"Civilization and Its Enemies" by Lee Harris

Harris' debut was a nearly perfect essay in political theory: The model he proposed explains facts and answers open questions more elegantly than competing theories. For instance, why weren't the attacks immediately followed by others? Because al-Qaida isn't fighting a conventional war, it is engaging in theater, and "followup acts would have had no glamour, and it was glamour --- and grandiosity -- that al-Qaida was seeking in its targets." Why is there no easy answer as to "what we did" to inspire such hatred? Because rational causes such as poverty and tyrannical governments in the Arab world did not create this fantasy ideology; America is just a prop in al-Qaida's psychodrama. "There is absolutely no political policy that we could adopt that would in any way change the attitude of our enemies," Harris writes.

If this book has an obvious flaw, it is Harris' slighting of his motivations in beginning to write on these topics. Harris' brilliant outpouring of political philosophy came after 9/11 and was spurred by the wounding of his country; his words sprung from the heart as much as the mind. But very little of what Harris says in his book takes into account the relative weights of heart and mind in determining how people live and organize their societies.

Take his remarks about the family and the difference between East and West: "Where the family rules, the team cannot prosper, and if the team cannot prosper, then neither can the society ... the West got rich and free because it followed this pattern; the East remained poor and unfree because it continued to be immersed in the family ... there is a cost (to the East's choice) just as there is a cost to living in any one social order rather than another."

Harris says what most conservatives are too chicken to admit: American values are by and large anti-family. But he doesn't seem to think that there are any costs to the choice we have made.

He might have a hard time making his case for "team cosmopolitanism" to most of those people who remain immersed in the family, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in various other spots of current interest. They value depth of feeling over variety, continuity over change, security over upward mobility. And they would rather see the same 20 or 30 people day in and day out than live the way we do. They would rather call their cousin's sister-in-law's son at the passport agency than live under the rule of law.

Harris' invocation of American subcultures betrays a somewhat mechanistic view of what a culture is. Like many Americans, I happen to enjoy our varied subcultures. But a society containing varied subcultures is a particular kind of society. Living in a family-oriented subculture in the Bible Belt or a religious Muslim subculture in Detroit is not the same as living in a traditional Christian or Muslim society per se. Some people want to live in societies that are relatively monolithic, just as some people want to be friends with those much like themselves in background.

Harris might also want to carefully distinguish the traditional, and pre-Islamic, structures of Middle Eastern society from Islam itself. As the French anthropologist Germaine Tillion pointed out 40 years ago, Islam set itself in opposition to tribalism and endogamy. If team cosmopolitanism aims to create "a society where membership is open to all who want to embrace the team ethos of their new community," there is no better description of early Islam; it just so happens that Mohammed preached in an area characterized by clans and cousin marriage, and Middle Eastern Islam reflects this as much as it reflects the Koran.

There is a deeper philosophical problem with Harris' view of our "way of living together." Even here in the 50 (or will it be 80?) states, "team cosmopolitanism" doesn't sound like much fun. The world of work that has been responsible for the great achievements of the West can be a dreary and unpleasant place. The good fellowship it provides is, even in the best case, pallid compared with family feeling and romantic love. Its cohesiveness depends on discouraging imagination, playfulness, contrarian thinking and risk taking, some or all of which most people enjoy. Teams can be fun, but they can also be nasty.

That's probably why Harris was working as a glazier, not nestled in the bosom of a giant corporation or university (and why I work from my home as a legal recruiter, dear reader, to support my habit of writing for Salon). That's why more and more Americans have turned to experiences that promise a warmer, mushier, more emotional or less competitive way of living. Fundamentalist Christianity is the most popular among them and the most socially influential in large parts of the country, but we should include chic bicoastal pastimes like yoga and studying the cabala too.

Many of us more-or-less conservatives -- and I count myself in -- have at one point or another found ourselves recommending to others, even to Others in the non-West, ways of life that we find profoundly unengaging ourselves. Harris has to defend "team cosmopolitanism" because it is the basis of most reasonable societies and it is exactly what fantasy ideologies rebel against. But he should acknowledge the costs, and not just in terms of the vanished sweetness of life.

"To force other cultures to stay permanently in the cake of custom imposed by the tradition of their ancestors," he writes, "is a perverse way of expressing appreciation for their humanity." I've heard this before: Why do you want this particular group of people to keep their quaint mud huts or rice terraces while you live in New York? This question assumes that custom is only a handicap and not a source of pleasure for traditional societies. It assumes that they take no joy in being who they are. And the remarkable thing is that whether or not you or I or Lee Harris would want their lives, they do.

"The West acknowledges the Other and is willing to compete with him," Harris writes; "other civilizations would prefer that he not exist. It is the West that has gone to study the East, and not the other way around." Even leaving aside the fact that this is true only, say, since 1492, that it ignores the intrepid travelers of medieval Islam and the fact that the Spain that sent forth the conquistadors had only just completed the reconquista -- even so, this is rather like arguing that single people are more curious, lively and aware than married ones because they go on dates. People who are satisfied do not go in quest of something else. Nor, of course, do they blow people and things up in the service of fantasy ideologies. They stay at home. The lack of progress -- look, no scare quotes! -- in the East (I think Harris really means the Middle East) could also be seen as a sign that their society works for them.

Definitions of "West" and "East" also change over time. Until well into the 19th century, European Jewish culture was considered backward and "Eastern" by Christian (and even many Jewish) European intellectuals, and it mainly was. What happened? Jews were legally allowed to enter mainstream society and did. Dynamism is neither a property of particular ethnic groups nor of particular religions.

Harris' book would have reached another level had he gone on -- as I have no doubt he is capable of doing -- to turn his erudition and originality to the flaws in our society. If it is worth defending, as most of us agree it is, it will still be so even when its fault lines are acknowledged. This is actually a better distinction between West and East than the one Harris draws. If there is anything that has constituted the strength of the West (keeping his capital letters), it's our capacity for living with self-doubt.

• View blog reactions