The Enemy At Home

by Dinesh D'Souza

  Liberal morality emerged in resistance to the traditional morality that holds sway in all traditional cultures and that constituted a virtual moral consensus in America prior to the 1960s. In America today, traditional morality is espoused mainly by religious and political conservatives. Traditional morality is based on the notion that there is a moral order in the universe, which establishes an enduring standard of right and wrong. All the major religions of the world agree on the existence of this moral order. There is also a surprising degree of unanimity about the content of the moral order. If we make a list of the virtues that are prized in various cultures, we discover that we are looking at pretty much the same list. Of course, some cultures give priority to promoting this or that virtue, or to eradicating this or that vice, but very rarely do we encounter virtues in one culture that are considered vices in another, or vices in one culture that are championed as virtues in another.

  There is also widespread acceptance in traditional societies, as there was in America, that human behavior falls short of the universal moral code. The existence, even the pervasiveness, of violation was never considered an argument against the code. On the contrary, it is precisely because of the imperfection of human nature and the depravity of human conduct that an unwavering moral standard was considered indispensable to provide a guiding light for human aspiration and to bring forth “the better angels of our nature.” Moreover, the traditional moral code was reflected in law. This is not to say that morality and law were ever identical. There are things that are immoral—like greed and selfishness—that are not, by themselves, illegal. There are actions that are against the law, like building without a permit or leaving your car in a No Parking zone, that are not necessarily immoral. Even so, the traditional understanding is that the law is a moral teacher and should generally reflect the precepts of the shared moral code.

  Many liberals reacted against the traditional moral code because they viewed it as a burden, and an obstacle to freedom. Since the traditional code was so deeply entrenched in Western society, the first moral rebels were also social rebels. These were the bohemians, most of whom were artists of one sort or another: poets, writers, sculptors, painters, and so on. You could find them on the Left Bank of Paris in the nineteenth century, or in Greenwich Village in New York in the early twentieth century. Fitzgerald’s Gatsby—a self-created individual who thinks nothing about pursuing a married woman because he obeys no rule other than the imperative of his inner imagination—is the classic expression of the high-flying bohemianism of the roaring twenties. The term “bohemian” was originally used to describe Gypsies, who were thought to have come from Bohemia in Central Europe. Like the Gypsies, the bohemians lived on the margins of respectable society and openly flouted its moral rules, which they spurned as “bourgeois morality.” The bohemians lived in obedience to a new code, which has now become liberal morality.

  This liberal morality did not become a mainstream phenomenon in the West until the 1960s, when bohemian values became the values of the counterculture. In a recent study, Elizabeth Wilson observes that “bohemian values have penetrated mainstream society to a degree unthinkable a hundred years ago,” so that today we commonly encounter attitudes and behavior “once considered completely beyond the pale.”27 Some in America regard the counterculture as largely the product of the Vietnam War, although it also developed in Europe, where the Vietnam War had no direct relevance. It is also inaccurate to think of liberal morality as the product of movements of social liberation, such as the feminist movement and the homosexual rights movement. In many ways those movements were themselves the product of the new morality. Their success is inconceivable apart from liberal morality, because this morality supplied the ethical vocabulary in which the champions of sexual freedom and sexual equality articulated their deepest concerns.

  What, then, is liberal morality? Its premise is that right and wrong reside not in some invisible external order but within the inner reaches of our own heart. Its operating maxim is the one that Polonius gives to Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “To thine own self be true.” The crucial difference between the traditional view and the liberal view is not in the content of morality but in the source of morality. Liberal morality holds that in a given situation—as when faced with a moral choice—we should not consult some external set of rules but look within ourselves to our moral rudder. Plumbing our inner depths, we have access through our feelings to a kind of “second self” or “inner self.” This is nothing other than our best self: it is the self uncorrupted by the evils of society. Indeed it can be viewed as the voice of nature within us. In the liberal view, human nature is in its original sense good but has been distorted by society. That is why liberals so often excuse irresponsible and even criminal behavior by saying, in effect, “Society made him do it.”

  As philosopher Charles Taylor puts it, the morality of the “inner self” is an attempt to achieve wholeness and self-fulfillment by “recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.”28 This morality is very appealing, because it celebrates individuality and moral freedom and places very few burdens on behavior. It celebrates individuality because it presumes that each person has his or her own way of being, which is revealed through an inward sensibility. It offers moral freedom because although one is obliged to follow what his heart says, ultimately he is accountable to no one other than himself.

  Moreover, liberal morality casts aside many of the old and restrictive rules that insist, in one way or another, “Thou shalt not.” There is no longer an external moral authority to constrain people from watching pornography or coveting their neighbor’s wife. What used to be considered sexually deviant or perverted under the old order becomes permitted as an expression of autonomy and individuality. Traditional forms of excess become excusable, even commendable, as modes of self-realization and self-discovery. This is not to say that morality becomes arbitrary. Consider some typical dilemmas. Do I, Jane, love Bill? Should I become a poet, or go to business school? The liberal view is not that any answer will do, or that all answers are equally right, but that there is a correct answer and your heart will tell you what it is. So morality is authoritative and at the same time subjective, because each person must decide for himself or herself what is right in a particular situation.

