Lee Harris on historical forgetfulness

One of the themes of Harris's Civilization and Its Enemies (2004) is the inherent danger to civilization of forgetting the prerequisites for its own existence. In particular, prosperity and security beget an unwillingness to risk one's individual or national life; but when one is faced with ruthless enemies, it will sometimes be necessary to take such risks in order to avoid enslavement and the destruction of one's civilization. The French, for example, ought to have taken the risk of opposing by force Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 (which we now know would have caused Hitler to withdraw immediately). By failing to run this risk, the French brought disaster on themselves a few years later.

[W]here the risk is total war . . . the human tendency is not to quantify and to make a rational calculation. The tendency is to do anything to avoid the risk . . . . When a risk involves life and death, for an individual or for a nation, there is a very natural tendency to accept any consequence less grave than death. And for a good reason. It allows us to live to fight another day.

Yet this very fact is precisely what gives an enormous advantage to any party who is willing to risk death or, in Hitler's case, total war. Because in those situations where it is irrational to voluntarily take a risk that involves life and death, those who are willing to act irrationally and to take this risk will be able to force any rational player into acceding to [their] will.

In a world where others are willing to risk death to get their way, you must be willing to risk death to keep them from getting their way. Equally, if you live in a world where nations are willing to risk total war over minor issues, then you too must be willing to risk total war over minor issues . . . . On the other hand, in a world where everyone else is accustomed to making rational economic choices, the man who is prepared to fight to the death will normally be appeased. The same logic applies to whole societies.

The result is an unsettling paradox: the more the spirit of commerce triumphs, the closer mankind comes to dispensing with war, the nearer we approach the end of history, the greater are the rewards to those who decide to return to the path of war, and the easier it will be for them to conquer. There is nothing that can be done to change this fact; it is built into the structure of our world . . . .

Forgetfulness overcomes every successful civilization. Its transformation of men into peaceful, commercially minded, liberal cosmopolitans is a large-scale version of the trustful community that leaves its doors unlocked. As it becomes harder and harder to imagine people playing by different rules from us, the advantage to those who are prepared to break the rules altogether increases.

. . . What Nazism, fascism, and Communism had in common was their refusal to play by the same rules as their middle-class and liberal opponents or even to acknowledge these rules. In each case, the leaders of these movements were prepared to push their own societies into civil war in order to get their way, and since their opponents could think of nothing worse, they were allowed to do so. (pp 63–64)

Though Harris does not state this explicitly, the remedy for the forgetfulness of civilization is presumably for the civilization's rulers to cultivate the historical memory of, and to imaginatively identify with, less civilized periods. On this score, our civilization, which has largely abandoned the teaching of history, does not appear to be acting so as to preserve itself.

[W]e must all struggle to overcome the collective tendency of civilized men and women to forgetfulness. For that, in truth, is the ultimate question facing us today, Can the West overcome the forgetfulness that is the nemesis of every successful civilization? If it can, then there is hope that mankind will be able to move forward to a higher stage of historical development. If it cannot, then the next stage of history will be one that we once hoped never to see again. (p. 218)