Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/05/05/tdr_interview_dinesh_dsouza_83.php
Monday, May 5, 2008
The Dartmouth Review: I watched a video of your debate with Christopher Hitchens, and read snippets of others as well as some of your articles concerning faith. As a young conservative, I must admit I find your commitment to and defense of God, Christianity, and religion in general more impressive than your work with Reagan or any other secular accomplishment. Can you tell our readers a bit about the reason Christianity has taken precedence in your work of late?
Dinesh D’Souza: It’s odd, when I look back at my own life, I was raised Christian, my family comes from a part of India called Goa that was Christianized by Portuguese missionaries going back a couple of centuries. So I was raised Christian, but like many of us, I learned my Christianity when I was five or eight or ten years old, so it was a very elementary, you could almost call it “crayon Christianity.” When I came to America as an exchange student, I brought that Christianity with me.
When I showed up on the Dartmouth campus in the fall of 1979, I, like a lot of young people going off to college, found my Christian beliefs under a skeptical attack. This skeptical attack was in the name of liberal learning, in the name of questioning, in the name of evidence. I found that at that young age I couldn’t defend my Christianity very well, so I began to be a little embarrassed about it and to pull away from it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to believe; my brain was getting in the way.
To some degree, I flung myself into political conservatism because I admired its tough-minded realism. Realism about human nature, realism about the way markets work, realism about the need to have a force in the world. Also, realism about the need for social order—I didn’t agree with the general liberal assumption that if you give people freedom they will usually use it wonderfully well. I was more skeptical about human nature. So conservatism became for me, at that time, very much a sort of rock to cling to.
It’s only in later life that I realized that the Christianity I pulled away from was a juvenile or immature Christianity, that, in fact, a mature or adult Christianity could withstand the attack. In my current work I’m attempting to outline a kind of apologetic for the twenty-first century. We’ve had Christian apologetics now for a long time, but the apologetics of say G.K. Chesterton or C.S. Lewis, the apologetics of the mid -twentieth century are really useful, but they’re a little bit dated.
There are new questions that are being raised by the so-called “New Atheism”, and so, very much inspired by people like Chesterton and Lewis I’m trying to engage the New Atheism and make the moral and intellectual case for Christianity in our time.
TDR: How do you perceive the state of faith in America today?
D’Souza: I think that on the one hand it is interesting that America has not gone the way of Europe. When I was at Dartmouth I became acquainted with what could be called the Secularization Thesis, the basic idea that as countries become more modern, more affluent, more technological, more scientific, more industrialized, they would automatically move away from religion; that God and religion were the provenance of poor and uneducated societies. So this thesis became very important in American intellectual life.
The next evidence put forward was the case of Europe, which did in fact, as it became more affluent, and modern, become more secular. But the interesting point is that America has not followed suit. America is in many ways more modern than Europe, more affluent, more technological, and yet America remains one of the most religious societies in the industrial world. [In] other modernizing countries, [like] China and India, we don’t see this secularization pattern happening. So the inevitability of secularization has proven to be not true.
I think here in the United States, however, we do see a newly militant atheism—more people feeling confident about describing themselves as atheists—and we also see many people who are, to some degree, rightly disgusted with the scandals and hypocrisies in the churches, both Catholic and Protestant. On the other hand, on the positive side, I see young people with a genuine, open-minded interest in God and in religion. This is not a dogmatic commitment to any particular denomination or even religion, but rather it’s a desire to learn more about Islam, more about Buddhism, and more even about Christianity.
I think very often people become jaded about Christianity, feeling that they’ve “been through it” because they were “born that way”. But it’s remarkable how little genuine exposure people have to Christianity, so in my current work I’m trying to show Christianity in a little bit of a fresh light. My sense of America is that there’s an opportunity for a genuine spiritual revival if we can show the relevance of Christianity in people‘s everyday lives.
TDR: What do you believe the proper role of religion in a liberal arts education ought to be?
