What's So Great about America by Dinesh D'Souza
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Book Reviews of What's So Great about America
Book Review: A great book
Summary: 5 Stars
I found this book very patriotic and interesting. I think every American should read this.Book Review: Polarizing book, but must-read
Summary: 4 Stars
Written in the aftermath of 9/11, What's so Great About America? was meant to address those multiculturalists who felt America `had it coming', those who did not understand why Muslims from halfway around the world would want to kill Americans, and those without the moral `self-confidence' to weather the coming fight, something D'Souza argues is a requirement of war unique to America. In a nutshell, he argues, with some interesting digressions, why America is worth fighting for.
He begins by explaining `why they hate us'. He explains the intractability of the clash of civilizations, the incompatibility of Islam with the West. Due to the nature of Islam, we cannot breezily brush over our differences, we cannot `agree to disagree'- something an American instinctively reaches for when a discussion reaches an impasse. This is because it is the very freedom that is the cornerstone of what America stands for that they find so repugnant. And it's not just that Islam is all about living your life for Allah and at the direction of Allah, which is entirely incompatible with the concept of freedom. They also feel it is that very freedom that has made America a morally bankrupt society. In essence a flip side to the question raised in the book's title, D'Souza goes on to discuss the question of America's morality in great detail.
An argument against the West has always been that it achieved its success through might and oppression of weaker peoples. But this completely ignores the fact that the West wasn't always the strongest, that there was a time when Huns and Muslims conquered and ruled over Western peoples. The West only became stronger gradually by exploring other lands and absorbing the good ideas they found. Admittedly they also imposed ideas on the colonies, primarily Christianity, but D'Souza argues that from Christianity came the idea of progress and it's progress that led to the three inventions he believes accounts for the Western domination of the current day: science, democracy, and capitalism. D'Souza convincingly argues that the targets of Western colonialism benefitted in the long-term where they absorbed Western advances, just as the West overcame their inferiority in the Middle Ages, when Islam and China reigned supreme, through absorption. This is demonstrated even now as China and India have risen through the use of Western capitalistic ideas while the Islamic world has remained poor and irrelevant because they seem to feel they have nothing to learn from the West. In fact, it's these three particular Western ideas that Islamic leaders are standing directly opposed to in this fight.
D'Souza makes an interesting digression to discuss the assimilation of different cultures into America, primarily by contrasting the Asian-American strategy versus that of blacks, before moving to what I thought was the most intriguing section of the book, the section where he takes the morality question head-on. He briefly addresses technology and capitalism's impact on social degradation, which is something argued pretty regularly within America itself, but points to the 60's revolution and eighteenth century French philosopher Jean Jaques Rousseau as the primary causes. He argues that it was Rousseau's philosophy of living life in the way the individual feels is best for them, social mores be damned, that stuck in the 60's and remains in vogue today. Rousseau expounded an `inner freedom' that instructed us to look deeply into our souls and to do with our lives what we find to be true to ourselves. D'Souza calls this `authenticity'. The prevalence of this idea in our culture can be seen today in the popularity of self-help books, which are popular because the flip side of authenticity has been an explosion of identity crises for those who cannot effectively read their inner tea leaves, and the love of artists, who are seen to be the rebels of society living the dreams of everyone else. D'Souza seems to agree with social commentators who in turn seem to agree with the Islamic world that Americans on the whole live immorally. But whereas Muslims believe it's freedom itself that's the cause of this immorality, D'Souza believes it's freedom without purpose that's the problem. He believes it's not enough to say that your inner self dictates what you choose, but there must be some compass that helps you choose wisely. The conservative's mission therefore should be to `steer the American ethic of authenticity to its highest manifestation and to ennoble freedom by showing it the path of virtue'.
In the end he thinks, despite America's identity crisis, that the path of freedom is closest to the path of virtue. He acknowledges that as long as we have freedom, we will have people who choose wrongly. However, he argues the virtue of the Islamic world is not authentic because it is forced. Thus, only freedom can get us to true virtue, and this is what's so great about the American ideal.
I found this book interesting. D'Souza is a sharp writer who excellently crafts his arguments. While the purpose of the book was to explain what's so great about America, he was able to be effectively even-handed in his arguments, I believe, because he is an immigrant and can spot things that are unique to America, including negative traits. Sometimes his language veered into the zealous patriotism of that time, but he mostly kept that sort of thing in check. Even though this book was written seven years ago, it's still relevant as we're still debating most of the issues he addresses, both internally and with the rest of the world.
Book Review: No Apologies Necessary
Summary: 4 Stars
Dinesh D'Souza, who immigrated to America from India, has had great success in this country. He is both a bestselling author and a former White House policy analyst and he wants to tell the world exactly What's So Great About America. And please note that there is no question mark at the end of his book's title.
