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The majority of books on one side or the other of the current American culture wars are shrill and hyperventilating. Here's one that's not. Calm, reasoned, and gently written, but making its points clearly. Recommended.
Dinish D'Souza captures the real America that most Americans have forgotten. This book should be mandatory reading in all High Schools and perhaps we would still have a chance that our youth would recognize that the USA is the best place on earth.
This book gave me a better understanding of the freedoms we enjoy in America and how we are morally slipping as a nation. Dinesh D'Souza has a broad knowledge of cultures and countries and writes well. I have recommended this book to family members and friends.
I order this book from the seller who indicated 5 to 7 days delivery. the reallity was that the book was received almost 3 weeks after I ordered it. COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE.IF THE DELIVERY TIME IS LONGER THAN WHAT'S ADVERTISED, PLEASE DISCLOSE IT ASAP SUCH THAT I CAN FIND OTHER SELLERS.C.
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. 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. He explains the intractability of the clash of civilizations, the incompatibility of Islam with the West. D'Souza calls this `authenticity'. This is because it is the very freedom that is the cornerstone of what America stands for that they find so repugnant. 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.
In a nutshell, he argues, with some interesting digressions, why America is worth fighting for. Written in the aftermath of 9/11, What's so Great About America. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
They also feel it is that very freedom that has made America a morally bankrupt society. He begins by explaining `why they hate us'. In the end he thinks, despite America's identity crisis, that the path of freedom is closest to the path of virtue. 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. 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.
An argument against the West has always been that it achieved its success through might and oppression of weaker peoples. 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. 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. 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'.
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. 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. Sometimes his language veered into the zealous patriotism of that time, but he mostly kept that sort of thing in check.
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. D'Souza is a sharp writer who excellently crafts his arguments. 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. 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.
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.
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