What's So Great about America
by Dinesh D'Souza

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• ISBN13: 9780142003015
• Condition: New
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Book Reviews of What's So Great about America

Book Review: Thank You Dinesh!
Summary: 5 Stars

I read D'Souza's chapters "Two Cheers for Colonialism" and "What African-Americans Owe America" and his logic and assertions in both chapters were so flawed that I sat in stunned disbelief. I haven't read anything so blindly and unthinkingly conservative in quite a while, but I have been reading many academic studies and books and other explicitly "liberal" publications, and the lat-ter are much, much more scholarly rigorous - It's not even close!

For instance, D'Souza is so contradictory: (1) He abhors moral relativism, but as one of many examples, he rationalizes the hypocritical slaveholding of some of the Founding Fathers as a necessary evil to establish the new nation; and (2) He asserts that a major reason why the West became so powerful and great was because of its scientific heritage - yet he avoids scientific inquiry into almost all of the issues he raises and often relies simply on unsubstantiated assertions and a host of straw man arguments and ad hominem attacks (e.g. using some alleged inadequacy of a particular individual like Jesse Jackson to implicate the entire left as extreme).

I was really appalled by D'Souza's absolutist language - as if he couldn't possibly be wrong (e.g. the West developed because of its love of science, democracy, and capitalism and not primarily because of colonialism, slavery, and other "evils." Leaving aside his pathetically inadequate descriptions of the history of democracy and capitalism in America, he doesn't even provide any evidence that directly weighs the impact of any of these factors on Western development. It's just laughable. If he was really so in awe of the West's love of science his conclusions would have been much more tentative and balanced.

I was also disturbed by how he used "leftist" arguments that have never actually been advanced by "leftist" academics as proof of the illegitimacy of leftist thinking. It was truly absurd when he kept asserting that "racism" or "the legacy of slavery" weren't explanations for black inequality (and tried to ridicule the apparently very popular target, Jesse Jackson, in the process). I mean, social scientists have advanced beyond such simple cause and effect thinking decades ago (if they ever did think so simply about such complex social phe-nomena as social inequality). Now social scientists typically claim that if white racism disappeared this very moment and the negative direct legacy of slavery was minimal, there would still remain gross inequality between blacks and whites-in part because of accumulated white social and economic advantages over hundreds of years and the resulting structural inequality (e.g. the jobs-housing mismatch, educational disparities, housing segregation, concentrated poverty, shifts in the American economy away from mobility-enhancing occupa-tions in manufacturing and other areas to high-skilled service sector jobs and overseas production, and on and on...). There are literally dozens of social scientists (e.g. economists, sociologists, political scientists, psychologists) that study each one of these factors for a career; and they are much less confi-dent about their conclusions than D'Souza even as they rely upon the "scientific method" that D'Souza alleges to deify to study these phenomena.

Also, in his genetics discussion as a potential explanation for black inequal-ity, where's his discussion of: (1) the fact that blacks' IQs (and others) have been rising substantially (the "Flynn Effect") since IQ tests were first conducted in the early 20th century; (2) the fact that blacks' average scores have been converging somewhat with whites' average scores since the 1970s; (3) the fact that even in countries where two groups are of the same "race," the more pow-erful high-status groups typically have higher average IQs than the more marginalized low-status groups (e.g. Protestants vs. Catholics in Northern Ireland, Japanese vs. Koreans in Japan, etc.); (4) the fact that almost all of the studies that have more or less directly looked at the genetic link between race and IQ by, for instance, looking at black and white children raised from a very early age in very similar environments, show similar IQs (e.g. the children of black and white American servicemen raised in Germany after WWII by their white German mothers had virtually the same average IQs); and last but not least, (5) the fact that studies that control for the total effect of childhood social environment in America show that blacks and whites scores are virtually identical. I mean, was any of this important to consider!? Even if he successfully rebutted all five of these widely acknowledged potential explanatory factors (and a host of others), shouldn't they at least have been considered? Especially in light of white Americans' (and others) strong past and present assumptions or "suspicions" about black genetic inferiority (which even he acknowledged ex-isted - i.e. Thomas Jefferson)?...

... With scholarly lightweights like D'Souza and Why America is So Great as a high-profile intellectual founda-tion, this devastating post-9/11 Conservative Backlash through which much of the world is currently suffering couldn't possibly maintain its marginal popular American support for much longer. The truth will prevail - one can only hope so!

Summary of What's So Great about America

United States Books

• Books > Subjects > History > Americas
• Social Sciences