D’Souza: I think this assumption in society that somehow religion should be left out of democratic debate is a ludicrous one. It’s based on a wrong view of history that somehow sees religion as inherently dangerous. Now, the reason for this myth is that we’ve been subjected, in the last hundred years or so, to a form of atheist propaganda, mainly the idea that history shows that religion has been a toxic and dangerous force in Western if not world history. The record doesn’t actually bear this out. The greatest crimes of religion are minute compared to the crimes of atheist regimes which are, in fact, far more bloodthirsty and have perpetrated offenses that are far more recent and that still are going on.
The greatest offense of religion and the Christian religion would be something like the Inquisition. That’s what comes to mind when you think of the crimes of religion. And yet, if you look at the historical scholarship on the Inquisition—I’m thinking here of Henry Kamen’s study of the Spanish Inquisition, which was the worst—over about 350 years the Spanish Inquisition killed about 2,000-3,000 people. That would factor to about 6-10 people per year, which is hardly a world historical crime. You have these atheists crying crocodile tears about theses crimes of religion that have occurred three hundred, five hundred, sometimes in the case of the Crusades a thousand years ago. Yet these people ignore the crimes of atheism perpetrated in the 20th century, and I’d say in some cases still continuing. People say that we have to avoid the perils of religious theocracy or religious persecution, but there’s been nothing like that in American history.
So we are tilting here against imaginary demons. All of this is a way of saying that I think there’s an unnatural fear of religion that I think has been implanted in the American psyche. All of this is behind the idea that not only should the government not install an official religion, which I think is not only a sensible idea but a Christian idea, but more than that the idea that if we engage with religion it becomes the prelude to theocracy.
The bottom line of it is, I think God and religion should be a vein of open, uninhibited inquiry. There’s no reason that this topic should be kept off limits. I would like to see in American intellectual life a revival of the kind of the theological debates that were once commonplace in American universities, and even in American public intellectual life.
TDR: On the subject of education, in 1981, you interviewed William F. Buckley Jr. for The Dartmouth Review. You described the paper as “quite popular with alumni,” but the source of a great deal of outrage amongst students and administration, something that, as a staffer, you “admittedly often enjoy[ed].” Buckley went on to answer that he considered The Dartmouth Review to be “an exciting and lively publication.” Now, as somebody who has had some time and distance from the College, what do you think about the publication you helped start, both then and now?
D’Souza: The goal of the paper was, and I think continues to be, one of providing checks and balances. The paper provides necessary scrutiny of the goings-on at Dartmouth. For those of us who are alumni, there’s no other independent way of finding out what’s going on in Hanover. We get a blizzard of materials from the administration, but this is not an administration with a reputation for even-handedness and giving us the full story. So the administration’s materials have to be viewed with skepticism. This is sort of Pravda, Parkhurst style. So, people say the Review is biased and so on. But sometimes it’s good to have alternative perspectives checking and challenging the official story. As an alumnus, that’s a valuable contribution by the Review.
I also think there’s too much political correctness on the college campus—too many entrenched assumptions. And what makes these assumptions particularly invidious is that they are not argued openly, they are presented as intrinsic to what it means to be an enlightened Dartmouth man or woman. The basic idea here is that, if you are a liberal, then the political noises you make reveal you to be a very sophisticated and intelligent person. There tends to be, on the Ivy League campus—Dartmouth being no exception—an unexamined and sloppy liberalism. And so, it’s very valuable to have a newspaper that’s irreverent about that and challenges and makes fun of it, and pokes holes in it. I think that’s good not only to provide a beachhead for conservatism, but also to keep liberalism healthy, by forcing it to contend with opposition it otherwise wouldn’t really have. I’m impressed, almost amazed, to see the longevity of the Review.
Most student enterprises peter out, the founders graduate, the organization of the newspaper disappears. Even a famous publication like the Berkeley Barb, which was published in the 1960s didn’t last very long. So the fact that the Review has crossed the quarter century mark is, to me, a real accomplishment. I think the Review has already secured for itself a place in the history of American higher education, and I hope it continues for a long time.
TDR: Can you recount some highlights of your Dartmouth career? And highlights affiliated with TDR?
