What's So Great About America Read online

  I became a U.S. citizen myself in 1991. I took the oath that fateful day, and over the years my identification with America has deepened to the point that I truly feel that I have “become an American.” This phrase has become common enough that we don’t give it a thought, and yet it is fraught with meaning. An American could come to India and stay for forty years, perhaps even taking Indian citizenship, but he could not “become Indian.” Indians would not consider such a person Indian, nor would it be possible for him to think of himself in that way. The reason is that being Indian, like being German or Swedish or Iranian, is entirely a matter of birth and blood. You become Indian by having Indian parents.

  In America, by contrast, millions of people come from all over the world, and over time most of them come to think of themselves as Americans. Sometimes their children and grandchildren forget where they came from, or stop caring. Whatever their origins, these people have somehow, like me, “become American.” Their experience suggests that becoming American is less a function of birth or blood and more a function of embracing a set of ideas. It is only for this reason that terms like “un-American” and “anti-American” make sense. You could not accuse someone of being “un-German” or “un-Pakistani.” They would not know what you were talking about.

  I believe that over the years I have developed an understanding of the central idea that makes America great, and I have seen the greatness of America reflected in my life. At the same time I take seriously the issues raised by the critics of America. I know that they are onto something as well. In recent years my enthusiasm about America has been shaken by the experience of parenthood. As the father of a seven-year-old girl, I have come to realize how much more difficult it is to raise her well in America than it would be for me and my wife to raise her in India. We are constantly battling to shield our daughter from toxic influences in American culture that threaten to destroy her innocence. And even as I seek to insulate her from those influences, I am not sure that I can. This is a battle that I know I might lose. Why, I sometimes ask myself, do I stay in America?

  I mention these details to make the point that I feel the force of the arguments for and against America, because they play out in my own life. This is a book that seeks to integrate my research and study about America with my personal experience of American life. It is a book that faces the harshest critics of America and the West, but concludes that those critics are wrong. They are missing something of great significance about Western civilization and about the American way of life. So for all my qualms, I will not be returning to India. I know that my daughter will have a better life if I stay. I don’t mean just that she will be better off; I mean that her life is likely to have greater depth, meaning, and fulfillment in the United States than it would in any other country. I have come to appreciate that there is something great and noble about America, and in this book I intend to say what that is.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TWO CHEERS FOR COLONIALISM

  How the West Prevailed

  Whatever happens, we have got

  The Maxim gun, and they have not.

  —HILAIRE BELLOC

  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 omnipresent. In India, for example, the houses of Parliament are divided into the Lok Sabha—a lower or “people’s house”—and the Rajya Sabha—an upper or “royal house.” India has a parliamentary system of government that closely mirrors that of the British. Moreover, the Indian business community speaks English and begins its day with another Western institution—the daily newspaper. Indian cities now have museums, which did not exist in ancient India and have been replicated from the West. People go to work in Western suits and ties, even though this attire seems utterly unsuited to India’s hot climate. Even India’s army wears Western uniforms and uses the same ranking hierarchy as the West. India has universities modeled on the Western system, which emphasize science and technology and confer degrees on solemn Indian graduates who wear a Western medieval uniform—caps and gowns—for the purpose. In short, the configuration of life in India, as in most countries, is in crucial respects determined by Western civilization.

  Yet tens of millions of American students do not know this. When I tell high-school and college students about it in my lectures, they profess ignorance, even indignation. The reason is that they have been getting a very different message from their professors. “The Indians are being forced to live like this,” they insist. “It is what the British inflicted on them.” Well, perhaps; but 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.

  This thought upsets many American students. The reason for their distress is that what our young people know is largely a product of multicultural education, which teaches them to despise Western civilization. One of the central premises of multiculturalism is that Western civilization is not superior to, or better than, any other civilization. To think this, in the multicultural view, is to be guilty of racism. Against this doctrine of cultural superiority, multiculturalists insist that all cultures are basically equal, each culture is an adaptation to its own unique environment, and no culture is better or worse than, superior or inferior to, any other.

