What Dinesh D'Souza can't see
I'm still making my way through Dinesh D'Souza's book, but let me direct you to David Kuo's Beliefnet interview with him, up today. It gets to the heart of why I think D'Souza goes wrong, but why his critique is still valuable.
In the interview, D'Souza says that now that we've got some distance from 9/11, we should apply critical thought to why the Islamists attacked us:
Our military force? No, the structures of market capitalism -- including the global media -- is the chief transmission belt! It's the same transmission belt that brings these corrupting (or liberating, depending on your point of view) values into the "Red" America that D'Souza valorizes. [N.B., before I say more, let me stipulate that the Islamic world can find in its Scriptures and Tradition ample reason to despise and make war on us infidels, which is another main flaw with D'Souza's thesis. But I want to focus in this post on his ignoring the role of aggressive capitalism in provoking the Islamic world to reaction.]
A much better book for those who wish to understand the role our own culture plays in provoking the traditional cultures of Islam is the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton's relatively brief "The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat." That book came out in 2002; Scruton didn't need five years after 9/11 to think about why it happened. He acknowledges in the book that there is plausible reason to blame Islam itself for 9/11. But it's not enough simply to say that 9/11 (by which he means the new terrorism) is all the fault of Islam, and leave it at that. Scruton too believes that the West has been aggressively provocative to all parts of the world that do not share its basic concepts:
It was brave of Scruton to have written that less than a year after the Twin Towers fell; if his book had attracted more attention, surely more people on the Right would have attacked him for blaming the victim. Anyway, I doubt D'Souza would disagree with this passage I quoted above. I strongly encourage curious readers to pick up Scruton's book, because it's argument is both complex and compact. Here, though, for our purposes is a key passage:
Globalization -- which is to say, modernization -- has brought with it economic structures and institutions that unavoidably disrupt traditional life. A century ago, what is now Saudi Arabia was a desert populated by tribes. It is now insanely wealthy, and therefore powerful. How can that not have disrupted and dislocated these tribal people? Similarly, the media revolution is now roiling the Arab Muslim world. When I was in Dubai a year or so ago, an American professor working in Damascus told me that the thing we in the West fail to understand is that thanks to satellite television, the Middle East is going through a cultural disruption/revolution that played itself out over decades in the West -- and that this revolution was occurring in a culture that was far more rigid than America's. Several people, mostly Arabs, told me that you could go to many capitals of the Arab world and find class and cultural divides asserting themselves and deepening, and it had a lot to do with the revolutionary effect of satellite TV: in the wealthier areas, people favored Western-style TV programs, and Western styles of dress; in the working-class areas, people favored the more extreme Islamist TV programs, and were dressing more religiously. A clash is coming, driven heavily by technology, which came from the West, and which serves as a vector transmitting Western values into those pre-modern societies.
Again, I haven't finished D'Souza's book, so I might be off here. But it seems clear to me that D'Souza fails to appreciate how much resentment that democratic free-market culture, which is built on the autonomous, freely-choosing individual, breeds in cultures that fear and loathe this concept. David Kuo tries to get D'Souza to acknowledge this in the interview, suggesting that the behavior of corporations -- which is to say, economics -- has as much to do with Islamic anger as the cultural left. Says D'Souza:
D'Souza is entirely missing the point. The Muslim terrorists are not angry because America is wealthier than they. They are angry because the market culture that has made America so wealthy is built on and sustained by an ideology that would destroy the things they hold to be true, and indeed constituitive of their very identity. You don't even need to go to the Muslim world to see this. I've written before about the fallacy that small-town America -- "Red America," as D'Souza might put it -- is a refuge from corrosive modernity. As long as you have cable and satellite television, you are pipelining Hollywood values right into the living rooms. You might think you can live in a small town and be free of it, but you can't: the kinds of values D'Souza rightly despises are everywhere. Cultural conservatives rightly worry about it, but rarely if ever stop to think about how the free market we so uncritically champion works to undermine and obliterate tradition, authority and the institutions that uphold and transmit values.
