Book Review of “What’s so Great about America?” by Dinesh D’Souza

“Why are some countries more successful than others?” I’m sure this question has crossed the minds of quite a few people. Many books have been written to answer this question. Some of them have propounded evolutionary and environmental theories while other hypotheses are rooted in religion. Others state that the rise and fall of nations is cyclical. Every nation has its glorious day in the sun before fading away such as Great Britain and the Roman Empire before that. China is also upheld as an example of a nation that was once great, lost its former glory and is now making a comeback. I myself have obsessed over this question for quite a long time and in my quest to find a reasonable answer, I devoured quite a number of books. Over time, the results of my research have basically yielded one overriding conclusion. I affirm that the history of the nation of Israel and the gift of monotheism this nation has bequeathed to the world culminating in the coming of the messiah has been the one decisive factor that has shaped history. At this juncture, I am sure that quite a few people will write me off as being one of those religious nuts who views everything through the lens of a biased Biblical worldview. Well, to be honest with you, they would be right. I do view everything through a Torah-based worldview because I believe it is God’s word to mankind. But that’s not the point here. The point is, am I right? Based on the socio-historical and existing empirical evidences, does my affirmation hold water? In support of my theory, I offer to you the following quotes from one of America’s sharpest political thinkers as he explores the real roots behind what has made the United States of America a beacon of light to the other nations of the world. Be prepared to have the foundations of your worldview shaken at its very foundations.

“I am impressed at the fact that Americans cannot fight a war and say they are doing it for strategic advantage or for oil; they have to be convinced, or to convince themselves, that they are fighting to expel a tyrant, or to secure democracy, or to ensure human rights. In other societies there are multiple measures of social recognition, such as family background, education, caste, and so on; in the United States, it pretty much comes down to how much money you have. Even so, ‘old money’ carries very little prestige in America; all it means is that your grandfather was a robber baron or a bootlegger. As a frequent speaker at American companies, I am struck by the ease with which Palestinians and Jews, Hindus and Muslims, Turks and Armenians, all work together in apparent disregard of the bitter historical grievances that have shattered their communities of origin. Elsewhere in the world the poor aspire to middle-class respectability, but in the United States the wealthy seek to dress and act like middle-class people, or even like bums. American children seem to believe quite literally that you can ‘be whatever you want to be,’ implausible though this seems to people in other places. American parents seem unnaturally eager to befriend their children and to treat them as equals, yet the children seem firmly convinced that they are far wiser than their elders. Young people in the United States ‘go away to college’ and typically never return home to live. In many other countries this would be regarded as abandoning one’s offspring. Americans are the friendliest people you will encounter, but they have few friends. Most people in the United States do not believe in idleness and pursue even leisure with a kind of strenuous effort. There are very weird people in America, but nobody seems struck or bothered by the amount of weirdness. In many countries old people believe their life is over and pretty much wait to die, while in America people in their seventies pursue the pleasures of life, including remarriage and sexual gratification, with a zeal I find unnerving. While the funeral is a standard public ceremony in most countries, funerals are a very rare public sight in America, and no one likes to go to them. It seems that Americans don’t really die: they just disappear.” Pg. 32

“We live in a world that has been decisively shaped by Western civilization. Travel to virtually any part of the globe, and the signs and symbols of Western dominance are prominent.” Pg. 37

“The British left India in 1947, and India became free. The Indians could easily have cast off their suits and ties and returned to their native garb. They had the option of returning to ancient tribal modes of government. The Indians could have outlawed the English language and required all education to be in Hindustani or one of the native dialects. But the Indians did not do any of these things. They decided on their own, and for their benefit, to continue doing many of the things that they had learned from the British.” Pg. 38

“If one begins with the multicultural premise that all cultures are equal, then the world as it is makes very little sense. After all, we live in a world where, by virtually any measure of achievement or success, some cultures are advanced and others are backward. To take one measure of success that everybody seems to want-economic development-it is obvious that the West is vastly ahead of everyone else. There is simply no comparison between, say, the per capita income of Europe and America and that of the nations of sub-Saharan Africa. If sub-Saharan Africa were to sink into the ocean tomorrow, the world economy would be largely unaffected.” Pg. 40

KEY QUESTION:
“Why did Western civilization become so dominant in the modern era? How did this massive transformation of the world begin? This important question is rendered all the more provocative by the realization that for most of human history other civilizations have proven far more advanced than the West: more advanced in learning, in wealth, in exploration, in inventions, and in cultural sophistication and works of the mind. How did the West accumulate so much economic, political, and military power that it was able to conquer and subdue all the other cultures of the world put together?”
Pg. 43 & 45

BEFORE WE ANSWER THIS QUESTION, LET’S EXPLODE THE COMMON EXISTING THEORIES.

1) THE ENVIRONMENTAL THEORY
“According to this view, cultures are the product of location and natural resources, and whether a culture develops or remains stagnant depends on such factors as the availability of mineral resources, climate, proximity to rivers, and such. The most eloquent expression of this argument is given by Jared Diamond in his bestselling book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond argues that Europe enjoyed immense natural advantages in prehistoric times that gave it a ‘head start’ over the other cultures of the world.”

