”. The Left needs to be to the Left of the Right, but if the Right is this far Left, what, as it were, is Left?
The result was “Bush derangement syndrome”, the desperate attempt to insist that Bush and the neoconservatives were motivated by something other than their stated goals. It didn’t really matter what, stupidity or greed or fundamentalist Christianity, but anything rather than admit that he was sincere about his idea of spreading democracy and revolution, that his real faith wasn’t the faith of Christ, but the faith of Condorcet – that he was sincere in his belief that ‘freedom is the desire in every human heart’.
I remember those days and those arguments and I can tell you that this faith was utterly mainstream, and it wasn’t just shared by Republicans or Bush acolytes. Fareed Zakaria, a staple of CNN, wrote a book (The Future of Freedom) in which he argued that Iraq and Iran were ready for democratic revolution, and he supported the removal of Saddam Hussain. So too did the ‘Reds for Bush’ – those long time liberals and leftists like David Aaronovich, Nick Cohen and most famously Christopher Hitchens, who decided that supporting Bush was a price worth paying for ridding the world of someone like Saddam. Hitchens always argued that this was a matter of solidarity with his socialist comrades in Iraq, and exporting revolution was what good Marxist should do. When he was attacked as a sell-out by his former comrades, he jeered that they had become complacent and conservative.
People who want to blame the failure in Iraq on Bush’s venality or stupidity can’t explain why the Obama administration faced the same fiasco in Libya – or why the ‘Arab Spring’ empowered Islamic reactionaries. Placing all blame for the failure in Iraq on the shoulders of Bush is a way of evading the magnitude of the disaster. If the failure is simply the defeat of one man’s folly, it’s no big deal; if it’s a defeat of our whole worldview, that’s another matter. If Iraq was the defeat of George Bush, you can relax; if Iraq was the defeat of Condorcet, then we are in deep trouble.
The ‘root cause’ argument, whether it’s the root-cause of foreign policy or the root cause of lousy regimes, leaves too much unexplained. It can’t explain why the post-Taliban regime in Afghanistan was united on the importance of killing Abdul Raman for the crime of converting to Christianity, nor why Muslims in Nigeria lynched Christians in response to cartoons published in Denmark. It can’t explain why the majority of the victims of jihad terrorism are other Muslims, killed for being the wrong sect or not being devout enough. It can’t explain the genocide of Christians in the Sudan or Hindus in Pakistan or Yazidi in Iraq. It can’t explain why there are ten countries that punish homosexuality with death, and thirteen that do the same thing with atheism. It can’t explain the widespread opposition to free speech, or freedom of religion or sexuality, not just in the Middle East but among Muslim communities in the West. Above all, it can’t explain why the hope that Islamic fanaticism would give way before modernity has been proven wrong for at least two centuries.
“Not quite two centuries ago, when the English scholar of Arabic E.W. Lane first came to Egypt, he predicted that contact with European civilization ‘will, probably, in the course of time, materially diminish the [Muslim] feeling of fanatical intolerance.’ Yet in the final edition of his book, Modern Egyptians, Lane was forced to add in a melancholy footnote that his original ‘prediction has not yet been fulfilled; on the contrary, European innovations in the dress and domestic manners and customs of the grandees, and of persons in the employ of the government, have enormously increased the fanaticism of those who belong to the religious and learned profession, and generally speaking, in the bulk of the population.’ In short, contact with Western culture had not only failed to modernize the bulk of the Muslim population, it had actually made them more fanatically intolerant of Western ways than they were before.”
While none of this can be explained by root causes, it can all be explained by the idea that the Islamic world has a popular culture of fanaticism every bit as strong as our popular culture of reason. This is where Harris differs from Huxley. Huxley took it as axiomatic that the Ethical Process would result in us becoming more reasonable – as we are drawn into larger and larger communities, we have to deal with each other reasonably. Smaller communities that refuse to do so will be squashed flat if they don’t get with the program. Yet a culture of popular fanaticism can also create large-scale social cooperation, and that is what Islamic fanaticism has done – create sections of the world (Egypt, Syria) so thoroughly Islamized that it’s hard to imagine them as anything else.