What I'm saying is that if D'Souza's critique were more honest and accurate, he would have to parcel blame to capitalists who push a system that does to traditional cultures precisely what the Islamists fear it will do. But he can't do that, because that would mean that the "enemy" is not solely the cultural left, but the economic right. It's very hard for US conservatives to see this, because we are soaked in free-market dogmatism, we rarely if ever question whether the market is a limited good.
Frankly, I don't know what the solution to this is. Muslim countries can't say they want to be part of the modern world, but reject the market and reject modern communications. Individuals can, of course, but not societies. If they accept these things, then they accept the possibility -- indeed, the certainty -- that the mindset that goes with these things will erode traditional religion, morals and communal identity. In any case, nobody's forcing the Islamic world to accept capitalism, global media, or any of these other things (well, the US is forcing Iraq to democratize, and we see how well that's going). In time, the Muslim world will reconcile with modernity, and the apocalypse that the imams fear will come true. We'd all be a lot safer, I think, if they'd let go of their fierce religion and moderate themselves into being liberal democrats and good Wal-Mart shoppers. But we on the Right shouldn't pretend that something profoundly important to pious Muslims would be lost if that were to happen. And that's what lots of these Muslims are angry about. If I were Muslim, I would hope that I wouldn't want to lash out violently, but I can't say that I wouldn't be deeply anxious, even angry, about what was happening. And I would hope that I would have the sense to realize that the distinction between so-called Red Americans and so-called Blue Americans on this questions is largely meaningless: Americans of whatever hue are modernists, and therefore radical (if largely benign) enemies of the Islamic view of man and society.
To be sure, Westerners were enemies of Islam and all it entails in pre-modern times, by virtue of the fact that we were Christians, not Muslims. So the enmity would be here no matter what. The point I wish to make, though, is that D'Souza's notion that American cultural conservatives have anything more than a superficial commonality with traditional Muslims strikes me as wrong. That doesn't mean we should be fighting -- I would hope for peaceful coexistence -- but we shouldn't pretend that all we US cultural conservatives need to do is to repudiate Michael Moore and Paris Hilton, and all will be well. The problem, from a pious Muslim point of view, is not Blue America. The problem is America itself, the nation-state personification of modernity. That may not be politically useful to the Right or the Left, but I believe it's true. Anyway, D'Souza's book is useful in that it encourages Americans to consider that maybe, just maybe, the Islamists who are trying to destroy us might have a point about the way we live. Trying to understand this, rather than weakening us, should help us better figure out how to resist them.
In the interview, D'Souza says that now that we've got some distance from 9/11, we should apply critical thought to why the Islamists attacked us:
And it's time to ask the descriptive question, what motivated them to do it? And what I'm saying is, what motivated them to do it is what they perceive to be an atheist society whose values have the effect of undermining the family, corrupting the innocence of children, and eroding faith in God.
They see this as having happened over here, and they say we are projecting these values over there. In fact, their objection to our military force is that they see our military force as the transmission belt for transmitting these immoral values to the traditional cultures of the world which reject those values. [emphasis mine -- RD]
Our military force? No, the structures of market capitalism -- including the global media -- is the chief transmission belt! It's the same transmission belt that brings these corrupting (or liberating, depending on your point of view) values into the "Red" America that D'Souza valorizes. [N.B., before I say more, let me stipulate that the Islamic world can find in its Scriptures and Tradition ample reason to despise and make war on us infidels, which is another main flaw with D'Souza's thesis. But I want to focus in this post on his ignoring the role of aggressive capitalism in provoking the Islamic world to reaction.]
