What's So Great About America

by Dinesh D'Souza

  The social traits I have here described are intrinsic to a free society oriented around technology and commerce. Important though they are, they are not the full story. To complete the story, we must examine the big change that came about in the 1960s, and was consolidated in the 1970s. You can see physical evidence of this change at the Yale Club in New York, where the photographs of Yale graduates are displayed. Through the 1950s and 1960s, these graduates present a neat, clean-cut appearance. Then, around 1969, the photographs tell a different story. The hair of the men gets longer, the hair of the women gets shorter. The hippie and the freak become recognizable social types. By the 1970s these changes have shaped virtually the whole class: the vast majority of graduates are seen sporting a languid, disheveled, rebel look. We can see a similar change by comparing the Beatles in the early 1960s with the Beatles in the early 1970s. By themselves these changes are merely cosmetic, but I am suggesting that they are outward manifestations of a much deeper alteration of outlook.

  The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a moral revolution in the United States in which the idea of freedom was extended beyond anything the American founders envisioned. The change can be described in this way. The American founders believed that all people share a basic human nature, and therefore they want pretty much the same things in life. The founders set up a regime dedicated to three types of freedom—economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of speech and religion—so that people could pursue happiness, or what we call the “American dream.”

  But this notion of freedom was radicalized in the 1960s. The change was brought about by the “counterculture,” the mélange of antiwar activists, feminists, sexual revolutionaries, freedom riders, hippies, druggies, nudists, and vegetarians. Rebels they all were, and bohemians of one sort or another. The great thinker who stood behind them, the philosopher of bohemia, was Rousseau. This is not to say that Rousseau caused the social revolution. But he articulated its complaints and aspirations in the most eloquent, profound way. By examining Rousseau and what has been termed his “romantic” philosophy, we can more deeply understand the important moral shift that has occurred in America in the past few decades.

  Rousseau was a deeply strange man. It has been said of him that he labored under the illusion that changes within his own life mirrored the great transformations of Western civilization. (Some have accused me of operating under the same delusion.) Many aspects of Rousseau’s thought are misunderstood. Upon receiving a copy of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Voltaire wrote to him, “The desire to walk on all fours seizes one when one reads your work. Unfortunately I lost that habit more than 60 years ago.”10 Even today the popular impression is that Rousseau wanted us to abandon civilization and live the life of a noble savage. But Rousseau explicitly disclaims any such intention. “Although I want to form the man of nature,” he writes, “the object is not to make him a savage and relegate him to the depths of the woods.”11 So, too, many people misunderstand Rousseau’s concept of the “general will” as constituting some kind of an apologia for totalitarianism. In fact, Rousseau was a champion of radical freedom. We can see this by focusing on a central element of Rousseau’s thought—the one that pertains to the “new morality” of the 1960s.

  The philosopher Charles Taylor—whose interpretation of Rousseau I rely on throughout this chapter—expounds Rousseau’s new idea: “There is a way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s. If I do not, I miss the point of my life. I miss what being human is for me.”12 By insisting that each of us has an original way of being human, Rousseau is articulating the idea of individuality. But he is doing a lot more than that. Rousseau insists that in determining the unique course of one’s life, the self is sovereign. To the American founders’ list of freedoms, Rousseau adds a new one: inner freedom. In its most important manifestation, inner freedom is moral freedom—the freedom to determine what is good. But inner freedom also encompasses the broad range of choices that make one’s life richer and more fulfilling. Rousseau argues that in deciding what to become, whom to marry, how to live, I should not go by the dictates of my parents, or my teachers, or my preachers, or even God. I should decide for myself alone.

  How should I decide? By digging deep within myself. By consulting my inner compass, what Rousseau calls the “interior guide that never abandons us.”13 For Rousseau, we are beings with inner depths. The principles of truth, he writes, are “engraved in all hearts” and to discover what is right in a given situation, all we have to do is “commune with oneself.”14 As the Savoyard Vicar puts it in Rousseau’s Emile, “I do not derive these rules from the principles of high philosophy, but I find them written by nature in ineffaceable characters at the bottom of my heart.”15 Here Rousseau is giving expression to the idea of authenticity, of being true to oneself.

  It is a massively important idea. Before Rousseau, no one believed that each human life should follow its own distinctive moral course, nor did anyone think of giving the inner self—the voice of nature within us—final authority in determining that course. Rousseau’s view emerged in resistance to an earlier view, according to which morality was a matter of costs and benefits. For Rousseau, calculation is the ethic of the bourgeois, the man of commerce. “Ancient politicians incessantly talked about morals and virtue,” Rousseau writes. “Those of our time talk only of business and money.”16

  Rousseau’s objection to the bourgeois is that he is a bit of a low character. His main goals are to improve his financial situation and move to a nicer neighborhood. The bourgeois wants to look good, smell clean, and have regular bowel movements. Medical checkups are a big thing with him; he wants to postpone death as long as possible. The bourgeois is far more concerned with his portfolio than with his soul. He spends all day doing corporate accounts or selling pest-control products, yet he is satisfied in his work. But how can one derive satisfaction from recording transactions all day, or from killing rats and cockroaches? The bourgeois is a man of limited horizons. However picayune his function, he is proud of his “work ethic.” But as Oscar Wilde once noted, to have to do laborious work like sweeping floors and adding up numbers is depressing enough; to take pride in such things is absolutely appalling.

