D’Souza’s Thesis: Why Is It Misunderstood?
A set of comments at National Review on Dinesh D’Souza’s thesis that Islamists have been successful because Islam is hostile to modern Western immorality shows how lost conservatism is. It’s not that the commentors–who include smart people like Victor Hanson and Stanley Kurtz– disagree with D’Souza; rather, they don’t even comprehend his thesis. His argument goes like this:
1. The Left won the Culture War in the Western World.
2. The Left’s immorality is now spreading worldwide, including to Islamic countries.
3. Mainstream Moslems are therefore now turning to the leadership of radical Islamists to fight back against infectious western decadence.
Thus, the Left caused 9-11. This is not moral causation, because it was not the intent of the Left to cause 9-11; it is just “efficient causation”, to use Aristotle’s classification. Or, if you like, it is somewhere in between: the Left wanted to spread its ideas around the World, and it sparked a war that it didn’t intend to cause.
The comments say that the Left is not to blame, which may be right (causing something bad doesn’t mean you are to blame for it), and that the Islamists are a bigger threat than the Left (which any conservative should think is false, as I have posted on before). Perhaps the problem is that many people categorized under “conservative” today are not conservative at all. They are foreign policy realists, or libertarians, or neoconservatives who approve of homosexuality, divorce, and pornography, and thus do not see the Left as a threat except to national security and to their pocketbooks. Naturally, such a person would not agree with D’Souza, and might even have trouble understanding his point, and why the Islamists are so angry.