Most writers in this genre – Robert Spencer, for example – tend to write this as “Islam bad, Christianity good”, or, anyway, “Muslims bad, Infidels good”. Harris is too smart for that:
“[T]here is nothing uniquely Muslim in [fanaticism]. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the bloody Sepoy rebellion was set off in India among Hindus over a completely unfounded rumor that the English had deliberately used the grease from cows in the casing of the bullets they provided to the native army, the Sepoys. Muslims also rebelled, because the rumor added that the grease from pigs had been combined with the grease from cows – but here the Muslims were only doing what other religious fanatics had done since time immemorial [...] [T]he Catholic Church had no problem condemning to death heretics who departed from the orthodox faith, and John Calvin in Geneva had few qualms about burning Miguel Servetus because of the latter’s questionable theological notions about the trinity. […] Fanatical intolerance, when undertaken to protect the existing cultural and religious traditions of a people, is thus by no means a phenomenon unique to Muslims. It is simply that the Muslims still retain this cultural defence mechanism in a world in which fanatical intolerance is no longer the practice of the other great religions.”
Nor is Iraq the first liberal nation-building project to come undone because of extreme fanaticism.
“[W]hen Napoleon ‘liberated’ Spain in 1808 from the corrupt and imbecilic Bourbon monarchy, he had no qualms about imposing the superior values of the French Revolution on the Spanish people. The rights of man and freedom of conscience were to replace Bourbon absolutism and the infamous Spanish Inquisition. Napoleon put his own brother, the humane and decent Joseph Bonaparte, on the vacated throne of Spain. With the best of intentions, King Jose, as Joseph was dubbed, set about freeing the Spanish people from the old iniquitous system that had kept Spain in the Dark Ages. He was aided in his efforts by many educated and enlightened Spaniards, who saw in the new king the answer to their prayers. Yet the Spanish people did not welcome the liberation from despotism and obscurantism that they had been offered by the French arm. In one of the few genuinely populist rebellions in European history, they spontaneously rose up against the new order and demanded a return to the old. They wished to put the vile and despicable Ferdinand VIII back on the Bourbon throne as an absolute monarch, and even clamoured for a return of the Inquisition. They developed guerrilla warfare, attacked the French troops, and even secured one astonishing victory against them at the battle of Baylen on July 20, 1808.”
The popular culture of fanaticism in the Islamic world means that the attempts to export democracy, whether it’s Bush’s project in Iraq or Obama’s project in Libya or the Arab Spring, could have only one result. Free and fair elections didn’t open the door to liberty, but to populism.
“American foreign policy makers, despite their noble intentions, made the fatal error of confusing populism with liberal democracy, thereby overlooking the fact that populism has almost invariably been the enemy of liberal cultures of reason, not only in the Muslim world, but in the West. Populism is the politics of the tribal mind, whereas liberalism is the politics of the rational actor.”
If this is ringing any bells, Harris beat you to it.
“The danger here is that the established political systems of the United States and Western Europe will face the kind of crises of confidence that lead to the dissolution of the rule by parliamentary democracy in Europe between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second World War, accompanied by a search for new and charismatic leaders who will emerge not from the established political parties, but from among the people themselves. These populist crusaders, unlike the established leadership, will be able to speak directly to the hears of the people because they feel the same range and anger and betrayal that the people themselves feel. They will share their tribal code. For this is the essence of all populist leadership – the leader must be seen as someone who is loyal first and foremost to the people, and not to some higher abstract idea, however noble. They must be willing to act like the chief of a tribe, and not like the chair of a board of a multinational corporation.”
Ladies and gentlemen, President Trump. It’s always worth remembering that, before he won the Presidency, Trump took on and wiped out both the republican establishment and the conservative movement. The landmark publication of official conservatism, National Review, dedicated a whole issue to “conservatives against Trump.” Fox News started out harshly critical of him, and the Republican Party made it clear from the start it didn’t want him. Trump didn’t care, and was happy to boast that he wasn’t a “real conservative”; he trashed fundamental conservative principles, such as the free market, and yet he won, simply because he was the only one on the stage who was playing by the rules of populism.
Four years later, despite the global pandemic, the consequent recession, and his utter incompetence being clear for all to see, he still came within a hair of winning re-election.
