Monday evening’s IMPACT speech from Islam critic and feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali introduced many Vanderbilt students to “critical reflection” of Islam and the merits that such reflection can have on a range of aspects of society. Ali spoke bluntly and freely about her own experience as a Muslim girl torn between religious piety and the prospect of freedom.
Hearing her account of discovering a world in the West that allowed her to be free from her restrictive conditions as a Muslim, I sensed a feeling verging on frustration in Ali’s calm and demure demeanor. She vocalized this apparent frustration during an appearance last year on the Canadian news and opinion show On The Map, hosted by a pest of a man, Avi Lewis.
During the interview, Lewis expressed shock that Ali had so much admiration and respect for the American democracy, falsely implying that it is a broken democracy. Ali’s response was that she had lived in countries without democracy, and while the Canadian Lewis had been born into freedom and “can spit on freedom,” she had seen what living without freedom was like.
She expressed that there is nowhere in the world freer than America.
The frustration Ali felt during that appearance and perhaps while being questioned Monday evening at Vanderbilt is a feeling that I and other Americans experience. It seems there is a sizeable portion of the country’s population that do not recognize, as Ali does, the superiority of Western and American political culture. These people, often cultural relativists, hold that the ideas of democracy, freedom of speech and free markets are morally equivalent to all other cultures of the world, including the truly oppressive culture of violence and bigotry in radical Islam.
The truth is that Western society, particularly that of America, is morally superior to all other societies, in either the past or the present, because it holds individual freedom in the highest regard. The principles that guided the founding fathers were based on the idea that the individual can and should choose for himself his government, his belief system and his path in life.
Freedom like this was revolutionary at the time, and it is still radical today.
To say that American society is superior to others is not to say that Americans cannot learn or grow from appreciating or understanding other cultures. It is also not meant to suggest that America does not have its own problems. For all of the noblest intentions of the founding fathers, there is no denying that America has fallen short of its high standard for human life many times. Yet it is precisely this high standard that sets America apart from the rest of the world and the rest of history.
This is a country where citizens are free to express any political opinion they wish. This is a country where citizens can choose how and where to worship, or even whether to practice faith at all. This is a country where children born into poverty can become corporate CEOs, professional athletes, award-winning novelists and Supreme Court justices. America is great because of what it stands for: freedom for the individual human being to explore his own humanity to the extent of his own aspirations.
Statements like these may be sources of derision for high-minded academics and crusaders for social justice who can point to the aforementioned shortfalls, but it seems that these critics refuse to see the forest for the trees. Sometimes, it takes someone born in the metaphorical desert, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to remind us of the beautiful forest that lies right before our eyes.
Anti-war liberals love to repeat the meme that criticizing your country is a patriotic duty. Intelligent criticism of government is an important aspect to living in a free society, but it is not patriotism. To be patriotic in America is to understand the noble history of our country’s foundation and continue to foster and praise these ideals in everyday life.
—Mike Warren is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Science. He can be reached at michael.r.warren@vanderbilt.edu