D’Souza: Well ours were the early years, and they were turbulent. We went through a series of presidents, and we caused a lot of trouble. Looking back on it, I think our main goal was to shift the center of political discussion from the left more in a rightward direction. I think this goal we actually did accomplish.
After I graduated from Dartmouth I’d sometimes come back to campus and talk to students, and I would say, “How would you describe yourself politically?” And they would say, you know, “I’m a Republican but I’m not as right-wing as those guys on the Review.” And I would inwardly chuckle when I heard this, because I realized that it was the presence of the Review that had enabled them to say that, by carving out a right-wing position and defending it unabashedly, the Review opened up space for a spectrum of ideas that departed from left-wing orthodoxy.
When I was a freshman there wasn’t that space, the spectrum was from the liberal to the left, and if you didn’t share those views you basically shut your mouth. Even today, I would venture to say there’s a wider spectrum of debate. And even if the Review isn’t given the credit, it did help to bring this about.
TDR: The subject of your Buckley interview was the role of alumni in the management of a private college. What is your take on the proposed change to the Board of Trustees and the lawsuit filed by the Association of Alumni?
D’Souza: The whole thing reeks of narrow-mindedness, pettiness, and a kind of naked power grab. In other words, I’m not surprised that the administration is doing this, but I’m surprised they’re doing it in such a boorish way. It’s not as if these guys, as a result of open-minded inquiry, have come to the sober conclusion that there’s a better way to have a trustee representation.
The bottom line of it is, the administration going back now twenty years was surprised when they first had a conservative candidate, in this case John Steel, challenge their appointed nominee, and Steel won. The administration saw that as an isolated incident, and to some degree it was—there were a couple of subsequent elections and the administration candidate won, but then, when Wilcomb Washburn ran several years ago, a very close race against the administration’s trustee candidate, Washburn’s campaign was ‘Give alumni a choice’, let’s not have just one nominee, sort of Soviet style, but give alumni a choice. So the administration figured out, ‘Why don’t we take the wind out of these conservative alumni by giving alumni a choice, but Iran-style, we will pick all the candidates, so then the alumni will choose from among our guys, and we can’t lose’.
But then conservative candidates, starting with T.J. Rodgers, continued to run, and the administration fell into a little bit of a trap, which is that the administration candidates split the ‘liberal’ vote, and the conservative candidate would win. So the administration’s scheme backfired, and they realized that this was a rather dangerous situation, because at this rate they were losing every election, so they figured, ‘How can we rig the rules again and try to prevent this kind of democracy from breaking out?’
So I see this latest scheme as being an effort to control the process, prevent alumni from having the same degree of representational voice that was there before, and I think it may be part of a cynical calculation that if some of these alumni lose interest in Dartmouth, ‘Who cares? These are not the kind of alumni we want to have involved. There’s enough money coming in from the liberal alumni to sustain the institution, and maybe some of the liberal alumni will even give more if they feel that the institution belongs to them.’ I see the long-term damage of all this as being quite serious. It’s still in an early stage, so it remains to be seen how it will all play out.
TDR: Who have been major influences on your thinking?
D’Souza: I would say politically, certainly in my Dartmouth years I was inspired by three people. One was Reagan; that was inspired by the fact that here was this rather implausible political candidate was really taking on collectivism, which was the great idea of the twentieth century. Reaganism can be understood as a mobilization against collectivism abroad, the Soviet empire, and the automatic expansion of the welfare state at home, something that had begun with FDR and continued with the Great Society. And Reagan was determined not only to stop the explosive growth of government, but I think in a more profound way to produce a cultural change in America so that it was no longer the bureaucrat but the entrepreneur who became the embodiment of American idealism. And we have, in fact, seen this cultural shift in America since Reagan.
The second person was Bill Buckley. Like Reagan, I was inspired not so much by Buckley’s writing but by his persona—he embodied an irreverent, fun-loving and wry conservatism, bold and very different from my perception of a conservative as some kind of narrow-minded, Midwestern, small businessman with a toothbrush mustache and an umbrella. Buckley was very different from that, so that was a conservatism that really appealed to me.
