What's So Great About America

by Dinesh D'Souza

  But the concept of cultural superiority need not be limited to groups contending for a specific prize. One might also find some cultures to be superior to others in achieving universal aspirations. Do such aspirations exist? Of course they do. Anthropologist Donald Brown provides a list of them in his book Human Universals.4 One such universal aspiration is the desire to speak one’s mind. In the West we call this the “right to free speech.” But of course this “right” is not recognized in many cultures. In the late 1980s, the novelist Salman Rushdie made some satirical references to the prophet Muhammad in his book The Satanic Verses. The Islamic world was not convulsed with laughter, and in February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to punish Rushdie for his crime of blasphemy by killing him.

  Rushdie, heretofore known as an intrepid iconoclast and debunker of Western civilization, now begged the West to protect his life. Rushdie and a group of writers held a press conference in America in which they indignantly accused the Ayatollah Khomeini of not having sufficient regard for the First Amendment! Rushdie himself called the Ayatollah’s attention to the works of John Stuart Mill.5 Unfortunately Khomeini was not well schooled in the rhetoric of multiculturalism; otherwise he could have replied, “What gives you the right to impose your Western values on me? You have your cultural values, and I have my cultural values, and mine are just as valid as yours. Your values give priority to free speech, but my values give priority to outlawing blasphemy. Rushdie is free to express his cultural values by saying whatever he wants about Islam. And I am free to express my cultural values and order that his head be chopped off.”

  This is impeccable multicultural logic, and if the doctrine of cultural relativism holds true, then the Muslims would seem to be fully justified in attempting to murder Rushdie. The only way to make the case against such an action is to argue that the principle of free speech may be Western in its origin but it is universal in its application. This is another way of saying that the Declaration of Independence and the United Nations charter are correct: there are universal human rights. These rights may not always be recognized or upheld. But the failure of a government to enforce them at a given time does not invalidate the right. To recall Lincoln’s statement that I cited earlier: the right has been declared so that the enforcement can follow when the circumstances allow.

  By denying that there are universal standards of human rights, multiculturalists become de facto apologists for tyranny. They are so concerned about one culture “imposing its morality” on another that they ignore the fact that such impositions are sometimes indispensable to protect human dignity. Early in the nineteenth century the British outlawed the ancient Indian practice of sati. This custom called for widows to be tossed onto the burning pyres of their husbands.6 The British also passed laws restricting child marriage, female infanticide, human sacrifice, and the caste system. In curbing these charming indigenous customs, the British were clearly imposing Western morality on their colonial subjects. But who today will dispute the results? Multicultural textbooks are strangely silent on these questions.

  The doctrine that all people have certain basic rights does depend, I will concede, on a certain conception of human nature, one that ascribes a certain special quality or sacredness to humanity. There are other human aspirations, however, whose universality does not depend upon a philosophical premise of this sort. Recently I was visiting my family in Bombay, and I noticed that, on the outskirts of the city, a group of American anthropologists had set up camp to study the displaced peasants living in huts. As one scholar emerged from his tent, sporting his blue jeans and adjusting his zoom-lens camera, the peasants eyed him enviously. They eagerly told him, “We want your jeans! We want your camera!” Appalled at this suggestion, the anthropologist drew himself to full height and said, “But I am not here to convince you that our way of life is better. Oh no, I am merely here to study you. I believe that your culture is fully equal to ours. In fact, in some respect you are spared from the rat race, you are closer to nature, you are ecological saints.” The peasants cogitated over these remarks and then repeated in unison, “We want your jeans! We want your camera!”

  This example illustrates the point that in today’s world there is a one-way movement from tribal, agrarian cultures toward modern, industrialized, American-style culture. Another way to put it is that people who go from wearing wooden shoes to wearing leather shoes will never go back to wearing wooden shoes. People identify America with triumph over necessity, with comfort, and with a longer life. Are there any societies that do not want these things? The very concept of “underdeveloped” nations, of nations seeking “development,” shows that the poor countries of the world are unanimous about wanting to get richer. Until we can find cultures that prefer hunger rather than plenty, disease rather than health, and short lives rather than long ones, we have to acknowledge that material improvement is a universal objective.

  Indeed, this is what Adam Smith said in his Wealth of Nations: “the desire of bettering our condition . . . comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go to the grave.”7 If this is true, then Francis Fukuyama is right that there is an inevitable progression from societies that thwart these human desires to societies that fulfill them. This isn’t necessarily the “end of history,” but it probably represents the end of primitive cultures. Moreover, given the things that people want, it is entirely reasonable to posit that some cultures (say, capitalist cultures with a Protestant heritage) are superior to other cultures (say, African socialist regimes or Islamic theocracies) in achieving these shared human objectives.

