Time to Rethink the Defense of Reason By David Warren

Lee Harris is among the few living writers who do not, as the saying goes, "subtract from the sum total of human knowledge" with each new essay. I've puffed him before, and will puff him again, the more shamelessly in the knowledge that his new book, The Suicide of Reason, is probably not even available in Canada.

As usual, Mr Harris is skiing uphill against the assumptions his American countrymen and others through the West have brought into the inaptly-named "war on terror." We seem incapable of projecting ourselves, even cursorily, into the mind of our mortal enemy, and the language we use to describe him, even when it is not cowardly and politically correct ("supporters" of Al Qaeda, "militants," etc.), conceals more than it reveals. Even in clearer, less compromised writing, the enemy is presented as un-adjectived "fanatics," or "terrorists" -- which they are, but the terms do not get us any closer to their motivations.

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