Freedom's Virtues

...He's also logged enough time on the campus lecture circuit to have encountered just about every anti-American fusillade offered by the anti-globalists, multiculturalists, and Eurosnobs...

...It's an ambitious project, and D'Souza only sketches it here, beginning with a distinction between what he calls the "externally directed" virtue of the Muslim world and the "self-directed" virtue of Americans...

...But then he tells conservatives that they have, in essence, already lost this fight: Authenticity is here to stay, and we should instead try to bend it to achieve conservative goals...

...And, he notes, America's success at making prosperity so widespread is a moral triumph, because it frees up time for family life, community involvement, and spiritual pursuits...

...When one gets past the "Death to America...

...The Islamic critique is similar to what many conservatives have been saying about America for some time—that, as D'Souza puts it, "the triumph of freedom comes at the expense of decency, community, and virtue...

...They must be able to articulate why the American way of life is superior not only at producing technology or prosperity or democracy, but at producing citizens who use their freedom to pursue virtue...

...He came to America from his native India when he was seventeen years old, and he has an immigrant's appreciation for what the United States represents...

...Refuting this challenge will require, as D'Souza wrote recently in these pages, "a full-bodied defense of freedom as understood in the West, as a gift from God and a necessary precondition for true virtue"—and it is up to conservatives to make this defense, since they alone still seem comfortable mentioning God and virtue...

...So why repeat them in a book that is ostensibly a response to the anti-Americanism of Islamic fundamentalists...

...He suggests we need "education and discussion" to return the question of the goal—the telos, the point—of human existence to the forefront of our national discourse...

...D'Souza himself has written, for example, in The Virtue of Prosperity that a true liberal-arts education steeped in the classics could "supply us with personal horizons of understanding and significance" that we seem to lack in an age of affluence...

...Still, readers of his other books—such as Illiberal Education, The End of Racism, and The Virtue of Prosperity—already know these arguments and his responses...

...We have to show [the Muslim world] why our society is a moral improvement on theirs," D'Souza writes, "and this is neither an obvious nor an easy task...

...So now, in What's So Great About America, he presents their claims that America is irredeemably tainted by racism, imperialism, and oppression...

...frenzy of the Arab crowds and delves into the thinkers who shaped Islamic fundamentalism, one finds "an intelligent and even profound assault on the very basis of America and the West"—a critique that, "at its best, shows a deep understanding of America's fundamental principles...

...But conservatives have been saying this in one version or another for years now...

...But at the same time, conservatives cannot simply pretend that the concerns they had about the moral direction of America the day before September 11 are now irrelevant...

...At the deepest level their assault is moral: they seek to destroy America's belief in herself, knowing that if this happens, America is finished...

...D'Souza admits that what's so great about America—the freedom of its people to "write the script of their own lives"—is only great when those lives and scripts are directed toward some compelling vision of the good...

...Each serves as a fat pitch over the middle of the plate, and there's considerable pleasure in watching D'Souza whack them out of the ballpark...

...His answer is that all these attacks aim at "America's greatest weakness: her lack of moral self-confidence...

...The millions of Americans who manage to live morally decent lives amidst the temptations of freedom embody virtue far more than those living under state-imposed sharia law...

...They must construct a defense of freedom defined as something more profound than, in Salman Rushdie's recent formulation, "short skirts and dancing...

...True virtue cannot be imposed: A veil worn under duress is no sign of true modesty...

...BY LEE BOCKHORN It becomes necessary, from time to time, to defend America not just against physical attack but also against its intellectual enemies, foreign and domestic—and few are better qualified to provide such a defense than Dinesh D'Souza...

...D'Souza considers the Islamic fundamentalist critique a more serious Lee Bockhorn is associate editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...So how do we convince people to choose the right script...

...But this raises another problem...

...D'Souza thus addresses What's So Great About America to his fellow conservatives as much as to anyone else...

...What we still need are ideas about how actually to apply our understanding of what such education could do for us if only we had it...

...Its central claim is that Islamic society is superior to the West because it "makes virtue as laid down by the Koran the chief end of government," unlike the West, which makes freedom the chief end of government...

...Dinesh D'Souza hasn't yet given the solution, but what he has accomplished in What's So Great About America is a convincing presentation of the vastness—and the urgency—of the task...

...threat than the anti-globalization and multiculturalist attacks...

...D'Souza contrasts the new moral order of Rousseauian "authenticity" and "self-fulfillment" with the classical and Christian moral order of duties that transcend individual desires...