  A few years ago the novelist Saul Bellow reportedly made the remark, “Show me the Proust of the Papuans, the Tolstoy of the Zulus, and I will read him.” Bellow’s comment was greeted with a universal cry of outrage. As one Ivy League professor put it, Bellow’s statement was “astoundingly racist.” But why? Bellow was not suggesting that the Papuans were incapable of producing a Proust, or the Zulus a Tolstoy. He was merely saying that, as far as he knew, they hadn’t. But Bellow’s sin was to imply that some cultures, and specifically Western culture, might have contributed more to the dining table of civilization than others. This violated the multicultural premise of the equality of all cultures.

  Another example: in the early 1990s, I attended a meeting of a historical society at which academicians were virtually coming to blows over the question of whether Columbus “discovered” America or whether he merely “encountered” America. An odd subject for fisticuffs, certainly. But beneath the semantic dispute was a larger issue. You see, the notion of discovery implies a subject and an object, as in “Fleming discovered penicillin.” By contrast “encounter” is a more neutral term that implies a meeting on a plane of equality. The historians who objected to the term “discovery” were trying to camouflage the fact that it was Columbus and his ships that ventured out and landed on the shores of the Americas, and not American Indians who landed on the shores of Europe.

  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. 1 We could use other measures of civilizational achievement, but the result would remain largely the same. The prevalence of poverty, repression, civil war, AIDS, and other horrors recently persuaded UN secretary general Kofi Annan to term sub-Saharan Africa “a cocktail of disasters.” Hierarchy, not equality, appears to be the governing principle for the cultures
of the world as they are now.

  Multiculturalists do not so much deny this as object to it on moral grounds. In their view, to rank Western civilization at the top, to give priority to the West, to establish a curriculum focused on the West, is to be guilty of “Eurocentrism.” The term “Eurocentrism” simply means placing Europe at the center of things, and it sounds like a pretty narrow and arrogant way to view the world. But of course if we are trying to describe the world in which we live, indeed the modern world of the past few centuries, then it is entirely accurate to focus on Europe, to place Western civilization at the center. Indeed, it was the West, expanding outward, which found and conquered and defined the rest of the world. For example, “Asia,” “Africa,” and the “Middle East” did not exist before Westerners came up with those names and a geography that divided up the planet in that way. “India” was made up of an assortment of local kingdoms before it developed—through its relationship to the West—national boundaries and eventually a sense of national identity.

  The “Eurocentric” approach seems entirely justified when you consider that Western civilization has dominated the world for nearly five centuries. Within the West, admittedly, the center of power has shifted. Inside the competing orbit of the West, the Portuguese first had the upper hand, then the Spanish, then the French, and then the English. Even so, never in the past few hundred years has the leadership position slipped out of the hands of the West. On the contrary, the West became more and more influential to the point that, a century ago, in the early part of the twentieth century, nearly 85 percent of the real estate on the planet was under the control and supervision of Western civilization. 2 It was the heyday of colonialism.

  In avidly seeking to downplay Western political, economic, military, and cultural superiority, advocates of multiculturalism emphasize that all cultures are on an equal plane and are equally worthy of study. Thus the multicultural curriculum treats in great detail the traditional religions and customs of non-Western cultures, even though many of those customs and mores are on the way out in those cultures. This fact was comically illustrated for me recently when I was watching on television a replay of the heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. It was held in the 1970s in the African nation of Zaire, and somewhat insensitively billed as the “Rumble in the Jungle.” Both Ali and Foreman studied their African roots, in order to win the support of the crowd and establish a psychological edge against the other. When their plane arrived, out came Ali, out came Foreman, and both were impressively regaled in traditional African outfits: headdresses, dashikis, and so on. But there to greet them on the tarmac were several hundred Africans in suits, looking a little puzzled at this clear case of multiculturalism gone awry.

  My point is that American multiculturalists are giving our students museumized portraits of non-Western cultures even as those cultures have moved, and continue to move, rapidly in the direction of the West. Thus American students are getting a false picture. They are not being prepared to face the world as it is, a world that is shaped and dominated by Western civilization.

  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. We can see this clearly by taking an imaginative leap back in time to A.D. 1500, when “the West” as we know it now was just starting to emerge.

