Submitted by Jon Monroe, Feb 6, 2007 00:59

The culture war is an industrial conflict composed of factories of the Left and factories of the Right, both ceaselessly engaged in the production of moral issues - the moralization of issues that are not essentially moral, or the making of an 'issue' where no real issue exists. Dinesh D'Souza's productive efforts are aimed at the latter: making an issue of moral differences that don't really exist.

Who else but a culture warrior could look at the hatred of Muslims for the West and conclude that it is the morality of the West, not the pathetic waste of energy on moralization that afflicts the Muslim world (and ours) like a disease, that produces this hatred. Have D'Souza and his ilk never travelled? Leftist and Rightist culture warriors share this in common at least -- they never travel, even when they travel... which is to say they see the world from behind a blindfold. That blindfold is the conviction that peoples are distinguished by relative amounts of morality, and that we/I/us have received more than the normal share of goodness. But moral depravity and moral virtue are now, and have always been, everywhere, more-or-less equally distributed. It is only the moralistic mindset of the world's religious and political ideologues that insists on seeing outward shows of vice, or the open discussion/reporting of vices, as indicative of deep-seated moral decline. And suppression of bad behavior is, of course, indicative of the practice of moral virtue (the case of the Puritans). Because they want to believe that morality is important, they moralize; they confound depravity with decadence; they imagine that human nature has been doled out in unequal measures in one place and another. D'Souza, in order to moralize the issue of Muslim-Christian culture conflict, needs there to be a virtuous world of Islam (was this a rhetorical trick of his, or genuine masochism?) in contrast to morally declining, christian West.

As an example - merely an example, but a typical one - look at any street corner in the virtuous Muslim world and you will see a pack of resentful men muttering under their breath at any woman who is dressed sluttily (and what isn't 'slutty' in their virtuous little minds?): they are full of resentment and yearning. Let us not kid ourselves about the virtues underlying such a typical behavior -- leave that for the self-deluding soul who, seeing what he can't have and desperately wants, must necessarily convince himself that he is above it. [Of course, understanding that nature does not maldistribute morality across the globe requires understanding that morality is different from what moral bigmouths like D'Souza and the christian/muslimextremists call it. It is essential to the existence of so-called culture wars that there be people whose self-images are puffed-up with self-satisfaction solely on account of things they have refrained from doing, or because of some trivial thing that they DID do, such as say: 'I believe'. There has to be some such rite tor other that entitles the poor wretches to hate/fear/despise everyone else while believing that the secret to saving the world is producing more people just like them. Wonderful people these! Superimpose a map of the incidence of self-reported religious belief in the USA with a map of the per capita rates of serious crime - murder, rape and child abuse - and you'll see what I mean. Superimpose another map of median income, and things becomes clearer again by a full step.] These types of men, of course, have their exact counterparts in the West, and the only difference between the one and the other is the relative standard of living. D'Souza, with HIS morals, would have made an excellent Muslim extremist -- this is true provided, of course, that one understands the extent to which moralization is immoral. Such a pity that good fortune deprived D'Souza of the opportunity to flower into the role. Failing the opportunity to hide in caves in Pakistan, though, he can do the next best thing: rake the coals of moralization in the West so that we can all enjoy a good, long Dark Age of stupid religious conflict. Moral distemper is, of course, the short path to virtue.

A word on the use of the word 'intelligent' to describe people like Dinesh D'Souza (as it occurs in the review). We should invent a new word to describe educated morons like Mr. D'Souza so that it is no longer necessary to confound formal intelligence with idiocy in those not-so-rare cases where we must acknowledge that someone like D'Souza possesses the bare skills of thinking and a reasonable command of language. Everything D'Souza writes demonstrates how little his kind of intelligence is worth.

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