Recourse of the Ostrich

Future generations will look back on the post-9/11 era and have one prevailing thought: that at the turn of the 21st century, self-evident truths had become radical causes for celebration. Sam Harris takes a long, sober look at liberalism in America and is not pleased by what he finds. That the following sentence is even quotable shows just how much intellectual and moral spadework is left to be done in the current crisis of civilization:

Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

What Harris tilts against is what I'd call the if-we-justers. "If we just got Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories;" "If we just removed all American military bases from the Middle East;" "If we just pulled all troops out of Iraq (and even Afghanistan) tomorrow;" "If we just attempted 'dialogue' with bin Ladenists;" etc. The second clause is: "everything would be fine."

Orwell used to call confrontation with unpleasant truths the "power of facing." This power was always hardest to come by when what you had to face was your own shortcomings – as an individual, a society, a believer in ideology. But now it's equally difficult to call up when all that's required is to realize that a group of reactionary psychopaths mean business when they say they want to kill you because it'd please an invisible man in the sky.

The Paul Berman Award for Sensible Liberalism goes to Sam this week.