  If there is a villain in the liberal story, it is traditional morality itself. The new code of individuality is fiercely intolerant of the old moral code—or indeed any code—that subjects individual choices to external judgment. Traditional morality and its defenders become objects of liberal antagonism, because they are viewed as “judgmental” and “repressive” and therefore as enemies of freedom. Consequently liberals become indignant whenever they encounter traditional morality, and many do whatever they can to subvert it. In this framework, transgressing the conventions and morals of traditional society becomes a virtue. This is why, when the comedian Ellen DeGeneres in 1997 publicly declared her lesbianism on national television, Vice President Al Gore praised her for her “courage” and her “contribution to society.” Absent liberal morality, Ellen’s behavior would be viewed as strange, and Gore’s as even stranger. It would be as though a leading public figure had announced a press conference to declare his preference for oral sex. Such a revelation of his nocturnal habits would be regarded as a disgraceful breach of decency. Moreover, it would be unthinkable for one of the nation’s top-ranking leaders to praise such a declaration for its boldness or value to society. He would be more likely to ignore it as beneath the dignity of comment. In Gore’s view, however, Ellen’s revelation was commendable because here was a glamorous figure and a role model asserting sexual autonomy and repudiating traditional morals.

  The liberals’ strongest charge against traditionalists is that they are hypocrites. This charge is easy to sustain because traditionalists inevitably fall short of the high moral bar that they set for themselves. By contrast, liberals are immune to the accusation of hypocrisy because in the sexual domain they
do not espouse external moral standards at all. To sustain a charge of hypocrisy you cannot accuse a liberal of operating a prostitution ring; you have to accuse him of failing to pay the minimum wage! The contempt and even hatred that many liberals exhibit toward traditionalists gives liberalism its crusading zeal. Some conservatives mistakenly regard liberalism as “non-judgmental,” but liberal morality is extremely judgmental in condemning traditional morality.

  This explains, for instance, the scorn with which organizations like Planned Parenthood regard efforts to teach sexual modesty and abstinence to young people. Such programs, according to Carol Rose, executive director of the Massachusetts ACLU, are “dangerous to the health and well-being of teens.” Abstinence advocacy is considered ineffective and even harmful because, in the liberal view, it has no chance of restricting teen sexual behavior. The liberal premise is that sex is natural and that young people are going to have it. Of course, modesty is also natural. Moreover, the liberal assumption is on its face implausible: young people were much less active sexually when abstinence was the moral norm, and they are much less active sexually in other cultures where abstinence remains the norm. Wendy Shalit argues that in traditional cultures unmarried young women are instructed to be ashamed of sexual experience, whereas in liberal culture they are induced to be ashamed of their sexual innocence.29 It is liberal morality that teaches young people to suppress modesty and act upon their sexual impulses with the sole caveat that they use contraceptives or other forms of “protection.” Liberal morality dispenses with traditional moral restraints and reduces the scope of sex education to matters of safety and hygiene.

  Clearly this approach of resignation in the face of human tendencies is not the one that liberals take in other areas. Liberals do not say, “Prejudice is natural,” and therefore racism and gay bashing on the part of young people should be accepted as inevitable. Rather, liberals typically condemn these tendencies and do what they can to suppress them, restrict them, and educate young people to resist them. When parents protest the exposure of their children to sexually explicit materials in school or in movies, liberals typically accuse them of “censorship.” But when civil rights and gay rights groups protest the portrayal of blacks and homosexuals, liberals hasten to get the material withdrawn or rewritten, or to extract public expressions of repentance. The reasonable conclusion, therefore, is that many on the cultural left regard racism and gay bashing as evils that should be discouraged, whereas they regard premarital sex as a good that should be promoted.30

  I will have more to say about the consequences of liberal morality in subsequent chapters. My conclusion at this point is that the depravity of American culture is defended and protected by the new liberal morality. This ethic has contributed to making American culture more trivial, debased, and degenerate. Now this gross underside of American culture is being exported to the world. Therefore it is no longer “our problem” but a global problem. Many liberals seem blind to the moral concerns of traditional people, such as their concern for childhood innocence and modesty, because they do not share the traditional view of right and wrong. What traditional cultures and specifically Muslim cultures consider deviant and disgusting, many liberals consider progressive and liberating. Thus, from the point of view of those cultures, liberals promote an “upside down” morality in which traditional forms of depravity become signposts of freedom. Traditional Muslims fear that freedom in the West means moral corruption, and liberals are the ones who are proving them right.

  SIX

  A World Without Patriarchy

  Divorce, Homosexuality, and Other Liberal Family Values

  IF YOU WANT to understand liberal family values, a good place to start is the Abu Ghraib scandal. For many Americans this statement may seem surprising. After all, Abu Ghraib is widely associated with prisoner abuse, lack of accountability, and torture. Once the scandal erupted in April 2004, with lurid photographs showing U.S. soldiers degrading and humiliating Iraqi prisoners, the American media portrayed the incident as a textbook case of the abuses of empire.

