His articles at the TechCentralStation are archived here: http://www2.techcentralstation.com/1051/searchauthor.jsp?Bioid=BIOHARRISLEE
If you want to bookmark his articles discussed at FR: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/k-leeharris/browse
essay Al Qaedas Fantasy Ideology By Lee Harris (FR post) "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology," (original)
The Clausewitz Curse (FR post) The Clausewitz Curse (original)
Given our uncertainty, what alternative does this, or any, administration have?Our World-Historical Gamble (FR post) Our World-Historical Gamble (original)
The collapse of the liberal order and the end of classical sovereignty.
His new book is to be released in February of 2004: Civilization and Its Enemies : The Next Stage of History
The clash that occurs within us at such a moment is caused by a conflict between our moral instincts and our moral imagination. The former is automatic and unthinking; the latter is deliberative and reflective. Our moral instincts prompt us to emote and to act; our moral imagination causes us to stop and think.
Our moral instincts operate on the exact same principle as an emergency room in a hospital: you help those who need help, and help those the most who need it the most. Hence you do not trouble yourself with the particular moral history of the patients that come to your attention: the man with the severed artery may be a serial killer, while the girl with the mild abrasion may be a living saint, but it is the severed artery that demands your immediate attention, and it is the abrasion that can patiently wait.
Should we lament that we are made this way? Not at all, since otherwise none of us would ever lift a finger for a stranger, nor pay any mind to the suffering of those who were not already intimately known to us. ..... no one should be ashamed to have felt a stirring of pity or compassion at the fall and humiliation of Saddam Hussein: such feelings are the natural result of the automatic moral instinct that compels us to reach out and try to help those whose suffering is immediately before our eyes .... Such feelings are simply a moral reflex whose general utility is so self-evident that we are willing to accept the fact that occasionally this reflex will be directed toward those who scarcely deserve it, like Saddam Hussein himself.
Here is at the point at which the role of the moral imagination becomes clear. It does not exist as a substitute for the moral instinct, but rather as a check upon it.
... the whole purpose of the moral imagination is to remind ourselves that our moral sympathies cannot be exhausted in the here and now, in the immediate present, but must be expanded to take into account the claims of the past and the future as well as the present, and of those who are invisible to us as well as those who are right before our eyes. .... the moral imagination compels us to evoke the faces of those whom Saddam butchered and terrorized, to force ourselves into visualizing them as vividly and keenly as possible, so that their faces will command our moral attention, rather than just the flesh-and-blood face of their murderer. But this is a difficult task, especially when there are so many victims' faces that our imagination is taxed even in trying to evoke a handful of them.
Yet it is a task that we must all force ourselves to accomplish if we are to become true moral agents, and not merely moral automatons. We must not only react unthinkingly to the suffering before us, we must take into consideration the suffering that we cannot see, and especially, as in the case of Saddam Hussein, when the visible sufferer was the cause of so much invisible suffering. But the only way we can do this is to keep our moral imagination in good repair, and to refuse to permit our moral instincts, no matter how well-meaning, to displace our capacity for reflective judgment. We must feel, but we must also think -- otherwise we fall short of our full moral humanity.