Thursday, November 8, 2007

Dinesh D'Souza: Christianity, Islam, and the War on Terror


D’Souza opens the lecture:
“I was considering using the podium, but then I realized that I had remembered to wear pants.”
D’Souza attacks a flawed question:
“I’m like the mosquito in the nudist colony… just trying to decide where to begin.”



I don’t know that our generation – the World War II generation – is the greatest generation, as it has been called. But I think it’s the last generation. From the time of the founding fathers of America to the WWII generation, there had been a consistent form of morality. Call it external morality. Everyone – believers, nonbelievers, Protestants, Catholics, Jews – believed in some sort of greater order that guided your life. Not necessarily God, but there were very few people who did not hold this conception. There was some sort of outside force that guided our conscience. It pulled against us when we wanted to do something. It acted as a guide that tells us something is wrong even if it might be to our Darwinian or economic personal advantage to do it. There is a standard that regulates our behavior. Starting in the sixties, there came about this new, internal morality. Some form of guiding inner voice that would speak to us and lead us along our personal paths. I remember going to my father in Bombay and telling him that I wanted to become a writer. He told me to do something useful with my life. No, but you don’t understand, I said. I’m being called to be a writer, I have this calling. The idea of personal fulfillment was foreign to him. I rejected the Harvard business school to be a writer? It sounds to me, said my father, like you have this little creature inside of you. And this little creature talks to you, tells you what to do, and you talk back. It wasn’t that my father was necessarily opposed to my proposition. It was that he just didn’t understand where I was coming from. This inner guiding morality is new. And it’s easy to get caught up in this inner-outer polarity. The “outer” morality is an inner morality as well, in that it is inner decision making and that it is guided by an individual conscience. The difference is in the source of the two moralities. The source of the outer morality is God, or a higher order, some outside force. The inner morality is cut off from the outside. It’s purely individualistic, rather capricious in this sense. What I’m getting at is that this new model makes absolutely no sense anywhere in the Muslim world. It just doesn’t fit with their model of reality.


We need to reconsider the terminology we use when are talking about the War on Terror. First of all, it isn’t a war on terror any more than World War II was a war on kamikaze-ism. Terror is a tactic, not the enemy. Suicide bombers: suicide is a term that implies a desire to end life. Someone who jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge is sick of life, despises life. This is not true for the suicide bomber. The suicide bomber wants to live. He is, however, willing to sacrifice his life for a greater cause. If the enemy is threatening to destroy his way of life, his family, his moral values, his religion, then the afflicted is willing to take desperate measures. Also, fundamentalism is a Western term, a Western idea. It is meant to deal with the Western ways of life, Christianity, and Western problems. It is not an appropriate term to apply to Islam. A fundamentalist Christian is someone who believes that the words of the Bible are the literal truth. That, however, is something that all Muslims believe, that the Q’uran is the literal word of God, to be read literally. If you don’t believe this, then you are not a Muslim. I’m not implying that all Muslims are extremists, I’m just saying that fundamentalism doesn’t apply to Islam the way it does to Christianity. We need new terminology.
The key point is how to move forward in the War. Christians have much in common with traditional Muslims. Our belief in a single god, in family values, in various currently controversial marital, sexual issues – we should be supporting the traditional Muslims. It’s the extremists that are the danger, yet they are so small a sliver of the Islamic population. A problem is that the extremists are quickly converting many traditionalists to their views. Caught in between siding with what is essentially seen as the Devil – the West, America – and a fellow Islamic sect, traditionalists side with the people are promoting their own religion. They don’t like the extremist violence, but it seems that they have little choice. The Jews have all stopped believing, the Christians no longer believe; the Muslims are the only ones left of the Abrahamic traditions that believe. They must fight to preserve their way of life. So the problem is that if we kill one hundred extremists, well there are a thousand traditionalists who just converted to extremism. What we need to do is drive a wedge in between traditionalism and extremism. The traditionalists are not our enemy. Islam is not the enemy.


A problem is that the image that most of the non-European world has of America is one of shameless debauchery and materialism and immorality. That is the image broadcasted across the world by television and pop culture. In America, we know that this gross pop culture is not America. It is merely pop culture. We see the underlying values. We have morality and decency. But in the East, there is no representation of this. They know no other side of America – how would they? All they see is MTV, and when they do see an American politician trying to speak to the Muslim world, he doesn’t deal with their problems. He purports this sort of fake judicious equality. America says it’s the umpire, but that’s a lie; that’s not how the Iraqis see it. America is a player. So to many Muslims in the East, America is the devil. America is seen as an entity that is threatening, even preventing, the Muslim way of life. An important question for Americans to think about is, Is this true? Is America an Eastern poison? So how do we deal with this awful representation of America abroad? We can’t and we shouldn’t sensor our culture. We need intelligent representatives and politicians to speak in the East, people who directly debate their problems. The East needs Westerners who understand them, what they want, not just Westerners who think they can solve Eastern problems by applying a glib Western panacea. 


Why do Muslims seem to point out America as the root of all-evil? Why is America being attacked and not Europe or Russia or China? Aren’t they just as materialistic and wealthy and against Islamic sentiments as we are? Well yes. But that is because they are sporting the Western values that have become so contagious, that are spreading throughout the world and perverting preexisting paradigms. And the Islamic world does not hate science either. Many of their extremist leaders were scientists. Bin Laden was a petroleum engineer. The motto in much of Asia right now is “Modernization: yes. Westernization: no.” They want American technology but not the value structure that comes with it.