A much better book for those who wish to understand the role our own culture plays in provoking the traditional cultures of Islam is the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton's relatively brief "The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat." That book came out in 2002; Scruton didn't need five years after 9/11 to think about why it happened. He acknowledges in the book that there is plausible reason to blame Islam itself for 9/11. But it's not enough simply to say that 9/11 (by which he means the new terrorism) is all the fault of Islam, and leave it at that. Scruton too believes that the West has been aggressively provocative to all parts of the world that do not share its basic concepts:
To transfer [Western] values to places that have been deeply inoculated against them by culture and custom is to invite the very confrontation that we seek to avoid. ...Politicians, asked to define what we are fighting for in the "war against terrorism," will always say freedom. But, taken by itself, freedom means the emancipation from constraints, including those constraints which might be needed if a civilization is to endure. If all that Western civilization offers is freedom, then it is a civilzation bent on its own destruction. Moreover freedom flaunted in the face of religious prohibitions is an act of aggression, inviting retribution from those whose piety it offends.
It was brave of Scruton to have written that less than a year after the Twin Towers fell; if his book had attracted more attention, surely more people on the Right would have attacked him for blaming the victim. Anyway, I doubt D'Souza would disagree with this passage I quoted above. I strongly encourage curious readers to pick up Scruton's book, because it's argument is both complex and compact. Here, though, for our purposes is a key passage:
Globalization, in the eyes of its advocates, means free trade, increased prosperity, adn the steady erosion of despotic regimes by the growing demand for freedom. In the eyes of its critics, hoever, it means the loss of sovereig nty, together with large-scale social, economic, and aesthetic disruption. It also means an invasion of images that evoke outrage and disgust as much as envy in the hearts of those who are exposed to them. In the United States, where pornography is protected as free speech, people are able to accept that this assault on human dignity is the price we must pay for freedoms too precious to relinquish. But if you have not known those freedoms, and believe in any case that happiness resides not in freedom but in submission to God's law, the impact of pornography is devastating. ... People in the West live in a public space in which each person is surrounded and protected by his rights, and where all behavior that poses no obvious physical threat is permitted. But people in Muslim countries live in a space that is shared but private, where nobody is shielded by his rights from communal judgment, and where communal judgment is experienced as the judgment of God. Western habits, Western morals, Western art, music, and television are seen not as freedoms but as temptations. And the normal response to temptation is either to give in to it, or to punish those who offer it.
Globalization -- which is to say, modernization -- has brought with it economic structures and institutions that unavoidably disrupt traditional life. A century ago, what is now Saudi Arabia was a desert populated by tribes. It is now insanely wealthy, and therefore powerful. How can that not have disrupted and dislocated these tribal people? Similarly, the media revolution is now roiling the Arab Muslim world. When I was in Dubai a year or so ago, an American professor working in Damascus told me that the thing we in the West fail to understand is that thanks to satellite television, the Middle East is going through a cultural disruption/revolution that played itself out over decades in the West -- and that this revolution was occurring in a culture that was far more rigid than America's. Several people, mostly Arabs, told me that you could go to many capitals of the Arab world and find class and cultural divides asserting themselves and deepening, and it had a lot to do with the revolutionary effect of satellite TV: in the wealthier areas, people favored Western-style TV programs, and Western styles of dress; in the working-class areas, people favored the more extreme Islamist TV programs, and were dressing more religiously. A clash is coming, driven heavily by technology, which came from the West, and which serves as a vector transmitting Western values into those pre-modern societies.
Again, I haven't finished D'Souza's book, so I might be off here. But it seems clear to me that D'Souza fails to appreciate how much resentment that democratic free-market culture, which is built on the autonomous, freely-choosing individual, breeds in cultures that fear and loathe this concept. David Kuo tries to get D'Souza to acknowledge this in the interview, suggesting that the behavior of corporations -- which is to say, economics -- has as much to do with Islamic anger as the cultural left. Says D'Souza:
I agree with you. But this is not my topic. My topic is not the sins of America, but rather what is the source of the volcano of hatred that is directed at America coming from much of the traditional cultures of the world, and specifically from the Muslin world? ... [T]his has nothing to do with the golden arches of McDonalds, or the high cost of Nike shoes. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Americans are a hundred times richer than Asian Indians, or Africans. Those are valid and important issues, but in this book, I'm trying to look at what has produced the furnace of rage toward America from the people who want to kill Americans.