  Rousseau’s strongest complaint against the bourgeois is that he professes to be moral while acting like a mercenary. His virtues are entirely based on selfish calculation: he treats other people well in order to make a bigger profit. The bourgeois man doesn’t care about being good; he only wants to appear good. His overriding concern is with his reputation. And in his social life, the bourgeois is obsessed with foolish vanity. Even his opinion of himself is derived from how he is perceived by others. His personality is so shaped by convention that he no longer knows who he really is. He is estranged from his own nature. He is a faker and a hypocrite. Even worse, he is not free because all his priorities and indeed his very identity are dependent on others. The conformity of the bourgeois is the mark of his unfreedom. Rousseau’s charges are precisely the ones that the young people of the 1960s launched against their parents.

  Against the false values of the bourgeois—against his artificiality and hypocrisy—Rousseau offered the alternative of primitive man, natural man, of Homo sapiens before the advent of civilization. Rousseau admits that natural man may never have really existed: he is a kind of mental construct, a “hypothesis.” Nevertheless, Rousseau finds it very illuminating to imagine what such a man might be like. He would be a savage, yes, but a noble savage. His selfishness would be confined to meeting his immediate bodily needs. Confronted by suffering on the part of his fellows, natural man would feel pity. Natural man is not virtuous—he doesn’t even know what that is—but he does have a basic innocence and goodness. Natural man is without vanity or pretense, the evils that Rousseau believes have been introduced by “civilization.” Rousseau also admires natural man because he is free: he has no prescribed duties, obeys no one, and follow
s no law other than his own will.

  Still, Rousseau is under no illusion that modern people can recover natural man. Having been imbued with civilization, we cannot now return to the forest and live with the bears. But if a return to nature is impossible, Rousseau argues that there is a second option available to us. We can recover the voice of nature in us. If man’s original home cannot be restored as a place, it can be restored as a state of mind. Charles Taylor terms this “self-determining freedom.” In Taylor’s words, “I am free when I decide for myself what concerns me, rather than being shaped by external influences. Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves. Self-determining freedom demands that I break the hold of external impositions, and decide for myself alone.” 17

  It is only when the layers of artificiality and convention are removed that one’s true self emerges. For Rousseau, the true self is characterized by originality, sincerity, and compassion. He makes virtues out of all three. In his Confessions Rousseau writes, “I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence.”18 Rousseau proves the point by giving us an autobiography like none that was written before him. Commenting on Rousseau’s revelations, Irving Babbit writes, “Never has a man of such undoubted genius shown himself so lacking in humility and decency.”19 Rousseau raises the curtain on all kinds of forbidden experiences, including masturbation, adultery, voyeurism, visits to brothels, even incest and sadomasochism. Far from being embarrassed about discussing such topics, Rousseau revels in them.

  Yet there is nothing cheap or sordid about Rousseau. He deals with intimate experiences with such passion, tenderness, and seriousness that the overall effect is to heighten our fascination. Generations of critics have denounced Rousseau as self-indulgent, disgusting, and perverted. They have noted that he fathered several children out of wedlock and then abandoned them to an orphanage; Rousseau can be seen as the original deadbeat dad. But none of these criticisms has diminished Rousseau’s appeal. Rousseau’s answer to them is something like the following: If I am not worth as much as you are, at least I am different. I may not be as virtuous, but I am my own person. You may not like my self-description, but you have to credit me with giving an honest account of myself. You may find me unappealing, but at least I am sincere. Finally, if I have not lived an irreproachable life, I am a well-meaning and good person, and I care. The reader may recognize in this portrait the moral code of a certain American ex-president.

  To understand why Rousseau’s ideas are so controversial, to see why their consolidation in the 1960s and 1970s continues to torment and divide Americans, it is helpful to contrast Rousseau’s Confessions with another book of the same title: the Confessions of St. Augustine. Augustine, of course, was one of the early church fathers, and at first glance his account of morality seems to be quite similar to that of Rousseau. “I entered into the depths of my soul,” Augustine writes, “and with the eye of my soul I saw the Light that never changes casting its rays over me.”20 In Augustine’s view, God is not to be found “out there” but within our hearts. God is the interior light that powers our souls.