“The struggle for survival will again create the Us versus Them mind-set to success in a life-and-death struggle, and in such an environment, the liberal internationalist will increasingly be looked upon as a traitor to his tribe. Nor does it make any difference whether the liberal internationalist is pushing the globalist agenda of multinational capitalist corporations, or the cosmopolitan agenda of the multicultural Left. From the point of view of the tribal mind, both forms of internationalism will represent a betrayal of the interests of the tribe.”
I’m old enough to remember the days when the Right was advocated global free trade. Watching ‘globalism’ become a curse word has been a shock.
This also explains the sheer weirdness of Trump’s support. It’s possible to make an argument that an unknown like Trump was a better bet than the known corruption of the Clintons, lesser of two evils and all that. Yet the true MAGAists showed a loyalty to Trump that makes no sense by any rational standard. It does, however, make sense if you think of Trump not as a politician chosen to do a certain job, but as a tribal chief. You defend your chief no matter what, because if the chief falls, the tribe goes with him.
It also explains why there’s been a steady stream of voices who hated Bush, called him every name in the book, suddenly starting to pine for him – all those articles about ‘crying wolf’. Bush was a known quantity who played the game by the standard rules. Trump just kicked the board over and said “Why should I play by your rules? You can all play by mine.”
What’s more, Trump is hardly the only populist to be empowered. In Eastern Europe, almost all governments are headed by populists, while in the West, they’re closer to taking power than at any time since 1945. Most significantly, the world’s largest democracy, India, is led by the populist leader Narenda Modi.
Continuing with his habit of saying “That writer who is notoriously pessimistic and depressing? Not nearly pessimistic and depressing enough.”, Harris argues that Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations gets it wrong. A clash is when two power blocks rub up against each other and try to get the better of each other. China and America each try to expand their zone of influence, for example. One or the other has dominance over, say, Taiwan, but no one expects American troops to land in Shanghai or Chinese troops to seize San Francisco. The danger we’re facing isn’t a clash of civilizations, but a crash – that Islamic radicals will do to the Western order what Trump did to the American political status quo.
It’s in their best interest to do so. Under a clash scenario, Islamic radicals are doomed so obviously that even they know it. Imagine the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in Egypt and using the Egyptian Air Force to attack America. They wouldn’t last a week.
Yet what’s actually happening – terror strikes launched by stateless enemies who hide within the larger community – is a threat that our systems and leaders have no way to deal with, or, rather, no way that’s morally acceptable to us. In his withering critique of Victor Davis Hanson, the War Nerd noted that Hanson’s appeal to classical models of warfare leaves out the fact that every ancient power that faced the kind of civilian insurgency that America faced in Iraq would have responded by wiping out the civilian population8, something utterly unacceptable to everyone across the political spectrum today. So the only answer available to our leaders is the one that our leaders are already doing: ramping up policing, trying to prevent terror attacks before they happen, and try to hold together the politics of reason as best they can, by finding compromises and accommodation where possible, while reinforcing the shaming code that shames people from acting unreasonably, which means ramping up the political correctness.
Unfortunately, this combination of trying to find an accommodation with Islamists through compromise while at the same time trying to shame the native population through political correctness is absolutely guaranteed to feed the populist fury that men like Trump exploit. People are not interested in high minded lectures on tolerance from those making accommodation with the most intolerant movements on earth. The most ardent Obama supporter must have facepalmed when, following the Orlando nightclub massacre, he declined to even use the words ‘radical Islam’ and Clinton tried to make the issue about gun control. Trump could not have asked for a better gift.
There isn’t any sign this is going to get better, and a good number of signs that it will get worse. Trump is a dishonest, incompetent crook, and that’s a good thing. Imagine what he’d be capable of if he were competent, if he actually believed in something. Trump won because he was the only one playing the populist game. That will not be the case next time around.
Everyone who wants to be President will have learned from his victory, which means that the next competition will be between several different populists, with victory going to the one who really, truly means it: who is willing to build a wall, jail his opponents, ban all Muslims from entering the country, support mass deportations. And even that will be a kindergarten compared to what might happen elsewhere; the last time a populist leader rose in Europe driven by anti-Muslim animus he started throwing them into camps, and it took the combined might of American and Britain to unseat him.
Towards the end of his book, Harris writes four of the most haunting sentences I have ever read:
“Will the devastatingly effective institution of jihad, adapted to new circumstances, be able to transform the entire world into the realm of Dar al-Islam? No. But it may well be able to destroy the world that Western liberalism has made. And that is something to think about.”
