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Sunday, October 22, 2006

Sunday question: How big a doofus is Dinesh D'Souza?

Mastermind of Islamic terrorism?

Dinesh D'Souza is a conservative intellectual who became famous with his work on the issues of "political correctness" on American college campuses. "Political correctness" in this case meaning things that conservatives found politically INcorrect, usually something having to do with aprreciating cultures and religions other than the ones in which you were raised.

I heard D'Souza speak years ago in an event sponsored by, as I recall, the Independent Institute, a rightwing libertarian group. I was relieved that I didn't burst into flames when I walked into the room. I didn't agree with his particular policy points, but I recall thinking he had some interesting observations. Though none of them were interesting enough to stick in my mind. Except one. Some old bigot got up in the question period and told a lame-o joke whose point was that Jesse Jackson is a racist. And D'Souza disagreed, saying that Jackson did not in theory or in practice advocate any sort of theory or attitude of racial superiority. I thought at the time that this at least distinguished him from the Paleolithic camp.

The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whose liberal credentials are scarcely in question, quoted D'Souza favorably in his book The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (1991). But he referenced D'Souza specifically on a factual question of ethnic "theme houses" among campus residences. Schlesinger's concerns with the excesses of "multiculturalism" focused in particular on tendencies toward re-segregation in education and on ethnic-based history texts that disregarded professional standards of scholarship, i.e., that just used made-up claims about history not sustainable by factual historical research.

I don't know if we can take this latest piece of hooey from D'Souza as a belweather exactly: God knows why faith is thriving San Francisco Chronicle 10/22/06.

I mean, his forthcoming book is said to explain, among other things, why Britney Spears was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

So how seriously can we take him any more?

His Chronicle article is basically explaining why religion, specifically the Christian variety, is the well-spring of all decent civilization, more-or-less. And also that atheists are sterile, or impotent, or just don't like sex, or something. I am willing to take it as a reflection of how much pressure even "highbrow" advocates of rightwing social philosophy are feeling the pressure to get behind the "creationist" movement which is part of the standard doctrine of today's Christian Republican Party. Social Darwinism is arguably more serviceable as a ideological backstop for "killer capitalism" and a foreign policy doctrine of preventive war. But for a party that has made defending torture a routine feature of our public discourse, I suppose a lot of our previous assumptions about politics and ideology have become as "quaint" and outdated as the Republicans view the Geneva Conventions.

Like some of the multicultural texts that Schlesinger was criticizing 15 years ago, this column of D'Souza's makes some broad assumptions whose plausibility is very dubious without providing any real data here to support them. Maybe in his forthcoming book he'll give us some references on his points on religion after explaining how Little Boo instigated the 9/11 attacks.

D'Souza sets up a phony division of society - specifically, "European" societies that either practice democracy or (in the case of the US under the Torture Party) did so until recently - into an atheists and religious people. And he writes:

Now imagine two groups of people - let's call them the Secular Tribe and the Religious Tribe - who subscribe to one of these two views. Which of the two is more likely to survive, prosper and multiply? The religious tribe is made up of people who have an animating sense of purpose. The secular tribe is made up of people who are not sure why they exist at all. The religious tribe is composed of individuals who view their every thought and action as consequential. The secular tribe is made up of matter that cannot explain why it is able to think at all.

Should evolutionists like [Daniel] Dennett, [Richard] Dawkins, [Sam] Harris and [Edwin O.] Wilson be surprised, then, to see that religious tribes are flourishing around the world? Across the globe, religious faith is thriving and religious people are having more children. By contrast, atheist conventions only draw a handful of embittered souls, and the atheist lifestyle seems to produce listless tribes that cannot even reproduce themselves.

Whatever factoids D'Souza or others might adduce in support of other particular points in his column, the whole silly argument stands or falls on the very shaky foundation he lays in those two paragraphs? He opens his column by citing the atheists in that quotation. Then with a rhetorical trick that's so ham-handed that, at least prior to the Cheney-Bush era, even rightwing intellectuals might have been embarassed to even try. He redefines atheists as the Secular Tribe, and opposes them to the Religious Tribe.

How hokey does it get? In reference to the American and European societies on which he focuses, this makes no sense. In Europe, the Christian Democratic parties that acknowledge a specific link to the Christian religious tradition are not *religious* parties in anything like the extent that the American Republican Party is today. The disputes over science vs. religious beliefs that we have in the United States on issues like the teaching of biology (creationism), global warming, stem-cell research and birth control would be scarcely recognizable in European democracies. Certainly, there are disputes over questions like the regulation of abortion. And, amazingly enough, those issues can be thoroughly aired without having a theocratic lobby like the Christian Right to spur it on.