WHY THE ENVIRONMENTAL THEORY IS FALLACIOUS:
“If Diamond is right that Europe enjoyed a natural advantage from ancient times, then why did this lead not become manifest until modern times? For more than a thousand years-say between A.D. 500 and A.D 1500- the West was a civilizational laggard and showed no signs of becoming the world’s dominant civilization. As we have seen, all bets were on China and the Islamic world. For the success of the West in the past five hundred years in ‘coming from behind’ to take over the world, Diamond and the environmental school have no plausible explanation.” Pg. 43

2) THE OPPRESSION THEORY:
“According to this view, the reason that Western civilization became dominant in the past five hundred years is because it is evil. Oppression-and specifically the crimes of ethnocentrism, colonialism, imperialism, and racism-is said to be the key to Western success. In other words, the West grew rich and powerful by beating up everybody else and taking their stuff.” Perhaps the most powerful exponent of oppression theory is the anti-colonial writer Frantz Fanon. Fanon writes, ‘European opulence has been founded on slavery. The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races.” Pg. 44-45

WHY THE OPPRESSION THEORY IS FALLACIOUS:
There is nothing intrinsically Western about the practices of ethnocentrism, colonialism, and slavery. Hence, these cannot be the underlying reasons behind Western dominance. Besides this statement seems to beg the question, because what we are really trying to discover is the source of power that allowed the Western brand of ethnocentrism, colonialism and slavery to dominate. In other words, why is the Western brand of ethnocentrism, colonialism and slavery superior to let’s say Islam’s or China’s brand of ethnocentrism, colonialism and slavery? Regardless, I’ve gotten ahead of myself. The real answer is that the West succeeded in spite of ethnocentrism, colonialism and slavery, not because of it.

DEBUNKING ETHNOCENTRISM
“When we look to other cultures, however, we find that there is nothing distinctively Western about ethnocentrism. It is present in abundance beyond Western shores. The Chinese, for instance, believed themselves to be the Middle Kingdom, the center of the universe. Of course, Islam resembled Christianity in believing itself in possession of the whole revealed truth, with everyone else consigned to ignorance and darkness. Indeed, it is frequently the case that the less developed a tribe, the more ethnocentric it is. What this research confirms is that ethnocentrism is universal, and it is not necessarily substantiated by civilizational achievement.　WHAT IS DISTINCTIVELY WESTERN IS NOT ETHNOCENTRISM (or racism), BUT A PROFOUND AND HIGHLY BENEFICIAL EFFORT TO TRANSCEND ETHNOCENTRISM.” Pg. 49-50

“It was the West, after all, which invented the notion of the ‘noble savage.’ We take this curiosity so much for granted that is surprises many to learn that other cultures historically have not shared it.” Pg. 50


3) THE COLONIALISM THEORY
“Those who identify colonialism and empire only with the West either have no sense of history or have forgotten about the Persian empire, the Macedonian empire, the Islamic empire, the Mongol empire, the Chinese empire, and the Aztec and Inca empires in the Americas. Shouldn’t the Arabs be paying reparations for their destruction of the Byzantine and Persian empires? Come to think of it, shouldn’t the Byzantine and Persian people also pay reparations to the descendants of the people they subjugated? And while we’re at it, shouldn’t the Muslims reimburse the Spaniards for their seven-hundred-year rule?” pg. 54

“As the example of Islamic Spain suggests, the people of the West have participated in the game of conquest not as the perpetrator, but also as the victims. Ancient Greece, for example, was conquered by Rome, and the Roman Empire itself was destroyed by the invasion of the Huns, Vandals, Lombards, and Visigoths from northern Europe. America, as we all know, was itself a colony of England before its war of independence; England, before that, was subjugated and ruled by the Norman kings from France. Those of us living today are taking on a large project if we are going to settle upon a rule of social justice based upon figuring out whose ancestors did what to whom.” Pg. 54

4) THE SLAVERY THEORY
“Perhaps it is not colonialism but slavery that is distinctively Western. Actually, no. Slavery has existed in all known civilizations. In his study Slavery and Social Death, the West Indian sociologist Orlando Patterson writes, “Slavery has existed from the dawn of human history, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region on earth that has not at some time harbored the institution.” The Sumerians and Babylonians practiced slavery, as did the ancient Egyptians. The Chinese, the Indians, and the Arabs all had slaves. Slavery was widespread in Greece and Rome, and also in sub-Saharan Africa. American Indians practiced slavery long before Columbus set one foot on this continent.” Pg. 54

DEBUNKING THE SLAVERY THEORY
“If slavery is not distinctively Western, what is? The movement to end slavery! Abolition is an exclusively Western institution. The historian J.M. Roberts writes, “No civilization once dependent on slavery has every been able to eradicate it, except the Western.” Pg. 55

“The uniqueness of this Western approach is confirmed by the little known fact that African chiefs, who profited from the slave trade, sent delegations to the West to protest the abolition of slavery.” Pg. 55

“THE DESCENDANTS OF AFRICAN SLAVES OWE THEIR FREEDOM TO THE EXERTIONS OF WHITE STRANGERS, NOT TO THE PEOPLE OF AFRICA WHO BETRAYED THEM AND SOLD THEM.” Pg. 55 (capitalized emphasis mine-Rich Oka)

“A trenchant observation on the matter was offered years ago by Muhammad Ali, shortly after his defeat of George Foreman for the heavyweight title. Upon returning to the United States, Ali was asked by a reporter, ‘Champ, what did you think of Africa?’ Ali replied, ‘Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat.” Pg. 56

“But starting in the seventeenth century, certain segments of Christianity-initially the Quakers, then the evangelical Christians-began to interpret biblical equality as forbidding the ownership of one man by another. Only then, for the first time, did slavery become a political problem.” Pg. 111

HOW THEN DID THE WEST BECOME DOMINANT?