  Cultural relativism collapses in the face of these universal aspirations. This was recognized by one of the Pied Pipers of relativism, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. For decades, Lévi-Strauss had emphatically insisted that so-called primitive cultures were just as complex and sophisticated as so-called advanced cultures. Lévi-Strauss labored ingeniously, in books like The Savage Mind and Tristes Tropiques, to show the equal value of these remote cultures. But then Lévi-Strauss made an alarming discovery: the people in those remote cultures don’t want to stay in those cultures. If given the choice, they would prefer to live as Westerners do rather than as their ancestors did. Once he digested this disturbing fact, Lévi-Strauss gave up. In a stunning admission, he wrote, “The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being Westernized, but that there is too much delay in giving them the means to Westernize themselves. It is of no use to defend the individuality of human cultures against those cultures themselves.”8

  This is a devastating blow for the relativist ideology. Equally crushing are the actions of the immigrants, who are walking refutations of cultural relativism. When immigrants decide to leave their home country and move to another country, they are voting with their feet in favor of the new culture and against their native culture. Leaving one’s country is a serious step. It involves giving up the community in which you have been raised, abandoning your family, severing your relationships with relatives and friends. You are imperiling your entire place in the world by going from a place where you are somebody to a place where you are nobody. People do not make such decisions whimsically. So why would immigrants voluntarily uproot themselves and relocate to another society unless they were deeply convinced that, on balance, the new culture was better than the old culture? Anyone who actually believed the multicultural nonsense that all cultures are equal would never leave home.

  The triumph of American ideas and culture in the global marketplace, and the fact that most immigrants from around the world choose to come to the United States, would seem to be sufficient grounds for establishing the superiority of American civilization. But this is not entirely so, because we have not shown that the people of the world are justified in preferring the American way of life to any other. We
must contend with the Islamic fundamentalists’ argument that their societies are based on high principles while America is based on low principles. The Islamic critics are happy to concede the attractions of America, but they insist that these attractions are base. America, they say, appeals to what is most degraded about human nature; by contrast, Islamic societies may be poor and “backward,” but they at least aspire to virtue. Even if they fall short, they are trying to live by God’s law.

  Americans usually have a hard time answering this argument, in part because they are bewildered by its theological cadences. The usual tendency is to lapse into a kind of unwitting relativism. “You are following what you believe is right, and we are living by the values that we think are best.” This pious buncombe usually concludes with a Rodney King–style plea for tolerance, “So why don’t we learn to appreciate our differences? Why don’t we just get along?” To see why this argument fails completely, imagine that you are living during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor is just starting to pull out your fingernails. You make the Rodney King move on him. “Torquemada, please stop pulling out my fingernails. Why don’t we learn to appreciate our differences?” Most of us probably realize that Torquemada would not find this persuasive. But it is less obvious why he would not. Let me paraphrase Torquemada’s argument: “You think I am taking away your freedom, but I am concerned with your immortal soul. Ultimately virtue is far more important than freedom. Our lives last for a mere second in the long expanse of eternity. What measure of pleasure or pain we experience in our short life is trivial compared to our fate in the never ending life to come. I am trying to save your soul from damnation. Who cares if you have to let out a few screams in the process? My actions are entirely for your own benefit. You should be thanking me for pulling out your fingernails.”

  I have recalled the Spanish Inquisition to make the point that the Islamic argument is one that we have heard before. We should not find it so strange that people think this way; it is the way that many in our own civilization used to think not so very long ago. The reason that most of us do not think this way now is that Western history has taught us a hard lesson. That lesson is that when the institutions of religion and government are one, and the secular authority is given the power to be the interpreter and enforcer of God’s law, then horrible abuses of power are perpetrated in God’s name. This is just what we saw in Afghanistan with the Taliban, and what we see now in places like Iran. This is not to suggest that Islam’s historical abuses are worse than those of the West. But the West, as a consequence of its experience, learned to disentangle the institutions of religion and government—a separation that was most completely achieved in the United States. As we have seen, the West also devised a new way of organizing society around the institutions of science, democracy, and capitalism. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution were some of the major signposts on Western civilization’s road to modernity.

  By contrast, the Islamic world did not have a Renaissance or a Reformation. No Enlightenment or Scientific Revolution either. Incredible though it may seem to many in the West, Islamic societies today are in some respects not very different from how they were a thousand years ago. Islam has been around for a long time. This brings us to a critical question: why are we seeing this upsurge of Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic fanaticism now?

  To answer this question, we should recall that Islam was once one of the greatest and most powerful civilizations in the world. Indeed, there was a time when it seemed as if the whole world would fall under Islamic rule. Within a century of the prophet Muhammad’s death, his converts had overthrown the Sassanid dynasty in Iran and conquered large tracts of territory from the Byzantine dynasty. Soon the Muslims had established an empire greater than that of Rome at its zenith. Over the next several centuries, Islam made deep inroads into Africa, Southeast Asia, and southern Europe. The crusades were launched to repel the forces of Islam, but the crusades ended in failure. By the sixteenth century, there were no fewer than five Islamic empires, unified by political ties, a common religion, and a common culture: the Mamluk sultans in Egypt, the Safavid dynasty in Iran, the Mughal empire in India, the empire of the Great Khans in Russia and Central Asia, and the Ottoman Empire based in Turkey. Of these, the Ottomans were by far the most formidable. They ruled most of North Africa, and threatened Mediterranean Europe and Austria. Europe was terrified that they might take over all the lands of Christendom. In all of history, Islam is the only non-Western civilization to pose a mortal threat to the West.