  As many liberals saw it, the images of Abu Ghraib—Private Lynndie England leading an Iraqi man on a leash, naked Iraqi prisoners stacked into a human pyramid, captives being forced to masturbate in a public corridor, and so on—demonstrate the Bush administration’s arrogant indifference to the misuse of power. As Mark Danner, author of Torture and Truth, puts it, “We’ve been offered a window into the realm of government decision-making having to do with interrogation and torture.” Anthony Lewis saw Abu Ghraib as symptomatic of “the abandonment of America’s commitment to human rights at home and abroad.” Seymour Hersh traced “the roots of Abu Ghraib” to torture memos drafted in the White House and torture policies approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.1

  Conservatives did their best to minimize the significance of Abu Ghraib. President Bush said it “does not represent America.” James Schlesinger characterized it as “Animal House on the night shift.” Many conservatives pointed out that there was no moral equivalence between an admitted excess like Abu Ghraib and the terrorists’ practice of chopping off captives’ heads. Bernard Goldberg noted that liberals who whine about “so-called American atrocities…never seem to cry over the genuine atrocities that are commonplace throughout the Arab world.” Some on the right defended Abu Ghraib as a way to get valuable tips about potential terrorist attacks. Rush Limbaugh claimed that “maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart” because, as an interrogation technique, “it sounds pretty effective to me.” Columnist Tammy Bruce wrote, “I’m all for whatever it takes to get information.”2

  Throughout the Muslim world, Abu Ghraib was viewed very differently. To see why, we need to take a closer look at the scandal. Fortunately we have a detailed picture of what happened, both from the military’s five-hundred-page report and from the trials of Private England and Private Charles Graner, the two main figures involved. After marrying at age nineteen “on a whim,” as she put it, England left her husband and enlisted in the military. There she met Graner, who was fresh from a divorce in which his wife had taken out three protective orders against him. Shortly before they went to Iraq, England and Graner partied together with another soldier friend in Virginia Beach. “They drank heavily,” the New York Times reports, and when the other soldier passed out, “Private Graner and Private England took turns taking photographs of each other exposing themselves over his head.” In Iraq, the two began an affair that they continued even though both were warned that their sexual trysts on the night shift violated military rules.

  Soon Graner and England began to make videos of their sex acts. They circulated the videos among their friends, and even mailed some to friends back in America. In October 2004, Graner persuaded several other soldiers to join him in staging and photographing prisoners. They made Muslim men strip naked and simulate various sex acts for the camera. They ordered male captives to put on female underwear, sometimes on their heads. They compelled prisoners to masturbate while they watched. At one point England said of a detainee, “Look, he’s getting hard.” Graner said he was the one who took the infamous photograph of England holding a leash around the neck of a crawling prisoner. “Look what I made Lynndie do,” Graner boasted in an e-mail with the photo attachment that he sent to someone he knew. Graner said the pictures he took of inmates masturbating were a “birthday gift” to England. Graner made another unexpected present to England: he made her pregnant.

  England discovered the pregnancy two days after she broke up with Graner. The reason for the breakup was that Graner was having an affair with another woman, Specialist Megan Ambuhl. During their courtship Ambuhl e-mailed Graner an article headlined, “Study Finds Frequent Sex Raises Cancer Risk.” She commented, “We could have died last night.” The army sent England home on account of her pregnancy, and by the time the baby was born she was no longer speaking to Graner. Graner proposed marriage to Ambuhl during his court-martial, and England found this out from her lawyers.
Graner got ten years in prison, England three years. The other soldiers received lesser sentences. Paul Arthur, the military investigator who was the first to question England, quoted her giving a simple motive for her actions. “It was just for fun.” Arthur added, “They didn’t think it was that serious. They didn’t think it was a big deal. They were joking around.”3

  Now we are in a better position to understand the Muslim reaction to Abu Ghraib. Most Muslims did not view it as a torture story at all. Muslims were not outraged at the interrogation techniques used by the American military, which are quite mild by Arab standards. Remember that Abu Ghraib was one of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious prisons. Tens of thousands of people were held there and many were subject to indescribable beatings and abuse. Twice a week, there were hangings outside the prison. This is what Muslims mean by torture, not the lights-on, lights-off version that American liberals are so indignant about. Moreover, Muslims realized that most of the torture scenes in the photographs—the hooded man with his arms outstretched, the prisoner with wires attached to his limbs—were staged. This was simulated torture, not real torture.

  The main focus of Islamic disgust was what Muslims perceived as extreme sexual perversion. For many Muslims, Abu Ghraib demonstrated the casualness with which married Americans have affairs, walk out on their spouses, and produce children without bothering to take responsibility for the care of their offspring. In the Muslim view, this perversion is characteristic of American society, and is the root of family breakdown in America. Moreover, many Muslims viewed the sexual degradation as a metaphor for how little Americans care for other people’s sacred values, and for the kind of humiliation that America seeks to impose on the Muslim world. Some Muslims argued that such degradation was worse than execution because death only strips a man of his life, not of his honor. As these Muslims saw it, there was in fact no moral equivalence between the sexual humiliation of Abu Ghraib and the decapitation of hostages by terrorists: the former was worse!