If Dinesh D'Souza or his publisher were concerned with being politically correct, this book would never have seen the light of day. D'Souza is not interested in defending an idealized version of America. Rather, he describes the real America, both the good and the bad, and reminds American citizens that they should be proud of themselves and their country despite the peevish criticism that the United States receives from others who blame them and their country for everything that goes wrong in the world. Not surprisingly, America's harsh critics conveniently only tell one side of the story and never give the United States credit for any of the good things that happen around the world.
Fair warning: what follows makes no attempt at being politically correct. It is D'Souza's blunt criticism of the "blame America first" crowd, and the Muslim world, in particular.
D'Souza makes four main points in What's So Great About America:
1. Much of the world hates the United States and her citizens.
2. There is really not much that America can do about being hated because it comes with the territory.
3. Modern American and Western society truly is the best that the world has to offer.
4. Islamic society is striking out at the West in order to mask its own humiliating failures.
The "blame America first" bunch, according to D'Souza is made up of three elements: leftist intellectuals largely located in Europe and the Third World, American multiculturalists who want us to believe that all cultures are equal, and Islamic fundamentalists. He contends that criticism from the intellectuals is largely a result of childish jealousy resulting from the fact that Europe's power and influence is a shadow of what it was a few decades ago. The unhappiness of Third World intellectuals is even more easily explained by the observation that, if they admitted how good America really is, they would at the same time be forced to also admit how bad their own countries are.
American multiculturalists are another story. Their multiculturalism is largely based on simple anti-Americanism and a desire to apologize to the rest of the world for all that America does today or has ever done in the past. In their view, all cultures are equal, regardless of the fact that some primitive societies have accomplished little or nothing even up to the present day and others, such as Islamic society, have taken a giant step backward in the last three centuries.
In D'Souza's view, it is Islamic fundamentalists who have the most legitimate reason for hating America because America is a strong threat to the Islamic world. But this threat does not come from either the American military or from America's solid support for Israel. It is the very idea of what America stands for that is such a threat to the Islamic way of life. The American way of life is one in which each citizen is free to shape his own life in ways that are entirely inner-directed and in which the government has no say. This concept is likely to win the hearts and minds of Muslims exposed to it and that threatens not only those in charge of Islamic society but the very sacredness of the Muslim home. Radical Islam sees this as the greatest threat that the Muslim world has faced since the days of Mohamed himself.
For that reason, Islamic fundamentalist leadership wants to stop the spread of American ideals at any cost but, even if America agreed to cooperate with them, we do not have the power necessary to keep our ideals and our culture from crossing the borders of the Muslim world. We live in an age in which the flow of information, thanks largely to television, movies and the internet, takes on a life of its own. That flow is simply unstoppable.
Muslim fundamentalists recognize that nothing about their culture appeals to outsiders and that it has no chance of expanding outside its given region. In fact, as D'Souza points out, the opposite is happening and it is the West that is making inroads into Muslim society. They know, too, that they have no real chance to conquer the West and bin Laden-style terrorism is a desperate attempt to strike out at a culture they both loathe and greatly fear. Unfortunately for both sides, this means that the West will have to continue to respond with force as long as radical Islam insists that death and destruction are to be its only exports other than an ever diminishing supply of crude oil.
Those who have grown weary of an endless repetition of the same short list of what is so wrong about America will welcome D'Souza's analysis of, and counterargument to, the main points thrown out most often by America's harshest critics. At the very least, this book will arm those who love this country with a framework for defending it and for regaining the pride that Americans should feel for how truly great a country America really is.
Book Review: The Right Stuff
Summary: 4 Stars
Give the man credit: he has an opinion, and he has guts. Anyone who's attended a top university in the US knows the courage it takes to challenge political orthodoxy in the rarefied palaces of academe. Yet during the campus backlash years of the Reagan administration, when students and professors busied themselves with anti-apartheid sit-ins and protests over human rights abuses in Nicaragua, Dinesh D'Souza made a splash, and more than a few enemies, when he founded the dissident conservative college paper "Dartmouth Review". The very name, with its less than subtle evocations of another well-known conservative maverick, caused a collective shudder of fear and loathing through the armies of radical activists standing guard over the fading glories of the 60s.
Since that time D'Souza has carved a niche of respect for himself in American intellectual life with his writings on American politics and sociology. His controversial recent works, "Iliberal Education" and "The End of Racism", were an out and out declaration of war on the system of leftist elites which preside over the development of thought at the nation's universities, and a systematic and devasting dissection of the cult of political correctness and its pernicious effect on the psyche of American society.
