Why I agree with D’Souza

When we separate out some of the individual arguments in Dinesh D’Souza’s book from his tendentious and dangerous main theses, namely that the left is the decisive reason for the radical Muslim campaign against America, and that traditional Muslims are our natural allies against the radical Muslims, there is much in his book with which I am profoundly in accord—because I have been saying the same things myself for years. For example, I have written that America’s morally libertarian culture makes Muslims fear and hate us even more than they otherwise would and thus exacerbates the Muslim threat, which happens to be the opposite of what D’Souza was saying just four years ago. D’Souza, as the conscienceless opportunist that he is, has dramatically shifted his philosophical orientation in this book, from his previous celebration of “subversive” American freedom destroying traditional cultures around the world, and his conviction that “the new morality is now entrenched and pervasive … there is no way to go back to the shared moral hierarchy of the past,” to a new-found respect for traditional morality. The weird and deeply sinister part of this is that, instead of D’Souza’s being led by his newly awakened belief in traditional morality to defend America from Islam, he uses it as springboard to say that we ought to unite ourselves with Islam, which, of course, would lead to the destruction of our traditional culture along with its morality. In other words, in the timeless neocon manner, D’Souza puts forth a conservative-sounding idea, in order to advance profoundly anti-conservative purposes.

Now that I’ve laid out the big picture, where there is total disagreement between D’Souza and myself, let’s look at some of the specific areas where there is agreement.

Thus D’Souza writes that the left hates and fears America—or, more precisely, it hates and fears conservative America and George W. Bush—more than it fears the Muslim radicals:

As leading figures on the left see it, the Islamic extremists pose a danger to the freedom and lifestyle of others while their American equivalents pose a danger to us. Thus, for the left, the enemy at home is far more consequential and frightening than the enemy abroad.

I agree, as I said the same in my article, “Fighting Terrorism, Liberal-Style,” at FrontPage Magazine in October 2004:

There are plenty of good reasons to be unhappy about this war—its terrible costs in life and limb, the bitterness it has engendered at home and abroad, the mistaken intelligence that was used to justify it, and the increasingly ideological and detached-from-reality manner in which Bush is waging it. But people on the left loathe the war for a bad reason, namely that it confirms traditional values of sovereignty, patriotism, and national defense that are the contrary of everything the left believes in. In fact, the left hates our war against militant Islam far more than it hates the Islamists’ war against us. Islamism only poses a threat to Western civilization, a heritage toward which the left feels at best an ambivalent loyalty. But the looming, years-long struggle against Islamism, by calling on principles and virtues that the left not only lacks but regards as alien and repugnant, poses a threat to the survival of the left itself. And that is why [George] Soros thinks Bush is a Nazi.

D’Souza also doubts the Bush view that the Muslim radicals hate us for our freedom:

The general view on the right is that Bin Laden and the Islamic radicals don’t despise us for what we do, they despise us for who we are. As President Bush has said, on various occasions, “They hate us because of our freedom.”

But is this really true? There is no evidence that Muslims—or even the Islamic fundamentalists—hate the West because the West is modern, or because the West embodies technology, prosperity, and democracy….

Further, D’Souza says that the Muslim radicals do not object

to freedom, but to the kind of freedom associated with drug legalization and homosexual marriage…. They do not hate us for our freedom; they hate us because of what we do with our freedom. The radical Muslims are convinced that America and Europe have become sick, demented societies that destroy religious belief, undermine traditional morality, dissolve the patriarchal family, and corrupt the innocence of children.

I entirely agree, as I made the identical argument in October 2002 at FrontPage Magazine, in my article “National Defense or Global Empire?”:

So much for America’s desire to uplift the Muslims. What about the other side of the coin—the Muslims’ desire to harm us? Ever since the September 11 attack, President Bush, mainstream politicians, and the neoconservatives have kept repeating the mantra that Al Qaeda attacked us because of “our freedoms”—“our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other,” as the President put it in his historic speech to the Congress on September 20, 2001. I confess that this idea has never made the slightest sense to me. Why should Muslims be enraged against us for the freedoms we enjoy in our own country? Whoever heard of people on one side of the world hating and mass murdering people on the other side of the world, simply because the latter had certain political and personal liberties that the former didn’t have and apparently didn’t want?