  In A.D. 1500 there were several civilizations dotting the globe, and two of them stood out in resplendence: the civilization of China and the civilization of the Arab-Islamic world. During the Ming dynasty, the wealth, knowledge, and power of China astonished all those who came into contact with it. Chinese astronomers knew more about eclipses and heavenly orbits than anyone else at the time. The Chinese were responsible for inventions of surpassing importance: printing, gunpowder, and the compass. In the fifteenth century the Chinese sent a fleet of ships, the largest and most sophisticated of their kind, to explore the shores of Africa, India, and other countries. At home, the Chinese ruling class presided over an empire distinguished by its size and cohesion. Confucian philosophy gave a kind of moral and intellectual unity to Chinese civilization. The Chinese had a merit system of government appointments when most of the world operated on traditional systems of nepotism and patronage. Chinese society showed a refinement in porcelain work, in silk embroidery, and in social refinement, that no other society could match. No wonder the Chinese emperors regarded themselves as the “sons of Heaven” and their part of the world as the center of the universe.3

  Equally impressive in the year 1500 were the achievements of Islamic civilization. Starting in the seventh century, the Islamic empire spread rapidly until it sprawled across three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. The Muslims unified their enormous empire around a single faith, Islam, and a single language, Arabic. The Islamic world enjoyed a flourishing economy, enriched by trade with India and the Far East, and a largely uniform system of laws. The Muslims built spectacular cities—Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Istanbul, Seville, Granada—distinguished by architectural and literary splendor. Islamic literature and thought exhibited a richness, variety, and complexity that far surpassed that of Europe at the time. Islam produced great men of learning, such as Ibn Sinha (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn Khaldun, al-Ghazali, al-Farabi, and al-Kindi. Indeed, much of Greco-Roman knowledge, including the works of Aristotle, that had been lost in Europe during the Dark Ages was preserved in the Islamic world. It is no exaggeration to write, in the words of historian David Landes, that during this period “Islam was Europe’s teacher.”4

  Nothing could compare to China and the Islamic empire, but there were other civilizations in the world in the year 1500. There was the civilization of India, renowned for its spiritual depth as the original home of two of the world’s great religions, Hindusim and Buddhism, and also famous for its wealth and mathematical learning. In Africa there were the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, which were large, orderly, and rich in gold. Finally in the Americas there were the Aztec and Inca civilizations. Despite their reputation for brutality and human sacrifice, these were impressive for their architecture, social organization, and city planning.

  Western civilization—then called Christendom—was a relative backwater. Mired in the Dark Ages, Christendom was characterized by widespread ignorance, poverty, and incessant clashes between warring tribes and between kings and the Church. Indeed, Islamic writers who encountered the West in the late Middle Ages describe it as remote, uninteresting, and primitive. A Muslim traveler described Europeans as “more like beasts than like men. They lack keenness of understanding, and clarity of intelligence, and are overcome by ignorance and apathy, lack of discernment and stupidity.” Another Muslim writer gives an account of the state of European medicine. He tells of a knight who came to a European physician complaining of an abscess on his leg; the physician seized an ax and chopped off the leg with one blow “and the man died at once.” Bernard Lewis finds in such Muslim writings “the same note of amused disdain as we sometimes find among European travelers in Africa and Asia many centuries later.”5

  How, then, did this relatively impoverished, backward civilization 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? There are two popular theories to answer this question. The first is the “environmental” school, and its thesis is conveyed by the title of a recent book, The Geography Behind History. 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. Africa, for example, is much larger than Europe but has a shorter navigabl
e coastline, and therefore it seems to enjoy fewer possibilities for commerce. The most eloquent expression of the environmental argument is given by Jared Diamond in his best-selling 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.6

  The environmental thesis does help to account for the origins of the earliest human civilizations. The flourishing of these civilizations did, in fact, depend decisively on access to water. Thus the civilization of the Fertile Crescent was made possible by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Not for nothing has ancient Egypt been termed “the gift of the Nile.” Other ancient civilizations developed on the banks of the Indus River in India and the Yellow River in China. But beyond this the environmental thesis in general, and Diamond’s arguments in particular, are useless in explaining the triumph of the West. After all, 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.