What's So Great About America Read online

  The clear implication of Lewis’s remarks is that the terrorists who profess the name of Allah and proclaim jihad are operating squarely within the Islamic tradition. Indeed, they are performing what Islam has typically held to be a religious duty. Of course it could be pointed out that there are millions of Muslims who do not agree with this view of Islam. They prefer what may be termed the “jihad of the heart” or perhaps the “jihad of the pen” to the “jihad of the sword.” But traditionally Islam has embraced all these forms of jihad as legitimate, so that the only reasonable conclusion is that many Muslims today, both in the West and in the Islamic world, no longer profess Islam in its traditional sense.11 In a word, they are liberals, not in the Michael Dukakis connotation, but in the classic meaning of the term. From the point of view of the bin Ladens of the world, these people are apostates for diluting the faith and refusing to do battle against the infidels.

  I realize that terms like “apostate” and “infidel” sound harshly unfamiliar to the Western ear. There is something strange and antique about them, as if they belong to the world of our ancestors. And of course they do. A thousand years ago, during the time of the Crusades, the ancestors of the West understood their Islamic foe very well. Nobody spoke of “the West” at that time; they spoke of “Christendom.” It was a time, one may say, when the Christians, too, had their jihad, and it was aimed at the reconquest of the Holy Land. For Christians, the crusades combined two traditional practices, pilgrimage and holy war. Kings and popes alike proclaimed that those who died in battle were martyrs for the faith and would go straight to heaven.

  There are important differences, of course, between Islam and Christianity, and the religious armies who faced each other in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were very conscious of them. But they were also conscious of the deep similarities between the two faiths. Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic, and they are the only two religions that can truly be called universal. Judaism is a religion for God’s chosen people, and God’s instructions are intended for them, not for anyone else. Hinduism is largely confined to India and the surrounding areas. Buddhism has longer tentacles, but it too is largely an Asian religion with a few adherents in the West. Confucianism is not really a religion, and in any case it has a limited reach. Christianity and Islam, by contrast, believe in a universal truth handed down by God that is true for all people in all places at all times. Believing themselves in possession of this exclusive truth, Christians and Muslims have historically sought to inform the whole world of their truth and to bring them to the one true faith. During the Crusades they both had a name for each other, “infidel.” It was the same name, and both sides interpreted it the same way. Islam and Christianity clashed not because they failed to understand each other but because they understood each other perfectly well.

  But a lot has happened since the twelfth century, and we have forgotten a lot of things. American culture is rather present oriented, and even what happened in the 1980s now seems dated. It is time that we started to learn and to remember because our enemies do. When bin Laden invokes the name of Salah-al-Din (Saladin), he is drawing inspiration from the great twelfth-century Muslim general who threw back the Crusaders and recaptured Jerusalem. In his videotaped statement released on Al Jazeera television, bin Laden said Americans should get used to suffering because “our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years.” He was referring to the dismembering of the Ottoman Empire, the last of the great Muslim empires, by the victorious European forces after World War I.

  Say what you will about the terrorists, they know who they are and where they are coming from. And behind their physical attack on America and the West is an intellectual attack, one that we should understand and be prepared to answer.

  One reason the terrorist assault startled Americans so much is that it occurred at a time when American ideas and American influence seemed to be spreading irresistibly throughout the world. The zeitgeist was captured by Francis Fukuyama in his best-selling book The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama argued that the world was moving decisively in the direction of liberal, capitalist democracy.12 In Fukuyama’s view, history had ended not in the sense that important things would cease to happen, but in the sense that the grand ideological conflicts of the past had been forever settled. Of course the pace of liberalization would vary, but the outcome was inevitable. The destiny of Homo sapiens had been resolved. We were headed for what may be termed Planet America.

  Fukuyama’s thesis, advanced in the early 1990s, seemed consistent with the remarkable events going on in the world. The collapse of the Soviet Union left America as the world’s sole superpower, with unrivaled military superiority. The discrediting of socialism meant that there was no conceivable alternative to capitalism, and all the countries of the world seemed destined to be integrated into a single global economy. Dictatorships crumbled in many parts the world, especially in Eastern Europe and Latin America, and were replaced by democratic regimes. America launched the silicon revolution and continues to dominate the world in technology. And American ideas and American culture have captured the imagination of young people around the world and made deep inroads into previously remote outposts in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.

  These are undeniable and hugely important facts, but the complacent confidence of the Planet America thesis has been shaken. The Cold War is over, and yet the world has become a more dangerous place. Americans, never particularly attentive to the rest of the world, have become acutely aware that there are powerful currents of resistance to globalization and Americanization. There are lots of people who do not want to become like us, and many people, especially in the Muslim world, apparently hate our guts and want to wipe us off the face of the earth. This realization, for Americans, comes as a surprise.

