What's So Great About America (23 page)

But the concept of cultural superiority need not be limited to groups contending for a specific prize. One might also find some cultures to be superior to others in achieving universal aspirations. Do such aspirations exist? Of course they do. Anthropologist Donald Brown provides a list of them in his book
Human Universals.
⁴
One such universal aspiration is the desire to speak one's mind. In the West we call this the “right to free speech.” But of course this “right” is not recognized in many cultures. In
the late 1980s, the novelist Salman Rushdie made some satirical references to the prophet Muhammad in his book
The Satanic Verses.
The Islamic world was not convulsed with laughter, and in February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a
fatwa
calling on Muslims to punish Rushdie for his crime of blasphemy by killing him.

Rushdie, heretofore known as an intrepid iconoclast and debunker of Western civilization, now begged the West to protect his life. Rushdie and a group of writers held a press conference in America in which they indignantly accused the Ayatollah Khomeini of not having sufficient regard for the First Amendment! Rushdie himself called the Ayatollah's attention to the works of John Stuart Mill.
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Unfortunately Khomeini was not well schooled in the rhetoric of multiculturalism; otherwise he could have replied, “What gives you the right to impose your Western values on me? You have your cultural values, and I have my cultural values, and mine are just as valid as yours. Your values give priority to free speech, but my values give priority to outlawing blasphemy. Rushdie is free to express his cultural values by saying whatever he wants about Islam. And I am free to express my cultural values and order that his head be chopped off.”

This is impeccable multicultural logic, and if the doctrine of cultural relativism holds true, then the Muslims would seem to be fully justified in attempting to murder Rushdie. The only way to make the case against such an action is to argue that the principle of free speech may be Western
in its origin
but it is universal
in its application.
This is another way of saying that the Declaration of Independence and the United Nations charter are correct: there are universal human rights. These rights may not
always be recognized or upheld. But the failure of a government to enforce them at a given time does not invalidate the right. To recall Lincoln's statement that I cited earlier: the right has been declared so that the enforcement can follow when the circumstances allow.

By denying that there are universal standards of human rights, multiculturalists become de facto apologists for tyranny. They are so concerned about one culture “imposing its morality” on another that they ignore the fact that such impositions are sometimes indispensable to protect human dignity. Early in the nineteenth century the British outlawed the ancient Indian practice of
sati
. This custom called for widows to be tossed onto the burning pyres of their husbands.
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The British also passed laws restricting child marriage, female infanticide, human sacrifice, and the caste system. In curbing these charming indigenous customs, the British were clearly imposing Western morality on their colonial subjects. But who today will dispute the results? Multicultural textbooks are strangely silent on these questions.

The doctrine that all people have certain basic rights does depend, I will concede, on a certain conception of human nature, one that ascribes a certain special quality or sacredness to humanity. There are other human aspirations, however, whose universality does not depend upon a philosophical premise of this sort. Recently I was visiting my family in Bombay, and I noticed that, on the outskirts of the city, a group of American anthropologists had set up camp to study the displaced peasants living in huts. As one scholar emerged from his tent, sporting his blue jeans and adjusting his zoom-lens camera, the peasants eyed him enviously. They eagerly told him, “We want your jeans! We want your camera!”
Appalled at this suggestion, the anthropologist drew himself to full height and said, “But I am not here to convince you that our way of life is better. Oh no, I am merely here to study you. I believe that your culture is fully equal to ours. In fact, in some respect you are spared from the rat race, you are closer to nature, you are ecological saints.” The peasants cogitated over these remarks and then repeated in unison, “We want your jeans! We want your camera!”

This example illustrates the point that in today's world there is a one-way movement from tribal, agrarian cultures toward modern, industrialized, American-style culture. Another way to put it is that people who go from wearing wooden shoes to wearing leather shoes will never go back to wearing wooden shoes. People identify America with triumph over necessity, with comfort, and with a longer life. Are there any societies that do not want these things? The very concept of “underdeveloped” nations, of nations seeking “development,” shows that the poor countries of the world are unanimous about wanting to get richer. Until we can find cultures that prefer hunger rather than plenty, disease rather than health, and short lives rather than long ones, we have to acknowledge that material improvement is a universal objective.

Indeed, this is what Adam Smith said in his
Wealth of Nations:
“the desire of bettering our condition . . . comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go to the grave.”
⁷
If this is true, then Francis Fukuyama is right that there is an inevitable progression from societies that thwart these human desires to societies that fulfill them. This isn't necessarily the “end of history,” but it probably represents the end of primitive cultures. Moreover, given the things that people want, it is entirely reasonable to posit
that some cultures (say, capitalist cultures with a Protestant heritage) are superior to other cultures (say, African socialist regimes or Islamic theocracies) in achieving these shared human objectives.