V. How screwed are we?
I often think that Lee Harris is the smartest guy you’ve never heard of. He’s read all those books you mean to get round to one day, and all the authors people namedrop (how many people talking about ‘cultural Marxism’ have actually read Marx?). That he can make the notoriously difficult Hegel understandable and even plausible tells you something. Yet he’s weirdly obscure.
A gay guy who talks about a threat from radical Islam and American exceptionalism should be a regular on Tucker Carlson. He isn’t, and when you read the book you can see why: America is exceptional, but that exceptionalism could only come about because of the genocide of native Americans? America’s founders weren’t smarter or better, just luckier? Bush was being traduced by the left, and he was sincere in his goals, which were the liberal internationalism of Condorcet, Kant and Karl Marx? American red tribe evangelicals are just as self-flattering as blue-state SJWS? We’re all the spiritual descendants of a French intellectual? Political correctness is an attempt to preserve the best traditions of the West? The populism that put Trump in the White House is the Voice of the People and that is why it is a Very Bad Thing? Huh?
Harris is impossible to pin down politically. If he’s a liberal, he’s a liberal in the sense we all are, and if he’s conservative, he’s the kind of conservative that’d be just as opposed to eliminating the welfare state as to single payer healthcare. Right, left, liberal, conservative: the labels don’t apply.
The Suicide of Reason is a frightening book, not in the book review sense, but in the staring-at-the-ceiling-wondering-about-the-future sense. The only thing I have read that gives me comparable willies is Scott’s discussion of AI risk. So: is it true?
Well, when someone comes up with a carefully argued theory that explains a great deal that’s been previously frustrating and incomprehensible, and then uses that theory to make specific predictions that all come true, I tend to think he’s on to something. The Shaming Code is an idea that explains so much you’d be foolish to dismiss it. That human beings are fundamentally tribal actors, rather than rational actors, is clear from a quick glance at human history. It’s also a valuable epistemic tool – that anything you think is completely natural and normal is likely just your shaming code talking, and you should scrutinize it ten times as much as any other proposition.
That’s something I know from a personal experience that I’m grateful for but not very proud of. Modern liberals tend to lump all bad things – racism, sexism, homophobia etc. together. A racist is likely a sexist is likely a homophobe and so on. But where I grew up, racism was taboo, as was homosexuality. So I was both anti-racist and homophobic until about fifteen, when I moved to a much different society, discovered one of my closest friends was gay, and did some rethinking. As I say, I’m not proud of it, but I am grateful for the experience of thinking something is utterly normal and natural and yet being completely wrong.
That rational actors are driven out by fanatics in cultural struggle for existence is also pretty clear – following the Danish cartoon riots, many asked why all newspaper publishers didn’t just republish the cartoons at once, demonstrating that they weren’t going to be intimidated? Well, because they were being rational actors, decreasing the threat to their own persons as much as possible. To publish and be damned, to risk their lives for a principle, would have required them to think not as rational businesspeople but as something closer to Christian martyrs or Marxist revolutionaries, i.e., as fanatics.
My main point of disagreement with Harris is the slight elision between fanatic and tribal actor. Going through the book again, it’s clear to me that Harris defines a tribal actor as someone who is utterly committed to the tribe, to the extent that he cannot see any good beyond the tribe’s good. A fanatic on the other hand, is someone willing to die, or at least risk death, for something beyond himself. These aren’t the same thing. Whatever you think about Gandhi insisting that suicide is better than violence, it can’t be compared to the fanaticism of Joseph Goebbels. There is a fundamental difference between Umkonto we Sizwe, the militant arm of the ANC, and HAMAS. Conversely, the carpe diem societies of the developed West have had no problem recruiting and training devastatingly effective soldiers who routinely risk their lives but would balk at the indiscriminate massacre of enemy civilians.
To be fair to Harris, he’s not denying any of this. It’s merely that, in a time and place that regards our popular culture of reason as a normal thing that will just spread automatically expand to cover the world he is shouting, as loudly as he can, “GUYS, IT’S NOT SO, OUR CULTURE IS REALLY, REALLY RARE, AND WE CAN LOSE IT QUITE EASILY”
The problem is that it is the scariest parts of his book that are the soundest. Iraq, Libya and the Arab Spring have all failed in exactly the way Harris predicted. We are facing a wave of populism that has just the characteristics he defined. One of the most worrying things in the Trump campaign was when his then spokeswoman dismissed concerns about the Muslim ban with “So what? They’re Muslims!” That’s the tribal actor at its most basic – what happens to members of the other tribe isn’t our concern.