  In his 1997 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington warned that America and the West should not arrogantly assume that the rest of the world would uncritically embrace the principles of Judeo-Christian civilization. Huntington disputed the thesis of “the end of history” and pointed out that the great victories won in recent years by liberalism and democracy were mainly in Latin America and Eastern Europe, regions of the world that were within the traditional orbit of the Judeo-Christian West. Huntington argued that in the post–Cold War world, the most dangerous conflicts would occur “across the fault lines between the world’s major civilizations.”13 Huntington identified civilizations mainly in terms of religion: Hindu civilization, Confucian civilization, Islamic civilization. Given the deep differences among these religious tribes, Huntington predicted that they were bound to quarrel.

  So who is right, Fukuyama or Huntington? This is one of the questions that this book will try to answer. But first let us examine the three main currents of foreign opposition to the spread of American influence.

  First, the European school. Actually this may be more precisely described as the French school, although it has sympathizers in other European countries. The French seem to be outraged by the idea that any single nation, let alone the United States, should enjoy global domination. The French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, termed the United States a “hyperpower” and scorned its “arrogance.” The French are not against arrogance per se, but in the case of the United States they regard the arrogance as completely unjustified. For the French, the grotesque symbol of Americanization is McDonald’s, and many French citizens cheered in 1999 when a sheep farmer named José Bové trashed a McDonald’s in France. The French worry that the spread of English threatens the future of the French language and, even more precious, French culture. Their anti-Americanization is based on a strong belief in French cultural superiority combined with a fear that their great culture is being dissolved in the global marketplace.

  Most Americans find it hard to take the French critique seriously, coming as it does from men who carry handbags. French anti-Americanism is also a political device
to legitimate the use of tariffs, thus protecting French products that cannot compete in the global marketplace. But at the same time the French have a point when they object to the obliteration of local cultures and the homogenization of the planet in the name of globalization and Americanization. Probably we can also agree that the world would be a worse place without the French language and French cuisine, although whether we could do without French films and French intellectuals is open to dispute.

  A second and more troubling critique of America comes from what may be termed the Asian school. This view, which has advocates in Singapore and Malaysia and, most important, China, holds that America and the West have solved the economic problem but they have not solved the cultural problem. As Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, has argued, America has generated a lot of material prosperity, but that has been accompanied by social and moral decline. Champions of the Asian school hold that they have figured out a way to combine material well-being with social order. In Singapore, for example, you are encouraged to engage in commerce, but there is no chewing gum in public and if you paint graffiti on cars, as one American visitor did, you will be publicly caned. The result, advocates of the Asian school say, is that people can enjoy a high standard of living but without the crime, illegitimacy, and vulgarity that are believed to debase life in the West.

  The “Asian values” paradigm is often viewed as an excuse for dictatorship. Admittedly it serves the interest of Asian despots to portray democracy as a debauched system of government, so that they can justify keeping political power in their own hands. But it is hard to deny that there are powerful elements of truth in the way that Lee Kuan Yew and others portray America and the West. That there may be an alternative model better suited to the human desire for prosperity, safety, and public decency cannot be rejected out of hand. Lee Kuan Yew’s slogan for this is “modernization without Westernization.”14

  Undoubtedly the most comprehensive and ferocious attack on America comes from what may be termed the Islamic school. From what Americans hear of this group, with its slogans that we are the Great Satan, land of the infidels, and so on, it does not seem that this is a very sophisticated critique of Western society. On television we see protesters in Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan, and they seem like a bunch of jobless fanatics. But behind these demonstrators who chant and burn American flags in the street, there is a considered argument against America that should not be lightly dismissed. Americans should not assume that because they haven’t heard much of this argument, it does not exist or has no intellectual merit.

  On the surface it seems that the Islamic critique is mainly focused on American foreign policy. Certainly many Muslims angrily object to the degree of U.S. political and financial support for Israel. “We consider America and Israel to be one country,” one Palestinian man told CNN. “When the Israelis burn our homes and kill our children, we know that it is your weapons, your money and your helicopters that are making this happen.” Interestingly the Palestinian problem was not initially a big concern for bin Laden; he seemed more exercised about the effect of American sanctions on the Iraqi people and about the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, the “holy soil of Islam.” Another issue for bin Laden, which resonates especially with Muslim intellectuals, is the proclaimed hypocrisy of America. In this view, the United States piously invokes principles of democracy and human rights while supporting undemocratic regimes, such as those of Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, that do not hesitate to trample on human rights. Probably bin Laden strikes the biggest chord with the man in the Arab street when he blames the poverty and degradation of the Islamic world on Western and specifically American oppression.