Really my mentor at Dartmouth would be Professor Jeff Hart, and some of my fondest memories of Dartmouth are a group of us at Professor Hart’s house, listening to recordings, cracking jokes, drinking wine—so Hart had a very big impact on me.
TDR: Whom are you reading these days?
D’Souza: Today, my interests are as much theological as they are political. I’m reading a philosopher, Charles Taylor, and would recommend in particular his book Sources of the Self. I’m also reading the Great Atheists—I see the New Atheists, people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris as Lilliputian front men for the Great Atheists of a hundred years ago—I’m thinking of figures such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, to some degree Marx, Bertrand Russell, and even Jean-Paul Sartre. Ultimately, I think as Christians there’s a need to confront those atheists and the arguments that they make.
TDR: Conservatism on college campuses, at Dartmouth specifically, on a national stage: how are we situated as the Bush Presidency wanes?
D’Souza: Conservatism’s prone to despondency, cynicism and the doldrums, but if you really look back with a little perspective, you see that conservatism has completely altered the political landscape in America. In the 1950s and 60s there was no conservatism, there was simply a scattering of renegade organizations like the National Review that had no real position in mainstream culture.
Conservatism came of age intellectually in the late 1970s—people forget, they think Reagan created Reaganism, and the opposite is true; Reaganism preceded Reagan. The main ideas that we think of as Reaganism had already been generated by conservatives in the 70s—supply-side economics, the so called “Reagan Doctrine”, the idea of missile defense, and so on. Reagan picked up those ideas and made them his own. If we had sat around in 1980 and said to ourselves, a bunch of conservatives, ‘What would it take over the next twenty five years for us to consider that we had done well?’ I would submit that we would say something like, ‘If we could get the Soviets out of Afghanistan and control the appetite of the Soviet bear—containment—this would be impressive. You know when I came to America the ethos had been set by John F. Kennedy. If you’re young and you’re idealistic and you care, join the Peace Corps—the idea of being a government servant was seen as the high point of American idealism. If you worked for yourself you were seen as a greedy, selfish guy. If you worked for the government you were a noble, altruistic guy. I think we felt that if we reversed a little bit, imposed some limitations on government, that this would be an achievement.
And finally, the so-called social issues were not even on the political table. Oddly enough, in the 1970s, even after Roe V. Wade, abortion was not even a political issue. That’s why when Nixon appointed judges he never paid any attention to an issue like that. So now you see the way in which the world has changed. The Soviet Empire has collapsed, there’s widespread skepticism of Big Government. The top marginal tax rate in 1980 was 70%, Reagan brought it down to 28%; it’s now about 35%. No matter whom you put in office, even the most liberal of the Democrats, [they] would not be able to take it back up to 70. So the achievement of conservatism has been very large, and to some degree permanent. Even an election doesn’t automatically overturn this, because conservatism has been setting the intellectual agenda for twenty-five years.
The big question’s not ‘Will Hillary get elected?’ or ‘Will Obama get elected?’ But, ‘If elected how will they govern?’ [Bill] Clinton was elected as a Democrat for two terms, but he was carried by the Reagan tide. His biggest accomplishments were things like free trade and welfare reform. His biggest failures were attempts to get gays in the military and, on a bigger scale, to have national healthcare. So despite the Democrat in the White House, conservatism continued to set the agenda, and indeed to prevail. So this is in a way the big unanswered question of this election. Not so much will a Republican or a Democrat win, though that is important, but will the conservative tide of the past twenty-five years continue to hold or will there be a real ebbing away from it, and a kind of new agenda coming to the forefront.
So looking back I think conservatism has reason not only to be proud, but also to be amazed at its achievements. And the core elements of conservatism—belief in a tough-minded foreign policy, belief in markets and prosperity, and a belief in what loosely can be called traditional values—this remains hugely appealing to people, and what it needs in every election cycle is not simply a regurgitation of the slogans of Reagan, but rather a creative application of Reaganite principles to new situations. n