In terms of global democratization, however, this odd-sounding explanation of the Muslims’ motives begins to make a good deal of sense. If freedom no longer means the freedom which we Americans have historically practiced and enjoyed, and which we benevolently hoped that other countries would adopt when they were ready for it; if freedom means, instead, the equal right and instant claim to the full panoply of American-style freedoms for everyone in the world, including Muslims; if such freedom further implies that it is our mission to bestow (or rather, as [Norman] Podhoretz puts it, to impose) those freedoms on them; and if, moreover, the very concept of freedom has been expanded to mean, not ordered liberty within a particular cultural and moral tradition (which was what Americans once had), but radical individualism with its destruction of all tradition, then, suddenly, it becomes perfectly understandable why Muslims should fear and hate us for our “freedoms”—because those freedoms, which we are trying to force on them, threaten their very existence as Muslims.

Universal democratism requires the reduction of all human beings to a low common denominator: the abstract individual possessing the same equal rights as everyone else in the world, but stripped of the social, biological, and transcendent dimensions that provide the real context and meaning of human life. And that’s why Muslims, who of all cultural groups are the most incompatible with Western individualism, are the most threatened by our naïve and arrogant claims of global sameness—and by our attempt to construct a new world order in the image of that sameness.

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying, as anti-Americans on both the right and the left say, that the radical Muslim threat is only a defensive response to American imperialism. I fully recognize the totalitarian character and the global aspirations of Jihadism, and the urgent necessity for us to combat it and contain it. But America, as we’ve seen, has been evolving its own set of globalist aspirations. So I ask the reader this question. If America were not trying to create, in Charles Krauthammer’s terrifying words, a “super-sovereign West, economically, culturally, and politically hegemonic in the world”; and if this American hegemony were not the carrier of a radical individualism that breaks down all cultural and religious values; and, furthermore, if we were not simultaneously admitting entire populations of Muslims into America, thus increasing the pressures of our hyper-individualist culture on theirs, isn’t it just possible that America would seem a good deal less threatening and hateful to many Muslims?

Finally, D’Souza, who in the early 00’s was singing the praises of young people with metal studs in their face because this embodied the “subversive” American freedom which D’Souza was celebrating as a force that would transform the world, proceeds to sound a theme he never has before—traditional conservatism:

From the American founding until World War II, there was a widespread belief in this country that there is a moral order in the universe that makes claims on us. This belief was not unique to Americans. It was shared by Europeans since the very beginning of Western civilization, and it is held even today by all the traditional cultures of the world. The basic notion is that morality is external to us, and it is binding on us….

What has changed in America since the 1960s is the erosion of belief in an external moral order. This is the most important political fact of the past half-century. I am not saying that most Americans today reject morality. I am saying that there has been a great shift in the source of morality. Today there is no longer a moral consensus in American society. Today many Americans locate morality not in a set of external commands but in the imperatives of their own heart. For them, morality is not “out there” but “in here.” While many Americans continue to believe in the old morality, there is now a new morality in America which may be called the morality of the inner self, the morality of self-fulfillment….

Thus we have the first way in which the cultural left is responsible for 9/11. The left has produced a moral shift in American society that has resulted in a deluge of gross depravity and immorality. This deluge threatens to engulf our society and is imposing itself on the rest of the world.

I agree, since the same ideas formed one of the two core themes of my 2003 booklet, Erasing America, from which I will quote extensive excerpts:

Alongside the question of whether “America” still means European America or the multicultural America that is replacing it, there is also the question of whether “America” means the bourgeois Judeo-Christian America that existed up to the 1960s or the hedonist-egalitarian America that is supplanting it….