Ideas about a Eurabian caliphate have always been fanciful. On the other hand, the idea that Islamic fanaticism manages to crash our civilization is all too believable. Historically, Islamic jihad has tended to call forth reactions at least as savage – the Crusaders, Hulaghu Khan, Vlad the Impaler or Slobodan Milosevic. There would be nothing to laugh about in a similar reaction empowered by twenty-first century weaponry.
Harris offers two ways out of the current mess, which he calls enlightened tribalism and critical liberalism. “Enlightened tribalism” is like those northern American states that regarded slavery as evil and completely banned it within their borders, but did not want to abolish slavery worldwide. “Critical liberalism” is like the radical abolitionists who wanted to abolish slavery worldwide. In our day, both would agree that our rare cultures of reason are ethically superior to those where fanaticism and violence are the norm. Both would accept that our cultures of reason are the result of a unique visceral code. Most important, both would accept that there are points where being a rational actor is not sufficient, where you have to fanatically defend those values that make the rational actor possible in the first place – being as prepared to die for them as Condorcet in Bourg-la-Reine or Mandela at the Rivonia Trial. The main difference would be that the enlightened tribalist would be content to defend these values within the bounds of the Western world and sharply reduce or eliminate immigration, while the critical liberal would support any movement worldwide that tried to spread these values.
The idea that you could fanatically defend the values of the rational actor appears paradoxical, but that’s because of the aforementioned elision between the rational actor and capital-R Reason, in the Enlightenment sense. A rational actor is someone acting for his rational self-interest and therefore can never be brought to sacrifice himself, nor really put himself at risk. But capital-R Reason has had no problems recruiting fanatics, zealots and martyrs, and these have succeeded far beyond anything purely tribal actors ever have. Napoleon nearly conquered all of Europe, and even after his defeat managed a return to power, based on the conviction he inspired, which was based on the belief in Enlightenment Reason. Similarly, we can understand the historical accidents that allowed the Enlightenment to get underway, but once it was underway, it seems to have spread exactly as Condorcet hoped. Harris writes that Condorcet was naïve to assume that all that was needed was to show how well societies like France and America and England were succeeding and explain to others how they could succeed this way – and yet Condorcet’s ideas have spread far beyond those three nations, not merely in Europe or ‘the West’ but globally. Sit down with the average Kenyan or Ghanaian and ask him what he would like his government and society to be like, and I guarantee you will hear something Condorcet would have approved of.
The tide of reason even seems to be even eroding Islamic fanaticism. Atheism is spreading in the Muslim world, to the extent that now 5% of Saudis say – privately, anonymously – that they are atheists9. Other movements, like those for women’s rights, are more pronounced. These are driven by the same thing that led to tolerance in Europe – the sheer horror of religious violence. As the Thirty Years’ War paved the way for the enlightenment in Europe, ISIS and its related movements seem to be doing the same thing in the Middle East.
It has not escaped me that both Enlightened Tribalism and Critical Liberalism will prove hard sells in today’s political landscape where the very idea of better cultures is taboo. But perhaps they will be more easily accepted as people understand that the alternative is a process of crash and decivilization that ends with the Muslim world a smoking, radioactive waste, and Muslims within the Infidel world staring out through barbed wire – as they are already doing in China.
1 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/minority-report/201406/asian-honor-and-suicide
2 https://www.ted.com/talks/steven\_pinker\_the\_surprising\_decline\_in\_violence
3 https://www.newsweek.com/racism-madison-high-school-teacher-fired-n-word-1466175
4 https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.09318
5 https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How\_To\_Actually\_Change\_Your\_Mind
6 https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/16/is-enlightenment-compatible-with-sex-scandals/
7 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qpuufdn37Kav8jZcN/if-you-can-see-the-box-you-can-open-the-box
8 https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/its-all-greek-to-victor-davis-hanson/
9 https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/1/atheists-in-muslim-world-growing-silent-minority/