  Clearly the foreign policy element is important, but there is much more to the Islamic critique than that. Once we begin to peruse the newspapers and listen to the public discussion in the Muslim world, and once we read the thinkers who are shaping the mind of Islamic fundamentalism, we realize that here is an intelligent and even profound assault on the very basis of America and the West. Indeed, the Islamic critique, at its best, shows a deep understanding of America’s fundamental principles—which is more than one can say about the American understanding of Islamic principles. This critique deserves careful attention not only because of its intrinsic power but also because it is the guiding force behind the jihad factories—the countless mosques and religious schools throughout the Muslim world that are teaching such violent hatred of America.

  Islamic critics recognize that other people around the world are trying selectively to import aspects of America and the West while rejecting other aspects that they do not like. Thus the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans, and the Latin Americans all want some of what the West has to offer—especially technology and prosperity—but they want to keep out other things. “Modernization without Westernization” expresses a widespread desire to preserve the treasured elements of one’s own culture and identity in the face of Westernization.

  But the Islamic thinkers argue that selective Westernization is an illusion. In their view modernity is Western, and they regard as naïve the notion that one can import what one likes from America while keeping out what one dislikes. The Islamic argument is that the West is based on principles that are radically different from those of traditional societies. In this view, America is a subversive idea that, if admitted into a society, will produce tremendous and uncontrollable social upheaval. It will eliminate the religious basis for society, it will undermine traditional hierarchies, it will displace cherished values, and it will produce a society unrecognizable from the one it destroyed. As bin Laden himself put it, Islam is facing the greatest threat to its survival since the days of the prophet Muhammad.

  He’s right. And the Islamic thinkers who fear the dissolution of their traditional societies are also correct. America is a subversive idea. Indeed, it represents a new way to be human, and in this book we will explore what this means and whether this subversive idea is worthy of our love and allegiance.

  So what is the Islamic objection to America? In conversations with Muslims from around the world, several common themes emerge. “To you we are a bunch of Ay-rabs, camel jockeys, and sand-niggers.” “The only thing that we have that you care about is oil.” “Americans have two things on their mind: money and sex.” “Your women are whores.” “In America mothers prefer to work than to take care of their children.” “In our culture the parents take care of the children, and later the children take care of the parents. In America the children abandon their parents.” “America used to be a Christian country. Now atheism is the official religion of the West.” “Your TV shows are disgusting. You are corrupting the morals of our young people.” “We don’t object to how you Americans live, but now you are spreading your way of life throughout the universe.” “American culture is a kind of syphilis or disease that is destroying the Islamic community. We won’t let you do to us what you did to the American Indian people.”

  What stands out about the Islamic critique is its refreshing clarity. The Islamic thinkers cannot be counted in the ranks of the politically correct. Painful though it is to admit, they aren’t entirely wrong about America either. They say that many Americans see them as a bunch of uncivilized towel heads, and this is probably true. They charge that America is a society obsessed with material gain, and who will deny this? They condemn the West as an atheistic civilization, and while they may be wrong about the extent of religious belief and practice, they are right that in the West religion has little sway over the public arena, and the West seems to have generated more unbelief than any other civilization in world history. They are disgusted by our culture, and we have to acknowledge that there is a good deal in American culture that is disgusting to normal sensibilities. They say our women are “loose,” and in a sense they are right. Even their epithet for the United States, the Great Satan, is appropriate when we reflect that Satan is not a conqueror—he is a tempter. The Islamic militants fear that the i
dea of America is taking over their young people, breaking down allegiances to parents and religion and traditional community; this concern on their part is also justified.

  The most important and influential of the Islamic critics of the West is the philosopher Sayyid Qutb.15 Born in Egypt in 1906, Qutb became disenchanted with Arab nationalism as a weapon against Western imperialism. He became a leader and theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization that is also one of the oldest institutions of radical Islam. Qutb argued that the worst form of colonialism—one that outlasted the formal end of European colonialism—was “intellectual and spiritual colonialism.” What the Islamic world must do is destroy the influence of the West within itself, to eradicate its residue “within our feelings.”

  What, for Qutb, was so evil about the West? Qutb argues that from its earliest days Western civilization separated the realm of God from the realm of society. Long before the American doctrine of separation of church and state, the institutions of religion and those of government operated in separate realms and commanded separate allegiances. Consequently, Qutb argues, the realm of God and the realm of society were bound to come into conflict. And this is precisely what has happened in the West. If Athens can be taken to represent reason and science and culture, and Jerusalem can be taken to represent God and religion, then Athens has been in a constant struggle with Jerusalem. Perhaps at one point the tension could be regarded as fruitful, Qutb writes, but now the war is over, and the terrible truth is that Athens has won. Reason and science have annihilated religion. True, many people continue to profess a belief in God and go to church, but religion has ceased to have any shaping influence in society. It does not direct government or law or scientific research or culture. In short, a once-religious civilization has now been reduced to what Qutb terms jahiliyya—the condition of social chaos, moral diversity, sexual promiscuity, polytheism, unbelief, and idolatry that was said to characterize the Arab tribes before the advent of Islam.