  Then it all went wrong. Starting in the late seventeenth century, when the West was able to repel the Ottoman siege of Vienna, the power of Islam began a slow but steady decline. By the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire was known as the “sick man of Europe,” and it collapsed completely after World War I, when the victorious European powers carved it up and parceled out the pieces. Not only did the Muslims lose most of the territory they had conquered, but they also found themselves being ruled, either directly or indirectly, by the West. Today, even though colonialism has ended, the Islamic world is in a miserable state. Basically all that it has to offer is oil, and as technology opens up alternative sources of energy, even that will not amount to much. Without its oil revenues, the Islamic world will find itself in the position of sub-Saharan Africa: it will cease to matter. Even now it does not matter very much. The only reason it makes the news is by killing people. When is the last time you opened the newspaper to read about a great Islamic discovery or invention? While China and India, two other empires that were eclipsed by the West, have embraced Western technology and even assumed a leadership role in some areas, Islam’s contribution to modern science and technology is negligible.

  In addition to these embarrassments, the Islamic world faces a formidable threat from the United States. This is not the threat of American force or of American support for Israel. Israel is an irritant, but it does not threaten the existence of Islamic society. By contrast, America stands for an idea that is fully capable of transforming the Islamic world by winning the hearts of Muslims. The subversive American idea is one of shaping your own life, of making your own destiny, of following a path illumined not by external authorities but by your inner self. This American idea endangers the sanctity of the Muslim home, as well as the authority of Islamic society. It empowers women and children to assert their prerogatives against the male head of the household. It also undermines political and religious hierarchies. Of all American ideas, the “inner voice” is the most dangerous because it rivals the voice of Allah as a source of moral allegiance. So Islam is indeed, as bin Laden warned, facing the greatest threat to its survival since the days of Muhammad.

  In recent decades, a great debate has broken out in the Muslim world to account for Islamic decline and to formulate a response to it. One response—let us call it the reformist or classical liberal response—is to acknowledge that the Islamic world has been left behind by modernity. The reformers’ solution is to embrace science, democracy, and capitalism. This would mean adaptation—at least selective adaptation—to the ways of the West. The liberal reformers have an honorable intellectual tradition, associated with such names as Muhammad Abduh, Jamal al-Afghani, Muhammad Iqbal, and Taha Husayn. This group also enjoys a fairly strong base of support in the Muslim middle class. In the past two decades, however, the reformers have been losing the argument in the Islamic world to their rival group, the fundamentalists.

  Here, in short, is the fundamentalist argument. The Koran promises that if Muslims are faithful to Allah, they will enjoy prosperity in this life and paradise in the next life. According to the fundamentalists, the Muslims were doing this for centuries, and they were invincible. But now, the fundamentalists point out, Islam is not winning any more; in fact, it is losing. What could be the reason for this? From the fundamentalist point of view, the answer is obvious: Muslims are not following the true teaching of Allah! The fundamentali
sts allege that Muslims have fallen away from the true faith and are mindlessly pursuing the ways of the infidel. The fundamentalists also charge that Islamic countries are now ruled by self-serving despots who serve as puppets for America and the West. The solution, the fundamentalists say, is to purge American troops and Western influence from the Middle East; to overthrow corrupt, pro-Western regimes like the ones in Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia; and to return to the pure, original teachings of the Koran. Only then, the fundamentalists insist, can Islam recover its lost glory.

  One can see, from this portrait, that the fundamentalists are a humiliated people who are seeking to recover ancestral greatness. They are not complete “losers”: they are driven by an awareness of moral superiority, combined with political, economic, and military inferiority. Their argument has a powerful appeal to proud Muslims who find it hard to come to terms with their contemporary irrelevance. And so the desert wind of fundamentalism has spread throughout the Middle East. It has replaced Arab nationalism as the most powerful political force in the region.

  The success of the fundamentalists in the Muslim world should not blind us from recognizing that their counterattack against America and the West is fundamentally defensive. The fundamentalists know that their civilization does not have the appeal to expand outside its precinct. It’s not as if the Muslims were plotting to take, say, Australia. It is the West that is making incursions into Islamic territory, winning converts and threatening to subvert ancient loyalties and transform a very old way of life. So the fundamentalists are lashing out against this new, largely secular, Western “crusade.” Terrorism, their weapon of counterinsurgency, is the weapon of the weak. Terrorism is the international equivalent of that domestic weapon of discontent: the riot. Political scientist Edward Banfield once observed that a riot is a failed revolution. People who know how to take over the government don’t throw stones at a bus. Similarly terrorism of the bin Laden variety is a desperate strike against a civilization that the fundamentalists know they have no power to conquer.