“I want to suggest that the reason the West became the dominant civilization in the modern era is because it invented three institutions: science, democracy, and capitalism. These institutions did not exist anywhere else in the world, nor did they exist in the West until the modern era. Admittedly all three institutions are based on human impulses and aspirations that are universal. But these aspirations were given a unique expression in Western civilization, largely due to the influence of Athens and Jerusalem-Athens representing the principle of autonomous reason and Jerusalem representing the revealed truths of Judaism and Christianity.”

HOW DID SCIENCE DEVELOP IN THE WEST?

“A notion crucial to the development of science is the idea of development itself-the idea of progress. Sociologist Robert Nisbet terms it “one of the master ideas of the West.” We see it, for instance, in the teenager who says to her mother, “Mom, how can you believe that? This is 2002!” That cliché is freighted with philosophical significance: it presumes a higher consciousness for the present than existed in the past. The belief in progress is also evident in the widespread expectation that our knowledge and our economy will continue to grow, and that our children will know more and have a better life than we do. Europeans and Americans take these things for granted, but they are novel concepts that arose recently in the West.”

“The idea of progress, like the idea of reason, is a doctrine that cannot be proved but must be taken on faith.” Pg. 63

“The modern West is the only civilization to entertain the idea that there is a meaningful pattern to history, that this pattern is onward and upward, that knowledge is cumulative and that its applications to human betterment are continuous and never-ending, that the future is certain to be better than the past.” Pg. 63

“Where, then, did the Western belief in progress come from? From Christianity. It is Christianity that introduced the idea of a divine plan for man and the world. In this view, history was not one meaningless event after another: it represented the fulfillment of a story line-a story line that began with the Fall but would end in triumph with the second coming of Christ.” Pg. 64

Conclusion: “Colonialism and imperialism are not the cause of West’s success; they are the result of that success.” Pg. 66

WHY AMERICA IS UNIQUE

“One of my high-school teachers in India liked to say, ‘If Hitler had been ruling India, Gandhi would be a lamp shade.” This man was not known for his sensitivity, be he had a habit of speaking the truth. His point was that the success of Gandhi and of the Indian protesters, who prostrated themselves on the train tracks, depended on the certain knowledge that the trains would stop rather than run over them. With tactics such as these, Gandhi his followers hoped to paralyze British rule in India, and they succeeded. But what if the British had ordered the trains to keep going? This is certainly what Hitler would have done? I don’t see Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun being deterred by Gandhi’s strategy. Even as the Indians denounced the West as wholly unprincipled and immoral, they relied on Western principles and Western morality to secure their independence.” Pg. 71

“The ideologues who proclaim the equality of all cultures simply cannot account for why so many people around the world seem perfectly willing to dump their ancient cultures and adopt new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that they associate with America. Nor can they account for the millions of people who have come as immigrants in the search of the American dream. If all cultures are equal, why aren’t people breaking down doors to get into Cuba or Iraq or Somalia?” pg. 74

“In America, the immigrant immediately recognizes, things are different. The newcomer who sees America for the first time typically experiences emotions that alternate between wonder and delight. Here is a country where everything works: the roads are clean and paper smooth, the highway signs are clear and accurate, the public toilets function properly, when you pick up a telephone you get a dial tone, you can even buy things from the store and then take them back.” Pg. 77

“I have a friend of mine from Bombay who has been unsuccessfully trying to move to the United States for nearly a decade. Finally, I asked him, ‘Why are you so eager to come to America?” He replied, ‘Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.’” Pg. 77

“The American view is that the rich guy may have more money, but he isn’t in any fundamental sense better than you are. The American janitor or waiter see himself as performing a service but he doesn’t see himself as inferior to those he serves. And neither do the customers see him that way: they are generally happy to show him respect and appreciation on a plane of equality. America is the only country in the world where we call the waiter ‘Sir’ as if he were a knight.” Pg. 78

“As Irving Kristol once observed, there is virtually no restaurant in America to which a CEO can go to lunch with the absolute assurance that he will not find his secretary also dining there. Given the standard of living of the ordinary American, it is no wonder that socialist or revolutionary themes never found a wide constituency in the United States.” Pg. 79

“This notion of you being the architect of your own destiny is the incredibly powerful idea that is behind the worldwide appeal of America.” Pg. 84

“America is the greatest, freest, and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. History will view America as a great gift to the world, a gift that Americans today must preserve and cherish.” Pg. 193