Free What's So Great About America by Dinesh D'Souza Page A

the institutions of colonialism and slavery proved to be the mechanism that brought millions of nonwhite people into the orbit of Western freedom.

    I t makes no sense to claim that the West grew rich and powerful by taking everybody else’s stuff for a simple reason: there wasn’t very much to take. “Oh yes there was,” the retort often comes. “The Europeans stole the raw material to build their civilization. They stole rubber from Malaya, and cocoa from West Africa, and tea from India.” But as economic historian Peter Bauer points out, before British rule, there were no rubber trees in Malaya, nor cocoa trees in West Africa, nor tea in India. The British brought the rubber tree to Malaya from South America. They brought tea to India from China. And they taught the Africans to grow cocoa, a crop the native people had previously never heard of. 19 None of this is to deny that when the colonialists could exploit native resources, they did. But this larceny cannot possibly account for the enormous gap in economic, political, and military power that opened up between the rest of the world and the West.
    What, then, is the real source of that power? I want to suggest that the reason the West became the dominant civilization in the modern era is because it invented three institutions: science, democracy, and capitalism. These institutions did not exist anywhere else in the world, nor did they exist in the West until the modern era. Admittedly all three institutions are based on human impulses and aspirations that are universal. But these aspirations
were given a unique expression in Western civilization, largely due to the influence of Athens and Jerusalem—Athens representing the principle of autonomous reason and Jerusalem representing the revealed truths of Judaism and Christianity.
    First let us consider science. It is based on a shared human trait: the desire to know. People in every culture have tried to learn about the world. Thus the Chinese recorded the eclipses, the Mayans developed a calendar, the Hindus discovered the number zero, and so on. But science—which requires experiments, and laboratories, and induction, and verification, and what one scholar has termed “the invention of invention”—is a Western institution. This explains why the vast majority of major inventions in the past few hundred years have occurred in the West. If science were not a Western institution, there would be no way to account for this disproportion; indeed, we would be forced to conclude that the rest of the world was incredibly stupid.
    Why did science develop in the West? This is a hugely complicated question and not one that I can fully answer. The best that I can do is to suggest two lines of thought that led the West in this direction. To locate the first, one has to go back to the ancient Greek philosophers. The ancient Greeks invented philosophy, which was an attempt to learn the truth about the world through unassisted human reason. No other ancient society placed so much confidence in reason. Philosophy as the Greeks understood it included science; it was a study of nature and of human nature. Greek philosophy from the time of Socrates emphasized the latter and thus made little headway in figuring out the mysteries of nature.
    But even so, the Greeks came up with the notion that the universe as a whole makes sense, that it operates in accordance with
laws, that these laws are accessible in principle to human reason, and that they can be expressed in the language of mathematics. It is important to realize that there is no logical reason why these things should be true. The influential Muslim writer al-Ghazali denies them. In The Incoherence of Philosophy, he argues that reason and logic are useless in apprehending the universe because Allah intervenes at every single moment to make things happen in the way that they do. This represented the Muslim version of the belief in an