The Decline of the West

For some time, I've had this vague notion of how history works: cultures progress, and as they do, they lose their appetite for war. Unfortunately, this makes them inferior warriors, so that when challenged by "inferior" cultures in which warriors are valued, eventually they face an enemy that defeats them. Thus Greece fell. Thus Rome fell. And so on. And the pattern repeats itself throughout history.

Here is a recent book that articulates this logic much better than I can.

The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West
Lee Harris
Basic Books, NY, 2007

This is not a pleasant book to read because the news is bad. But I believe it's an important book and that Harris' insights are mostly true. Excerpts:

The approach this book will take is that there is no guarantee of inevitable progress because the law of the jungle can never be abolished, though it can be, and has been, ameliorated by various cultural traditions including our own. There can be no hope of an end of history or of a golden age in which men will no longer be driven to conflict and struggle. Furthermore, there can be no guarantee that these struggles will be merely inconclusive "clashes" between civilizations. On the contrary, there is every reason to assume that future struggles will end in the triumph of one civilization and the demise of another. The first Arab conquerors did not clash with the Sassanian Empire_they absorbed and transformed it. The Ottomans did not clash with the Byzantine Empire_they conquered it and remade it in their own image. The Spanish did not clash with the Aztec civilization_they annihilated it. The Anglo-Saxons in North America did not clash with the native American cultures_they wiped them out.

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If the modern liberal West is to survive, it must begin by recognizing the laws of power that govern the jungle. Even if it does not wish to obey these laws, it must know them. For example, it must clearly understand that our own liberal and popular cultures of reason are serendipitous exceptions to these laws; they must not be taken as evidence that the laws of the jungle are destined to wither away. Where the tribe is a person's only guarantee of security and defense, men will continue to rely on their tribes, and they will act as tribal actors because it is the rational thing for them to do. On the other hand, the rational actor cannot exist unless his whole society has managed somehow to escape the laws of the jungle; hence, the rational actor must recognize that if he is to remain a rational actor, he must be willing to defend at all cost the traditions and institutions of the society that permits him this option. If he is deluded into believing that all men are rational actors by nature, then he will be clueless when confronted with the tribal actor, whose conduct and behavior will make no sense to him. Worse, because the rational actor will be tempted to dismiss the tribal actor as behaving irrationally, the rational actor will fail to see that it is the tribal actor, and not himself, who is acting rationally in terms of the universal struggle for survival and supremacy.