Europe isn't free from disputes over science, either. But anti-scientific trends there would deal more with secular claims for things like the effectiveness of alternative medicine, which anyway is better regulated in Europe than in the US.

And the idea that foreign policy in the Middle East should be dominated by crackpot 19th-century fundamentalist Christian notions of the End Times is simply not an issue for the European Union.

But does this "secularism" correspond to "atheism"? I'm sure there is some correlation. But the notion that being religious excludes an appreciation for secular science or support for a secular government is just silly. Fundamentalist Christians may reject science and birth control on purely religious grounds and seek to impose their standards on the rest of us by law. But that is not the case with mainstream Christianity or with most Christians in America and Europe. Being "religious" is perfectly compatable in practice with being "secular" in everything related to government and science.

Both religious fundamentalists and atheists would argue that a secular outlook is incompatable with religious faith. But in practice, they often go together. To equate "secular" with "atheist" and "religious" with "non-secular" is nothing but a propagandistic ploy. It does not reflect the real attitudes and behavior of people in D'Souza's "European" societies.

To paraphrase Shakira's song "Don't Bother":

He makes the kind of point
That defies reality
He is just a flack
And he's fact-free

Her father is an Arab and so is her name and she's from Colombia: is she "Western"? (Who in their right mind cares?)

The rest is, well, I guess the kind of thing that for the Christian Right would come off as "highbrow" reasoning:

The most secular continent on the globe is decadent in the literal sense that its population is rapidly shrinking. Lacking the strong Christian identity that produced its greatness, atheist Europe seems to be a civilization on its way out. We have met Nietzsche's "last man" and his name is Sven.

His name is Sven? What the [Cheney] does that mean?

Since the history of European civilization isn't exactly explained on FOX News' daily broadcasts, sweeping generalizations about History are usually pretty safe. Now, if you were to browse a good encyclopedia for, oh, a few minutes, you could probably find out that Europe was pretty thoroughly Christian from the fall of the Roman Empire until today. But Christian Western Europe was pretty much of a cultural and civilizational backwater until they starting learning about science and the classical (Greek and Roman) scholarship that had gone into eclipse in western Europe during the Dark Ages. Started learning about it from the Muslim world, that is, to a large extent through al-Andalus, the Muslim-controlled areas of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal today). And if we want to nitpick, the Byzantine Empire and Russia were Christian, as well. How does that fit into D'Souza's idea that a "strong Christian identity" produced the "greatness" of his model European civilization?

But Christian Rightists would know to disregard any explanation along those lines as lying liberal misinformation.

There are some other gems there, too. For example:

While Islam spreads in Europe and elsewhere, Christianity is spreading even faster in Africa, Asia and South America. Remarkably, Christianity will soon become a non-Western religion with a minority presence among Europeans.

Now wait. I realize I don't have access to the hermetic wisdom of Republican Party Higher Thought? Silly me. But isn't Latin America in the, uh, Western Hemisphere? Don't the religious traditions of the dominant cultures in Latin America, even in states with a majority "indigenous" population, stem from Spain, Portugal, England and America?

Or this:

My conclusion is that it is not religion but atheism that requires a Darwinian explanation. It seems perplexing why nature would breed a group of people who see no purpose to life or the universe, indeed whose only moral drive seems to be sneering at their fellow human beings who do have a sense of purpose. Here is where the biological expertise of Dawkins and his friends could prove illuminating. Maybe they can turn their Darwinian lens on themselves and help us understand how atheism, like the human tailbone and the panda's thumb, somehow survived as an evolutionary leftover of our primitive past.

Why are even the highbrow conservatives so obsessed with accusing their opponents (real and imaginary) of being hypocrites? And I have to wonder if D'Souza has ever talked to any real live atheists. I mean, in what alternative reality is it the case that atheists' "only moral drive seems to be sneering at their fellow human beings who do have a sense of purpose"? In this case, "highbrow" is barely distinguishable from Rush Limbaugh's junkie bigot level of thought.

The only real use of D'Souza's article is to show us where you wind up when you try to construct highbrow arguments for bonehead reactionary ideas. It can be embarassingly daffy.

posted at 4:30:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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