So, you think there's no distinction, then, between the cultural and the economic? That the economic does not influence the cultural?
No, what's happening here is that much of the world is indeed mired in desperate po verty. But, much of the world has been mired in desperate poverty since time immemorial. ...
D'Souza is entirely missing the point. The Muslim terrorists are not angry because America is wealthier than they. They are angry because the market culture that has made America so wealthy is built on and sustained by an ideology that would destroy the things they hold to be true, and indeed constituitive of their very identity. You don't even need to go to the Muslim world to see this. I've written before about the fallacy that small-town America -- "Red America," as D'Souza might put it -- is a refuge from corrosive modernity. As long as you have cable and satellite television, you are pipelining Hollywood values right into the living rooms. You might think you can live in a small town and be free of it, but you can't: the kinds of values D'Souza rightly despises are everywhere. Cultural conservatives rightly worry about it, but rarely if ever stop to think about how the free market we so uncritically champion works to undermine and obliterate tradition, authority and the institutions that uphold and transmit values.
What I'm saying is that if D'Souza's critique were more honest and accurate, he would have to parcel blame to capitalists who push a system that does to traditional cultures precisely what the Islamists fear it will do. But he can't do that, because that would mean that the "enemy" is not solely the cultural left, but the economic right. It's very hard for US conservatives to see this, because we are soaked in free-market dogmatism, we rarely if ever question whether the market is a limited good.
Frankly, I don't know what the solution to this is. Muslim countries can't say they want to be part of the modern world, but reject the market and reject modern communications. Individuals can, of course, but not societies. If they accept these things, then they accept the possibility -- indeed, the certainty -- that the mindset that goes with these things will erode traditional religion, morals and communal identity. In any case, nobody's forcing the Islamic world to accept capitalism, global media, or any of these other things (well, the US is forcing Iraq to democratize, and we see how well that's going). In time, the Muslim world will reconcile with modernity, and the apocalypse that the imams fear will come true. We'd all be a lot safer, I think, if they'd let go of their fierce religion and moderate themselves into being liberal democrats and good Wal-Mart shoppers. But we on the Right shouldn't pretend that something profoundly important to pious Muslims would be lost if that were to happen. And that's what lots of these Muslims are angry about. If I were Muslim, I would hope that I wouldn't want to lash out violently, but I can't say that I wouldn't be deeply anxious, even angry, about what was happening. And I would hope that I would have the sense to realize that the distinction between so-called Red Americans and so-called Blue Americans on this questions is largely meaningless: Americans of whatever hue are modernists, and therefore radical (if largely benign) enemies of the Islamic view of man and society.
To be sure, Westerners were enemies of Islam and all it entails in pre-modern times, by virtue of the fact that we were Christians, not Muslims. So the enmity would be here no matter what. The point I wish to make, though, is that D'Souza's notion that American cultural conservatives have anything more than a superficial commonality with traditional Muslims strikes me as wrong. That doesn't mean we should be fighting -- I would hope for peaceful coexistence -- but we shouldn't pretend that all we US cultural conservatives need to do is to repudiate Michael Moore and Paris Hilton, and all will be well. The problem, from a pious Muslim point of view, is not Blue America. The problem is America itself, the nation-state personification of modernity. That may not be politically useful to the Right or the Left, but I believe it's true. Anyway, D'Souza's book is useful in that it encourages Americans to consider that maybe, just maybe, the Islamists who are trying to destroy us might have a point about the way we live. Trying to understand this, rather than weakening us, should help us better figure out how to resist them.
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