Cultural relativism collapses in the face of these universal aspirations. This was recognized by one of the Pied Pipers of relativism, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. For decades, Lévi-Strauss had emphatically insisted that so-called primitive cultures were just as complex and sophisticated as so-called advanced cultures. Lévi-Strauss labored ingeniously, in books like
The Savage Mind
and
Tristes Tropiques,
to show the equal value of these remote cultures. But then Lévi-Strauss made an alarming discovery: the people in those remote cultures don't want to stay in those cultures. If given the choice, they would prefer to live as Westerners do rather than as their ancestors did. Once he digested this disturbing fact, Lévi-Strauss gave up. In a stunning admission, he wrote, “The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being Westernized, but that there is too much delay in giving them the means to Westernize themselves. It is of no use to defend the individuality of human cultures against those cultures themselves.”
⁸

This is a devastating blow for the relativist ideology. Equally crushing are the actions of the immigrants, who are walking refutations of cultural relativism. When immigrants decide to leave their home country and move to another country, they are voting with their feet in favor of the new culture and against their native culture. Leaving one's country is a serious step. It involves giving up the community in which you have been raised, abandoning
your family, severing your relationships with relatives and friends. You are imperiling your entire place in the world by going from a place where you are somebody to a place where you are nobody. People do not make such decisions whimsically. So why would immigrants voluntarily uproot themselves and relocate to another society unless they were deeply convinced that, on balance, the new culture was better than the old culture? Anyone who actually believed the multicultural nonsense that all cultures are equal would never leave home.

T
he triumph of American ideas and culture in the global marketplace, and the fact that most immigrants from around the world choose to come to the United States, would seem to be sufficient grounds for establishing the superiority of American civilization. But this is not entirely so, because we have not shown that the people of the world are
justified
in preferring the American way of life to any other. We must contend with the Islamic fundamentalists' argument that their societies are based on high principles while America is based on low principles. The Islamic critics are happy to concede the attractions of America, but they insist that these attractions are base. America, they say, appeals to what is most degraded about human nature; by contrast, Islamic societies may be poor and “backward,” but they at least aspire to virtue. Even if they fall short, they are trying to live by God's law.

Americans usually have a hard time answering this argument, in part because they are bewildered by its theological cadences.
The usual tendency is to lapse into a kind of unwitting relativism. “You are following what you believe is right, and we are living by the values that we think are best.” This pious buncombe usually concludes with a Rodney King–style plea for tolerance, “So why don't we learn to appreciate our differences? Why don't we just get along?” To see why this argument fails completely, imagine that you are living during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor is just starting to pull out your fingernails. You make the Rodney King move on him. “Torquemada, please stop pulling out my fingernails. Why don't we learn to appreciate our differences?” Most of us probably realize that Torquemada would not find this persuasive. But it is less obvious why he would not. Let me paraphrase Torquemada's argument: “You think I am taking away your freedom, but I am concerned with your immortal soul. Ultimately virtue is far more important than freedom. Our lives last for a mere second in the long expanse of eternity. What measure of pleasure or pain we experience in our short life is trivial compared to our fate in the never ending life to come. I am trying to save your soul from damnation. Who cares if you have to let out a few screams in the process? My actions are entirely for your own benefit. You should be
thanking me
for pulling out your fingernails.”

I have recalled the Spanish Inquisition to make the point that the Islamic argument is one that we have heard before. We should not find it so strange that people think this way; it is the way that many in our own civilization used to think not so very long ago. The reason that most of us do not think this way now is that Western history has taught us a hard lesson. That lesson is that when the institutions of religion and government are one, and the secular
authority is given the power to be the interpreter and enforcer of God's law, then horrible abuses of power are perpetrated in God's name. This is just what we saw in Afghanistan with the Taliban, and what we see now in places like Iran. This is not to suggest that Islam's historical abuses are worse than those of the West. But the West, as a consequence of its experience, learned to disentangle the institutions of religion and government—a separation that was most completely achieved in the United States. As we have seen, the West also devised a new way of organizing society around the institutions of science, democracy, and capitalism. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution were some of the major signposts on Western civilization's road to modernity.

By contrast, the Islamic world did not have a Renaissance or a Reformation. No Enlightenment or Scientific Revolution either. Incredible though it may seem to many in the West, Islamic societies today are in some respects not very different from how they were a thousand years ago. Islam has been around for a long time. This brings us to a critical question: why are we seeing this upsurge of Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic fanaticism now?

To answer this question, we should recall that Islam was once one of the greatest and most powerful civilizations in the world. Indeed, there was a time when it seemed as if the whole world would fall under Islamic rule. Within a century of the prophet Muhammad's death, his converts had overthrown the Sassanid dynasty in Iran and conquered large tracts of territory from the Byzantine dynasty. Soon the Muslims had established an empire greater than that of Rome at its zenith. Over the next several centuries, Islam made deep inroads into Africa, Southeast Asia, and
southern Europe. The crusades were launched to repel the forces of Islam, but the crusades ended in failure. By the sixteenth century, there were no fewer than five Islamic empires, unified by political ties, a common religion, and a common culture: the Mamluk sultans in Egypt, the Safavid dynasty in Iran, the Mughal empire in India, the empire of the Great Khans in Russia and Central Asia, and the Ottoman Empire based in Turkey. Of these, the Ottomans were by far the most formidable. They ruled most of North Africa, and threatened Mediterranean Europe and Austria. Europe was terrified that they might take over all the lands of Christendom. In all of history, Islam is the only non-Western civilization to pose a mortal threat to the West.