  Both Augustine and Rousseau counsel inwardness as the means to truth. Rousseau’s innovation is to cut off this quest from any external source of authority, including that of God. For Rousseau the self defines what is good; the inner light is the final arbiter of how I should live my life. Augustine, by contrast, presumed that the inward journey is merely the pathway to the Creator. The inner light is controlled by an outer source, and that is God. Another way to put it is that Augustine presumes that there is a moral order in the universe that is separate from us and that makes claims on us. The existence of such an order was taken for granted by virtually all the great thinkers of the ancient world—Christian and non-Christian, Western and non-Western, believers as well as atheists.21 Its laws were considered no less valid than, say, the laws governing the motion of the tides and the planets.

  In America, of course, the moral order was represented by Christianity. Intellectuals have been rebelling against the Christian order for several centuries. But I think it is fair to say that until the 1950s—the era of the “greatest generation”—the Christian paradigm held firm in America. It had been modified over time to take into account the multiplicity of Christian denominations, as well as the presence of Jews—hence the attempt at forging a Judeo-Christian synthesis. Despite these accommodations, the vast majority of Americans in the 1950s believed that, for human beings in general, there was a “right way” to live and a “wrong way” to live, and they were pretty confident that they knew the difference between the two. There was a whole moral framework that this group took for granted.

  What changed in the 1960s in America is the collapse of this framework, the erosion of belief in this external order. For the first time many people, especially young people, began to find the external rules arbitrary, senseless, and oppressive. The counterculture did not reject morality; it was passionately concerned with morality. But it substituted Rousseau’s conception of the inner compass for the old rules of obligation. Getting in touch with one’s feelings and being true to oneself were now more important than conforming to the preexisting moral consensus of society. By embracing the new morality, the children of the 1960s became incomprehensible to their parents. And as this new generation inherited the reins of power, its ethos entered the mainstream. As a consequence of this change, America became a different country.

  The magnitude of the change is evident when we consider the philosophical presuppositions of the “old morality” and the “new morality.” The old morality was based on the premise that human nature is flawed. Since human beings are inclined to do bad things, consulting the inner self becomes a very misguided thing to do. The self is the enemy; the self is under the sway of the passions; the self must be overcome. The wayward passions must be ruled by the mind or brought to submission by the will. Through reason or revelation, human beings acquire knowledge of the external order. Conformity to that order is the measure of how good a person you are. And the institutions of society should be devised in such a way as to steer flawed or sinful human beings away from temptation and to keep them on the straight path.

  Rousseau turns this paradigm upside down. For him, human nature is basically good. It is society that corrupts man. The means of this corruption is reason, which is deployed to enable one man to advance above another, to accumulate more than the other, to appear good in the eyes of everybody. Since reason has become an instrument of sordid calculation, it is the enemy of morality and truth. In order to discover what is good and true, we must set aside reason and be in touch with our feelings. This is the romantic element in Rousseau. According to him, feelings never lie because they speak with the voice of nature itself. By listening to that inner voice, and following it, we can rise above the corruptions and compromises that society seeks from us, and we can recover our natural goodness.

  The triumph of Rousseau’s worldview gives rise to a new set of problems that could not have arisen under the old order. In earlier eras people didn’t have “identity crises” because their moral identity was supplied by the ethical framework that they all took for granted. This ethical framework might emphasize different virtues in different times or places—thus one society emphasizes the warrior ethic, another the ascetic life, a third the life of production and the family. The challenge that people faced was one of living up to the moral order. The Spartan soldier might have wondered whether he was courageous enough not to retreat in the face of certain death. The medieval Christian monk might have doubted his ability to live by the Benedictine Rule. Undoubtedly there were members of the “greatest generation” who struggled to conform to the demands imposed on them by the regnant code: to remain faithful to their wives, go to church on Sunday, show up for battle when drafted, and so on. But in each case some external framework remained in place and provided an unquestioned standard by which hu
man action was judged.

  In Rousseau’s new world, however, the external framework ceases to be authoritative for the whole society. A person can, of course, join the marines and embrace the military code, or become a Muslim and follow the Islamic regimen. But now it is the individual’s act of choosing that is important. No one sees it as obvious that the military life or the Islamic life is the best or highest calling. Most people’s reaction is, “Well, if it works for you,” and “Well, if you’re happy.” In other words, each person must select his or her priorities and moral commitments in a society where other people are sure to choose differently, and in which there are obvious trade-offs to be made.

  In Rousseau’s world, moral identity is a problem because it is not given: it is self-generated. Authenticity and self-fulfillment represent an ongoing pursuit, and there is constant anxiety from the knowledge that this pursuit can fail. A person who feels inwardly directed to be an artist might, for various reasons, take a job in banking and spend the rest of his life feeling that he has betrayed his true calling, that he has “sold out.” Moreover, even commitments that are satisfying at a given time can lose their hold on us; when this happens to the whole moral outlook we have chosen, the result is utter confusion, a crisis of identity. An “identity crisis” is what happens to you when a set of commitments that once seemed right no longer makes sense to you: suddenly you are cut adrift, you have lost your horizon, you no longer know who you are.22 These problems are peculiar to a society that has adopted the ethic of authenticity: in other words, they are American problems.