In the traditional or Classical-Christian view, life is experienced as participation in (or as rebellion against) a comprehensive order of existence—consisting of a natural order, a social order, and a divine order—that precedes the existence of the individual. The basic values and institutions of society are affirmed by its members because they see them as grounded, not in the arbitrary will of men, but in truth….

In the modern or Secular-Democratic view, life is experienced as an expansion of the unfettered human will into a reality created by man himself. Man is essentially good, and there is no higher truth from which he receives the order of his being. In effect, man’s preferences define what is good. The basic institutions of society are not grounded in any natural or transcendent order, but in human desire, and therefore must be continually reshaped to satisfy ever-changing human needs and demands. Moreover, since there are no standards based on higher truth, all needs, preferences, and demands are of equal value….

… Among other things, this radical individualism signifies the breakdown of normative boundaries of social behavior that have characterized all previous stages of Western personality and Western culture. It attempts to “liberate” the self from the psychic and moral structures that make individuality—and civilization itself—possible, while keeping all the material goods and appurtenances of civilization in place….

Such phenomena symbolize the Totally Liberated Self, even as, by being taken for granted by most people, they demonstrate its irresistible dominion over our society. … [T]hese ubiquitous and therefore invisible habits of hyper-individualism make it very difficult for people living in contemporary society to adhere, in any publicly meaningful way, to the bourgeois-Christian norms that once characterized our culture. Indeed, the culture we now inhabit is not so much a culture as an anti-culture, since, in its attempt to liberate the human personality from all “givens,” it erases the very idea of a common heritage transmitted from one generation to the next….

That disease, which is identical to the loss of traditional Western order described above, consists in the breakdown and disappearance of the West’s foundational belief in an objective truth higher than man, and in an essential nature of things not subject to man’s will; its consequent loss of the ability to hold to concrete moral standards and the institutions that embody and support them; and its assertion of individual desire and choice as the supreme guiding principles of society. No longer believing in the “givens” of nature, tradition, and divine revelation, the modern and postmodern West has stripped away the quality of transcendence from every sphere of life where it was once commonly recognized and experienced … with the aim that human beings should not feel encroached upon by any standard external to their immediate impulses and wishes….

The moral suicide and the national suicide proceed in tandem. Without a belief in the objective reality and desirability of the good, contemporary people have no wish to “impose their judgments on others,” since, as they see it, their own judgments cannot be grounded in anything beyond their personal preferences. Without the instinctive faith that their society possesses an essential character or embodies a higher ideal (except for the ideal of borderless freedom and tolerance), they feel no duty to defend their society against obvious threats to its long-term cultural and even political survival. Rejecting both transcendence and tradition, they end up believing in just two things: the individual’s unrestrained right to define his own notion of truth according to his own preferences, as the U.S. Supreme Court put it in Planned Parenthood v. Casey; and the aggregation of all such radically free individuals in a globalized system where all desires (except the desire for moral truth and community) will be equally valued and equally fulfilled.

However, the reader may have noticed that my ideas do not exactly fit D’Souza’s on this point, because I do not say that Muslims are threatened only by the cultural left; I say they are also threatened by Bush-style universal democratism. I will close by repeating my quote from my October 2002 FrontPage Magazine article:

Universal democratism requires the reduction of all human beings to a low common denominator: the abstract individual possessing the same equal rights as everyone else in the world, but stripped of the social, biological, and transcendent dimensions that provide the real context and meaning of human life. And that’s why Muslims, who of all cultural groups are the most incompatible with Western individualism, are the most threatened by our naïve and arrogant claims of global sameness—and by our attempt to construct a new world order in the image of that sameness.

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Tom S. writes:

I agree that D’Souza has a few points correct. I guess I’ll take the “Freud” position; Sigmund Freud called himself “half a Marxist” because Marx said that there would be war, privation, crime, and suffering, but that the Revolution would solve all problems. Freud said that he believed the first part. D’Souza says that the Left has destroyed our morality, degraded our culture, depraved our young people, and shattered our society, and that this is why Muslims war against us. I believe the first part…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 18, 2007 12:42 AM | Send