In "What's So Great About America", a lengthy post 9/11 analysis of what's gone right in the US and wrong most everywhere else in the world, D'Souza is at his most convincing and least doctinaire. He's matured as a writer, and approaches this work with the confidence of a battle scarred survivor with no axe to grind, just hard-won wisdom to share in a dangerous, unsettled world.
It's refreshing how unafraid he is to put controversial topics on the table, challenging the reader to interpret only the facts that history gives us, the truth as we know it, unalloyed by ideological contamination. He fuses heart-felt patriotism of the old fashioned kind with reasoned, thoughtful analysis. An intellectual who actually pens chapters with bold faced titles "The Reparations Fallacy: What African Americans Owe America", and "Two Cheers For Colonialism: How the West Prevailed", and then lays out his ideas with good natured, and convincing, pragmatism, offers an unequalled voice of reason in the dark forest of relativsm where American thought languishes.
Given the timing of "What's So Great..", it's important that a work like this comes to us courtesy of a recent immigrant. There's a perspective here impossible to duplicate among our nation's coddled natural born citizenry, many of whom condemn their native land as they would a resented parent who's spoiled them into impossible expectations. D'Souza brings none of this baggage to his work. He's grateful and proud to be a US citizen without feeling any need to disrespect his culture of birth. He's just seen the superiority of life here, the energy, the possibilties.
In his chapter "Becoming American", he lays out the central and simple idea that life in America is rich and bountiful not because the streets are paved with gold, but because people are allowed to create their own individuality here as they can nowhere else in the world. Accountant, Bohemian, novelist, politician, internet entrepreneur, painter...the choice here is infinite, and it is yours. The individual is the starting point of everything in American society.
This message has a ringing authenticity from someone who hails from a world where fate is prescribed, religion and God dominate, and individual initiative is spurned and in many cases squashed. There's no smugness in D'Souza's message. He articulates the hopes of immigrants to this nation for four centuries. And as uplifting as his analysis is, it's equally unsettling in its assessment of world hatred and resentment.
He draws the conclusion that history will ensure that right will prevail, and that America is nothing less than the beacon on the hill for a benighted world. His voice is consonant with the neo-conservatives and their doctrine of spreading peace and prosperity through democracy. But his tone is more modulated than theirs, reminding us of the intensity of the enemy's determination, and warning that, however worthwhile and necessary, the struggle towards a liberal world society will require all the force of unified will the nation can muster.
Book Review: This is a serious essay. Read It!
Summary: 4 Stars
Despite the one-sidedness one comes to expect of D'Souza's books, this is a serious piece of research. D'Souza's glimpse into the worldview of the Egyptian philosopher Sayyid Qutb and what Qutb has to say about America alone is worth the price of the book.
Equally, his discussion of the philosophical basis of American Democracy and the balancing act required by the founding fathers to reach agreement on the Constitution are subtle and nuanced treatments of the topic unlikely to be found in everyday contemporary political writings about the U.S. -- whether within or outside the US.
Also, it is not all bad that under a thin guise of praising America, the author gives us a good bit of tongue-lashing -- a taste of what non-Americans (really) think of us. Beneath the thin veil of syrupy accolades, he issues a broadside against a long list of contemporary American social evils, a broadside that although it comes without warning, seems richly deserved and most of the times, very constructive. It helps that D'Souza's writing is lively well thought out and enthusiastic.
The good news is that his critique centers only on the past two generations of liberal tinkering, which has, as the author rightly points out, been in large part responsible for many of America's current social maladies. The bad news is that he leaves unscathed the other half of the problem, "conservative tinkering".
Also, one senses a deep inner nervousness when D'Souza discusses issues of race in America. Even though he has written a decent book on the topic, he is most superficial and least convincing when expounding on the issue of race. I find his racial analysis utterly lacking in depth or sophistication and even of only minimal honesty.
Perhaps it is unfair to say so (and I mean no disrespect) but I can only imagine this sensitivity to have more to do with being transposed from Indian Brahmin to designated or honorary American white. Undoubtedly, transposed Brahmin identity (awarded at birth like whiteness) and sympathies must lie on the side of whiteness. I have no other way of accounting for this gap in D'Souza's otherwise clean and uncompromising thinking.
In both this and his book entitled "The End of Racism," the author proves that he is a decent researcher even as he fiercely maintains his ideological blinders in the "on position." One must shudder to think how much more constructive and useful Mr. D'Souza's contribution would be were he to just once rise above being a Republican ideologue and for once taking off his conservative and Brahmin blinkers.
Despite all of this, I am hooked; I will keep reading everything he writes because, if nothing else, D'Souza is maturing. Sooner rather than later he will become the academic he is struggling to become and I hope to be around when this intellectual explosion occurs.
I give the book four stars.